Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Nevertheless, several qualifications have to be made to a description of the Bolsheviks as “victors” in the civil wars. For one thing, obviously some important territories of the former Russian Empire remained outside the Soviet imperium at the close of the wars, notably the strategically and economically important lands of independent Finland, the Baltic States, and Poland, while Bessarabia had been incorporated into Romania. Second, although peasant resistance to Soviet power had been broken and its recrudescence in armed form contained by the NEP, it had not been extinguished altogether and would resurface in what amounted to an economic war between the hungry cities and relatively prosperous villages of the USSR in the late 1920s. Lenin was therefore right to have termed NEP a “peasant Brest”: just as the treaty of 1918 had not brought (and was never intended to bring) a permanent peace between Soviet Russia and imperial Germany, NEP was regarded by most Bolsheviks as a temporary breathing space. Once the civil wars were over in 1926, the Soviet state, increasingly under the sway of Stalin, would again turn on the peasants, in the collectivization campaign that was intended to finally extend Soviet rule into the countryside and to break peasant resistance forever. Indeed, a case can be made for regarding the collectivization campaign as a second round of the civil wars.186 Third, although the Allies had withdrawn from Soviet Russia, although they would welcome their former enemy into the League of Nations in 1934, and although they were grateful for the Soviet contribution to the subsequent struggle against Hitler, the enmity between East and West that would characterize the post-1945 period was demonstrably born in the period immediately following the October Revolution of 1917. In that sense, the “Russian” Civil Wars can be described as the first round of the Cold War that continues to shape the modern world.

Moreover, it is obvious that even the imperfect Bolshevik victory did not endure. In 1991, the USSR collapsed, partly as a consequence of the long-standing enmity toward it of the United States and its allies, which had forced the Soviet state to sacrifice the economic well-being of its population to the demands of the arms race; partly, also, as a consequence of the hostility toward Moscow of non-Russian territories that had been incorporated into the Soviet sphere during the civil wars and during and after the Second World War. Worth recalling here is that those territories on the edge of and immediately abutting the borders of the former Russian Empire were precisely those in which the Bolsheviks had perceived the greatest hope for the tide of world revolution that they predicted would flow from the Russian source. That hope had been dashed at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920, however, and by 1926, the only pro-Soviet government on the face of the globe was, perversely, housed at Ulan Bator in Mongolia.187 What sort of victory was that for a party whose very essence was proletarian internationalism?

Finally, it is worth asking whether the party that emerged from the civil wars truly deserves the title “Bolshevik.” The bitter and exhausting struggles against counterrevolution, nationalism, peasant conservatism, and intervention, it could be argued, had cost Lenin’s party its soul. Consequently, the Russian Revolution of 1917 largely failed in its objective of remaking the world. It begat an apparently powerful state, the USSR, but the much-vaunted “new Soviet man,” fashioned from the DNA of socialism and immune to militarism and colonialism, was stillborn. Rather, the new Soviet man of the post–civil war years was a party apparatchik who helped corral and police an increasingly disgruntled population of Russians and an always alienated population of non-Russians, while assisting in the governance of the most militarized state in the world as it strove to forestall economic collapse and renewed invasions. Moreover, guided by Stalin, he would very soon turn on the idealists of the old party and the military leaders of the civil wars, who were the central targets of the murderous purges of the 1930s. From exile, in 1937, Leon Trotsky, the organizer of the Red Army and the chief architect of the “Bolshevik victory” in the “Russian” Civil Wars, would ruefully observe this betrayal of the revolution.188 Four years later he would be murdered in Mexico by an agent of Stalin’s secret police.

Notes

1. The most prominent English-language works include David Bullock, The Russian Civil War, 1918–22 (Oxford: Osprey, 2008); W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989); Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Edinburgh: Berlinn, 2008); and Geoffrey Swain, Russia’s Civil War (Stroud: Tempus, 2000).