Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was the most consequential conflict between the World Wars and one of the deadliest in history. It began in October 1917 with the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd and continued until 1922, when the last White and separatist forces were defeated and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formally proclaimed. The war's complexity defies simple narratives. The principal combatants were the Red Army (the Bolsheviks' military force, built from scratch by Leon Trotsky as People's Commissar of War) against the White Armies — a loose coalition of tsarists, moderate socialists, nationalists, and regional separatists united only by opposition to Bolshevik rule. Complicating the picture were the anarchist forces of Nestor Makhno in Ukraine, the interventionist armies of fourteen Allied countries (Britain, France, Japan, and the United States among them), and the newly independent states of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the Caucasus nations fighting to secure their independence. Trotsky's achievement in building and commanding the Red Army is one of the most remarkable feats of organisation in modern history. In 1918 the Bolsheviks had no functioning military force; by 1920 the Red Army numbered over five million men. Trotsky maintained discipline through a combination of political commissars, exemplary punishment, and the enforced retention of 40,000–50,000 tsarist officers as 'military specialists' whose families were held hostage to ensure loyalty. The war's turning points were the defeat of Admiral Kolchak in Siberia (1919), the failure of General Denikin's advance on Moscow (1919), and the Soviet-Polish War (1919–21) which, despite Soviet defeat at the Battle of Warsaw, exhausted the last major White-aligned force. The war was decided less by military strategy than by the Bolsheviks' control of Russia's population centres, railways, and armaments industry — combined with the Whites' inability to offer a credible alternative to Bolshevik social promises. Total deaths are estimated at 7–12 million, the majority from famine and epidemic disease (particularly typhus) generated by the war's disruption. The famine of 1921–22 alone killed between 5 and 10 million people.
- Year: 1917 CE
- Category: Military
