The Civil War, which broke out in the summer of 1918, first went favorably for the Whites. In late June and early July the troops of the Samara government captured Simbirsk, Kazan, and Ufa. Although the Red Army managed to eliminate that threat, it immediately had to face a greater menace: the forces of Kolchak, supported by the Czechs, and those of Denikin, aided by cossacks. Kolchak's units, advancing from Siberia, took Perm in the Urals and almost reached the Volga. At this time, on the sixteenth of July, Nicholas II, the empress, their son, and four daughters were killed - apparently in compliance with Lenin's secret order - by local Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg, where they had been confined, when the Czechs and the Whites approached the town. Denikin's army, after some reversals of fortune, resumed the offensive, and its right wing threatened to link with Kolchak's army in the spring of 1919. While Kolchak's forced retreat eliminated this possibility, Denikin proceeded to occupy virtually all of Ukraine and to advance on Moscow. In the middle of October his troops took Orel and approached Tula, the last important center south of Moscow. At the same time Iudenich advanced from Estonia on Petrograd, seizing Gatchina, only thirty miles from that city, on October 16, and besieging Pulkovo on its outskirts. As a recent historian of these events has commented: "In the middle of October it appeared that Petrograd and Moscow might fall simultaneously to the Whites."
But the tide turned. Iudenich's offensive collapsed just short of the former capital. Although the Red Army had had to be created from scratch, it had constantly improved in organization, discipline, and leadership under Commissar of War Trotsky, and it managed finally to turn the tables on both Kolchak and Denikin. The admiral, who had assumed the title of "Supreme Ruler of Russia" and had received recognition from some other White leaders, suffered crushing defeat in late 1919 and was executed by the Bolsheviks on February 7, 1920. The general was driven back to the area of the Sea of Azov and the Crimea by the end of March 1920. At that point the Soviet-Polish war gave respite to the southern White Army
and even enabled Denikin's successor General Baron Peter Wrangel to recapture a large section of southern Russia. But with the end of the Polish war in the autumn, the Red Army concentrated again on the southern front. After more bitter fighting, Wrangel, his remaining army, and a considerable number of civilians, altogether about 100,000 people, were evacuated on Allied ships to Constantinople in mid-November. Other and weaker counterrevolutionary strongholds, such as that in Archangel, had already fallen. By the end of 1920 the White movement had been effectively defeated.
Allied Intervention
The great Civil War in Russia was complicated by Allied intervention, by the war between the Soviet government and Poland, and by bids for national independence on the part of a number of peoples of the former empire of the Romanovs who were not Great Russians. The intervention began in 1918 and involved fourteen countries; the Japanese in particular sent a sizeable force into Russia - over 60,000 men. Great Britain dispatched altogether some 40,000 troops, France and Greece two divisions each, and the United States about 10,000 men, while Italy and other countries - except for the peculiar case of the Czechs - sent smaller, and often merely token, forces. The Allies originally wanted to prevent the Germans from seizing war materiel in such ports as Archangel and Murmansk, as well as to observe the situation, while the Japanese wanted to exploit the opportunities presented in the Far East by the collapse of Russian power. Japanese troops occupied the Russian part of the island of Sakhalin and much of Siberia east of Lake Baikal. Detachments of American, British, French, and Italian troops followed the Japanese into Siberia, while other Allied troops landed, as already mentioned, in northern European Russia, as well as in southern ports such as Odessa, occupied by the French, and Batum, occupied by the British. Allied forces assumed a hostile attitude toward the Soviet government, blockaded the Soviet coastline from October 1919 to January 1920, and often helped White movements by providing military supplies - such as some British tanks for Denikin's army - and by their very presence and protection. But they often avoided actual fighting. This fruitless intervention ended in 1920 with the departure of Allied troops, except that the Japanese stayed in the Maritime Provinces of the Russian Far East until 1922 and in the Russian part of Sakhalin until 1925.
The War against Poland
The Soviet-Polish war was fought in 1920 from the end of April until mid-October. The government of newly independent Poland opened hostili-
ties to win the western Ukraine and western White Russia, which the Poles considered part of their "historic heritage," although ethnically the areas in question were not Polish. The ancient struggle between the Poles and the Russians resumed its course, with this time the Russians, that is, the Soviet government, in an apparently desperate situation. Actually the war produced more than one reversal of fortune. First, in June and July the Poles overran western Russian areas; next the Red Army, led by Michael Tukhachevsky and others, staged a mighty counteroffensive that reached the very gates of Warsaw; then the Poles, helped by French credits and Allied supplies, defeated the onrushing Reds and gained the upper hand. The Treaty of Riga of March 18, 1921, gave Poland many of the lands it desired, establishing the boundary a considerable distance east of the ethnic line, as well as of the so-called Curzon Line, which approximated the ethnic line and which the Allies had regarded as the just settlement.
National Independence Movements
National independence movements in the former empire of the Romanovs during the years following 1917 defy comprehensive description in a textbook and have to be left to special works, such as Pipes's study. As early as 1917 Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and White Russia declared their independence. They were followed in 1918 by Estonia, Ukraine, Poland - once German troops were evacuated - the Transcaucasian Federation - to be dissolved into the separate states of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia - and certain political formations in the east. The Soviet government had proclaimed the right of self-determination of peoples, but it became quickly apparent that it considered independence movements as bourgeois and counterrevolutionary. Those peoples that were successful in asserting their independence, that is, the Finns, the Estonians, the Latvians, and the Lithuanians, as well as the Poles, did so in spite of the Soviet government, which was preoccupied with other urgent matters. Usually they had to suppress their own Communists, sometimes, as in the case of Finland, after a full-fledged civil war. All except Poland and Lithuania became independent states for the first time. In other areas the Red Army and local Communists combined to destroy independence.
Developments in Ukraine turned out to be perhaps the most complicated of all. There the local government, the Rada or central council, and the General Secretariat, proclaimed a republic of the Ukrainian people after the fall of the Provisional Government in Petrograd. Soviet authorities recognized the new republic, but in February 1918 the Red Army overthrew the Rada. Soviet rule, established in the spring of 1918, was in turn
overthrown by the advancing German army. The Germans at first accepted the Rada, but before long they sponsored instead a Right-wing government under Paul Skoropadsky. After the Germans left, the Directory of the Rada deposed Skoropadsky in December 1918, only to be driven out in short order by Denikin's White forces. Following Denikin's withdrawal in the autumn of 1919, Soviet troops restored Soviet authority in Ukraine. Next the Directory of the Rada made an agreement with the Poles, only to be left out at the peace treaty terminating the Soviet-Polish War, which simply divided Ukraine between Soviet Russia and Poland. Ukrainians supported different movements and fought in different armies as well as in countless anarchic peasant bands. Political divisions survived the collapse of the Ukrainian bid for independence and later divided Ukrainian emigres. Yet it remains an open question to what extent the young Ukrainian nationalism, nurtured especially among the Ukrainian intellectuals in Austrian Galicia, had penetrated the peasant masses of the Russian Ukraine.