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for sponsoring our episode. It’s spring 1919, and though peace is being
discussed in Paris, the vast expanses of revolutionary Russia are burning. Counter-revolutionary forces are about to
launch an attack on the Bolshevik heartland, small nations are arming themselves for independence,
and the Allies attempt to intervene: eto grazhdanskaya voina v rossii - it’s the Russian Civil
War. Hi, I’m Jesse Alexander and welcome to the
Great War. The civil war raging in the lands of the old
Russian empire in the early months of 1919 was without doubt the biggest conflict in
the aftermath of the First World War. Actually, it was more like several wars going
on at once, because the fighting involved numerous factions: there were revolutionary
Bolsheviks, counter-revolutionaries, independence movements, foreign forces, and peasant uprisings. And not all of them were Russian. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George
might have said it best when he wrote: “Russia was a jungle in which no one could say what
was within a few yards of him.” (Lloyd George, 326-327) Let’s start to make sense of this conflict
by asking ourselves this question: how did Russia get be such a mess in the first place? After the October Revolution of 1917, the
Bolsheviks were able to spread out quickly from their base in the main industrial cities
of European Russia. The chaos and disorder meant there was little
resistance to this “triumphal march of Soviet power” (Mawdsley, 14-18 online): The Imperial
army was disintegrating, and the aristocracy had fled. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin even
announced to the Moscow Soviet in April 1918: “It can be said with certainty that, in
the main, the civil war has ended.” (Mawdsley, 21-22). Well, Lenin couldn’t have been more wrong. The forces of the Central Powers advanced
that spring, occupying the western part of the empire. The famous Czech Legion , made up of some
55,000 former Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war, mutinied and turned on the Bolsheviks,
cutting most of Eastern Russia off from Bolshevik power (Volkov). The Allies also decided to intervene, and
sent some 30,000 British, French, American and Japanese troops into the country, in the
far north around the town of ArchAngelsk and in the far east at Vladivostok. The forces of the counter-revolution, led
by former Tsarist generals, began to organize with Allied help. Fierce fighting took place, especially in
the south and east, along the railway lines in what was known as the eshelOnaya voina,
or train war. As 1918 ended and 1919 began, the Civil War
entered a new and more intense phase with the Allied defeat of the Central Powers. German and Austrian troops began to pull out
of the territories they had occupied for most of the year: the Baltics, Poland, Belarus,
Ukraine, and the Caucasus, many of whose people wanted independence. In other parts of the country, the counter-revolutionary
forces were now ready to take the offensive against the Red Army. That was a little refresher of 1918. Now, let’s take a closer look the different
factions at the start of 1919 so we can see just who is fighting whom, and why. Let’s start with some familiar faces, the
Allies. In early 1919, the British, French, Japanese
and Americans had a dilemma on their hands. In theory, now that the Germans were out of
Russia, they had a free hand, but in practice they weren’t quite sure what to do. They had intervened in 1918 to deny the Germans
material and strategic advantages, to support the counter-revolutionaries, and to protect
their economic interests - but now their people wanted peace, and their soldiers did not see
the point of remaining in a foreign and dangerous country once the Great War had been won. But they also desperately wanted to stop the
revolution from spreading and argued among themselves at the Paris Peace Conference about
how best this could be achieved. French General Ferdinand Foch and British
Minister Winston Churchill supported full-scale military intervention – as Churchill put
it, ”After having defeated all the tigers and lions I don’t like to be defeated by
baboons.” But Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Wilson were
not keen on putting more blood and treasure into the Russian mess. They had bigger fish to fry with the Peace
Conference, the establishment of the League of Nations, demobilizing their armies, and
new borders in Central Europe (Leonhard, 504, 508). In the words of Lloyd George: “I would rather
leave Russia Bolshevik until she sees her way out of it than see Britain bankrupt. And that is the surest road to Bolshevism
in Britain.” (Mawdsley, 130). The French, who were worried about recovering
the money they’d lent to Russia before the revolution, did send an intervention force
to southern Ukraine in late 1918 . But other than Foch they preferred a more indirect strategy
of supporting the smaller countries of Central Europe as a so-called cordon sanitaire, a
