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Russian Revolution

The russian civil war.

The Russian Civil War (1918-21) was fought to decide who should control Russia in the wake of the October 1917 revolution. During this period a conglomerate of anti-Bolshevik groups, dubbed the Whites, fought to remove the Bolsheviks from power and restore some elements of the old order. Other groups not directly aligned with the Bolsheviks or the Whites fought for independence or control of their own regions. The Russian Civil War was a pervasive conflict, drawing in many disparate political and military groups, nationalist movements and all classes of Russian society. Several foreign nations, most of whom opposed the Bolshevik government in Russia, also contributed troops, weapons, supplies and intelligence to warring parties. Like most other internecine conflicts the Russian Civil War produced confusion, division, attack and retaliation, intense propaganda, war crimes and human suffering on catastrophic levels.

The Russian Civil War emerged from strong and widespread resistance to the new Bolshevik order. Opposition to the Bolsheviks after the October 1917 was pronounced, however in early 1918 this opposition began to strengthen and intensify into a counter-revolutionary movement. Tsarists, liberals, Mensheviks and SRs alike believed the Bolsheviks were usurpers who had stolen power, despite their grandiose claims that they represented the working classes. The catalyst for the outbreak of civil war was an uprising by the Czech Legion. A Russian Imperial Army unit, the Czech Legion contained volunteers of Czech and Slovak heritage who enlisted to defend their homeland during World War I. By May 1918 the Legion was distributed along the Trans-Siberian Railway but found itself unable to move, due to transport shortages and Bolshevik red tape. Tensions between Czech Legion soldiers and Bolshevik officials began to escalate. On May 14th the Legion began to rebel, killing several Bolsheviks and seizing control of Chelyabinsk, a town not far south of Ekaterinburg, where the former tsar and his family were being held.

Over the coming weeks, the Czech Legion continued its revolt against Bolshevik authority, seizing control of towns and stations along the Trans-Siberian Railway. They were joined by other aggrieved groups, particularly former tsarist officers and loyalist militias. By the end of June 1918 the counter-revolutionaries controlled most of the railway and with it all of Siberia. Behind the White armies emerged a political movement, a loose coalition of anti-Bolsheviks comprised of monarchists, liberals, non-Bolshevik socialists and disgruntled peasants. These groups had very few shared values or objectives, other than their opposition to the Bolsheviks and their determination to overthrow the Soviet regime. Most White leaders were nationalist and imperialist: they wanted to retain the Russian Empire and restore it to a position of strength in Europe and Asia. Beyond that, however, they had little in common politically. They had no system of government in mind, no agreed foreign policy, no single leader or leadership group. Some wanted the tsar restored; some wanted a constitutional monarchy; some wanted a republic; some expressed no views on the matter.

Together this broad and eclectic movement became known as the Whites. As one might expect, their biggest problems were division, disunity and a lack of leadership and coordination. Separate White armies were formed under the command of General Kornilov, General Denikin and Admiral Kolchak – all former military commanders of the tsarist regime. Kornilov’s army, also referred to as the Volunteer Army, was the largest of these. Foreign powers also intervened to bring about the collapse of Bolshevism. With the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, the Bolsheviks appeared not only as traitors to the war cause, but an ideological threat to democratic, capitalist nations. Most foreign powers refused to recognise the legitimacy of the Bolshevik regime, dealing instead with White generals in exile. British, French and American units were all sent to various Russian ports to support White forces, while Japanese troops invaded in the east. Foreign military intervention was lukewarm at best; rarely did foreign units directly engage the Bolsheviks on their own. Some foreign powers were chiefly interested in protecting resources previously lent to Russia. By late 1918, World War I had come to an end and nobody wanted to commit large troop numbers to another major conflict. As a consequence, foreign troops began withdrawing from Russia in 1919.

The Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War can be attributed to several factors. The White armies fought as separate units and, for the most part, were unable or unwilling to coordinate their strategy or offensives. They were geographically scattered around Russia and not often able to combine their forces in sufficient numbers to push back the Red Army. The Whites were politically divided and not particularly well led; the only common view all Whites shared was opposition to the Bolshevik regime. The Whites also lost important generals at important times: Kornilov was killed in battle in March 1918 and Kolchak was captured and executed in January 1920. In contrast to White forces, the Red Army was strongly disciplined and contained five million soldiers at its peak. The Bolsheviks and Soviets also maintained control of Russia’s industrial heartland, most of its major cities, its significant ports and railways; this gave them access to infrastructure, communications and supply lines. The Bolshevik propaganda campaign was also more successful, promoting a White victory as a return to the ‘old Russia’ – a prospect that terrified most Russians. Further, when administering the regions they controlled the Whites often resorted to similar methods employed by the Bolsheviks: conscription, grain requisitioning, coercion and terror. The Whites failed to win sufficient support from the Russian people and could not present themselves as an alternative to the Soviet regime.

© Alpha History 2014. Content on this page may not be republished or distributed without permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use . This page was written by Jennifer Llewellyn, John Rae and Steve Thompson. To reference this page, use the following citation: J. Llewellyn et al , “The Russian Civil War” at Alpha History , http://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/russian-civil-war/, 2014, accessed [date of last access].

• Modern History

The Russian Civil War: A tale of two revolutions and a nation divided

The Russian Civil War was a brutal conflict that raged across Russia from 1917 to 1923. It would become one of the most pivotal episodes in 20th-century history.

Emerging in the wake of the Russian Revolution, which itself had toppled the centuries-old Romanov dynasty, the civil war pitted various factions against each other in a struggle for the very soul of Russia.

On one side were the Bolsheviks, led by figures like Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, who aimed to establish a socialist state based on Marxist principles.

Opposing them were the White Armies. This was a disparate coalition of monarchists, liberals, and conservatives, who were united mainly by their antipathy toward Bolshevik ideology.

Yet, the conflict was not a simple binary struggle; it involved a myriad of other groups, including anarchists, ethnic nationalists, and even foreign interventionist forces.

Each one had their own agendas and visions for Russia's future.

What had happened in Russia before the civil war?

The Romanov dynasty had ruled Russia for over three centuries, but by the early 1900s, the empire was in serious decline.

Social inequality in the country was rampant. A burgeoning industrial working class meant that an impoverished peasantry was chafing under the yoke of both an autocratic monarchy and a rigid social hierarchy.

The situation was made much worse by Russia's involvement in World War I, which had drained the nation's resources.

However, it was the February Revolution of 1917 that was the final tipping point.

It would result in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the establishment of a Provisional Government.

Ultimately, the Provisional Government proved to be ineffectual and unable to address the pressing issues of land reform and social inequality.

This vacuum of power and lack of legitimacy provided a fertile ground for more radical ideologies to seek control.

so, the Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, seized this opportunity to propagate their vision of a socialist utopia.

Lenin's return to Russia from exile in April 1917 was a watershed moment in this transition.

He was able to galvanize the Bolshevik movement, which then grabbed at control of Russia in the October Revolution later that year.

The Bolsheviks, who promised "peace, land, and bread," successfully overthrew the Provisional Government and took control of Petrograd.

This effectively declared the dawn of a new socialist government.

Yet, the Bolshevik seizure of power polarized Russian society and led to the immediate disintegration of the fragile alliances that had formed in opposition to the Romanovs.

The Constituent Assembly, a democratically elected body meant to draft a new constitution, was disbanded by the Bolsheviks when it became clear that they would not hold a majority.

This act further alienated various factions, including liberals, monarchists, and even some socialists.

These groups viewed the recent events as a betrayal of true democratic principles.

As a result, these groups banded together into what became known as the White Army, and sought to take back power through force.

The civil war had begun.

The important personalities of the conflict

At the forefront of the coming conflict was Vladimir Lenin. He was the real intellectual and ideological engine behind the Bolshevik Revolution.

As a master of political strategy, his writings and speeches provided the theoretical framework for the new Bolsheviks state.

In addition, his leadership during the October Revolution and the early years of the Civil War was instrumental in the early consolidation of Bolshevik power.

However, it would be Lenin's ability to adapt, as evidenced by his introduction of the New Economic Policy when War Communism failed, that best showcased his pragmatism.

Next, close to Lenin was Leon Trotsky: a military strategist was only matched by his ideological fervor.

He was the architect of the Red Army. This was a ragtag group of workers and peasants that he had transformed into a formidable fighting force capable of taking on the well-armed and better-trained White Army.

However, these soldiers were often highly motivated, as they saw themselves as the vanguard of a new social order.

