Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

A long-term view of the origins of the “Russian” Civil Wars would cite a combination of the unique nature of the growth of the Russian Empire and the pressures placed on it by the challenges of modernity in the half century or so prior to their outbreak. The Russian Empire was unusual in that it was a contiguous, land-based empire in which, although by far the largest ethnic group, Russians were in a minority, accounting for about 44 percent of the population by the time of the first census in 1897. Although efforts to cooperate with and co-opt non-Russian elites were almost as common as attempts to suppress them for much of the empire’s history, this was never going to be an equal partnership, and relations between Russians and non-Russians became increasingly strained in the late 19th century, as the last tsars, Alexander III and Nicholas II, reacted to the first stirrings of nationalism among the “minorities” with the promotion of Russian nationalism (and its broader ally, Pan-Slavism) and ill-considered attempts at forced Russification, imposing the Russian language, Russian laws, and Russian governmental structures on peoples from Finland through Poland, the Baltic, and Ukraine to Transcaucasia and thereby withdrawing from the compact whereby these peoples had enjoyed varying degrees of (albeit limited) autonomy in culture, religion, and government.

This period, particularly after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, also featured radical changes in Russian society, as industrialization was fostered so that Russia might compete on the world stage with its Great Power rivals. Indeed, from the 1890s onward, the Russian Empire was in the midst of the most dynamic and rapid industrial revolution the world had ever seen. Although there were Russian centers of industrial growth and the concomitant proletarization of the population (around St. Petersburg and Moscow, for example), it is of interest that most of the industrializing regions were to be found in the non-Russian periphery: the Baltic (especially Riga), Poland, eastern Ukraine, and Baku (the world’s leading oil-producing region by the turn of the century). As the population boomed (the empire’s populace more than doubled, from 60 million to over 120 million between 1861 and the outbreak of war in 1914), the pressures and stresses of urbanization placed great strains on the political structures of the state, which had been only partially modernized by Alexander II’s “Great Reforms” to local government, the courts, education, and the army in the 1860s. Moreover, many of those reforms had been undone by his Canute-like conservative successors, Alexander III and Nicholas II. Although in the last years of the autocracy social advancement by merit was more common than the patrimonial system of yore, many young men found their careers and ambitions blocked by the carapace of tradition and elitism in which the regime still enveloped itself. This applied as much to those liberals and conservatives who might have wished a reformed tsarism to endure as it did to those revolutionary socialists who fundamentally opposed it. The regime’s struggle to contain such ambitions, particularly those directed at the field of politics, was at the core of the narrative of late tsarism.8 In 1905, tensions reached their zenith with the failed revolution of that year, in which peasants (who felt themselves cheated by the settlement of 1861, which had granted them insufficient lands, who felt overtaxed by the government, and who were now increasingly subject to the whims of the world market into which Russia was integrated) combined with impoverished workers, the emergent educated and frustrated professional classes, and non-Russian nationalists to bring tsarism to its knees. Nicholas II rallied and saved the regime by dividing liberals from radicals through the foundation of an advisory State Duma (parliament), but then proceeded to re-exacerbate tensions by clawing back the limited powers he had granted it, ignoring it and frequently dispersing it, and driving some liberals back into the revolutionary camp.