Meanwhile, after the country's withdrawal from the First World War, only part of Russia - Moscow, Petrograd, and much of the industrial heartland - was under Bolshevik control. Ukraine slipped under German influence, the Mensheviks held sway in the Caucasus, and much of the countryside belonged to the Socialist Revolutionaries. Given the Bolshevik desire to dominate the whole of Russia and the rest of the former tsarist empire, civil war was inevitable.
The Civil War and the Creation of the USSR
From 1918 to 1920 Russia was torn by a civil war that cost millions of lives and untold destruction. In the context of the Russian Revolution, the term "civil war" had two distinct meanings. It described the repressive measures applied by the Bolsheviks against those who refused to recognize their power seizure and defied their decrees, such as peasants who refused to surrender grain. It also defined the military conflict between the communists' Red Army and various "White" armies formed on the periphery of Soviet Russia for the purpose of overthrowing the communists. Both wars went on concurrently. The struggle against domestic opponents was to prove even more costly in human lives and more threatening to the new regime than the efforts of the Whites.
In the summer of 1918 the fortunes of the Bolsheviks were at their lowest ebb. Not only had they to contend with rebellious peasants and hostile White armies supported by the Allies, but they lost such support as they had once had among the workers: in elections to the soviets held in the spring of 1918 they were everywhere defeated by rival socialist parties. They dealt with the problem by expelling the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks from the soviets and forcing re- elections until they obtained the desired majorities.
The Bolsheviks' growing unpopularity moved them to resort to unbridled terror. The Cheka (a forerunner of the notorious KGB), or political police, was formed in December 1917 to protect communist power. By the end of the civil war the Cheka had become a powerful force. In the first half of 1918 it carried out not a few summary executions. In July, on Lenin's orders, the ex-tsar and his entire family were murdered in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg (called Sverdlovsk between 1924 and 1991), where they had been held prisoner. The formal "Red Terror" began in September 1918, The pretext was a nearly successful attempt on the life of Lenin by a Socialist Revolutionary, Fannie Kaplan. As soon as he recovered from what could have been fatal wounds, Lenin ordered the Cheka to carry out mass executions of suspected opponents. Thousands of political prisoners held without charges were shot.
The civil war in the military sense was fought on several fronts. The first "White force, known as the Volunteer Army, formed in the winter of 1917-18 in the southern areas inhabited by the Cossacks. Another army was created in western Siberia; several smaller White armies came into being in the north-west, the north, and the far east. These anti- communist armies were often led by former imperial officers, and all were in varying measures supported by the United Kingdom with money and war materiel. There were also the anti-communist "Greens" and the anarchists, who were strongest in Ukraine; the anarchists' most talented leader was Nestor Makhno. The Allied intervention was initially inspired by the desire to reactivate the Eastern Front of the First World War, but after the Armistice it lost its clear purpose, and it was continued on the insistence of Winston Churchill, who saw in Bolshevism a permanent threat to democracy and world peace. Neither the American nor the French contingents on Russian soil engaged in combat, and they were withdrawn after the Armistice. The British stayed on until the autumn of 1919, doing occasional fighting but mainly providing aid to the White armies.
The Red Army was formed in February 1918, and Trotsky became its leader. He was to reveal great leadership and military skill, fashioning a rabble into a formidable fighting force. The Bolsheviks had been slow in forming a professional army, largely because they feared the prospect of arming peasants, whom they viewed as class enemies. At first they relied mainly on partisans and Latvian volunteers. In the autumn of 1918, however, they decided to proceed with the formation of a regular army manned by conscripts. Command over the troops and the formulation of strategic decisions was entrusted to professional officers of the ex-tsarist army, some 75,000 of whom were drafted. To prevent defections and sabotage, the orders of these officers were subject to approval by Bolshevik political commissars assigned to them. Officer families were treated as hostages. At the height of the civil war the Red Army numbered almost 5 million people.
The decisive battles of the civil war took place in the summer and autumn of 1919. Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, leader of the White forces in Siberia, launched in the spring a drive on Moscow and approached the shores of the Volga, when he was stopped by a numerically superior Red force and thrown back. His army disintegrated later in the year, and he himself was captured and shot without trial, possibly on Lenin's orders (February 1920). Of all the White generals, Anton Denikin came closest to victory. In October 1919 his Volunteer Army, augmented by conscripts, reached Oryol, 150 miles (250 kilometres) south of Moscow. In their advance, Cossacks in White service carried out frightful pogroms in Ukraine in which an estimated 100,000 Jews lost their lives. Denikin's lines were stretched thin, and he lacked reserves. He advanced recklessly because he had been told by Britain that unless he took Moscow, the country's new capital, before the onset of winter, he would receive no more assistance. In battles waged in October and November the Red Army decisively crushed the Whites and sent them fleeing pell-mell to the ports of the
JOSEPH STALIN (1879-1953) Soviet politician and dictator
The son of a Georgian cobbler, losif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili studied at a seminary but was expelled for revolutionary activity in 1899. He joined an underground revolutionary group and sided with the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party in 1903. A disciple of Vladimir Lenin, he served in minor party posts and was appointed to the first Bolshevik Centra! Committee (1912). He remained active behind the scenes and in exile (19I3-S7) until the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought the Bolsheviks to power. Having adopted the name Stalin {from Russian stal, "steel"), he served as commissar for nationalities and for state control in the Bolshevik government (1917-23). He was a member of the Politburo, and in 1922 he became secretary-general of the party's Central Committee.
After Lenin's death (1924), Stalin overcame his rivals, including Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolay Bukharin, and Aleksey Rykov, and took control of Soviet politics. In 1928 he inaugurated the five-year plans that radically altered Soviet economic and social structures and resulted in the deaths of many millions. In the 1930s he contrived to eliminate threats to his power through the purge trials and through widespread secret executions and persecution.
On the eve of the Second World War Stalin signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (1939); he attacked Finland, and annexed parts of eastern Europe to
strengthen his western frontiers. When Germany invaded Russia (1941), Stalin took control of military operations. He allied Russia with Britain and the United States; at the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences he demonstrated his negotiating skill. After the war he consolidated Soviet power in eastern Europe and built up the Soviet Union as a world military power. He continued his repressive political measures to control interna! dissent; increasingly paranoid, at the time of his death he was preparing to mount another purge after the so-called Doctors' Plot.
Noted for bringing the Soviet Union into world prominence, at terrible cost to his own people, Stalin left a legacy of repression and fear as well as industrial and military power. In 1956 he and his personality cult were denounced by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev,