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p Hardly had Russia begun to recover from the disastrous consequences of the world war when she became the victim of another destructive and sanguinary conflict—the Civil War, which lasted nearly all of three years.

p Responsibility for that war rests with the governments of the United States, Japan, Great Britain and France, and also those of Germany and her allies, who organised a campaign of armed intervention against Soviet Russia and instigated the counter- revolutionary forces inside the country to a new uprising. The governments of these bourgeois countries feared that the example set by the workers, peasants and soldiers of Russia might evoke among their own working classes a desire to follow suit and that Russia’s withdrawal from the war might lend strength to the craving for peace rife among the peoples of the belligerent states, who had had their fill of misery. The foreign imperialists hoped that with the re-establishment of a bourgeois dictatorship in Russia they would get back their nationalised factories, collect the loans that had been annulled by the Soviet Government, and continue plundering the peoples of Russia as before.

Russia’s very existence as an independent state hung in the balance. Early in 1918 the American imperialists offered their scheme of a partitioning of Soviet Russia. A map of Russia, prepared by the US State Department in 1919, showed Russia restricted to the Central Russian Uplands: the rest of the country was to be parcelled out to various "independent states”. A supplement to the map said, in part, that all of Russia should be broken 24 up into large natural areas, each with its own distinct economic pattern. And none of these areas should be self-sufficient enough to form a strong state.

Imperialists Attack
the Soviet Republic. Civil War Begins

p The imperialist states had reached an agreement in regard to a military invasion of Russia as early as December 1917, and had designated the areas each was to take over. Nor did they lose any time getting down to business. Rumania, with her bourgeois- landlord government, backed by France, occupied Bessarabia in December 1917. Pleading the necessity of forestalling an allegedly impending "German attack”, French, British and American troops landed at Murmansk in March 1918. In August they occupied Arkhangelsk, where counter-revolutionary elements launched an anti-Soviet revolt. Joining forces, the invaders and counter- revolutionaries overthrew the Soviet power of that city. The invaders established a harsh occupation regime and proceeded to plunder the region.

p On the night of April 4-5 two Japanese were murdered at Vladivostok by Japanese agents, and on the morrow Japanese troops landed and occupied the city ostensibly "to protect the life and property of foreign nationals”. That same day a British landing party was put ashore. In the middle of August an American expeditionary force arrived. And by autumn of 1918 the Soviets had been overthrown by the invaders and whiteguards all over the Soviet Far East.

p Central Asia was another region where British troops were sent and where, with their help, the local nationalist-minded bourgeoisie, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks liquidated Soviet power and set up a counter-revolutionary Transcaspian government. In August British troops entered Baku, crushed the Baku Commune, took twenty-six of its leaders out of town and on September 20, 1918, had them shot without a trial.

p There was yet another force in Russia which the Entente powers used in their anti-Soviet campaign. This was a Czechoslovak corps, 60,000-strong, composed of officers and men of the Austro- Hungarian army captured by the Russians during the world war. Upon concluding the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Soviet Government had given the Czechoslovak corps permission to go home, via Vladivostok. Allied representatives succeeded in bribing the corps command and conspired with it to incite the soldiers to an anti-Soviet revolt. The revolt broke out on May 25, 1918, and soon spread over the entire stretch of the Trans-Siberian Railway from Penza to Vladivostok, over which the numerous Czechoslovak 25 troop trains were strung out on their way to the port of embarkation. Over 100,000 rifles and various other arms were supplied to these troops by the United States.

p This revolt of the Czechoslovak corps sparked a kulak uprising in the Volga area, in the Urals, and in Siberia. The Soviets were overthrown everywhere between the Volga and the Pacific coast. Counter-revolutionary “governments” appeared at Samara, Omsk and Yekaterinburg, which gave the capitalists back their factories and the landlords their estates.

p A 10-hour working day was established for the workers. Punitive detachments terrorised the population in town and countryside. And self-styled governments began forming armies to fight the Soviets.