preventive bulwark stopping the Bolshevik revolution from spreading west. Wilson was also wary, and wrote that “to
be dragged further into the Russian chaos would be fatal.” (Leonhard, 719). The Allies made some attempts at diplomacy
in early 1919 but these failed because none of the warring parties wanted to negotiate,
and the Allies refused to recognize the Bolshevik government. Their approach shifted to an indirect war
against Bolshevism. They would support those fighting the Bolsheviks
but also began a slow withdrawal of their troops starting in the spring of 1919. So much for the Allies who weren’t particularly
sure how to engage but were sure that they didn’t like the prospect of a Bolshevik
Russia. Let’s turn our attention to the Russian
factions. Thankfully, they’re colour-coded, which
makes it a bit easier to sort out. We’ll start with the red faction, the Bolsheviks. Their objective was to consolidate the revolution
and re-establish control over the vastness of the empire that had fallen to pieces . They
also wanted to spread the revolution abroad, especially to Germany . To further this goal,
they founded the 3rd Communist International in March , which most Communist Parties of
Europe attended. This ideological fervour made them many enemies
but allowed them to produce coherent and targeted propaganda. The centres of Bolshevik power were the big
industrial cities in European Russia with large populations of factory workers, like
Moscow and Petrograd. They did have some support among minority
groups and in cities in other parts of the country, but in early 1919 they depended on
the traditional Russian heartland – on March 5 they even moved the capital from Petrograd
to Moscow, which was farther away from enemy troops. In the central zone they controlled, the Bolsheviks
attempted to impose what they called War Communism. This was a policy which saw them forcibly
take food from peasants to feed the hungry Red Army and city workers. They also tried to organize, centralize, and
nationalize the economy and ownership of land and industry. The peasants, who made up the majority of
the population, did not take kindly to these policies and resisted. The Bolsheviks responded by launching what
became known as the Red Terror, to impose control by force of arms. The secret police, known as the Cheka and
led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, tortured and killed thousands of peasants, especially wealthier
kulaki, and middle class “bourgeois”, and regularly took hostages to ensure delivery
of food or labour . Lenin wanted this done so “the people will see, tremble, know,
shout: they [the Bolsheviks] are strangling and will strangle the bloodsucker kulaks.” (Gerwarth, 82). They also set up thousands of prisoner and
labour camps, in addition to running over 21,000 prisons (Mawdsley, 190-191). Unsurprisingly, these atrocities turned much
of the population against them. So, although the Reds dominated the Russian
heartland, most of the important industrial areas and a population of 60 million people,
conditions were still chaotic and their control over the vital food-producing countryside
was fragile at best in the face of fierce peasant resistance (Mawdsley 146, Peeling). The most significant counter-revolutionary
forces were those of the Whites. They were a military-nationalist movement
started by former Tsarist Chief of Staff General Alekseev (who died in 1918), and their members
came mostly from the old officer class of the Imperial Army . They believed in Mother
Russia and abhorred the Bolsheviks – and though they wished for a return to the old
order, if not the Tsar, they lacked clarity of vision and coordination. The Whites faced all sorts of challenges in
their quest to turn back the Red tide of revolution. For one thing, the areas they controlled in
early 1919 were remote and underdeveloped, and they struggled to coordinate their actions
. General Denikin was in command of the Volunteer Army and allied Cossack forces in the North
Caucasus and South Russia. In the East, Admiral Kolchak squashed a fledgling
All-Russian parliament that had been set up in part thanks to the protection of the Czech
Legion, and assumed dictatorial powers from his new capital in the Siberian city of Omsk. In the Arctic, White forces were small, under
direct British influence, and would not play a decisive role in the fighting to come. All three of the White zones were sparsely
populated and had very few factories, which would make raising and equipping armies extremely
difficult. But the Whites had help, in the form of the
Allied intervention forces. Allied troops were present in the same zones
as the Whites, although only in the north did they see significant action against the
Red Army. Once the leftover stocks of weapons and ammunition
ran out towards the end of 1918, the White armies would be supplied by the Allies, especially
the British. Throughout 1919, they would supply the Whites
