When Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Party seized power in Russia to cre-ate a one-party Communist regime in lcre-ate 1917, building a military was a low priority. Indeed, the Bolsheviks were more concerned with prevent-ing the old army beprevent-ing used against them than buildprevent-ing a new one. For seizing power in Petrograd, defeating armed resistance in Moscow, repulsing Kerensky’s desultory attempt to take back Petrograd, and spreading Soviet power across Russia, Red Guards were more than enough. These hastily assembled and loosely organized worker militias were perfectly adequate to establish Soviet power. The Bolsheviks made little effort to preserve the imperial army, which disintegrated rapidly as soldiers headed home. Contrary to Bolshevik expectations, Russia’s revo-lution did not spark Europe-wide revorevo-lution. They had to defend them-selves not only against imperial Germany, but against domestic foes and Allied intervention. Lenin and his party quickly realized that they were caught in a desperate civil war and needed an army to protect the revolu-tion and to survive. On 28 January 1918, Lenin’s new Bolshevik govern-ment, the Council of People’s Commissars, decreed the formation of a new Workers-Peasants’ Red Army.
The Bolsheviks’ first task was ending the war with Germany. The Ger-man gamble on returning Lenin to Russia from exile in Switzerland had paid rich results, and the Germans fully expected to reap the rewards of victory. They presented Leon Davidovich Trotsky, the Bolsheviks’ Com-missar for Foreign Affairs, with draconian demands for territorial conces-sions. Unwilling to accept defeat, and expecting world revolution, Trotsky declared “no war, no peace” and left the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. The Germans then took by force what the Bolsheviks refused to give them. In February 1918 they pushed east, and the Bolsheviks could not stop them.
Faced with imminent destruction, Lenin convinced his party to accept German terms. In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed 3 March 1918, the Bolsheviks surrendered Finland, the Baltics, Poland, and Ukraine. The Germans had returned Lenin to Russia in April 1917, and from the point of view of the Western Allies, Lenin had taken Russia out of the war and handed Germany territory beyond the wildest dreams of German expan-sionists. To overthrow what they saw as a German puppet, protect the military material they had shipped to Russia, and resurrect a Russian front against the Germans, Britain, France, the United States, and even Japan landed troops around Russia’s periphery. The first British troops landed in Murmansk only days after Brest-Litovsk was signed.
Faced with the German threat, Trotsky had abandoned foreign affairs and on 13 March 1918 became People’s Commissar for Military Affairs and thereby creator of the Red Army.
In a way, the German threat simplified his task. Many former officers and soldiers volunteered for the new Red Army to defend their home-land. In the end, they did not fight Germans, but instead fellow Russians in the approaching Civil War. Trotsky began organizing and disciplining the Red Guards and pro-Bolshevik partisans into a real army, using tsarist officers, volunteer or conscripted. Few of these “military specialists” were Bolshevik, and they were not trusted. Trotsky used military commissars, an institution introduced by the Provisional Government, to maintain control. These commissars acted as co-commanders. Without their signa-tures, orders were illegitimate. They watched for any signs of treason or counterrevolution, enforcing revolutionary control at the muzzle of a revolver.
Over the spring and summer of 1918, the institutions of the Red Army took shape. In April, a central bureau was established to coordinate the work of military commissars. Mass military training for the working pop-ulation followed. In May, the Soviet government established military dis-tricts, emulating imperial models, to handle recruitment and supply for the nascent Red Army. An all-Russian Main Staff managed the organiza-tion and training of the army, as well as its operaorganiza-tional coordinaorganiza-tion in the field. Many steps Trotsky took rankled the far left within the Bolshevik Party. European socialism traditionally regarded a people’s militia as the only acceptable army. The use of conscription, tsarist officers, and harsh discipline all seemed incompatible with socialist principles. Trotsky’s response was simple: winning the Civil War required a disciplined, pro-fessional army, not partisan bands. He had the solid backing of Lenin and the party’s leadership.
The Bolshevik plight got much worse in May 1918. From the hundreds of thousands of Austrian prisoners taken by the imperial army, a special Czech Legion had been recruited to fight for the liberation of their home-land from Austria. When Soviet Russia left the war, the Czech Legion headed east along the Trans-Siberian Railway to travel around the world to the Western Front and continue its fight. In May, though, clashes with local Bolsheviks led to a full-scale Czech revolt. The Legion’s 40,000 sol-diers seized control of the railroad, and with it all Siberia. Shielded by the Czechs, anti-Bolshevik Russians, labeled the Whites in contrast to their Red opponents, organized to take power back. The Bolsheviks intro-duced conscription, and service in the Red Army was made obligatory for imperial officers.