On the other side of the ideological divide were figures like Alexander Kolchak and Anton Denikin: the key leaders of the White Army.

Kolchak was a naval officer and explorer, who personally took charge of anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia when he declared himself "Supreme Ruler" of Russia.

Although initially successful, his campaign eventually faltered due to both military setbacks and his inability to garner widespread political support across Russia.

Aiding him was Anton Denikin, another prominent White leader that commanded the military forces in Southern Russia.

As a career military officer, Denikin was less an ideologue than a staunch patriot.

He openly admitted that he was fighting more for a unified Russia than for any specific political vision.

As a result, u nlike the Red Army, the Whites did not have a unified ideological platform.

Rather, they were bound together by their shared opposition to Bolshevik rule.

This lack of ideological cohesion was both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, it allowed the White Armies to attract a broad range of supporters, but on the other, it made it difficult to articulate a clear alternative to Bolshevik rule, reducing their appeal, especially among the peasantry.

The other, smaller groups in the conflict

In addition to the Reds and Whites, there were other groups that played a smaller, but no less significant role in the conflict.

The Green Armies, largely composed of peasants, were a third force that opposed both the Bolsheviks and the Whites.

Their primary concern was protecting their communities and their land from requisition and occupation.

Then there were the anarchists: most notably the Black Army led by Nestor Makhno in Ukraine, who fought for a stateless, non-hierarchical society.

While they sometimes collaborated with the Red Army against the Whites, their ultimate goals were at odds with the Bolshevik vision of a centralized socialist state.

What happened during the Russian Civil War?

One of the earliest and most significant was the Battle of Tsaritsyn, later known as Stalingrad and now Volgograd.

This battle was crucial for the Red Army, not only because Tsaritsyn was a vital transportation hub, but also because it was a proving ground for future Soviet leaders like Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov.

The Red Army's victory there bolstered its morale and provided a strategic advantage in the crucial early stages of the war.

Then, following the Battle of Tsaritsyn, the White Army, under the command of Anton Denikin, launched a major offensive in the summer of 1919 aimed at capturing Moscow.

Known as the Moscow Offensive, this campaign represented the high-water mark for the White Army.

Denikin's forces advanced rapidly, coming within 200 miles of the Russian capital.

However, the offensive ultimately faltered due to overextension. However, the lack of overall coordination, and the Red Army's successful counterattacks were additionally important.

The failure to capture Moscow was a turning point in the war. It was the beginning of the end for the White Army's hopes of overthrowing the Bolshevik regime.

Over in Ukraine, the anarchist Black Army led by Nestor Makhno initially collaborated with the Red Army to fight against the Whites.

However, this alliance was short-lived, and Makhno's forces soon found themselves fighting against both Reds and Whites.

Similarly, the Green Armies engaged in guerrilla warfare against both major factions, further complicating the military landscape.

At the Battle of Warsaw in 1920 the Red Army advanced toward Warsaw but was decisively defeated by Polish forces there.

This sudden loss prevented the spread of Bolshevik influence into Central Europe and exposed the geographical limitations of Red Army power.

The drastic economic measures used in Russia

One of the most radical and controversial Bolshevik policies they enacted during this time was 'War Communism'.

This system that aimed to centralize the economy under state control. As a result, industries were nationalized, and private trade was banned.

The state took control of agricultural production as well, by requisitioning grain from peasants to feed the cities and the Red Army.

While War Communism succeeded in meeting some immediate military needs, it had devastating social and economic consequences.

Production plummeted, and widespread famine ensued, which led to significant discontent among the peasantry and working class.

Recognizing the failures and unsustainability of War Communism, the Bolshevik leadership, under Lenin's advice, introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921.

The NEP allowed for a limited return of private enterprise and trade. In particular, p easants were allowed to sell their surplus produce, and small businesses could operate under certain conditions.

The NEP was ultimately a strictly pragmatic move, which aimed at reviving the economy and placating the increasingly restive peasantry and working class.

While it did lead to economic improvement and stabilization, it was also criticized by many within the Bolshevik party for compromising core socialist economic principles.

Internal dissent and rebellion

The Bolshevik regime, despite its revolutionary rhetoric of worker and peasant empowerment, faced significant opposition from the very classes it claimed to represent.

