552 Chapter 27
to talks at Brest-Litovsk (today in Belarus) in December
- They presented Russia with severe terms (far
more severe than the treaty later given to defeated Ger-
many) and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918)
showed that Lenin and Trotsky were determined to
have peace. They gave up Finland, the Baltic States,
Poland, White Russia (Belarus), Ukraine, and Bessara-
bia. When the Germans capitulated to the Western
allies in November, however, Russia repudiated the
treaty.
Civil War, 1918–20
The Bolshevik seizure of power in late 1917 did not
give them control of the entire Russian Empire. They
had begun as a small faction in Russian politics, and
they won control in Petrograd because they were well
organized, had the will to act (and to act ruthlessly),
and understood that land and peace were more popular
than parliamentary democracy. “No amount of political
freedom,” Lenin noted, “will satisfy the hungry.” The
Bolshevik government, however, faced opposition in
many regions of the empire, often from larger and more
popular forces. The result was a Russian civil war that
continued long after the end of the world war.
When the civil war began, the Bolsheviks (renamed
the Communist Party in 1918) had sufficient forces for
a coup d’état but not for a war. However, they faced
civil war on several fronts. They shifted the capital
from Petrograd to Moscow, a city less vulnerable to for-
eign-supported armies, as they faced early defeats.
White (anti-Bolshevik) forces soon controlled Siberia
(where they installed Admiral Alexander Kolchak as
their ruler), the southern regions around Kazan, and
Ukraine, where the Cossacks joined the anti-Bolshevik
coalition. Trotsky, named commisar for war, organized
a volunteer (later conscript) army known as the Red
Army to fight the counterrevolutionary Whites, and
brutal civil war soon stretched across the Russian Em-
pire. It included a war with the Cossacks in southern
Russia, wars of independence in Ukraine and the Baltic
states, intervention by several of the western Allies,
campaigns in the Caucasus that led to the secession of
south Asian provinces, and even war in the Far East,
where the Japanese invaded Russia. The intervention of
the western Allies scored some brief success in Ukraine,
where they supported early victories by General Anton
Deniken. The Americans staged a landing at Archangel,
and the British and French briefly supported a puppet
government of Northern Russia at Archangel, but nei-
ther the British nor the Americans were willing to ac-
cept significant involvement in the war. For a while this
produced a bizarre situation in which German anti-Bol-
sheviks fought together with western Allies, but west-
ern forces withdrew from Russia in September 1919.
A Communist victory in the civil war was complete
in most regions by 1920. The Whites were poorly co-
ordinated among the many fronts, badly divided in
their plans for Russia, and heavily dependent upon the
western world. The western Allies, however, were sim-
ply too exhausted by the years of fighting Germany to
be interested in another prolonged battle. Shortly after
they stopped supplying the Whites, the Red Army won
the civil war. Ukraine (1919) and the Caucasian states
(1920) were annexed again, although the Baltic states
(Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) kept their indepen-
dence. The most famous episode of the civil war did
not occur on a battlefield: In the summer of 1918, the
Communist government ordered the execution of
Nicholas II and his family (who had been held prisoner
at Ekaterinburg, on the Asian side of the Ural Moun-
tains) when it appeared possible that White armies of
Kolchak might liberate them.
During the civil war, Lenin began to consolidate
Communist power. In 1918 a Congress of Soviets
adopted a new constitution for Russia (the country did
not become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
[USSR], or Soviet Union, until 1922). The constitution
attempted to create a “dictatorship of the proletariat,”
including one-party government and restrictions on
freedoms of speech, press, and assembly. The govern-
ment, now led by a five-man Politburo, demonstrated
the police powers of this dictatorship after a socialist
woman attempted to assassinate Lenin in 1918: Thou-
sands of critics of the regime were killed in a policy
called “the red terror,” a grim introduction to the au-
thoritarian violence that Europe would face during
most of the twentieth century. The most far-reaching
policy of the new Communist state had global implica-
tions. In the spring of 1919 Lenin created the Third
International (the Comintern, 1919–43) to link Com-
munist parties in all countries and to support revolu-
tions around the world. Revolutionary situations existed
in many war-weary countries, such as the Spartacist re-
volt in Berlin in early 1919. Béla Kun, a protegé of
Lenin, established a short-lived Bolshevik government
in Hungary later in 1919. These events alarmed anti-
communist capitals around the world and led to a post-
war “Red scare” in many countries.