Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

2. It is worth noting here that one of the most contested cities of the period was L′vov (Lviv in Ukrainian, Lemberg to the Austrians), which had never been part of the Russian Empire, apart from a brief period of occupation in 1914–1915.

3. For a fuller explanation of the need for a broader geographical focus and a lengthier chronology of the subject, see Jonathan D. Smele, The “Russian” Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (London/New York: Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2015). The trend toward dealing with the subject in this manner was chiefly initiated by Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002). This is to a degree echoed and built upon in Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), which examines events on the Eastern Front in the context of decolonization. Despite its title, another recent addition to the genre—Douglas Boyd, The Other First World War: The Blood-Soaked Russian Fronts, 1914–1922 (Stroud: The History Press, 2014)—is disappointing, being a rather shallow popular history of Russia’s part in the First World War and the Allies’ role in Russia, with a single final chapter devoted to some aspects of “The Wars after the War.”

4. V. V. Erlikhman, Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke: Spravochnik (Moscow: Russkaia panorama, 2004), 18; and Iu. A. Poliakov, Sovetskaia strana posle okonchania grazhdanskoi voiny: Territoriia i naselenie (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), 104. These sources cite fatalities in action of 950,000 in the Red Army, 650,000 among White and nationalist forces, and 900,000 among various independent partisan forces, with a further 2,000,000 deaths due to terror (1,200,000 killed by the Reds, 300,000 by the Whites, and 500,000 by partisan forces) and 6,000,000 due to hunger and disease. To put the figure of a total of 10,500,000 deaths in perspective, the Russian deaths in the First World War were approximately 3,700,000 by recent estimates (2,000,000 military deaths and 1,700,000 civilian): Erlikhman, Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke, 18. For comparison, it is worth noting that in Europe’s other great internecine conflict of the 20th century, the Spanish Civil War, it is likely that losses amounted to around 530,000, with perhaps 50,000 more fatalities in Franco’s postwar prison camps. Given that Spain’s population in 1936 was approximately 25,000,000, while the population of the Russian Empire in 1917 was approximately 160,000,000, it seems that mortality was around three times greater in the Russian Civil War than in the Spanish Civil War.

5. Frank Lorimer, The Population of the Soviet Union: History and Prospects (Geneva: League of Nations, 1946), 29. Unsurprisingly, the gathering of data for the 1926 census was not unproblematic, but the greatly esteemed Lorimer insisted that its findings, published in 56 volumes, was “one of the most complete accounts ever presented of the population of any country.” Ibid., xiii. A recent, sober Russian analysis, while detailing the problems associated with statistics from this period (and decrying exaggerated and unscientific estimates of 40,000,000 deaths found in the popular press of the late glasnost′ period, when sensationalism was rife), nevertheless concludes that in 1926 there was a population deficit “in the amplitude of 20–25 million” people in the USSR. Iu. A. Poliakov, ed., Naselenie Rossii v XX veke, Tom 1: 1900–1939 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), 95–96.

6. To take but one example, the street in Kyiv on which the Ukrainian parliament (the Verkhovna Rada) stands is now named for the historian and politician Mykhailo Hrushevsky, one of the founding fathers of the anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian National Republic of the civil-wars era, who was persecuted and (in 1934) quite possibly murdered by the Soviet security services.

7. For a fuller discussion of the historiography, see Jonathan D. Smele, “Russia: Civil War, 1917–1920,” in Reader’s Guide to Military History, ed. Charles Messenger (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), 510–15; and Jonathan D. Smele, ed., The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Continuum, 2003).