One of the most notable instances of internal dissent was the Tambov Rebellion, which erupted in 1920–1921.

This was predominantly a peasant uprising which exploded in response to the harsh requisitioning policies of War Communism.

The peasants, already burdened by the devastation of war, found themselves further impoverished by a state that seemed more interested in its ideological goals than in the welfare of its people.

Eventually, the Tambov Rebellion was brutally suppressed by the Red Army. However, it exposed the deep-seated discontent among the Russian large sections of the rural peasantry.

Similarly, the Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921 revealed identical cracks in the Bolsheviks' urban support base.

The Kronstadt sailors had been ardent supporters of the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution but became severely disillusioned by the authoritarian turn of the regime.

They issues demands for "Soviets without Communists" and called for an end to War Communism.

Just like the Tambov rebellion, this one was also crushed. But these signs of discontent my have been a contributing factor to the shift towards the more moderate New Economic Policy.

How the war came to an end

The final blow to organized White resistance came with the defeat of Pyotr Wrangel in Crimea in November 1920.

Wrangel had been one of the last White Army commanders to continue the fight, and his defeat was the end of large-scale military opposition to the Bolshevik regime.

However, i t wasn't until 1923 that the Bolshevik government could confidently declare the civil war to be officially over.

The Bolsheviks, who were now unchallenged as the rulers of Russia, then set about building the world's first socialist state.

In 1922, the Soviet Union was formally established. This officially brought together various ethnic and national groups under a single federal structure.

However, the new state bore the deep scars of the civil war: the economy was in ruins, millions had died, and the social fabric was deeply frayed.

At this point in history, there was no guarantee that the new soviet state would survive very long.

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All you need to know about the Russian Civil War

Red Guard patrol.

In March 1917, the monarchy was toppled in Russia and a republican form of government was established. This, however, only exacerbated the accumulated social, political and economic problems of a country weakened by its participation in World War I.

In November of the same year, Russia lived through a second revolution when the Bolsheviks came to power. A significant part of the population, however, did not share the views of the fanatical champions of socialism. Therefore, the beginning of the Civil War in the country is commonly associated with November 7, 1917 - the day of the Bolshevik coup in the then capital of the Russian state, Petrograd (St. Petersburg).

Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra Feodorovna.

In an effort to pull Russia out of World War I as rapidly as possible, Lenin’s government signed a peace treaty with the Germans in Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918. Under its harsh terms, the country lost all of Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic Region. The so-called “obscene peace” came as a shock to Russian society and noticeably increased the number of fierce opponents of Soviet power, who were determined not to surrender even an inch of their land to the enemy.

And so it was that, from the Summer of 1918, Civil War began to rapidly escalate throughout the vast territory of Russia. Apart from the Bolsheviks and their immediate political opponents, numerous anarchist elements, insurgent armies and “independent states” that had emerged on the fringes of the war-ravaged empire, as well as Western powers, which had decided to make the most of the turmoil in Russia, were drawn into it. 

International Workers' Day demonstration.

The conflict reached its culmination in 1919, with major battles being fought at the approaches to Moscow and Petrograd. And the end of the bloody conflict is associated with the establishment of Soviet power in the Far East in 1922.

As a result, socialism won a decisive victory in Russia and this had enormous implications for the entire history of the 20th century.

In this article, you will learn who fought in the war and what their goals were, who the Reds, Whites and Greens were, what role the interventionists played and why the Bolsheviks ultimately emerged victorious from this fierce conflict.

Who were the Reds?

Soldiers of the Red unit.

Supporters of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party were members of the so-called ‘Red’ camp. This vivid color - the color of blood - became the symbol of revolutionary struggle, the left-wing movement, socialism and communism.

Initially, the volunteer detachments of the Red Guards were the armed backbone of the new government. The Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army was established at the end of January 1918. Despite its name, it didn’t consist entirely of workers and peasants, but included representatives of different classes of Russian society, who shared the same revolutionary ideals.

Thus, quite a large number of tsarist officers enlisted in the Red Army, in which they were referred to as “military specialists”. The first Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Soviet Russia was Jukums Vācietis, a former colonel in the imperial army.

The numerous partisan detachments operating behind enemy lines significantly bolstered the Bolsheviks in the war. They were either established by local party bodies or were set up spontaneously at the initiative of the population.