p The Baltic regions, most of Byelorussia, the Ukraine, the Don region, the Crimea and Georgia had been occupied by the German army early in 1918. The Soviets had been overthrown throughout these parts and the bourgeoisie and landlords were once again in power: The Soviet Republic found itself hemmed in on all sides by fronts held by the invading and whiteguard armies, and cut off from its main food, fuel and raw materials sources of supply.

p The Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who maintained clandestine contact with the invaders, were quick to profit by the plight of the Republic. During July 1918, anti-Soviet revolts organised by the Socialist-Revolutionaries broke out in twenty-three towns in Central Russia. Early in July Left Socialist- Revolutionaries started a revolt in Moscow, assassinating Mirbach, the German ambassador, in the hope of provoking a war with Germany. A series of attempts against the lives of Soviet Government and Communist Party leaders were made by Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist bands. Lenin, head of the Soviet Government, was grievously wounded on August 30.

In the autumn of 1918, after the end of the First World War, the Entente powers intensified their criminal intervention against the Soviet people, bringing the numerical strength of their expeditionary forces to over 300,000 officers and men. During 1919 the authors of this war of aggression, notably British Minister of War Churchill, worked on a plan of organising a fourteen-power coalition for an anti-Soviet campaign. The fledgling Soviet state was destined to go through a heavy ordeal—a trial by battle.

Soviet People Up in Arms

p Answering the call of the Communist Party and the Soviet Government, the workers and peasants of Russia rose in arms to defend the Revolution, filled with revolutionary enthusiasm and inflamed 26 by wrath against the foreign invaders and whiteguards. The Soviet Government declared the nation in danger and summoned the people to turn the country into an embattled camp. To better organise the defence of the country a Workers’ and Peasants’ Council of Defence was set up under the chairmanship of Lenin.

p In a short time-span a large regular Red Army was created, composed of workers and peasants. Hundreds of thousands of workers and indigent peasants volunteered for service. In spite of heavy battle losses the Red Army continued to grow and by the end of 1920 numbered over 5,000,000 men. While Communist workers formed its backbone, peasants were numerically preponderant. Together with the workers the toiling peasants fought in defence of the Soviets, which, besides giving them political freedom, had given them land and freed them of the landlord yoke.

p Numerous training centres for workers and peasants provided commanding cadres for the Red Army. Hundreds of talented commanders of battalions, regiments, divisions and larger units came from among people. The Civil War produced such renowned commanders as Vassily Bliicher, a worker-Communist, the first to receive the Order of the Red Banner; Vassily Chapayev, born into a poverty-stricken peasant family; Nikolai Shchors, son of a railway worker; Semyon Budyonny, a Cossack, who had risen from organiser of a partisan cavalry detachment to commander of the legendary Cavalry Army that spread terror in the enemy ranks; and Mikhail Frunze, a Communist, who began in 1918 as commander of a workers’ detachment and in 1919 was in command of a front.

p Thousands of officers of the old army were drawn into the work of building up and training the Red Army. Most of them served the Soviets loyally and quite a few worked up to high army posts and played an important role in the defeat of the invaders and whiteguards, as, for instance, Sergei Kamenev, former colonel of the tsarist army, who was given in 1918 command of the Eastern Front and in 1919 became commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the Republic; and Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a young officer, who commanded an army in 1918, and in 1920 was put in command of the Western Front.

p There were, on the other hand, quite a few former officers who deserted from the Red Army to the enemy, and it became necessary to keep an eye on the work of the commanders. This control was carried out by the Commissars—the best men of the working class, battle-hardened Communists, high-principled revolutionaries. They were the soul of the Red Army, cementing it, welding it into a united force. Dmitry Furmanov, Communist, writer, commissar of the famous Twenty-Fifth Division whose commander was Chapayev, described the army commissars as "wearing a plain 27 uniform, like the rank and file, eating the same rations, sharing hardships with the men, and—in battle—always in a hurry to be the first to die".

p People in the rear carried on in keeping with the slogan "All for the Front, All for Victory!" coined by the Communist Party. Industrial facilities were geared to the production of weapons, ammunition and army togs. Despite a critical shortage of raw materials, fuel and food, industrial output was generally able to meet the needs of the army. This should be attributed to a mass display of a high order of heroism on the part of the workers, a striking manifestation of which was voluntary unpaid week-end community work projects. Subbotniks or Communist Saturdays they were called; they were initiated by the railwaymen of Moscow in the spring of 1919, and the movement soon swept the country from end to end.

