Fearing a White victory, the moderate socialist parties threw their support behind the Reds at critical junctures, thereby complicating this scenario. Moreover, left-wing factions within these parties forged alliances with the
Bolsheviks. For instance, until mid-1918 the Bolsheviks stayed afloat in part owing to the support of the Left SRs, who broke from their parent party following October I9I7. Accepting commissariats in the new government, the Left SRs believed they could influence Bolshevik policies towards Russia's peasant majority. In some locales the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition even weathered the controversy over the Brest-Litovsk Peace in March I9I8, which ceded eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and Ukraine to Germany, as well as Transcaucasia to Turkey, in return for an end to hostilities. Ratifying the treaty sundered the alliance with the Left SRs, who withdrew from the Lenin government in protest, and also sparked heated controversy within the Communist Party, especially among the so-called Left Communists led by Nikolai Bukharin, who backed a revolutionary war against Germany. Renegade Left SRs later formed a new party called the Revolutionary Communists (RCs), who participated in a ruling coalition with the Bolsheviks in many Volga provinces and the Urals. Committed to Soviet power, the RCs perceived otherwise questionable Bolshevik practices as the consequence of temporary circumstances brought about by civil war. The Bolshevik attitude towards the RCs and other groups that supported the Reds reflected the overall strength of Soviet power at any given time. Exercising power through a dynamic of co-optation amid repression, they manipulated their populist allies before orchestrating their merger with the Communists in 1920.[146]
Because political opposition to the Bolsheviks became more resolved after they closed down the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, the Lenin government established the Red Army under Leon Trotsky. He promptly recruited ex-tsarist officers to command the Reds, appointing political commissars to all units to monitor such officers and the ideological education of recruits. This early phase of the civil war ended with a spate of armed conflicts in Russian towns along the Volga in May and June 1918 between Bolshevik-run soviets and Czechoslovak legionnaires. Prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian armies, they were slated to be transported back to the western front in order to join the Allies in the fight to defeat the Central Powers. Their clash with the Soviet government emboldened the SR opposition to set up an anti-Bolshevik government, the Committee to Save the Constituent Assembly, Komuch, in the Volga city of Samara in June 1918. Many delegates elected to the Constituent Assembly congregated there before the city fell to the Bolsheviks that November. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks expelled Mensheviks and SRs from local soviets, while the Kadets met in the Siberian city of Omsk in June to establish a Provisional Siberian Government. The rivalry between Samara and Omsk resulted in a state conference that met in Ufa in September, the last attempt to form from below a national force to oppose Bolshevism. Drawing representatives from disparate bodies, the Ufa Conference set up a compromise five-member Directory But in November the military removed the socialists from it and installed Admiral Kolchak in power. He kept his headquarters in Siberia, remaining official leader of the White movement until defeat forced him to resign in early 1920.
Although its role is often exaggerated, international intervention bolstered the White cause and fuelled Bolshevik paranoia, providing 'evidence' for the party's depictions of the Whites as traitorous agents of imperialist foreign powers. Maintaining an apprehensive attitude towards the Whites whom many in the West viewed as reactionaries, the Allies dispatched troops to Russia to secure military supplies needed in the war against Germany. Their involvement deepened as they came to see the Bolsheviks as a hostile force that promoted world revolution, renounced the tsarist government's debts and concluded a separate peace with Germany. Allied intervention on behalf of the Whites became more active with the end of the First World War in November 1918, when the British, French, Japanese, Americans and a dozen other powers sent troops to Russian ports and rail junctures. Revolutionary stirrings in Germany, the founding of the Third Communist International in Moscow in March 1919 and the temporary establishment of Bela Kun's Hungarian Soviet Republic at roughly the same time heightened the Allies' fears of a Red menace. Yet the Allied governments could not justify intervention in Russia to their own war-weary people. Lacking a common purpose and resolve, and often suspicious of one another, the Allies extended only half-hearted support to the Whites, whom they left in the lurch by withdrawing from Russia in 1919 and 1920 - except for the Japanese who kept troops in Siberia.
Both Reds and Whites turned to terror in the second half of 1918 as a substitute for popular support. Calls to overthrow Soviet power, followed by the assassination of German Ambassador Count Mirbach in July, which the Bolsheviks depicted as the start of a Left SR uprising designed to undercut the Brest-Litovsk Peace, provided the Bolsheviks with an excuse to repress their one-time radical populist allies and to undermine the Left SRs' hold over the villages. Moreover, with Lenin's approval, local Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg executed Tsar Nicholas II and his family on 16 July 1918. Following an attempt on Lenin's life on 30 August, the Bolsheviks unleashed the Red Terror aimed at eliminating political opponents within the civilian population.
The Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-revolution and Sabotage (Cheka), set up in December 1917 under Feliks Dzerzhinsky, carried out the terror.
Seeking to reverse social revolution, the Whites savagely waged their own ideological war that justified the use of terror to avenge those who had been wronged by the revolution. Although the Whites never applied terror as systematically as the Bolsheviks, White Terror was equally horrifying and arbitrary. Putting to death Communists and their sympathisers, and massacring Jews in Ukraine and elsewhere,[147] the Whites posed a more serious threat to the Reds after the Allies backed the Whites' cause. Until their defeat in 1920, White forces controlled much of Siberia and southern Russia, while the Reds, who moved their capital to Moscow in March 1918, clung desperately to the Russian heartland.
The Whites' unsuccessful three-pronged attack against Moscow in March 1919 decided the military outcome of their war against the Reds. Despite their initial success, the Whites went down in defeat that November, after which their routed forces replaced General Anton Denikin with Petr Wrangel, the most competent of all the White officers. Coinciding with an invasion of Russia by forces of the newly resurrected Polish state, the Whites opened their final offensive in the spring of 1920. When Red forces overcame Wrangel's army in November, he and his troops retreated back to Crimea from which they then withdrew from Russia. In the meantime, the Bolsheviks' conflict with the Poles ended in stalemate; the belligerent parties signed an armistice in October 1920, followed by the Treaty of Riga in 1921, which transferred parts of Ukraine and Belorussia to Poland.
Although at civil war's end the difference between victory and defeat seemed a small one, it is hard to imagine how the Whites might have prevailed in the ordeaclass="underline" the Constituent Assembly elections made clear that over 80 per cent of the population had voted for socialist parties. The Whites simply lacked mass appeal in a war in which most people were reluctant to get involved. Concentrated on the periphery, the Whites relied on Allied bullets and ordnance to fight the Reds. True, a more determined Allied intervention might have tipped the scales in the Whites' favour in the military conflict, but their failure was as much political as it was military. Recent scholarship reaffirms the ineptitude and corruption of the White forces, emphasising that their virtual government misunderstood the relationship between social policy and military success.[148] Moreover, the alliance with the moderate socialists, made frail by lack of a common ideology to unite them, contributed to the Whites' political failures, as did the hollow appeal of their slogan, 'One, Great, and Indivisible Russia'.[149]
146
Donald J. Raleigh, 'Co-optation amid Repression: The Revolutionary Communists in Saratov Province, 1918-1920',
147
Orlando Figes,
148
Jonathan Smele,
149
Susan Z. Rupp, 'Conflict and Crippled Compromise: Civil-War Politics in the East and the Ufa State Conference',