Who were the Whites?

White troops.

The Reds’ opponents in the Civil War were called the ‘Whites’ (during the French Revolution, the color white was also associated with the opponents of the revolution). The Bolsheviks claimed the Whites were fighting for the “rule of the tsar, the landlords and the capitalists”.

Far from everyone in the White camp held monarchist views, however. A rejection of Bolshevik ideas united the adherents of very different political parties and movements.

Given the specific features of the Civil War, it is difficult to talk about a clear front line. Nevertheless, certain regions of the country were held by the opposing sides almost for the entire duration of the conflict. 

Thus, the Soviet authorities firmly controlled the western regions, including Moscow and Petrograd, while the Whites were entrenched on the Don in the south, in Siberia in the east and in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in the north.

Who were the Greens?

Rebellious peasants during the Tambov Uprising.

The third significant force in the Civil War were the so-called ‘Greens’. This was the label given to peasants and Cossacks and also various kinds of anarchists, who found neither the Whites nor the Reds to their liking.

The Greens refused to be mobilized into the warring sides’ armies and would take to the woods (which is how they got their name). They not infrequently managed to assemble large military formations and establish control over large areas of territory.

In Tambov Province, south of Moscow, in 1920, for instance, a large-scale insurgency led by Alexander Antonov flared up against the Bolsheviks. His United Partisan Army numbered more than 50,000 fighting men and Soviet troops only succeeded in defeating it with great difficulty.

The Greens usually fought against both the Whites and the Reds, but they were sometimes capable of reaching agreement with one or other of the warring sides. Anarchist Nestor Makhno, commander of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, allied himself with the Bolsheviks several times, but eventually resumed hostilities against them, was defeated and fled the country.

Who took part in the intervention?

American troops in Russia.

As a consequence of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, German troops occupied the whole of Ukraine and the Baltic Region (Poland was already under their control). It was only after the November Revolution of 1918 and the ousting of the kaiser that they started withdrawing from the territory of the former Russian Empire.

It was also the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that led to the large-scale intervention of the Entente powers in Russia. The intention of the allies was to bring the Russian army back to the battlefield and they gave their support (which included arms supplies) to the Whites, who promised to wage war against the Germans to a victorious conclusion after they had seized power. Limited contingents of British, French, American, Italian, Canadian, Australian and Greek troops disembarked in ports in the south, north and east of the country.

Even after the end of World War I, the Entente was in no hurry to evacuate its troops, continuing to seek political and economic advantage for itself from the Russian chaos. The interventionists themselves kept away from areas of intensive military operations, mainly sticking to anti-partisan operations. They only started withdrawing from the country in the second half of 1919 when it had become clear that the White movement was doomed.

An English officer decorating officers of the Czechoslovak Corps, who fought on the side of the Whites in the Civil War.

The Japanese made the most persistent attempts to cling on in Russia. Their plans included the subjugation of broad territories in the Far East and Siberia as far as Lake Baikal - either directly or through the establishment of a puppet state.

Lacking the means to enter into open armed conflict with the Japanese interventionists, the Bolsheviks gradually squeezed them out of their territory by diplomatic methods and by fueling the partisan movement in the rear of the enemy. They only finally managed to regain occupied northern Sakhalin in 1925.

How deadly was the Red and White terror?

Corpses of victims of the winter 1918 Red terror in Yevpatoria, Crimea.

Extreme brutality is a feature of any civil war and the conflict in Russia was no exception. In Soviet Russia, violence against class enemies and counter-revolutionary elements was enshrined at state level by a September 5, 1918, decree, ‘On Red Terror’.

Up to two million people fell victim to the officially-sanctioned Red terror overall. More than half a million died in the so-called ‘White terror’. This had nothing to do with any humanity on the part of the enemies of the Bolsheviks, but derived from the fact that the regions under their control were more lightly populated. 

The two sides matched each other in brutality. Thus, the repressive policy of Admiral Alexander Kolchak, the leader of the Whites in the east of the country, led to large-scale insurgencies in the rear of his armies and this was one of the principal reasons for the collapse of the regime of this self-proclaimed Supreme Leader of Russia.

The interventionist forces were also involved in the terror. They accounted for over 111,000 Russian deaths.

Why did the Bolsheviks win?

White troops laying down their arms.

