Reds, Whites, and collapsing fronts from 1917 to 1922
The Russian Civil War tore through the former empire from 1917 to 1922 after Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in October. Nicholas II's February abdication had already ended monarchy and left a summer of dual power racing toward confrontation.
Russia had fought since 1914 beside France and Britain, and the February Revolution of 1917 left a centrist Provisional Government sharing authority with elected soviets of workers, soldiers and peasants. Alexander Kerensky's cabinet could not end the war, and General Lavr Kornilov's failed coup in September swung support to the Bolsheviks, who captured the soviets and, promising peace and all power to them, overthrew the government in late October.
Resistance hardened into full war by May–June 1918. Lenin's Red Army faced the White movement, dominated by right-leaning imperial officers and rallying around Alexander Kolchak, while Ukrainian anarchists of the Makhnovshchina, Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and peasant green armies fought everyone. Thirteen foreign states intervened against the Reds, chiefly Allies hoping to revive the Eastern Front, and three Central Powers sought to keep what they had gained at Brest-Litovsk. As the old army disintegrated, Leon Trotsky rebuilt the volunteer Red Guards into a Workers' and Peasants' Red Army from January 1918.
The Czechoslovak Legion's revolt in Siberia in May 1918 triggered Allied landings in the north and Siberia and shrank Bolshevik territory to most of European Russia. In 1919 the Whites struck in three waves, an eastern push in March, a southern one in July and a western drive in October, but Red counteroffensives beat each back, and by early 1920 they had lost on all three fronts. Kolchak's armies fled east, and the Don and Volunteer armies were evacuated from Novorossiysk in March and Crimea in November 1920.
The last major prize, Vladivostok, fell in October 1922, though the Basmachi movement in Central Asia kept fighting until 1934. Somewhere between 7 and 12 million people became casualties, most of them civilians. Victory came at a territorial price: many non-Russian peoples broke away, and the March 1921 Peace of Riga split Belarus and Ukraine with Poland. The Soviet Union emerged on most of the old imperial territory.
Source: Russian Civil War
