Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

In the Baltic region, for example, national parties of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, usually dominated by liberals, were able to secure the independence that had evaded them earlier in 1918. Their rule was not uncontested, however, by elements of the generally conservative Baltic German community and the allies they found among renegade Freikorps elements of the former Imperial German Army (who were seeking to establish a United Baltic Duchy allied to Berlin), rogue Russian commanders seeking plunder and adventure (notably Ataman S. N. Bułak-Bałachowicz), and White forces who were pressed back into the nascent Baltic States by the Red Army (notably the Pskov Volunteer Corps). Soon the confusion in the region resulted in a war between pro-German elements and the new armies of Latvia and Estonia (the Landeswehr War), in which the Allies had to intervene to disband the Germans.

In Ukraine, the withdrawal of Austro-German forces also soon resulted in the overthrow of their puppet Hetmanate and its replacement by a government of Ukrainian Social Democrats and Socialists-Revolutionaries (the Directory), which soon reestablished the Ukrainian National Republic, with the veteran socialist agitator Simon Petliura at its helm. The UNR, in January 1919, formally united with the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, which had been established by Ukrainian liberals on the former Austrian crown lands in Eastern Galicia. Ukraine, however, was to become a chaotic theater of the civil wars, in which the always mutative, vulnerable, and peripatetic Council of Ministers of the UNR could not attract the protection (and still less recognition) of the Allies, as a consequence of its earlier dealings with the Central Powers at the first Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This remained the case even after most of its radical socialist ministers resigned in February 1918, in an act of appeasement to Paris and London.

In Transcaucasia, meanwhile, Menshevik Georgia reasserted its formal independence, renouncing the protectorate that had been established over it by Germany under the Treaty of Poti of 28 May 1918, while radical nationalist forces (the Dashnaks and Musavat, respectively) came to the fore in the governments of the Democratic Republic of Armenia and the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, as the Ottoman Army of Islam withdrew. However, just as Allied postarmistice intervention in the Baltic might have subsequently become the key factor in sustaining the independence movements there in 1919, in 1918 British forces in Transcaucasia were also instrumental in helping the national movements in Azerbaijan and Armenia to expunge Bolshevik subversion (notably by carrying off the 26 Baku Commissars in September 1918).48 Georgia, however, received less succor; as in the case of Ukraine, this was a consequence of its subservience to Germany in 1918 (as well as because of its strained relations with White forces in the North Caucasus and South Russia, which the Allies were coming to favor).49

1918–1922: Reds versus Whites

In 1919, the main focus of the “Russian” Civil Wars actually was Russia—specifically the Bolshevik heartland in European Russia. As the Democratic Counter-Revolution waned and avowedly conservative and militaristic (but far from committedly monarchist) forces, the Whites, came to the fore, White armies sought to advance on Petrograd and Moscow from the north, south, east, and west. Consequently, the Red command accepted a tacit truce for most of the year with its nationalist enemies in the Baltic, Poland, and Transcaucasia (although the same could not be said for Ukraine, which was far too strategically and economically valuable for Moscow to allow it to pass into hostile hands) and concentrated instead on rebuffing these attacks and forcing the Whites back into the Black, White, and Baltic Seas and, eventually, the Pacific Ocean. Space here precludes a very detailed account of developments on the various Red versus White fronts of 1919 and the final obliteration of the remnants of the Whites by Red forces over the following years.50 However, a condensed narrative of these complex struggles will be assayed.