p The country’s economic policies were planned exclusively in the interests of winning the war. The process of nationalisation of industry was drastically speeded up in order to undermine the economic power of the bourgeoisie and to mobilise the country’s entire resources for the war effort. Medium-size and even minor industrial plants were taken over by the state, to say nothing of 28 the important plants, and a lump revolutionary tax of 10,000 million rubles was imposed on the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois-owned apartment houses and residences were expropriated to house working-class families from slum areas. Members of the bourgeoisie were compelled to work.

p Universal labour conscription was introduced to provide manpower for industry and transport. Industrial management was stringently centralised, no enterprises were permitted to do business independently, and all output was required to be delivered to the state.

p While the Civil War lasted the Soviet Government was unable to stock enough grain by buying from the peasants or bartering for manufactured goods, inasmuch as money had devaluated and the output of manufactured goods was negligible. To feed the army and the civilian population, therefore, the Soviet Government had to have recourse to urgent measures. Thus a surplus appropriation system was introduced in January 1919, in accordance with which peasants were required to deliver surplus food products to the state. Approximately one half of the value of the products was paid for in manufactured goods and the remainder in paper money, the purchasing power of which was very low. Actually a part of the grain deliveries were appropriated by the state on a loan basis. The system admittedly worked a hardship on the peasants, but it was vitally necessary. The toiling peasants accepted it, well realising that the Red Army had to be fed if it was to beat off the onslaught against the Soviet state.

p The sale of the most important lines of manufactured goods and food products was prohibited and replaced by a system of distribution through a co-operative network. Priority was given to the needs of workers and children. Wages were paid in kind, inasmuch as money had very appreciably fallen in value. Food and manufactured goods were rationed and issued to those who worked, on an equitable basis, in quantities just affording subsistence.

p The reign of terror unleashed by the counter-revolutionaries and their numerous subversive conspiracies compelled the Soviet Government to counter with "red terror”, and the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission set up towards the close of 1917 under F. E. Dzerzhinsky, a revolutionary of an unimpeachable moral character, struck back hard at the foes of the Revolution. A number of important anti-Soviet plots were brought to light, hatched by members of foreign diplomatic missions in collaboration with the Constitutional-Democrats, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. Nothing accounted for the successes of the Extraordinary Commission so much as the whole-hearted support of the masses.

This "red terror" was a defensive measure. In the beginning of 1920, when the foreign expeditionary forces and the whiteguard 29 armies had been defeated in the main, the All-Russia Central Executive Committee repealed the death penalty in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR).

Invading and Whiteguard Armies Defeated

p Looking back, it becomes clear that the eventual defeat of the foreign expeditionary forces and whiteguard armies had been assured by the formation of a mass Red Army, militarisation of the home front, adaption of the national economy and economic policy to war needs, and whole-hearted support of the Soviet state by the workers and toiling peasantry.

p During the summer and autumn of 1918 the greatest threat to the Republic came from the east, where the Czechoslovak and whiteguard forces menaced the country’s vital centres, including Moscow, which had become in March 1918 the capital of the Soviet state. The Red Army’s main forces were therefore dispatched to the Eastern Front, and many Communists were sent there in accordance with the plan of Party mobilisation. In the course of September and October the Red Army inflicted a heavy defeat on 30 the enemy at Kazan, Simbirsk and Samara, liberating these three towns and throwing back the enemy troops to the Urals.

p Heavy fighting went on about the same time in defence of Tsaritsyn on the Volga (now Volgograd) against the Cossack army of General Krasnov, which virtually invested the city in August and then again in October. The defenders fought with great Man. The slogan was "Die, but Don’t Surrender Tsaritsyn!" A contingent of Tsaritsyn workers 10,000-strong fought shoulder to shoulder with the Red Army. After exhausting the enemy in defensive fighting the Soviet forces launched a counter-offensive in October, defeated the besieging troops and threw them back beyond the river Don. The final defeat of General Krasnov’s Cossack army was achieved early in 1919.

p In the spring of 1918 the Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Baltic regions rose in arms against the German forces of occupation. After the November 1918 revolution in Germany the Soviet Government annulled the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk, came to the aid of the peoples of the areas which had been seized by the German imperialists, and their joint efforts succeeded in expelling the invaders. The Ukraine, Byelorussia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania proclaimed themselves independent Soviet republics, and were granted recognition as such by the Government of the RSFSR. Before the year 1919 was half over, however, counterrevolutionary elements in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, backed by foreign interventionists, succeeded in liquidating the Soviets and replacing them with bourgeois dictatorships.

p Thus it came about that in the spring of 1919 Soviet Russia was fighting back on many fronts. The main attack was being pressed in the east by the Kolchak army which had driven close to the Volga; Denikin’s army was attacking from the south; Yudenich was marching on Petrograd; Polish forces had invaded Russia from the west; foreign expeditionary forces and a whiteguard army under General Miller were advancing from the north, and the interventionist and whiteguard forces in Turkestan and Transcaucasia were stepping up their offensive. Weighing the situation, the Communist Party decided to concentrate on halting Kolchak, and within a brief time-span succeeded in mobilising the manpower and materiel that were to assure his eventual complete defeat.

p On April 28, 1919, undaunted by spring freshets and muddy roads, the southern force of the Eastern Front under Frunze, attacking unexpectedly, dealt the enemy a powerful blow, throwing him back beyond the river Belaya; whereupon a successful offensive was developed by all the armies of the Eastern Front. During July the Kolchak forces were cleared out of the Urals and driven back into Siberia. Invaluable help was given the Red Army by the workers of the Urals industrial plants, who destroyed 31 Kolchak’s communication lines, attacked his units, supplied the advancing Red Army with important information, and helped recapture one town after another.

p In August the Soviet forces undertook an offensive designed to drive the Kolchak army out of Siberia, where a strong partisan movement under Bolshevik leadership was already under way. Some 150,000 workers and peasants were fighting in various partisan detachments scattered over Siberia and Russia’s Far East. Their daring operations were of great help to the Red Army in liberating Siberia. On January 6, 1920, at Krasnoyarsk, the main body of Kolchak’s army was forced to surrender, Kolchak himself placed under arrest, sentenced to death by the Irkutsk Revolutionary Committee, and shot.

p When Kolchak’s main forces were defeated by the Red Army back in the summer of 1919 the imperialist powers began feverish preparations for a new campaign against the Soviet Republic. The main blow was struck in the south by the army of General Denikin. By the autumn of 1919 it had succeeded in occupying the Ukraine, the towns of Kursk, Orel and Voronezh, reaching the vicinity of Tula, and creating a threat to Moscow.

p Launching an appeal for an all-out effort to stop Denikin, the Communist Party mobilised some 25,000 Communists and sent them to the Southern Front. The Komsomol, in turn, sent 21,000 members, and the trade unions 35,000 workers. In October the troops of the Southern Front started a counter-drive, and heavy fighting took place at Orel and Voronezh, where Denikin’s best divisions were smashed. On October 20 the Red Army took Orel, and on the 24th Voronezh. The entire whiteguard front buckled in and began to retreat, pursued by the Soviet cavalry under Budyonny. By March 1920 Denikin’s army had suffered a resounding defeat, its remnants withdrew to the Crimea, and Denikin fled abroad, surrendering the command to General Wrangel.

p When 1919 drew to a close the forces of General Yudenich had also been completely defeated. They had twice been able to approach Petrograd, once in the spring, and again in the autumn. The defence of Petrograd was a heroic episode of the Civil War. Workers—men and women, all Communists and Komsomols capable of bearing arms fought by the side of the Red Army. Munition factory workers worked round the clock producing arms and ammunition. Backed by so strong a home front the Red Army not only held Petrograd but inflicted a crushing defeat on Yudenich’s forces and drove their remnants out of the country.

