The Russian Civil War

1918 - 1921

Immediate Problems

• The shortage of raw materials and investment capital had reduced industrial production to two-thirds of its 1914 level.

• Inflation had rocketed• The transport system had been crippled• Hunger gripped large areas of Russia - grain

supplies were over 13 million tonnes short of the nation’s needs

• Within a few months of the October Revolution, the food crisis had been further deepended by the ceding to Germany of the Ukraine, Russia’s richest grain producing region.

Bolshevik Early Measures:The Decree on Land

The key article of this measure stated:“ Private ownership of land shall be

abolished forever, land shall not be sold, purchased, leased, mortgaged, or otherwise alienated. All land, whether state, crown, monastery, church, factory, private, public, peasant etc. shall be confiscated without compensation and become the property of the whole people, and pass into use of all those who cultivate it.”

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk 1918

• A huge slice of territory, amounting to a third of European Russia, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea and including the Ukraine, Russia’s major grain-source, was ceded to Germany.

• The land lost by Russia - a million square miles - contained a population of 45 million people

• Russia was required to pay three billion roubles in war reparations.

A War about Food• On occasion, the fighting was simply a desperate struggle for food.

Famine provided the back drop to the Civil War. The breakdown in food supplies that had occurred during the war against Germany persisted. Until this was remedied whole area of Russia remained hungry. The failure of the new regime to end hunger was an important factor in creating the initial military opposition to the Bolsheviks in 1918. In addition to the problems of a fractured transport system, Lenin’s government was faced with the loss to Germany of Russia’s main wheat-supply area, the Ukraine. In March 1918, the month in which the Brest-Litvosk Treaty was signed, the bread ration in Petrograd reached its lowest ever allocation of 50 grams per day.

• Hunger forced many workers out of the major industrial cities. By June 1918 the workforce in Petrograd had shrunk by 60 per cet and the overall population had declined from three to two million. A visitor so the city at this time spoke of:

“entering a metropolis of cold, hunger, of hatred and endurance.”

Bolshevik Victory

• RED STRENGTHS• Controlled the centeral area of western Russia• Two major cities of Russia - Moscow & St Petersburg - the

administration centres of the coutnry remained in their hands• The areas the Reds held were also the industrial centres for

Russia• The dependence for the Whites on supples from aboard

helped support the Reds accusations of Whites being foreign interventionists.

• The Red Army was brilliantly organized and led by Trotsky.

White Weaknesses

• The reasons for the final victory of the Reds in the Civil War are difficult to determine:

• The various White armies fought as separate detachments. • Apart from their obvious desire to overthrow the Bolsheviks -

they had no single aim• They were unwilling to sacrifice their individual interests in

order to form a united anit-Bolshevik front• In the rare cases in which the Whites did consider combining -

they were geographically scattered.• The Whites were too reliant on supples from aboard• The Whites lack leaders of quality of Trotsky.

Trotsky’s Role

• To defend the Red Armys internal lines of communication• To deny the Whites the opportunity to concentrate large

forces in any one location• To prevent the Whites maintaining regular supplies.

• The key to this strategy was control of Russia’s railways. The railway was the means of transporting troops swiftly and in large numbers to the critical areas of defence or attack. It was no accident that the decisive confrontations between Reds and Whites took place near rail junctions and depots.

Foreign Intervention• In 1918 British land forces entered Transcaucasia in southern Russia

and also occupied part of central Asia• British warships entered Russian baltic waters and the Black Sea,

where French naval vessels joined them• The French also established a major land base around the Black Sea

Port of Odessa.• In April 1918, Japanese troops occupied Russia’s far eastern port of

Vladivostok• Four months later, units from France, Britain and the USA and Italy

joined them• Czech, Finnish, Lithuanina, Polish and Romanian forces crossed into

Russia. • In 1919 Japanese and United States troops occupied parts of Siberia.

Kulaks• The Bolshevik term for the class of rich exploiting peasants. The

notion was largely a myth. Rather than being a class of exploiters, the kulaks wer simply the more efficient farmers who were marginally more prosperous. Usually have one more cow or several more pigs or a larger plow than other peasants.

The end of War Communism

• It is precisely now and only now when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh ad thousands of corpses are lettering the roads that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of the church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.

Krondstadt Uprising• Opposition to Lenin & Communist Party - grew as a result of harsh

treatment and conditions of Civil War, War Communism and the Cheka, famine, conditions were worse under the Bolsheviks than under the Tsar.

• Workers Opposition - demanding higher wages, better conditions, new elections, freedom of speech & press, freedom of assembly. - called for Soviets without Communists.

• Kronstadt Naval Base - March 1921 - sailors & Petrograd workers staged an uprising - strong supporters of the Bolsheviks in 1917 revolution - Trotsky used Red Army & Cheka (60,000) to squash the sailors & workers - 20,000 men killed and wounded - Survivors were executed in batches, hunted down and/or sent of to labour camps.

• Krondstadt uprising was a surprise to the Bolsheviks.• Lenin dismissed the incident as Bourgeois enemies of the October

Revolution BUT he also learnt a lesson from this uprising. --- Led to a new economic policy.