Montage of photos made during the Russian Civil War – from Wikipedia “Russian Civil War” under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
(5) RUSSIAN REVOLUTION & CIVIL WAR (1917-1922)
That’s right – it’s the communist revolution, as in THE communist revolution. The origin or archetype of all subsequent communist revolutions, which in turn have made the word revolution itself virtually synonymous in modern history with communist revolution.
“Civilization is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and corpses of their victims.”
I’ve included the two great eighteenth century revolutions or revolutionary wars – the wars of the American Revolution and the French Revolution – in my god-tier special mentions as wars that made the modern world.
However, they are only two of the four revolutions I rank as the god-tier revolutions of history pursuant to adding the two definitive twentieth century revolutions. I was going to reserve the latter two revolutions for my top ten revolutions but consider that they simply have too great a scale and impact, particularly in the fascinatingly convoluted civil wars fought because of them, to omit from special mentions for my top ten wars.
So following on from my special mentions for the American and French Revolutions, this is my special mention for the third of my four great revolutions or revolutionary wars – the Russian Revolution and Civil War, evolving from and overlapping with the Eastern Front of the First World War.
Whereas the American Revolution and French Revolution had been the vanguard of modern liberalism and nationalism, the Russian Revolution was the vanguard of modern Marxist socialism – literally in the ideology of its chief revolutionary Lenin, for which its strand of socialism came to be named as Marxist-Leninism.
Or in other words, communism, although technically communism was its professed theoretical end state – or rather, end-statelessness, since Marxism proclaimed its ‘temporary’ authoritarian state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, would wither away.
However, the Marxist authoritarian state proved much more durable than Marx had anticipated, particularly the new communist government or Soviet Union that emerged from the Russian Revolution and Civil War.
It also proved to provoke much more fervor, both for and against it, in a manner similar to Marx’s opiate of the masses, religion. I sometimes like to quip about the four great evangelizing or missionary religions in history – Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Marxist-Leninism. And of the other three, the Bolshevik revolutionaries in the Russian Revolution and Civil War most closely resembled the militancy of Islam – as observed by Paul Johnson, although Johnson also thought Lenin even closer to Jean Calvin, “with his belief in organizational structure, his ability to create one and then dominate it utterly, his puritanism, his passionate self-righteousness, and above all his intolerance”.
It tends to be forgotten that there were in fact two revolutions in the Russian Revolution, resulting in one of my pet peeves of history with the popular misconception that the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian monarchy of the Tsar.
They did not. The first revolution or February Revolution did, instituting the new Provisional Government in the style of a parliamentary republic and closer to the liberalism or nationalism of the American and French Revolutions.
What the Bolsheviks overthrew, in the second revolution or October Revolution that is generally remembered as the Russian Revolution, was the first revolution’s Provisional Government – capitalizing (heh) on that Government’s single biggest weakness, the continuation of Russia’s war effort in the First World War.
Surprisingly, the Bolsheviks did this by mostly bloodless coup – at least at the outset. The resistance to their revolution and their reaction to that resistance proved very bloody indeed. The new Bolshevik regime, which ultimately became the Soviet Union, pulled out of the world war but fought a far-flung civil war on an even larger scale. It always seemed to me ironic that Russian war-weariness from the casualties of the First World War played such a large part in the revolution led by the Bolsheviks, only for the Bolsheviks to fight a civil war which involved even more casualties in the former Russian empire than the First World War.
And it’s that civil war which is particularly fascinating, albeit incredibly convoluted, as far removed from the more straightforward civil wars fought (at least largely) between two opposing sides. Instead, the Russian Civil War was what Wikipedia describes as a “multi-party civil war” and what I would describe as an all-out battle royale or pile-up.
Sure, there were the two largest combatants – the Bolsheviks or Reds, and the so-called Whites, “the loosely allied forces” in opposition to the Bolsheviks. Beyond the opposing Red and White Armies, there were the Blacks or anarchist forces, particularly those led by Makhno in Ukraine, and the non-ideological Greens or nationalist forces. Not to mention a Blue Army in there somewhere, rival militant socialists, village peasant factions, Baltic and Caucasian nationalist separatists, Poland, and more.
And beyond them were the foreign forces – the Allies intervening for the Whites or against the Red Army, “whose primary goal was re-establishing the Eastern Front of World War 1” and the Central Powers, chiefly Germany, intervening for the Reds or “rivalling the Allied intervention with the main goal of retaining the territory they had received in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Soviet Russia”.
While the Allied intervention extended to a dozen or more nations depending on how you reckon them, it is another one of my pet peeves of history when people, usually left wing, bring this up as an indictment of capitalist states going all-out attempting to crush “the revolution”. While the Allies no doubt hoped to reopen the Eastern Front and therefore opposed the Reds, they were even less united than the Whites they ostensibly supported, and with a few notable exceptions never committed forces on any decisive scale – mostly more in the nature of a few guys as advisors or sitting around docks to protect them or the materiel they had shipped to their former Russian ally.
Ultimately the Bolsheviks or Reds won against all other combatants, among other things from their greater unity and fanatical purpose, as well as a greater ability to make promises and break them later – particularly the longstanding ability of communists to stab anarchists in the back. “Some historians have determined that the Black Army saved the entire war from the Whites at several points…However, they were betrayed three separate times by the Bolsheviks and defeated finally when they could turn their full force onto them”
RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)