One of the main reasons for the defeat of the Whites in the Civil War was the fragmentation of their forces. Positioned at vast distances from one another, their generals could not effectively coordinate their operations. Furthermore, the disparate anti-Soviet military formations were sometimes in open conflict with one another.

The Whites lacked political unity or any kind of clearly-formulated ideology that they could effectively convey to the population (aside from anti-Bolshevism and the integrity of the state). The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, had fully-developed political, social and economic programs and knew how to conduct effective propaganda.

The Reds found themselves in control of the country’s densely-populated industrial regions, in which they were able to set up well-defined structures of civil and military administration, albeit through the use of sometimes brutal methods. They rapidly organized a system of training for officers and technical specialists and, in addition, they attracted to their ranks around 70 percent of former tsarist army officers.

The Bolsheviks were able to act as a single monolithic force in the Civil War. They reacted effectively to threats from any direction and instantly moved their forces to counter them. Thus, having routed Kolchak in the Urals in the Spring of 1919, by the fall, the Red Army was already able systematically and successfully to repel an advance on Moscow by Anton Denikin’s Armed Forces of South Russia and the advance of Nikolai Yudenich’s Northwestern Army on Petrograd. After a number of such heavy defeats, the White movement was effectively doomed.

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Foreign intervention

Victory of the red army, casualties and consequences of the war.

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• Table Of Contents

The Allied governments now had to decide on their policy in the confused Russian situation. The original purpose of intervention, to revive an eastern front against Germany, was now meaningless. Russian exiles argued that, since the pre-Bolshevik governments of Russia had remained loyal to the Allies , the Allies were bound to help them. To this moral argument was added the political argument that the Communist regime in Moscow was a menace to the whole of Europe , with its subversive propaganda and its determination to spread revolution.

At the beginning of 1919 the French and Italian governments favoured strong support (in the form of munitions and supplies rather than in men) to the Whites (as the anti-Communist forces now came to be called), while the British and U.S. governments were more cautious and even hoped to reconcile the warring Russian parties. In January the Allies, on U.S. initiative , proposed to all Russian belligerents to hold armistice talks on the island of Prinkipo in the Sea of Marmara . The Communists accepted, but the Whites refused. In March the U.S. diplomat William C. Bullitt went to Moscow and returned with peace proposals from the Communists, which were not accepted by the Allies. After this the Allies ceased trying to come to terms with the Communists and gave increased assistance to Kolchak and Denikin.

Direct intervention by Allied military forces was, however, on a very small scale, involving a total of perhaps 200,000 soldiers. The French in Ukraine were bewildered by the confused struggle between Russian Communists, Russian Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists, and they withdrew their forces during March and April 1919, having hardly fired a shot. The British in the Arkhangelsk and Murmansk areas did some fighting, but the northern front was of only minor importance to the civil war as a whole. The last British forces were withdrawn from Arkhangelsk and from Murmansk in the early fall of 1919. The only “interventionists” who represented a real danger were the Japanese, who established themselves systematically in the Far Eastern provinces.

In the first half of 1919 the main fighting was in the east. Kolchak advanced in the Urals and had attained his greatest success by April. On April 28 the Red Army’s counteroffensive began. Ufa fell in June, and Kolchak’s armies retreated through Siberia , harassed by partisans. By the end of summer the retreat had become a rout. Kolchak set up an administration in November at Irkutsk , but it was overthrown in December by Socialist Revolutionaries. He himself was handed over to the Communists in January 1920 and was shot on February 7.

Meanwhile, in the late summer of 1919, Denikin had made a last effort in European Russia. By the end of August most of Ukraine was in White hands. The Communists had been driven out, and the Ukrainian nationalists were divided in their attitude to Denikin, Petlyura being hostile to him, but the Galicians preferring him to the Poles, whom they considered their main enemy. In September the White forces moved northward from Ukraine and from the lower Volga toward Moscow. On October 13 they took Oryol. At the same time, Gen. Nikolay N. Yudenich advanced from Estonia to the outskirts of Petrograd ( St. Petersburg ). But both cities were saved by Red Army counterattacks. Yudenich retreated into Estonia, and Denikin, his communications greatly overextended, was driven back from Oryol in an increasingly disorderly march, which ended with the evacuation of the remnants of his army, in March 1920, from Novorossiysk . In April 1920 an alliance between Petlyura and Polish leader Józef Piłsudski led to a joint offensive that overran much of Ukraine and sparked the Russo-Polish War .