in the East with as many weapons and ammunition as the entire Soviet zone was able to produce,
allowing the former Tsarist generals to continue the fight (Mawdsley 144). In the South, the British also sent a military
mission to train White troops, and shipped 60 tanks and aircraft manned by British crews
who actually did see combat. (Mawdsley 167). Despite this advantage, White leaders could
not coordinate their military and political goals with each other, or with the Allies,
who were often not even aware of White plans. As Great Russian nationalists, they also had
rocky relations with various minority groups, including the Cossacks fighting alongside
them. And since they were military men, they lacked
expertise and focus on establishing a functional civilian administration and economy. They were missing a vital ingredient that
the Bolsheviks and the regionalists had: a clear and coherent vision they could bring
to the people through propaganda. Their propaganda emphasized the Bolshevik
evil and associated the revolution with the Jewish religion , drawing on previously-existing
anti-Semitism and justifying it as revenge for the Red Terror (Figes, 676-677). As one White put it after the war, “They
shouted ‘Death to the bourgeois.’ And we replied ‘Death to the Yids.’” (Figes, 677). The Whites engaged in a White Terror of their
own, killing and torturing those suspected of Red sympathies. Jews were especially targeted, and though
Polish, Red Army and particularly Ukrainian troops participated, many of the pogroms which
killed between 150,00 and 300,000 people were carried out by White units. (Sumpf, Figes 677, Figes 679, Smele 160) So, on one side we had the red Bolsheviks
that controlled the industrial centers and tried to establish their power through violence
and terror. Their main opponents, the Whites were spread
throughout the vastness of Russia and couldn’t agree on much more than that they wanted to
get rid of the Bolsheviks – through violence and terror. Now, there were some other colourful factions
as well – the Greens were various peasant groups who rose up and revolted against the
Bolsheviks, and the Blacks were an anarchist army based in eastern Ukraine . But, we will
get to them in a future episode because they definitely deserve a closer look. Our final group of factions doesn’t have
a colour. They’re the smaller peoples on the western
edge of the empire who were attempting to form new, independent states. The Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania, along with Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland had all declared independence in the
chaos of 1918 and were still fighting to maintain it. The fledgling nations rushed to recruit armies
and establish their borders in the face of hostility from the Bolsheviks, the Whites,
and sometimes each other. The Baltic states were too weak to take on
the Red Army on their own and they relied on outside help, whether from the Finns , remaining
German forces, Freikorps units , or the British Navy in the Baltic Sea (Mawdsley, 122). Others, like the Poles and the Ukrainians,
would end up fighting the Reds mostly on their own. It’s important to note that some people
from these areas, especially from the towns, fought on the Bolshevik side as well, the
most famous being the Latvian Riflemen. To further muddy the waters, the Reds also
set up Socialist governments in each region which were competing with the independence
movements. Alright, so by early 1919 the Russian Civil
War is mostly a war between Reds and the Whites in different regions of the former Russian
Empire, while at the same time smaller nations are trying to establish themselves along the
old border zone between Germany, Austria-Hungariy, and Russia. Now that we have an idea of who was doing
the fighting, let’s take a moment to look at how they fought. The Russian Civil War was not an easy war
to fight. All sides had to deal with huge distances
, poor transportation and communication networks , and a completely wrecked economy. Russia had been absolutely devastated by revolution,
occupation by the Central Powers , and civil war in 1917 and 1918. Industrial production was a fraction of what
it had been during the war, and food was extremely scarce. So scarce that zoo animals were eaten in Petrograd
and in Armenia, the pre-war goat population of around 1 million fell to just 6000 (Figes,
604, Gattrell, 234). Remember the goats. Actual combat was also a little different
than in the Great War . Because of the distances involved, railways were critical for the entire
course of the civil war, and armoured trains were used to project power between the isolated
cities . And just to clarify a popular misconception here: Fighting armoured trains under these
circumstances was not trivial , you couldn’t just blow up the tracks and ambush the train
like in a movie. The railroad wasn’t just your enemy’s
supply route, it was your own side’s supply route once you’d taken out their armoured
train. Tactics also evolved throughout the conflict,
