“The outcome of the war had a profound effect on the lives of millions of people within the country and abroad for the next 70 years.”
By Richard W. Harrison
THE RUSSIAN CIVIL War, which ended 100 years ago with the establishment of a totalitarian communist regime in the former Russian Empire, was one of the most fateful struggles of the 20th century, yielding perhaps only to the two world wars in its significance.
The outcome of the conflict had a profound effect on the lives of millions of people within the country and abroad for the next 70 years.
The struggle pitted two irreconcilable parties against each other. The communists, known collectively as the Bolsheviks, or Reds, sought to construct a new, collectivist society on the ruins of the old Russian Empire. Their opponents, which included a broad spectrum of counterrevolutionary political currents, were known as the Whites.
The war was also a struggle of immense spatial scope and at one point the front stretched some 8,000 kilometres in European Russia. Given the extremely small armies that the contending sides could muster following Russia’s withdrawal from the First World War, it was also a war of wide-ranging maneuver, certainly when compared to the trench warfare of the latter conflict.
Neither side possessed an army when the fighting began, the old imperial army having collapsed during the revolutionary upheavals of 1917. The Reds quickly set about building a new Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, albeit with a great deal of help from a large contingent of former Czarist officers.
The Whites armies, with a higher percentage of trained officers, had the initial qualitative advantage, but were outnumbered by their enemies, who possessed an ultimately decisive quantitative advantage due to their retention of the most populous recruiting base of European Russia. The communist program also had an inherently broader appeal to the impoverished masses.
The war comprised three main fronts: the Eastern, stretching from the middle Volga to Lake Baikal in Siberia; the Southern, which encompassed most Ukraine and southeastern Russia, and; the Polish, which covered the territory from the newly-independent Baltic States to the Romanian border. These fronts alternated in significance throughout the war, with the Reds sometimes attacking and sometimes defending.
Other, lesser fronts also flared up from time to time. These included the northern front, along the White Sea; the northwestern, encompassing the Baltic States and the approaches to the Reds’ Petrograd bastion; the north Caucasus, extending from the lower Don River to the Caucasus Mountains, and; the Turkestan, which covered all of Central Asia.
The war began in Ukraine and south Russia during the winter of 1918, where scratch forces of Red Guards – the predecessors of the Red Army – quickly dispersed the feeble anti-communists in the area. However, the Reds themselves were soon driven out by the advancing German army, which occupied the territory later that spring as a result of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The peace agreement ceded large parts of the former empire to the Germans and their allies. At the same time, Russia’s former allies – Britain, France, the United States and Canada, among others – landed forces at Murmansk and Archangel, thus opening a front in this area. Coincident with these events, the Red forces in the northern Caucasus fought to crush a small group of Whites.
Fighting intensified in the summer of 1918, when the action spread to the eastern periphery of the Bolsheviks’ territory. The Whites advanced rapidly at first and even captured Kazan’, along the Volga River. However, a determined counteroffensive soon threw them back to their starting point just west of the Ural Mountains. The Whites were also unsuccessful in capturing the Bolshevik stronghold of Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad). Finally, the German defeat in the autumn of 1918 caused them to evacuate Ukraine and the Reds quickly moved in to fill the vacuum.
All of this was just a prelude to the decisive year of 1919. This phase began with the Whites’ second offensive along the Eastern Front, which pushed the Reds back nearly to the Volga. The Reds counterattacked the motley Whites in April and soon threw them back in what soon developed into a general offensive along the entire front. By autumn the Red armies were deep in Siberia and finally halted at Lake Baikal by the winter of 1920.
The Southern Front exploded in the spring of 1919 as well, with the irruption of the White armies out of the North Caucaus. Here, the Whites made their most serious attempt to take Moscow and overthrow the Soviet government. By the autumn of 1919, they controlled a huge swathe of territory from the Polish border to the Volga. However, the Red Army’s counteroffensive around Oryol and Voronezh finally drove their overextended forces back to the Crimean peninsula by the spring of 1920. Here the beleaguered White forces managed to hold out and even expand the area under their control until a determined Red offensive in October-November 1920 forced them to abandon the Crimea and evacuate the remnants of the White army to safety abroad.
Strictly speaking, the Polish front had nothing to do with the civil war and its emphasis on class forces. Rather it was a national war that pitted a reborn Polish state against its former Russian overlords, who appeared this time in the guise of social revolution. The Poles chose to attack in Ukraine in the spring of 1920 as Soviet Russia lay nearly prostrate following two years of civil war. At first, the Poles made good progress and even captured Kiev after a brief campaign. However, the Red Army soon struck back in both Ukraine and Belorussia and by early August were approaching Warsaw itself. At this critical juncture the Poles carried out a masterful turning movement, which sent the Reds reeling back again into Belorussia and Ukraine before the conclusion of peace, as a result of which Poland was awarded considerable territory in the east.
This essentially concluded the Russian civil war, although there remained isolated centers of resistance in Central Asia and the Far East. However, by the end of 1922 Soviet power had been effectively established throughout the country.
Richard W. Harrison was a co-editor and translator of The Russian Civil War, 1918-1921. An Operational-Strategic Sketch of the Red Army’s Combat Operations, the third part of a three-volume official Russian history of the conflict. Harrison earned his Undergraduate and Master’s degrees from Georgetown University, where he specialized in Russian Area Studies. He later earned his doctorate in War Studies from King’s College London. He also was an exchange student in the former Soviet Union and spent several years living and working in post-communist Russia. He has taught Russian History and Military History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The book is published by Casemate.
