Empire in Ashes: The Russian Civil War
A dying empire, a murdered tsar, and two armies fighting for the soul of a nation — the Russian Civil War would reshape the twentieth century in blood.
In 1917, Russia was already broken by three years of war against Germany and its allies. The Tsar's armies bled on the Eastern Front while hunger and fury gathered at home, and in February the monarchy that had ruled for centuries simply gave way. Nicholas II abdicated, a Provisional Government took power, and across the country workers, soldiers and peasants organized themselves into councils called soviets — a strange dual authority that satisfied no one for long. In September the Russian Republic was formally proclaimed, but the deeper crisis of authority remained unresolved.
Alexander Kerensky's Provisional Government could not deliver what people wanted most: an end to the war. That failure, compounded by a botched coup attempt by General Lavr Kornilov that same September, pushed support toward the Bolsheviks, who had seized control of the soviets. Promising peace and 'all power to the Soviets,' Lenin's party overthrew the Provisional Government in the October Revolution, on the eve of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets.
The Bolshevik triumph was far from settled. Former tsarist officers, Cossack armies, and rival socialists all refused to accept the new order. By the spring of 1918 the White movement had emerged, uniting right-leaning officers of the old empire under figures like Admiral Alexander Kolchak, commander of the Imperial Black Sea Fleet, General Anton Denikin, General Nikolai Yudenich and General Pyotr Wrangel. Against them stood the Red Army, built to defend Lenin's socialist state, and swelling by late 1920 to some five million men under commanders such as Semyon Budyonny, Mikhail Frunze, Lev Kamenev and Mikhail Tukhachevsky.
Foreign powers poured into the chaos. Thirteen states intervened, most from the wartime Allies — Britain, France, the United States, Japan, and others — hoping to reopen the Eastern Front against Germany or simply to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle. British, French and American troops landed at Murmansk and Arkhangelsk in March 1918; Japanese and American forces occupied Vladivostok that April. Romania, backed by France, had already occupied Bessarabia in December 1917. Meanwhile Germany occupied Ukraine under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the harsh peace Lenin had signed to buy Russia out of the World War.
Amid this tangle, a 60,000-strong Czechoslovak Legion, armed by the United States and trying to make its way home along the Trans-Siberian Railway, revolted in Siberia in May 1918 — a spark that helped ignite full-scale civil war. Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, furious over Brest-Litovsk, turned to terror, assassinating German ambassador Count Wilhelm von Mirbach and, on 30 August 1918, gravely wounding Lenin himself in an assassination attempt. Ukrainian anarchists known as the Makhnovshchina fought their own three-year war against the Bolsheviks even as they had once been allies against the old regime.
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