Civil war and terror
1918–1921
The civil war
A war of armies, requisitions, pogroms, and typhus, which the Reds won because they held the center and were willing to be harsher.
White armies under Denikin, Kolchak, Yudenich, and Wrangel, plus nationalist forces, peasant “Greens,” foreign interventionists, and a collapsing Germany and Austria, fought across the old empire. The Reds held Moscow and Petrograd, the rail hub, and the armories. Trotsky’s train, political commissars, and the return of tsarist officers under hostage pressure built an army. War Communism fed it by taking grain at gunpoint.
Deaths from combat, execution, disease, and the 1921 famine run into the millions. White forces and Ukrainian nationalist units carried out pogroms that killed, by the best modern estimates, well over 50,000 Jews and possibly far more. Red units also pogromed; the Whites did it as a system in several armies. The Bolsheviks won by 1921. Winning was not the same thing as being the milder side. On the policies they put in writing, they were building a permanent dictatorship while the Whites were trying to restore a military state.
Where to check it · Figes; Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War; Oleg Budnitskii on pogroms; Peter Kenez.