Hard Lessons From the Russian Civil War

The official 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which birthed the world’s first Communist state, came and went two years ago.

- Cathy Young

But the revolution actually played out over five horrific years known as the Russian Civil War. A cen­ tury ago this summer, the anti­Bolshevik White forces were running a fully func­ tional government in northern Russia. Their “Supreme Ruler,” Admiral Alexan­ der Kolchak, was internationally recog­ nized as the head of state, and their army was crushing the Bolsheviks in the South. By November 1919, the tide had turned. By the time the war was over, between 7 and 12 million were dead, and the Com­ munists were victorious.

The Soviets’ civil war mythology pre­ sented the conflict as a heroic story about workers and peasants defeating the com­ bined forces of upper­class Russian reac­ tionaries and Western interventionists. The Russian émigré mythology treated it as a heroic story of idealistic patriots crushed by the forces of darkness. But the real Russian Civil War was far more com­ plicated than either of those narratives.

Besides the Reds and the Whites, there was the roughly 100,000­strong Black Army led by anarchist and Ukrainian independence fighter Nestor Makhno, who started out in the Bolshevik camp before going his own way. There were also the nationalist forces of the Ukrainian