Real fighting began in summer 1918, as Bolshevik Reds clashed with Czech-supported Whites for control of the industrial cities of the Ural Mountains and the Volga River valley. While Trotsky was responsible for building, organizing, and managing the Red Army, actual command in the east went to Ioakim Ioakimovich Vatsetis, a colonel in the tsarist army.
He commanded the Red Army’s Eastern Front in July–September 1918
and was thereafter commander in chief of all Red forces. These early struggles demonstrated the character of the Civil War’s fighting. Both the Reds and the Whites employed improvised armies of unwilling peas-ants. They were reluctant to fight and eager to desert. This made both armies small and brittle, especially in 1918 and 1919. In Russia’s immense spaces, it was almost impossible to hold a defensive line, and once a line was broken, there were neither the men nor defensible terrain to make a new stand. Fronts moved back and forth fluidly for hundreds of miles.
Cavalry, useless in World War I against disciplined infantry, was perfect for the open spaces and small armies of the Civil War.
Both sides made allowances for their unwilling rank and file. The Whites developed an officer-heavy army from tsarist veterans. White armies were as a result often highly skilled and highly motivated, but vul-nerable to losses. The Reds, on the other hand, relied on political indoctri-nation as well as discipline to convince soldiers to fight. Special units of communists and industrial workers, the Bolsheviks’ natural constituency, were used as shock troops due to their higher levels of motivation. There were other means: the Bolsheviks’ fearsome 1st Cavalry Army, the source of much of Joseph Stalin’s later military elite, relied less on indoctrination than on a esprit de corps of frightfulness and plunder.
Bolshevik support among industrial workers and foreign intervention around Russia’s seacoasts meant the Bolsheviks never lost control of Rus-sia’s central industrial heartland, and with it the vital railroad network through Moscow and Petrograd. While the Whites relied on material aid from the Western allies, the Reds used Russia’s industrial centers to keep their war running. Lenin’s government introduced a policy later termed
“War Communism” to manage the effort. This involved the total conver-sion of the economy to state ownership and control and the destruction of the ruble through hyperinflation. The Bolsheviks faced the same challenge the tsarist government did during World War I: how to make peasants exchange valuable grain for worthless money when there was nothing to buy. The Bolshevik answer was requisitions: confiscating grain at gunpoint. At the same time the Reds were battling White opposition around their periphery, they were also fighting the peasantry in territory nominally under their control.
Imperial Germany’s war effort collapsed under the cumulative weight of Allied military and economic pressure in November 1918. German troops marched back home from the territory they had occupied after Brest-Litovsk. This threw an immense swath of the Russian Empire, stretching from Ukraine through Belorussia into the Baltics, into anarchy.
In some places—the Baltics and Poland—local nationalists seized power and established new national states out of the ruins of collapsed empires.
Soviet Russia quickly reestablished control over Belorussia. Ukraine descended into chaos, torn between Reds, Whites, Ukrainian nationalists,
and peasant anarchists. With Germany defeated, the Western Allies were free to intervene against the Bolsheviks, but had no stomach for another war so soon after the last. Instead, they continued their previous limited intervention and material support of the Whites.
By the end of 1918, the essential structures of Bolshevik military gover-nance were in place. At the summit was the Bolshevik Party, controlled by its Central Committee, and, later, by the Politburo, a subcommittee of the Central Committee. Final authority over the military always lay with the party leadership. Underneath that, Leon Trotsky ran the Red Army through two linked offices. He was People’s Commissar of Military Affairs, the equivalent of a War Minister, heading the bureaucratic machi-nery of the Red Army. He was also Chairman of the Revolutionary-Military Council, a collective body of the Red Army’s top officials that set policy within the military. While this gave him great power, he did not control units in the field. That was left to the Red Army’s commander in chief, who was always a military professional. The units of the Red Army had a dual structure. In addition to a commander who ultimately answered to the commander in chief, formations of any size also had a commissar, answering to a separate political chain of command, to ensure loyalty and promote ideological indoctrination among the troops.
