Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

A final key feature of late tsarism that fed into the civil wars was migration. One chief purpose of serfdom had been to maintain a static population that was easy to control, tax, and recruit to the armed forces. After the emancipation of 1861, barriers to movement withered. Indeed, pressure on land in Russia, combined with the need for labor in the booming industrial centers of the peripheries, witnessed a flood of Russians emigrating to towns in the Baltic, Poland, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia. By the 1890s, the government itself was sponsoring migration through a Resettlement Administration attached to the Ministry of the Interior (subsequently it was taken over by the Ministry of Agriculture). Around five million peasants left European Russia for Siberia during the period (although only around two-thirds of them settled there permanently). Their story was largely a happy one, with prosperous centers of dairy farming springing up east of the Urals (although the life lessons these families learned—that socialism, in the form of the powerful Siberian cooperative movement, offered them greater protection and profit than had the tsarist system—would come back to haunt the Siberian Whites during the civil wars). Part of the Siberian farmers’ success can be attributed to the fact that they were moving into a nearly empty space, populated only by scattered and small native communities. Far less comfortable were Russian settlers who went to Russian Turkestan, where they came up against the nomadic traditions of much of the native population in the north of the region and the highly sophisticated Muslim culture of the populous valleys of the south. This, as we shall see, was the recipe for the conflict that sparked the “Russian” Civil Wars, even as the tsarist regime was fighting for its survival in the world war that broke out in 1914.

As one leading British historian of the post-1905 “constitutional” period of tsarism once explained, Russia’s experience of the First World War exacerbated a number of these preexisting tensions in Russian society.9 Bob McKean mentioned problems caused by the refugee crisis (which added to the migrations of previous decades), increased urbanization (to man arms factories), the mobilization of 15 million men into the army, the strains placed on transport and the economy, the decimation at the front of much of the officer corps who had provided a bulwark to tsarism, and—because of defeat and the scandals surrounding the royal family (notably the Rasputin episode)—the discrediting of Nicholas II in particular and autocracy in general. Added to this were the revived ambitions of political and social leaders of a liberal or even socialist bent who were drafted in to assist the regime by the government (notably Zemgor, the Union of Zemstvos and Town Councils).10 Together, McKean concluded, these tensions were sufficient to ensure that when the food riots that broke out in Petrograd in February 1917 inspired a mutiny of the city’s garrison and the instigation of a revolution, almost nobody came to the defense of Nicholas; even most of the high command advised him to abdicate. This he duly did, on behalf of himself and (illegally) on behalf of his sickly son, Alexis.11

If this serves as a useful and commendably concise analysis of the February Revolution of 1917, however, it fails to explain why that revolution, which seemed almost universally popular and was virtually bloodless, should descend into full-scale and incomparably sanguinary civil war before the end of that year. To understand that, it is necessary to appreciate that one of the key facets of the “Russian” Civil Wars—clashes between Muslim and either Orthodox or (later) secular forces in Central Asia—was already under way, long before Nicholas II signed the abdication document in a sidetracked train near Pskov on 2 March 1917 (and would continue long afterward). It too had been generated by the world war’s exacerbation of existing tensions.