The Provisional Government made a number of bungling attempts to stifle the Bolsheviks in the summer of 1917. Perhaps the Party's reaction against such efforts, as much as anything else, spurred it to action in the coup of November 6-7. That takeover, followed by the Bolsheviks' highhanded treatment of other socialist parties, dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the Brest Treaty, the reckless use of terror against alleged enemies, and murder of the royal family on July 16-17, 1918, helped bring together a varied group of opponents to the Communist regime. There were the so-called Whites: monarchists, constitutional democrats, SRs, former tsarist officials, officers, soldiers, and Cossacks; a pro-Allied Czechoslovak Legion, stuck in Russia as a result of the Brest Treaty; and
Thousands of troops from several Allied coimtries, including Japan, Great Britain, France, and the United States. Furthermore, various nationalities, taking advantage of war and revolution, began separating themselves from the former Russian empire; Finland, the Baltic states {Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), and Poland succeeded in becoming independent; Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Transcaucasus (Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia), and several other groups in the south of European Russia and in Central Asia only succeeded, more or less, in becoming short-lived republics.
War Communism is a phrase used to define the aggressive and even brutal actions taken by the Reds, or Communists, from 1918 to 1921, to defeat Whites and secessionists, overcome the countless problems caused by the severely diminished economy, and begin the socialist transformation of Russian society. Political divisions among the Whites was their great weakness; the only thread that held them all together was opposition to the Reds. Tliey differed over basic issues: the best form of government, land reform, and questions of self-determination for ethnic or
Civil War prisoners jammed into a boxcar, two tiers deep. Siberia, 1919 or 1920. Reproduced from the Collections of the Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-91460.
National minorities. The Reds fought from inside a great circle and with a more unified command than the Whites, whose forces were spread out around the perimeter. Great savagery characterized fighting on both sides of the Civil War.
The Communists' heaviest blows fell on Whites and peasants. Separated by Germans or Ukrainians or Whites from much of the best grain-producing areas of the Ukraine and southern Russia and desperate for food, the Reds stripped grain from peasants, sometimes paying low fixed prices, sometimes paying nothing. They created committees of poor peasants or gangs of armed workers and peasants to make war on so-called kulaks {kiilaki, "wealthy" peasants) and to purge villages of whatever grain they could find. Peasants who could not keep their grain hidden often ceased producing more than was needed to feed themselves. But the Reds confiscated even small stores of grain and seed reserved for the next planting. This conflict in the countryside, where peasants sometimes violently resisted attempts to take their food, resembled the disaster that occurred 10 years later when the state set out to collectivize agriculture. On both occasions millions of peasants starved. A notable difference between the two disasters is that the Soviet government admitted foreign agencies (most importantly the American Relief Administration under the direction of Herbert Hoover) into Russia to provide relief during the famine of 1920-1922, whereas a decade later, in 1932-1933, the Soviet government refused even to acknowledge the more devastating famine of those years.
World History