The climax of the Civil War took place in 1919. The Reds faced three main centers of White opposition. In the east, a White movement under the tsarist admiral Alexander Vasil’evich Kolchak loosely controlled terri-tory from the Urals east to the Pacific Ocean. To the south, Anton Ivano-vich Denikin ruled the north Caucasus. Finally, in the Baltics, Nikolai Nikolaevich Iudenich led a smaller White movement. Had those three coordinated their actions, the Bolsheviks would almost certainly have been crushed. The Whites were, however, by comparison to the Bolshe-viks a broad but fractious movement devoid of overarching leadership.
The White coalition involved almost every strand of Russian politics to the right of the Bolsheviks, including moderate socialists and monarchists alike. There was no coherent political program aside from restoring Rus-sian unity, and even that rankled non-RusRus-sian nationalist movements that might otherwise have gladly fought the Bolsheviks. The generals who dominated the Whites did not easily defer to one another, each having an eye on ruling Russia after the Civil War. The Reds, though split on many issues, recognized Lenin’s final authority, and their central location at the hub of Russia’s railroad network ensured they could employ their resources effectively.
1919’s fighting began in the east, where in March Kolchak’s army attacked east against a thin screen of six Red armies stretching 400 miles from north to south. Typical of the Civil War’s fighting, Kolchak’s offen-sive easily punched through the Bolshevik line, forcing a headlong retreat that continued 400 miles, nearing the Volga River. Kolchak’s problem,
though, was that Bolshevik supply lines shortened as his lengthened, and his manpower base, thinly populated Siberia, prevented him from mak-ing up his mountmak-ing casualties. By late April, as Kolchak’s offensive lost momentum, the Reds put professional revolutionary Mikhail Vasil’evich Frunze in command of four of the Eastern Front’s six armies. Frunze counterattacked on 28 April 1919, breaking through the southern section of Kolchak’s defenses and sending the Whites reeling backward at full speed toward the Urals. Kolchak’s defeat created a dilemma: whether to pursue him to the Pacific or pull troops from the east to defend against the growing menace from Denikin in the south. Trotsky and Vatsetis advocated the latter course, setting off a bitter debate within the party that ended in Vatsetis’s dismissal. Sergei Sergeevich Kamenev, a tsarist colonel and General Staff officer, took over as commander in chief. Frunze took over Kamenev’s position as commander of the Eastern Front and contin-ued the relentless pursuit. Kolchak himself was shot by local Bolsheviks in Irkutsk in February 1920.
Though Trotsky and Vatsetis lost the argument over strategy, they may have been right. Denikin’s Volunteer Army in the south pulled together tsarist officers, cossacks, reluctant peasant conscripts, and Allied weapons and supplies into an effective fighting force. Denikin began his drive north in May 1919. Though he enjoyed remarkable success, advancing for five months to within 200 miles of Moscow, the inherent limita-tions of the White movement held him back. He had only perhaps 100,000 men, not nearly enough mass to overcome Russia’s immense space. Weakened like Russian armies before him by geography, Denikin’s Volunteer Army thinned as it spread like a fan while pushing north toward Moscow. What made Denikin’s attack especially dangerous was that it coincided with Iudenich’s attempt to take Petrograd from the west.
With only 15,000 men, Iudenich reached the Petrograd suburbs in October before losing momentum and fleeing into Estonia. At almost the same time, a Red counterattack against Denikin smashed through his thinning lines and sent the Volunteer Army into rapid retreat south.
By March 1920, the White movement in the south was confined to the Crimea, and the Civil War seemed over. The Red Army prepared to demo-bilize. Instead, the Bolsheviks faced an invasion from a resurrected Poland, which had used the collapse of its three partitioning powers to recreate a Polish state. Poland and Soviet Russia had skirmished in 1919 over their borderlands in Belorussia and Lithuania, but in April 1920 Poland invaded Ukraine with aid from Ukrainian nationalists and cap-tured Kiev. In May, the Soviets prepared a counteroffensive west through Belorussia by the Western Front under the dynamic, young Mikhail Niko-laevich Tukhachevskii. At the same time, the Reds’ dreaded 1st Cavalry Army counterattacked in Ukraine, forcing Polish withdrawal.