and eventually trains were accompanied by supporting infantry and mounted escorts. Unlike the Western Front, cavalry was quite
important in the wide open spaces, and a horse-drawn machine-gun cart known as the tachAnka became
an common source of mobile firepower. There were only a few tanks and airplanes
which the British and French provided to the Whites. In early 1919, the White troops were better
trained and equipped than the Reds, but fewer in number – and they were very officer-heavy. By February the Red Army, under the direction
of War Commissar Leon Trotsky, had grown to half a million men , but many of these were
recently conscripted and poorly trained peasants (Mawdsley, 123). The Reds also struggled to impose a command
structure and discipline, and to integrate former Tsarist officers and political instructors,
known as commissars, into their ranks. Both armies suffered from constant desertions
and fluctuations in morale. Alright, now that we have an idea of the kind
of warfare being waged on the battlefields of the Russian Civil War, let’s look at
how the fighting played out in early 1919. In the North, there were bitter small-scale
skirmishes we reported on in the last episode. The terrain, weather and only a handful of
railway lines made military operations extremely difficult. The Allied forces fought directly against
the Red Army and actually commanded White troops, which was not the case elsewhere even
though Bolshevik propaganda claimed otherwise. The main battles between Whites and Reds would
take place in the South and East though, so let’s turn our attention there. In southern Russia, Cossack forces of the
Don Host and Kuban People’s Republic allied to the Whites overstretched themselves attempting
to take the city of Tsaritsyn (today’s Volgograd) and were routed by Red troops. Their lands would now be subject to a particular
form of Red Terror known razkazAchivanie or de-cossackization, meant to stamp out Cossack
cultural identity and will to fight. This defeat led to a united Cossack and White
command, called the Armed Forces of Southern Russia. Even further south in the Caucasus, the Whites
launched a major offensive against a Red Army that was suffering badly from typhus. The Reds could barely supply their troops
via camel caravan from Astrakhan, some 500km away. Though outnumbered three to one and lacking
supplies themselves, the Whites smashed the Reds, capturing the cities of Grozny, Vladikavkaz
and Piatigorsk. As it would turn out, this was the biggest
single White victory of the war . Two entire Red armies of 150,000 men were destroyed and
about 50,000 prisoners taken . (Mawdsley, 161) After the crushing defeat, Trotsky summed
up the state of the Red Army in the south: “A swollen army, really a horde rather than
an army, has clashed with Denikin’s properly-organized troops and in a few weeks has been reduced
to dust.” (Mawdsley 162) These numbers give us an idea of the scale
of the fighting, which compares to some battles of the Great War. Now, we are going to look East where the Whites
were also fighting as I mentioned earlier. In the East, the White Admiral Kolchak’s
army was in good position to launch an attack westwards. In December 1918 his troops had defeated the
Red Army and took the key city of Perm. The Bolsheviks sent one Joseph Stalin to investigate
the disaster, and he reported that the retreat had been “an absolutely disorderly flight
of an utterly routed and completely demoralized army.” Only 1/3 of the Red troops made it to the
new front line, and there were many desertions. Kolchak therefore sought to make use of his
advantage and attacked again in March, towards the city of Ufa and the Volga river. This would allow him to threaten the Bolshevik
centre of power, and give him better access to new recruits, railway lines, and food sources. (Mawdsley 141)
On this front the Whites actually outnumbered the Reds, but the White troops were inexperienced
and young, and the Red Army had large reserves in its rear and an advantage in artillery. (Mawdsley, 146). At first, the White offensive sliced through
the Red Army and sent it reeling on a retreat of hundreds of kilometres to the West – but
ultimately the offensive came to an end short of its objectives and the Volga remained out
of reach. So, we have skirmishing in the north, both
Red and White victories in the south, and a White advance in the East. Now let’s have a look at the situation in
what had been Western Russia. The retreat of German and Austrian troops
after the November 11 armistice seemed to present a golden opportunity for the Bolsheviks. They were now felt they could strike down
the local independence movements and carry the revolution into Europe as they dreamed
. So despite the weakness of the Red Army, they went over to the attack in January. The Bolsheviks were met by troops loyal to
the new republics , and foreign forces supporting them. In the Baltic, the Red Army first advanced
but then was stopped and partly thrown back by local forces with the assistance of Finnish
