Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

In addition to the physical losses, the psychological scars all this inflicted on the participants in the “Russian” Civil Wars (and their descendants)—be they victors or vanquished—remain forever incalculable, for this was without a doubt the greatest cataclysm to engulf Russia since, in 1237–1240, the Mongols had surged through the Caspian Gate to overrun Kievan Rus′ and sack the cities of what had until then been one of the richest and most sophisticated societies in Christendom. It took Russia half a millennium to recover from that catastrophic event. It could be argued that, a century after the events with which we are here concerned, the Russian Republic and the other successor states to the USSR are also still coming to terms with them.

Such a complex historical phenomenon as the “Russian” Civil Wars is worthy of study on several levels. As should already be clear, even a century after the events, historians have yet to agree upon matters as basic as the geographical and chronological scope of the subject. In addition, it remains unclear what actually happened, as the struggles were played out across (and beyond) the huge (and often impenetrable) former empire, which on the eve of its collapse had covered no less than one-sixth of the land surface of the globe. In addition, of course, the chief outcome of the wars was the formation of the USSR, from which ensued the major ideological struggle of the twentieth century, generating a chiefly bipolar world in which the challenge of communism to capitalism was of paramount importance (and at the same time adding ideological tropes to contending histories of the period produced in the USSR and the West). This remained the case until the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s. Even then, though, with communism gone, the echoes of the “Russian” Civil Wars did not altogether fade. Indeed, if anything—and much to the surprise of most Western politicians—they found new resonances, as the successor states around the periphery of the former Soviet Union began to question and challenge the post–civil wars settlement that had been imposed by Moscow back in the 1920s, opening old wounds and picking away at still painful scars. On a superficial—or at least symbolic—level, this often took the form of toppling Soviet-era statues and renaming cities, streets, buildings, and institutions after rehabilitated national heroes.6 More alarmingly, some of the armed conflicts that had been frozen by the creation of the USSR broke out anew: from Azeri–Armenian battles over Nagorno Karabakh in the late 1980s, through the Georgian–Ossetian War of 2008, to the Russian–Ukrainian contest over eastern Ukraine that erupted in 2014.

Other than to provide a new, comprehensive, and up-to-date reference tool, therefore, the intention of this book and the rationale for the selection of its contents are to collate a combination of heretofore insufficiently explored perspectives and insights from the vast array of newly available sources (many of them online) to complement more traditional repositories of information and to bring them to bear upon what remains, indubitably, a turning point in world history. To those ends, alongside this introduction (which can also be read as a historiographical guide to the subject),7 as well as its attendant apparatus of a list of acronyms and abbreviations, a chronology, a glossary, appendixes, and a bibliography, the volume is centered on an extensive dictionary. Across almost 2,000 discrete entries, featuring extensive cross-references, the dictionary covers the course of the civil wars among all the peoples and regions of the former Russian Empire (and beyond), presenting the biographies of leading military and political figures and detailing key military forces and their attributes (including such diverse matters as weaponry, uniforms, flags, anthems, art, language, propaganda, laws, treaties and agreements, etc.); the roles of political parties and social movements; military, governmental, and quasi-governmental organizations; creeds and concepts; and the major events of the “Russian” Civil Wars. Where appropriate, entries also include information on how events and individuals have been memorialized (or dememorialized) in the contemporary world.

1916–1917: The Origins of the “Russian” Civil Wars