Tukhachevskii, fired by ambition and the tantalizing prospect of carry-ing revolution to Poland and through it to Germany, drove his Western Front toward Warsaw. This caught him in the same trap that had foiled Denikin. When a state cannot mobilize resources fully (and this was certainly true in the Civil War), armies lack the mass to deal with Russia’s space. Tukhachevskii’s front grew narrower and thinner as his supply lines lengthened. As he neared Warsaw in July, his forces were too depleted to take it by frontal assault, so he instead angled right to envelop Warsaw from the north, weakening his left, southern flank. Rec-ognizing the danger, the Bolshevik leadership diverted two armies from the Southwestern Front, embroiled in fighting around Lvov, to move northwest to protect the Western Front’s exposed southern flank. Instead, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, commissar for the Southwestern Front, blocked the transfer. Stalin’s motives are cloudy, perhaps involving greater glory for the Southwestern Front at the expense of the Western, but his actions unquestionably had a terrible effect on Tukhachevskii’s campaign. On 16 August 1920, the Poles counterattacked from southeast of Warsaw, breaking through Tukhachevskii’s paper-thin left flank and sending his entire Front into headlong retreat. Though Tukhachev-skii’s efforts pushed the limits of what Soviet manpower might achieve, Stalin’s obstructionism certainly aided the Polish defense. By spring 1921, the Front had stabilized and the Soviets and Poles agreed to a fron-tier incorporating substantial Belorussian and Ukrainian populations into Poland.
The remaining Whites in the Crimea, now led by Baron Peter Nikolae-vich Wrangel, used the distraction of the Polish invasion to launch their own offensive north in June 1920. This achieved little, and by September Frunze had arrived to push Wrangel’s Whites back into the Crimea. On the night of 7–8 November, Frunze’s forces stormed the Crimea, breaking through the Perekop. In less than ten days, all resistance was crushed and the Civil War was over. The chaos it produced means that accurate casu-alty figures are impossible to derive. Perhaps a million Red soldiers died, and fewer Whites from a smaller army. Five million civilians may have died, most from disease and famine. Wrangel’s defeat meant the Red Army could finally demobilize, though consolidating Soviet authority over what became the Soviet Union took several years. American, British, and French troops abandoned a losing cause. In Transcaucasia, the Red Army had occupied Azerbaijan, expelling a Muslim national government, in April 1920. In December, nationalist Armenia accepted Soviet rule as an alternative to conquest by the Turks. The Red Army invaded and quickly conquered Georgia, the last holdout in Transcaucasia, in February 1921. In the west, Finland and the Baltics retained their independence with West-ern support. In Siberia, the Bolsheviks established a buffer state, the Far Eastern Republic, while they worked for Japan’s evacuation of territory
it had occupied during the Civil War. Fighting continued long after the defeat of the Whites. Soviet Russia was plagued by “banditism,” a loose term that covered not only criminal gangs but also peasant resistance to Soviet power. In the spring and summer of 1921, over 100,000 Red Army soldiers were occupied with campaigns against banditism. As the prob-lem was brought under control, the Red Army surrendered domestic duties to special internal troops.
The one place that the Red Army maintained active campaigning was in central Asia against the basmachi, Turkic muslim rebels against Soviet control. During the Civil War, Bolsheviks had seized control of Russian-dominated cities in central Asia, but the native population of the countryside remained hostile. Cut off from contact with Moscow by White territory, the Bolshevik cities held on until Kolchak’s defeat allowed reinforcements through to impose Soviet rule on the countryside. This generated widespread resistance. Through the early 1920s, 20,000–30,000 Red Army troops were involved in suppressing the basmachi. In 1922, bas-machi rebels, commanded by refugee Ottoman officers, even captured Dushanbe, the current capital of Tajikistan. Generally speaking, though, the basmachi had no better luck fighting the Soviets than their fathers resisting Russian imperial expansion. Regular Red Army troops system-atically secured cities and communications lines, then eradicated basmachi bands. Any serious threat was gone by the late 1920s, though scattered resistance continued as late as 1933.
As soldiers and commanders returned to civilian life after the Civil War, they served as a vital tool of Bolshevik state building. Membership in the Bolshevik Party had more than doubled over the course of the Civil War,
As soldiers and commanders returned to civilian life after the Civil War, they served as a vital tool of Bolshevik state building. Membership in the Bolshevik Party had more than doubled over the course of the Civil War,