and German Freikorps troops, including the famous Eiserne or Iron Division, plus British
naval support. In February, fighting was particularly heavy
as the Reds were halted outside the new Lithuanian capital of Kaunas. Polish and Bolshevik forces also clashed,
at Bereza Kartuska. Each side was advancing into the gap left
by retreating German forces who had kept them apart until now. These skirmishes marked the beginning of a
full-scale Polish-Soviet war, which we will cover in more depth in the future. In Ukraine, Symon Petlura’s Ukrainian People’s
Republic and the allied West Ukrainian People’s Republic had little outside help. French troops based in Odessa and White forces
in the region did not have good relations with the Ukrainians, and neither did the neighbouring
Poles, who also laid claim to the city of Lviv, known as Lwow in Polish. The Ukrainians were driven back and lost their
capital, Kyiv, to the Reds in February. Caught between the advancing Red Army and
rival Poles, in early 1919 the future of independent Ukraine looked grim. To sum it all up, by the late winter of 1919,
the Allied-supported Whites seemed well-established in the south and east, the Reds were stalled
in the west, and the revolution’s outcome was still in doubt. Lenin himself proclaimed: “Our situation
has never been so dangerous as it is now. The imperialists were busy amongst themselves. But now one of the groups has been wiped out
by the group of the English, French, and the Americans. They consider their main task to be to smother
world Bolshevism, to smother its main center, the Russian Soviet Republic.” (Mawdsley, 127) The Allies certainly did want
to defeat Bolshevism, but ultimately it was the clash between Reds and Whites that would
determine Russia’s fate. Now that we’ve taken a deep dive into the
“Russian” Civil Wars, it’s time for our Roundup segment where we take a look at
what else is going on in February 1919. Let’s start in Paris at the Peace Conference,
where on the 7th Italian delegates published a memorandum claiming full recognition of
the terms of the Treaty of London of 1915, which awarded them former Austrian territory,
plus the city of Fiume. The treaty presented a problem for the Allies,
who wanted to give some of the land promised to Italy to the new Yugoslav kingdom – this
would soon turn into one of the most difficult questions of the conference, especially as
the Yugoslavs proposed an extension of their borders on the 18th (Leonhard, 736). On the 13th Japan proposed a racial equality
clause during the League of Nations discussions , but this was rejected after opposition from
the United States and Australia (Leonhard, 693). A French proposal for a League of Nations
Army was also defeated. The next day, Wilson presented the draft text
of the covenant of the League of Nations, which had been prepared in just two weeks. He the left for home to shore up domestic
support in Congress. On the 19th, a French anarchist attempted
to assassinate French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, who survived despite being shot. Turning to other news, on February 6th the
new German Parliament met in the city of Weimar, since Berlin was considered too unstable . The
Majority Social Democrats had won the recent election, while the Independent Social Democrats
suffered a resounding defeat. On the 8th, French General Franchet d’Esperey
joined the Allied occupation forces in Constantinople, and two days later, the city was divided into
British, French, and Italian zones. On the 16th, the new republic of German Austria
went to the polls, which resulted in the election of a Social Democratic government that would
struggle with the borders conflicts to the east with Hungary, and to the south with Yugoslavia
and Italy. And finally, on February 19th, an American
delegation led by William Bullitt went to Moscow to meet the Bolsheviks to discuss pre-war
debt repayment and diplomatic relations. Nothing would come of the mission as the Bolsheviks
refused to repay the debts and Wilson refused to recognize the Bolshevik regime (Leonhard,
719). Those were some of the main developments in
Paris and across Europe in February 1919 – we can already see that just a few weeks into
the Peace Conference the road to a settlement on which all could agree was murky indeed. Alright, two of my main sources for this episode
were Evan Mawdsley’s “The Russian Civil War” and Orlando Figes “A People’s Tragedy”. You can find all our sources for this episode
in the video description, including links to amazon. If you buy through these links, we do get
a small commission which helps support the channel, and of course you can also support
us on Patreon which gets you access to our Patreon Podcast and other perks. We’ve also got some new merchandise available
so give our store a look. I’m Jesse Alexander and this is The Great
War 1919, a production of Real Time History and the only Youtube history channel that
can see more than a few yards in the Russian jungle.
