Lecture on the Russian Civil War by Sean Guillory

1. The Russian Civil
War, 1918-1921

2. Main
Issues
1. What are the causes of
the Russian Civil War?
2. Why did the Bolsheviks
win?
3. What was the impact of
the Civil War on the
Bolshevik Party and the
Soviet state and society?

3. First Cause: Socialist Parties Fracture
Second Congress of Soviet Oct. 25, 1917
• Vote to form all-socialist government passes
unanimously
– Right SRs and Menshevik-Defensists walk out. Say must
support Provisional Government.
– Trotsky: “To those who have left us and to those proposing
negotiations with the government, we must say: You are a
mere handful, miserable, bankrupt, your role is finished, and
you may go where you belong—to the dustbin of history.”
• Vote to transfer all power to the soviets. Officially
ends the Provisional Government.
– Menshevik-Internationalists walk out. Only most radical
parties left.
• Bolsheviks and moderate socialist unwillingness to
compromise.

4. Second Cause: Closing the Constituent
Assembly, November, 1918
other socialists 5%
Bolshevik 25%
SR 58%
Kadet 5%
conservatives 7%
• First all-Russian
democratic vote.
• SRs win majority.
• Bolsheviks use Red
Guards to lock out
Constituent Assembly
delegates on second
day.

5. Who Really has power?
Constituent Assembly vote by Region

6. Constituent Assembly vote in Moscow

7. Constituent Assembly vote in Petrograd

8. Constituent Assembly vote in Kursk

9. Constituent Assembly Vote at the Front

10. Results
Bolshevik takeover democratic? Yes and No.
Bolsheviks argue:
• We have real power: cities and army.
• Why let unconscious and backward peasants
decide the fate of the revolution.
• Revolution is not about “liberal democracy.” Its
about socialist transformation.
• We have the guns. Do something about it.

11. Third Cause
• Civil War already brewing in earliest days of
Revolution.
• Political and class animosity building throughout
1917
• Leads to political polarization, unwillingness to
compromise, and thirst for revenge.
• Fragmentation of a multiethnic empire.

13. The Bolshevik Government first Acts
• Lenin pressured to form coalition with Left SRs.
• Creates Council of People’s Commissars, Sovnarkom. All
Bolsheviks. Lenin chairman.
Decrees:
• Decree on Land
• Decree on Peace
• Decree on workers’ control
• Censorship of “bourgeois press”
• Declaration of Rights
• Creation of the The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for
Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage or Cheka.

15. Treaty of Brest-
Litvosk, March 3,
1918
• Ends Russia’s involvement in the
War
• Gives Germans Ukraine and
Baltics
• Gives Turkey free hand in
Transcaucasia
• Left SRs leave government in
protest. Charge Bolsheviks with
capitulating with German
imperialism.
• Result: One party rule.

16. Civil War Begins
Principle Players
Reds:
Bolsheviks
Whites:
Monarchists
Moderate socialists
Liberals
Others:
Nestor Makhno -
anarchists
“Greens” – Ukrainian
nationalists
Allied Intervention:
50,000 Czechoslovaks
28,000 Japanese
24,000 Greeks
13,000 Americans
12,000 Poles
4,000 Canadians
4,000 Serbs
4,000 Romanians
2,000 Italians
1,600 British
760 French

17. ― Bolshevik control, November
1918
― Maximum advances of 'White'
forces
― Frontiers, 1921
Russian Civil War

18. “Red Terror”
• Bolsheviks instituted mass terror autumn 1918.
• Response to assassination of Cheka head Mikhail
Uritskii and assassination attempt on Lenin.
• Terror decreed September 2, 1918
• 500-1300 shot in Petrograd, 6000 arrested
• Estimates of 10,000 – 15,000 shot in first two months.
• Arrests and executions of striking workers, peasants,
army deserters.
• Beginning of the “Gulag” - Solovki
• Official numbers: 12,733. Unofficial estimates for
1918-1920: 50,000 to 140,000 executed.

19. “White Terror”
• Numbers difficult to estimate. Wasn’t as
organized. Kontrarazvyedka, counter-espionage.
• Executions in the field.
• Mostly Bolshevik prisoners, partisans, local
allies.
• Pogroms--anti-Jewish violence. Approximately,
150,000 Jewish victims.