In 1920 there was still an organized White force in Crimea , under Gen. Pyotr N. Wrangel , who struck northward at the Red Army and, for a time, occupied part of Ukraine and Kuban. The Red Army eventually battered Wrangel’s forces, whose rearguards held out long enough to ensure the evacuation of 150,000 soldiers and civilians by sea from Crimea. This ended the Russian Civil War in November 1920.

As many as 10 million lives were lost as a result of the Russian Civil War, and the overwhelming majority of these were civilian casualties. Thousands of perceived opponents of the Bolsheviks were murdered by the Cheka , and life among the peasants was miserable. Disease, particularly typhus , was rampant, and malnutrition was the natural consequence of Lenin’s widespread grain confiscations. The almost complete breakdown of transportation made it impossible to distribute even those inadequate supplies that the government made available. Between 1914 and 1920 the number of working locomotives in Russia declined from more than 17,000 to fewer than 4,000, and the railway system, which spent much of the war under the control of White Armies, was devastated. In the cities, wooden houses were pulled down to serve as fuel, and urban workers—ostensibly the foundation of the Soviet government—began to vanish back to the countryside.

The Communist victory was at the same time a defeat for the various nationalist movements of the non-Russian peoples. The hopes of the Tatars and Bashkirs , between the Kazan area and the southern Urals, were ruined in the course of the civil war. The Communists proclaimed the right of self-determination, but in practice they imposed the dictatorship of the Russian Communist Party on them. In Tashkent the Muslim population remained mistrustful of any Russian authorities, and for some years guerrilla bands of nationalists, known as Basmachi , harassed the Communist authorities.

Russia had ceded parts of Transcaucasia to the Ottoman Empire as part of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, but this only served to spark a temporary revival of the three separate Transcaucasian republics— Azerbaijan , Armenia , and Georgia —in May 1918. The Moscow government did not intend to respect Transcaucasian independence for long. In April 1920 the Azerbaijan government surrendered to the double threat of invasion by the Red Army and rebellion in Baku . In December 1920 the formerly Russian portion of Armenia was incorporated into Soviet Russia, and the Moscow government recognized the rest of Armenia as part of Turkey. From February to April 1921 the Red Army invaded and conquered Georgia.

For the territory around Lake Baikal and east of it, from the spring of 1920, the fiction of a Far Eastern Republic , independent of Soviet Russia, was maintained. This government was in practice fully controlled from Moscow. The Japanese delegates at the Washington Conference of 1921–22 promised the U.S. government that they would withdraw all their troops from Russian territory. This they did at the end of October 1922. The Far Eastern Republic had now served its purpose, and its assembly in November formally voted it out of existence and united it to Soviet Russia .

The political system that emerged victorious from the civil war bore the name Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. In fact the soviets were of small importance. All power belonged to the Communist Party , members of which occupied all the posts in the Soviet of People’s Commissars and the key posts at all lower levels of the machinery of government. The party itself was governed by its Central Committee , which Lenin dominated.

Second only to Lenin was Trotsky , who as commissar for war not only had supreme command of the armed forces but was also largely responsible for organizing supplies and for the mobilization of manpower. By 1919 the Red Army had become much better than the armies of its White opponents. The victory of the Communists in the civil war is indeed mainly due to this simple fact of military superiority, reinforced by the fact that, holding the central core of European Russia throughout the war, they could plan operations and move men more easily than their enemies, whose bases were on the periphery and cut off from one another.

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The Civil War: Background

In this segment, the intent is to provide background reading on the Civil War, as well as explore the origins of the conflict. Not only one must see alliances, but analyze the reason behind the different formations of different factions. This section includes books and articles, as well as compilations of primary sources. While most of the background information focuses on the achievements and final victory of the Red Army, other sections will focus on other players and other more specific aspects of the war.

• Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War . Pegasus, 2007.
• The author offers a lucid, detailed account of the men and events that shaped twentieth century communist Russia. He draws upon a wide range of sources to recount the military course of the war, as well as the hardship the conflict brought to a country and its people—for the victory and the reconstruction of the state under the Soviet regime came at a painfully high economic and human price. This book can serves as a general source of background facts on the Civil War.

