Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

23. On the October events, see Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2004).

24. On the Vikzhel negotiations, see Geoffrey Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War (London: Longman, 1996), 53–62.

25. The established view, challenged here, has it that “the Russian Civil War . . . began in the autumn of 1917. To be precise, it began on 25 October[,] during the evening,” with the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd. See Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 4.

26. Rex A. Wade, “The October Revolution, the Constituent Assembly, and the End of the Russian Revolution,” in Reinterpreting Revolutionary Russia: Essays in Honour of James D. White, ed. Ian D. Thatcher (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 72–85.

27. The Allied powers were not altogether lacking in imperialistic designs on Russia, as it collapsed, but these pale in comparison to the expansionist plans and actions of the Central Powers. That Allied intervention has a huge historiography in comparison to that of the Austro-German incursion is apparent from the comparative size of the chapters covering these subjects in Smele, Russian Revolution and Civil War. The best work on Allied intervention remains Richard H. Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917–1921, 3 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961–1972). On Austro-German intervention, see Winifried Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik, 1918: Von Brest-Litovsk bis zum Ende der Ersten Weltkriegs (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1966). On Turkey, see Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

28. Lenin’s majority in the party may well, in fact, have been a gerrymandered one, and in its Central Committee a majority either abstained or voted against Lenin in the key vote of 23 February 1918. On the Bolshevik opposition to Lenin, see Ronald I. Kowalski, The Bolshevik Party in Conflict: The Left Communist Opposition of 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1991). On the negotiations and the peace treaty, see John W. Wheeler-Bennett, The Forgotten Peace: Brest-Litovsk, March 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1938).

29. The fullest version of the treaty (and its variants and supplements) is available online at Yale Law School’s Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/bl34.asp#treatytext.

30. See Jonathan D. Smele, “Mania Grandiosa and ‘The Turning Point in World History’: Kerensky in London in 1918,” Revolutionary Russia 20, no. 1 (2007): 1–34.

31. See, for example, Clifford Kinvig, Churchill’s Crusade: The British Invasion of Russia, 1918–1920 (New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2007); and Brock Millman, “The Problem with Generals: Military Observers and the Origins of the Intervention in Russia and Persia, 1917–1918,” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 2 (1998): 291–320. Offering support to this argument, not all socialists favored armed resistance to the Bolsheviks. Following an Extraordinary Party Conference in November 1917, the Mensheviks offered limited support to the Soviet government and attempted to work from within Soviet institutions to temper the Bolshevik dictatorship. The best summary of the Mensheviks’ experience of the civil wars is provided, despite its title, in André Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 70–88.

32. See Smele, “Russian” Civil Wars, ch. 1.

33. The cause of the revolt remains contentious. Soviet historians always blamed Allied provocation, as did some (generally left-wing) Western historians; others blamed the Bolsheviks for unwisely attempting to disarm the powerful legion, perhaps as a consequence of instructions from Berlin and Vienna. See Victor M. Fic, The Bolsheviks and the Czechoslovak Legion: The Origin of Their Armed Conflict, March–May 1918 (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1978).

34. Oliver Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 148–50.