The Russian civil war
The Bolshevik Revolution of 7 November 1917 was followed by a wave of armed insurrections across the former Russian empire by anti-Bolshevik factions loosely characterised as ‘White’ Russians. At the height of the civil war the Whites appeared to surround the Bolshevik strongholds of Moscow and Petrograd, but in reality they were a disparate group of moderate socialists, ethnic nationalists, Romanov loyalists, proto- dictators and bandits, and never really formed an effective opposition.
In Siberia the Whites were led by their self-proclaimed ‘supreme leader’, the former tsarist naval officer Admiral Alexander Kolchak. The Allied intervention in north Russia was partly intended to link up with Kolchak, but his regime was corrupt and unpopular and he lost the support of his most formidable force of 40,000 former Czech and Slovak prisoners of war and deserters, known as ‘ the Czechoslovak Legion’. Kolchak was captured by the Bolsheviks and executed.
Around the Baltic coast, Estonians and Latvians were fighting for independence alongside the former tsarist general Yudenich’s White Russians, who were trying to seize Petrograd. To further complicate matters, German troops and the paramilitary Freikorps were still trying to seize territory. The Germans left and Latvia and Estonia secured independence, but Petrograd remained defiantly ‘Red’.
In southern Russia and Ukraine, the Whites coalesced around General Anton Denikin’s ‘ Volunteer Army’. Denikin (pictured below) won a series of early victories but, as well as the Bolshevik Red Army, he also had to contend with Ukrainian and other separatist forces, ethnic militias and even the Turkish army. Although the British sent Denikin millions of pounds’ worth of arms his army still disintegrated; the remnants were destroyed in Crimea in 1920.
The Russian civil war effectively ended with the founding of the Soviet Union on 30 December 1922, although some insurgencies continued into the 1930s. In total, the conflict may have cost as many as 12 million lives.