In October 1917, a few months after Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication and with a year remaining in the Great War, Russia’s brief experiment with representative government ended with a whimper. Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolutionaries stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd without much of a fight, unseating Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government. With Leninist workers in control of the railways, the Bolsheviks rapidly took control of Petrograd, Moscow, and the industrial heart of Russia.
But there were some… who resisted. A loose alliance of democrats, imperialists and social-revolutionaries formed to try and free their homeland from communism. They would fight, often valiantly, but ultimately futilely, for half a decade.
The Bolshevik Revolution and the resulting Civil War inflicted between seven and twelve million deaths on Russia and its immediate neighbors from 1917-1922. That’s not even glancing at the Stalinist excesses that followed.
The multi-million person margin of error in those figures is the result of the raw chaos that suffused the conflict and the utter breakdown of social and civil structure in the country as a result. To compound the inevitable disruptions of apocalyptic war, the communists intentionally sought to throw down any structure remaining from the old Tsarist order. Continuity of narrative itself was a threat to their power.
On the low end, the Russian Civil War inflicted forty seven percent of the casualties suffered by all belligerents of the Great War, on the high end, eighty percent. The human toll extended far beyond the battlefield. Red Terror, White Terror, Pogroms and random atrocity pervaded. Many of the atrocities of World War II received full-dress rehearsals, albeit on a smaller scale, in the Russian Civil War.
The overarching clash between the Red, Bolshevik faction and the White Army is properly seen as the main axis of the conflict, but the dynamics were nowhere near so simple as Communists vs. Everyone Else.
The Russian Civil War could just as aptly be described as a series of overlapping, interlocking wars with a rotating roster of participant nations and factions. The fighting stretched from Poland and Finland in the west all the way to the Pacific Ocean in the East. The war encompassed all of what would become the Soviet states and even spilled into Mongolia and Northern China. The United States, Britain, France, and Japan all sent thousands of troops into the conflict with varied and often conflicting objectives and rules of engagement.
In addition to the Reds, the Whites, and the contingents of aforementioned allied nations, significant combatants included countless local militias lumped together by history as the Green Russians, who defied the White and Red Armies as well as foreign interlopers for years as local bands. Many fought on past the "end" of the war in 1922, though all were eventually brought to heel.
Ukrainian anarcho-libertarians under Nestor Makhno formed yet another faction, sometimes referred to as the Black Russians. The Black Russians would fight both with and against the Bolsheviks, eventually allying with them against the Whites only to be betrayed and subsumed or driven out of their homeland by the communists.
Numerous nationalist splinter groups sprung up, seizing their chance for self-determination amidst that chaos, and were eventually, inevitably, ground under the communist boot heel.
And, of course, banditry-writ-large remained ubiquitous throughout the war.
The White Russians themselves were hardly unified. Imperialist, Democrat, and Menshevik, alike found themselves in coalition with no driving vision, no true single commander, and no cause other than anti-communism. Experienced great war general Ivan Denikin took command of the most significant ground combat force in the White Russian Army the Volunteer Army in and around the Don Basin. Opportunist Pyotr Krasnov, who would later fight for the Nazis, named himself Attaman of the Don Cossacks, deciding to fight his own war against the Soviets, independent of Denikin. The uninspiring Admiral Kolchak found himself in command of the White Russians in Siberia. The allies recognized Kolchak as the Supreme Leader of Russia, and Denikin did eventually pay lip service to him as superior, but their operations were never coordinated to any meaningful extent. These thee men, and their eventual successors, each fought their own war against Bolshevism.
Despite their advantages in materiel, international support (albeit, support that came erratically, and never without strings), and most of all trained military personnel, this absence of unity of command would be the White Russian Army’s undoing. Unable to muster their forces along a single line of effort, they failed to crush the Bolsheviks before Leon Trotsky was able to shape the Red Army into an effective force.
The White offensive of 1919 floundered 220 miles short of Moscow. Makhno’s Ukrainians allied with the Reds in an act of foolish shortsightedness. An initially stunning success turned into a rout with the intervention of the Black Russians. Denikin was forced to fall back to secure his supply lines or face being caught in an untenable situation between the Reds and the Blacks. It was as close as the White Army would ever get to victory.
With the Red bastion solidified in Moscow and Russia’s industrial heartland, the communists now held the advantage. The war would last another three years, but the Whites never regained the initiative, and the ripples of the communist triumph in Russia affects life to this day, everywhere on the globe. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ideology of Marx, sadly, remains with us.
But what if it didn't?
What if a unifying figure emerged, to provide the vision that Denikin, Krasnov, and Kolchak could not. A symbol, to tell the story of Russia’s struggle abroad secure steady aid, more active participation from Imperial Russia’s allies? What if daughters of the Romanov dynasty survived to learn from their father's tragic errors? What if just a handful of lives saved could change the course of history?
If that sounds fascinating to you, welcome to the universe of the Romanov Reign. I hope you'll give them a try, and if you do, I hope you enjoy them. Links are embedded in the pics below.
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I hope you and yours' are enjoying the holiday season! Not for nothing, but these two tomes might make pretty decent Christmas presents for that history obsessed dad in your life :)
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