The Russian Civil War, 1917???1922

Abstract

The Russian civil war was the paradigmatic revolutionary civil war of the twentieth century, but the term is an oversimplification for the extensive series of military conflicts waged in the remnants of the tsarist empire between 1917 and 1922. “The wars of the tsarist succession” would be a more adequate description. There was indeed a massive civil war among Russians, but in addition both Russian sides sought to extend their control over all the non-Russian peoples of the former empire, among whom a lengthy and confusing series of campaigns were waged. One historian has counted eleven different armies that at one time or another fought in Ukraine. Independent rulers briefly emerged in remote areas, while criminal bands ravaged sizable districts. The major powers intervened militarily on the periphery, but without determination or effectiveness, except in the Baltic. Even before winning the civil war in Russia proper, the new Bolshevik dictatorship attempted to send its poorly organized forces into Europe, producing a major war with Poland in 1920 and, more successfully, carrying out the conquest of Mongolia in 1921, extending its control even beyond the former tsarist domains. All the while, the last phases of the intra-Russian civil war were being fought within ethnic Russia. This enormous series of struggles, which lasted for five years, produced immense collateral damage among civilians in terms of executions, famine, and mass epidemics, and cost nearly five times as many lives as were lost on the eastern front in World War I.