20. Execution of the Tsar
• Royal Family under house arrest since March 1917.
• Moved to Yekaterinburg in August 1917
• White forces closing in July 1918
• Order from Lenin to execute Tsar and his family July 17.
Trotsky’s account:
"My next visit to Moscow took place after the fall of
Ekaterinburg. Talking to Sverdlov I asked in passing, "Oh yes
and where is the tsar?" "It's all over," he answered. "He has been
shot." "And where is his family?" "And the family with him."
"All of them?" I asked, apparently with a touch of surprise. "All
of them," replied Sverdlov. "What about it?" He was waiting to
see my reaction. I made no reply. "And who made the decision?"
I asked. "We decided it here. Ilyich [Lenin] believed that we
shouldn't leave the Whites a live banner to rally around,
especially under the present difficult circumstances."

21. War Communism
Centralisation and control over the economy
1. All large factories to be controlled by the government. End of
workers’ control.
2. Production planned and organized by the government.
3. Forced requisition of grain from peasants.
4. Food and most commodities were rationed and distributed in
a centralized way.
5. Private trade in consumer goods became illegal
6. Discipline for workers was strict, and strikers could be shot.

22. The Costs of War
Communism
• The cities were emptied
• In 1920, industrial production had been
13% and agricultural production 20% of
the 1913
• Grain requisitioning and outlawing private
trade in grain resulted in famine – 5
million casualties.
• Large scale strikes and protests in late
1920
• Peasant rebellion in Tambov.

23. Utopian Dreaming
• Revolution is impossible without utopian dreaming.
• Revolutions are:
– are willed with language about the new, the
emergent, joy, hope, fun.
– are not about the present, but about the future.
– a break between past and present, old and new.
– are always experienced in the future tense: what
will or should be.

24. The dark side to the
quest for the "new"
• Anxieties about the
purity of the new life =
a revolutionary
asceticism.
• Impatience and the
speeding up of time.
• Authoritarian impulse:
– Protect the
revolution against
backwardness,
infection, and
corruption.
– Enforce the new life
on the other.
– Violence justified as
a progressive
necessity.
• Eschatological
worldview: Rhetoric of
the apocalyptic “end
times” followed by
salvation.

25. The purpose of revolution is to
“remake everything. To organize
things so that everything should be
new, so that our false, filthy, boring,
hideous life should become a just,
pure, merry, and beautiful life.”
--Alexander Blok, 1918
“Today the millennium of
‘beforetimes’ is broken. We will
remake life anew—right down to the
last button on your vest.”
--Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1917

26. War Communism as Utopia
"The main direction will be entrusted to various kinds
of book-keeping offices or statistical bureau. There,
from day to day, account will be kept of production
and all its needs; there also it will be decided whither
workers must be sent, whence they must be taken, and
how much work there is to be done. . . When the social
order is like a well-oiled machine, all will work in
accordance with the indications of these statistical
bureau. There will be no need for special ministers of
State, for police and prisons, for laws and decrees -
nothing of the sort. Just as in an orchestra all the
performers watch the conductor's baton and act
accordingly, so here all will consult the statistical
reports and will direct their work accordingly.”
"The State, therefore, has ceased to exist. There are no
groups and there is no class standing above all other
classes. Moreover, in these statistical bureau one
person will work today, another tomorrow. The
bureaucracy, the permanent officialdom, will
disappear. The State will die out."

27. Why the Reds Won
• Peasants and the land
• Internal lines
• White disunity
• National minorities
• Bolsheviks’ promise
for a better future

28. Civil War Legacies: Bolsheviks
• Cheka
– “siege mentality”, legacy of violence as policy
• Party discipline
– “ban on fractions”
• Ban on other parties
• Suspend freedom of press, assembly
• Centralization
– workers’ control to one-man management

29. Human Costs of War and Revolution
• Seven years of war and revolution, 1914-1921
• WWI:
– Estimated 3 million deaths
• Civil War:
– Combat: 2 million
– Famine: 5 million
– Disease: 2.3 million
– Millions more exiles, refugees, homeless, disabled.

30. The Party After the Revolution
– Tremendous growth.
24,000 in March 1917.
732,521 in March 1921.
– Committees spread all over
country
– No coordination, no chain
of command.
– Belief in campaigns and
coercion as politics.
– Communist arrogance and
view that communism
could be willed into
existence.

31. Civil War as the Revolution
• Bolsheviks took power in October, but for many
the Civil War was the defining revolutionary
event.
• Turned the Bolshevik Party from an elite
organization to mass political party
• Remembered as a time of heroism,
revolutionary romanticism, and utopianism.
• Defined what was communism for many.