1926 4 June: The closure of the last active Red front, the Turkestan Front, marks the end of the “Russian” Civil Wars.
Introduction
Despite the titles of the best-known works on the subject, in the period under discussion here, there never was such an event as “the Russian Civil War.”1 Rather, as the title of this volume indicates, a plethora of multifaceted wars swept across and beyond the Russian Empire as it collapsed at the end of the First World War and was then refashioned as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the subsequent years. Some of these wars involved battles—political and military—between various Russian political and social groups, but others were between Russians and the many non-Russian former subjects of the tsar (particularly in the Baltic region, Poland, Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia), while still others involved few, if any, Russians, and were contested between the non-Russian minorities of the old empire (notably, the Ukrainian–Polish War and the struggle between Azerbaijan and Armenia). In the purely Russian wars, contending views of politics and economics were at the fore, but in the other “Russian” civil wars, elements of nationality, identity, and religion were added to the equation. Amplifying this was the fact that the former imperial Russian space (or at least its peripheries) became the object of foreign intervention on a tremendous scale: both the Central Powers in 1918 and the Allies from 1918 to 1922 dispatched tens of thousands of troops to theaters as far flung as Odessa and Vladivostok and Arkhangel’sk and Ashkhabad. At the same time, the conflicts in the former Russian Empire leached across its borders into Poland and Galicia, Turkey, Persia, China, and Mongolia.2 So to designate these events as a singular and discrete “Russian Civil War” is clearly misleading.
The time frame of the struggles discussed here also strays from the norm. Being focused primarily, if not exclusively, on the battles between the forces of the emergent Soviet state (the “Reds”) and their conservative opponents (the “Whites”), previous studies have tended to limit their coverage to the period in which that struggle reached its zenith (roughly 1917/1918–1921/1922). Herein, having recast the events as a matrix of overlapping and sometimes parallel wars that were as much about the collapse of the tsarist empire and the construction of its successor, the USSR, as they were about the rise of Soviet socialism and the demise of Russian tsarism, conservatism, and liberalism, the chronology of this historical dictionary is correspondingly broader. In this volume the opening salvos of the “Russian” Civil Wars are detected in the major uprising against tsarist rule that occurred in Central Asia in the summer of 1916. Likewise, the wars’ terminus is regarded as June 1926, when the last Red front (army group), the Turkestan Front, was placed on a peacetime footing as the Central Asian Military District.3
If the geographical and chronological scale of the “Russian” Civil Wars was unusual, their costs were unparalleled (except, perhaps, by the still uncounted “cost” of the vicious wars in China from 1927 to 1949): between 1917 and 1921 alone, at least 10,500,000 people lost their lives during the struggles with which we deal here; many millions more were maimed, orphaned, or widowed; and at least 2,000,000 former subjects of the tsar were pressed into foreign exile.4 As the most active fronts of the “Russian” Civil Wars began to die down, in 1921–1922, at least another 5,000,000 people then perished in a horrendous famine across the Volga–Urals region, the North Caucasus, and Ukraine that was in large part precipitated by the previous years of civil-war-induced chaos. And several tens of thousands, at least, of other people were then killed in battles and anti-Soviet uprisings—mostly in Transcaucasia and Central Asia—before the upheavals reached a temporary quietude around 1926. Consequently, the first complete (“All-Union”) Soviet-era census, which was conducted in that year, identified 147,027,915 citizens of the newfound USSR—where without world war, revolution, and civil wars (and taking into account the loss of the former imperial lands of Finland, the Baltic, Poland, Bessarabia, and other territories), it might have expected to have found at least 175,000,000 and perhaps more.5
In addition to the physical losses, the psychological scars all this inflicted on the participants in the “Russian” Civil Wars (and their descendants)—be they victors or vanquished—remain forever incalculable, for this was without a doubt the greatest cataclysm to engulf Russia since, in 1237–1240, the Mongols had surged through the Caspian Gate to overrun Kievan Rus′ and sack the cities of what had until then been one of the richest and most sophisticated societies in Christendom. It took Russia half a millennium to recover from that catastrophic event. It could be argued that, a century after the events with which we are here concerned, the Russian Republic and the other successor states to the USSR are also still coming to terms with them.
Such a complex historical phenomenon as the “Russian” Civil Wars is worthy of study on several levels. As should already be clear, even a century after the events, historians have yet to agree upon matters as basic as the geographical and chronological scope of the subject. In addition, it remains unclear what actually happened, as the struggles were played out across (and beyond) the huge (and often impenetrable) former empire, which on the eve of its collapse had covered no less than one-sixth of the land surface of the globe. In addition, of course, the chief outcome of the wars was the formation of the USSR, from which ensued the major ideological struggle of the twentieth century, generating a chiefly bipolar world in which the challenge of communism to capitalism was of paramount importance (and at the same time adding ideological tropes to contending histories of the period produced in the USSR and the West). This remained the case until the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s. Even then, though, with communism gone, the echoes of the “Russian” Civil Wars did not altogether fade. Indeed, if anything—and much to the surprise of most Western politicians—they found new resonances, as the successor states around the periphery of the former Soviet Union began to question and challenge the post–civil wars settlement that had been imposed by Moscow back in the 1920s, opening old wounds and picking away at still painful scars. On a superficial—or at least symbolic—level, this often took the form of toppling Soviet-era statues and renaming cities, streets, buildings, and institutions after rehabilitated national heroes.6 More alarmingly, some of the armed conflicts that had been frozen by the creation of the USSR broke out anew: from Azeri–Armenian battles over Nagorno Karabakh in the late 1980s, through the Georgian–Ossetian War of 2008, to the Russian–Ukrainian contest over eastern Ukraine that erupted in 2014.
Other than to provide a new, comprehensive, and up-to-date reference tool, therefore, the intention of this book and the rationale for the selection of its contents are to collate a combination of heretofore insufficiently explored perspectives and insights from the vast array of newly available sources (many of them online) to complement more traditional repositories of information and to bring them to bear upon what remains, indubitably, a turning point in world history. To those ends, alongside this introduction (which can also be read as a historiographical guide to the subject),7 as well as its attendant apparatus of a list of acronyms and abbreviations, a chronology, a glossary, appendixes, and a bibliography, the volume is centered on an extensive dictionary. Across almost 2,000 discrete entries, featuring extensive cross-references, the dictionary covers the course of the civil wars among all the peoples and regions of the former Russian Empire (and beyond), presenting the biographies of leading military and political figures and detailing key military forces and their attributes (including such diverse matters as weaponry, uniforms, flags, anthems, art, language, propaganda, laws, treaties and agreements, etc.); the roles of political parties and social movements; military, governmental, and quasi-governmental organizations; creeds and concepts; and the major events of the “Russian” Civil Wars. Where appropriate, entries also include information on how events and individuals have been memorialized (or dememorialized) in the contemporary world.