The Probert Encyclopaedia of Warfare

RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR

The Russian civil war was a bitter conflict of nearly three years lasting from 1918 1921 which followed Russian setbacks in the Great War and the upheavals of the 1917 Revolution. In December 1917 counterrevolutionary armies, the 'Whites', began to organise resistance to the October Revolution of 1917. The Red Army (Bolsheviks), improvised by Leon Trotsky, opposed them and civil war resulted. Hostilities continued for nearly three years with the Bolsheviks being successful. The war was fought in the regions of the Caucasus and southern Russia, the Ukraine, the Baltic, northern Russia, and Siberia. The Bolsheviks also had to fight against the armies of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland. In northern Russia the British and French landed troops at Murmansk in June 1918, seized Archangel, and set up a puppet government. There continued outbursts of fighting against the Bolsheviks until October 1919. In Siberia, Admiral Kolchak, with the assistance of a Czech legion (composed of prisoners of war) and of Japanese forces that had landed at Vladivostok established a 'White' government at Omsk. Kolchak was captured and executed by the Bolsheviks in February 1920. While each of the 'White' armies was engaged in an isolated operation, the Soviet forces were waging a single war. Trotsky was an active agent for the Bolsheviks in all the crucial operations of the war. The Bolsheviks put down peasant risings in 1920 and a mutiny by sailors at Kronstadt in 1921. The Bolsheviks were far superior to the Whites in both organisation and propaganda. The last foreign forces left Soviet soil in 1922 when the Japanese evacuated Vladivostok. The Soviet government was recognised by Britain in 1924, and by the USA in 1933.
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