Central and Eastern Europe

1917–1922: The Russian Civil War

November 1917 – October 1922 · 1 battle

The Bolshevik coup in Petrograd did not give Lenin power over the whole of Russia. Ranged against the new government were officers of the old Tsarist army, Cossacks, socialists and the peoples of the former empire, and at various moments the interventionist forces of the great powers as well. For five years fighting raged from the Baltic to the Pacific. The victory of the Red Army, bought with famine, terror and millions of victims, entrenched the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party and gave birth to the Soviet Union, whose commanders and methods were to play a large part on the road to the Second World War.