p In the foreign expeditionary forces, meanwhile, battered as they were by the Red Army and subjected to the revolutionary propaganda spread by underground Bolshevik organisations, a process of demoralisation was making rapid headway among the rank and 32

p file. Soldiers began refusing to fight against the workers and peasants of Russia. Sailors of the French squadron in the Black Sea mutinied and flew the red flag—to show their approval of the Russian Revolution. The spring of 1919 saw the beginning of a general withdrawal of foreign troops from the Soviet soil. Those in the south of Russia were the first to go. They were followed that summer by those in Central Asia and Transcaucasia. Evacuation of the force in northern Russia was begun in the autumn. And in the beginning of 1920 the US troops cleared out of the Russia’s Far East. Lenin speaking in December 1919 said: "The victory we won in compelling the evacuation of the British and French troops was the greatest of our victories over the Entente countries. We deprived them of their soldiers. Our response to the unlimited military and technical superiority of the Entente countries was to deprive them of it through the solidarity of the working people against the imperialist governments."  [32•1 

p Thus, at the opening of 1920, the Red Army had won a decisive victory in the Civil War: the main forces of counter- revolution at home, that is, the whiteguard armies of Kolchak, Denikin 33 and Yudenich, had been crushed and those of the foreign invaders driven out of the country. The imperialist powers, however, would not give up and continued their criminal aggression against the peoples of Russia. In the spring of 1920 the bourgeois-landlord government of Poland, egged on by the leading imperialist powers, started a large-scale war with Soviet Russia. Early in May the Polish forces succeeded in taking Kiev. And in June the whiteguard army under General Wrangel launched an offensive northward from the Crimea. It was as if international imperialism was reaching out with two hands—Poland and Wrangel—in an effort to throttle the Soviet Republic.

p In a series of hard-fought battles the Red Army defeated the Polish forces and forced them to retreat. The war ended with Poland in possession of some Soviet territory, i.e., Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia, though less than the Soviet Government had been ready to cede to Poland in order to avoid war.

p In the autumn of the same year, 1920, the Red Army had crushed the Wrangel forces. Courage of the highest order was displayed by the Soviet fighters who stormed the powerful fortifications barring access to the Crimea. M. V. Frunze, in command of the Southern Front, telegraphed Lenin as follows: "I wish to testify to the high valour displayed by our heroic infantry in storming Sivash and Perekop.  [33•1  They advanced over narrow passages in the face of murderous fire to break through barbed-wire entanglements. Our losses have been extremely heavy. Some divisions lost three-fourths of their personnel. Total casualties in this operation were no less than 10,000. Our armies have done their duty by the Republic. The last foothold of the Russian counterrevolution has been liquidated and Soviet rule has been re- established in the Crimea.”

p In Central Asia, too, the Civil War came to an end during 1920 with the clearing of foreign expeditionary forces and whiteguards out of all of Turkestan. Aided by the Red Army, the people of Khiva deposed the local Khan and the people of Bukhara overthrew the local emir. Both Khiva and Bukhara were proclaimed Soviet People’s Republics by the respective congresses of people’s representatives. For several years to come, however, armed basmachi  [33•2  bands supported by the British terrorised Central Asia bringing much woe to the working people of Turkestan, Khiva and Bukhara.

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p Action by the workers and peasants toppled the bourgeois- nationalist dictatorship in Azerbaijan (April 1920), Armenia ( November 1920) and Georgia (February 1921), and the three countries were proclaimed Soviet Socialist Republics. Red Army units moved into the new republics at the request of their revolutionary governments to help deal with the remnants of the reactionary and counter-revolutionary elements.

p In the Soviet Far East the Japanese invaders managed to hold out until the end of 1922. At Spassk and Volochayevka the joint forces of the Japanese and whiteguards suffered a decisive defeat; on October 25, 1922, the revolutionary troops entered Vladivostok; and the Japanese expeditionary force sailed for home.

This history-making Soviet victory in a three-year-long war against foreign and counter-revolutionary armies showed what a people that had gained its freedom was capable of doing. This victory was made possible by the fact that the workers and peasants of Russia had risen in defence of their own Soviet power, in defence of their right to be free and independent. They won because they had joined together to form a strong and enduring union and because their effort was directed by the Communist Party under the leadership of Lenin.