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The Russian Civil War was fought from 1917 to 1922. It began immediately after the collapse of the Russian provisional government and the Bolshevik takeover of Petrograd, rapidly intensifying after Lenin's dissolution of the Russian Constituent Assembly. The main hostilities took place between Communist forces known as the Red Army and loosely allied anti-Communist forces known as the White Army. The Communists won, and established the Soviet Union in 1922.Following the abdication of Russian Czar Nicholas II and the turbulent Russian Revolution throughout 1917, a socialist leaning Provisional Government was established. In October another revolution occurred in which the Red Guard, armed groups of workers and deserting soldiers directed by the Bolshevik Party, seized control of St. Petersburg and began an immediate armed takeover of cities and villages throughout Russia. In January of 1918, Lenin had the Constituent Assembly violently dissolved, proclaiming the Bolsheviks as the new government of Russia.
The Bolsheviks decided to immediately make peace with Germany and the Central Powers, as they had promised the Russian people prior to the Revolution. This decision has also been attributed by historians to Vladimir Lenin's sponsorship by the foreign office of Kaiser Germany, offered by the latter in hopes that with a revolution, Russia would withdraw from World War I.
A cease fire was immediately announced and peace talks began. As a condition for peace, the proposed treaty by the Central Powers conceded huge portions of the former Russian Empire to Imperial Germany and Turkey, greatly upsetting nationalists and conservatives. Leon Trotsky, representing the Bolsheviks, refused at first to sign the treaty while continuing to observe a unilateral cease fire, following the policy of "No fighting, but no peace treaty".
In view of this, the Germans began an all out advance on the Eastern Front, encountering no resistance. Signing a formal peace treaty was the only option in the eyes of the Bolsheviks, because the Russian army was demobilized and the newly formed Red Guards were incapable of stopping the advance. They also understood that the impending counterrevolutionary resistance was more dangerous than the concessions of the treaty, which Lenin viewed as temporary in the light of aspirations for a world revolution. The Soviets acceded to a peace treaty and the formal agreement, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was ratified on March 6, 1918.
In the wake of the October Revolution, the old Russian army had been demobilized and the volunteer based Red Guard was the Bolsheviks' main military arm. In January, Trotsky headed its reorganization into the "Workers' and Peasants' Red Army," in order to create a more professional fighting force. He instituted a forceful conscription program, frequently resorting to repressive tactics, and used former Tsarist officers as "military specialists".
The Bolsheviks banned all non-Bolshevik political activity around the same time, even other socialist groups, when it became clear that the Bolsheviks could not hold a majority of the seats in any democratically elected governing body outside of St. Petersburg and Moscow. This was particularly visible in the elections to the Constituent Assembly where Bolsheviks constituted a minority of the vote (despite Bolshevik supervision at major urban polling centers).
While resistance to the Red Guard began on the very next day after the Bolshevik cue, the Brest-Litovsk treaty and the political ban became a catalyst for the formation of anti-Bolshevik groups both inside and outside Russia, pushing them into action against the new regime.
A loose confederation of anti-Bolshevik forces aligned against the Communist government, including republican, conservative, reactionary, pro-monarchist, liberal, non-Bolshevik socialists, and democratic reformist supporters, voluntarily united only in their opposition to Bolshevik rule. Their military forces became known as the White movement (sometimes referred to as the "White Army"), and they controlled significant parts of the former Russian empire for most of the war.
A Ukrainian nationalist movement known as the Green Army and an anarchist movement known as the the Black Army played a much smaller part in the war, sometimes harrying both the Reds and the Whites, and sometimes even each other.
The Western Allies, upset at the withdrawal of Russia from the war effort, also expressed their dismay at the Bolsheviks. Winston Churchill declared that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle".[citation needed] In addition, there was also a concern - shared by many countries in the Central Powers as well - that the socialist revolution would spread and so many expressed support for the Whites, occasionally provided troops and supplies.
The majority of the fighting ended in 1920 with the defeat of General Pyotr Wrangel in the Crimea, but a notable resistance in certain areas continued until 1922 (e.g, Kronstadt Uprising, Tambov Rebellion, and the final resistance of the White movement in the Far East).
The Soviet government held that the Bolshevik movement was an international workers' movement and not specifically Russian; therefore, Soviet historiography traditionally referred to the conflict as the "Civil War and Military Intervention of 1917-1922". This term also encompassed the Polish-Soviet War, resistance in Ukraine, as well as Basmachi resistance and foreign intervention in Central Asia in its definition.
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