The Russian Civil War: Documents from the Soviet Archives (Book)

• Butt, V. P., and A. B. Murphy, N. A. Myshov, G.R. Swain, ed. The Russian Civil War: Documents from the Soviet Archives . London: Longman, 1996.
• In this compilation, the editors managed to compile correspondence between commanders that were finally accessible as the Soviet archives opened to the public. While it does not offer a narrative, the avid reader is able to draw his/her all conclusions from the different texts, which serve as a rich basis for research.

The Russian Civil War: Primary Sources (Book)

• Murphy, A. B. The Russian Civil War: Primary Sources . London: Longman, 1996.
• To go with the source about, Murphy brings together another collection of primary sources, both from Soviet archives and elsewhere, as above.

La guerre civile et l’économie de guerre origines du système soviétique (Article, Source in French)

• Sapir, Jacques. “La guerre civile et l’économi de guerre origines du système soviétique,” Cahiers du monde russe 38 (1997), 9-28.
• Place the two conflicts , World War I and the Civil War, in the double process of breaking the tsarist system and genesis of the Soviet system, and there still remains an important research theme to advance the understanding of what was the USSR. While significant work has already been done on the matter, the author attempts to take an approach other than purely historical in order to study the time period. His methodology consists of taking into account the notion of a war economy to try and understand the development of the Soviet system, given that a war economy is not only the economy of a country at war. In fact, in the twentieth century, a number of countries have attempted to conduct armed conflict by not applying to the economy and society mobilization that was the lot of able-bodied men. The war economy here refers to forms of economic and social mobilization that started up in 1914 . Sapir sees economics as largely instrumental in organizing the imagination and guide the thinking of economists, thinkers, and social reformers thereafter. In the particular case of the USSR , the article argues  that the dual experience of the war economy observed in Russia and Germany between 1914 and 1917 , and the mobilization implemented in the context of civil war, was instrumental in the establishment of a number of institutions of the Soviet system.

Rostov in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1920: The Key to Victory (Book)

• Murphy, Brian. Rostov in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1920: The Key To Victory . London: Routledge, 2005.
• These documents were collected from the archives in Rostov-on-Don, and this book makes them available for the first time in print. Both Reds and Whites realized Rostov’s vital strategic importance, and the city changed hands six times between 1917 and 1920. These newly published personal stories fill out the social background to its complex mix of classes and nationalities. They convey the daily experience of life in the streets, and the perils faced by either side when changing fortunes forced them to escape across the River Don.

Communists and the Red Cavalry: The Political Education of the Konarmiia in the Russian Civil War, 1918-20 (Article)

• Brown, Stephen. “Communists and the Red Cavalry: The Political Education of the Konarmiia in the Russian Civil War, 1918-20.” The Slavonic and East European Review 73 (1995), 82-99.
• Soviet writers long maintained that the political education of the Red Army was one of the great success stories of the Russian Civil War. The work of political education took on special importance in the Red Army because the majority of its soldiers were peasants. From the perspective of Soviet leaders, the peasant mentality was individualistic, conservative and backward. The author comes to show that, while repression played an important role in the Red Army during the Civil War, leaders of the Soviet state saw the imposition of discipline from above as a necessary but not a sufficient means of motivating and controlling peasant soldiers.

Civil War in South Russia, 1918 (Book) // Civil War in South Russia, 1919-1920 (Book)

• Kenez, Peter. Civil War in South Russia, 1918 . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
• Kenez, Peter. Civil War in South Russia, 1919-1920 . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
• In this two part series, Kenez recounts the events of the war in the Southern regions of Russia. The events’ importance lies in the variety of actors that played a role in the area: Europeans, Whites, and Reds. The book also serves as a good introduction to the

The White Armed Forces

The white army (book/memoir).

• Denikin, Anton I. The White Army . Translated by Catherine Zvegintzov. London: Academic International Press, 1973.
• The author, General Anton I. Denikin, discusses the White Army military campaign, together with flaws on the campaigns and (mostly) victories. Following the October Revolution both Denikin and Kornilov escaped to Novocherkassk in Northern Caucasus and, with other Tsarist officers, formed the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army, initially commanded by Alekseev. When Kornilov was killed in 1918, the Volunteer Army came under Denikin’s command. In the face of a Communist counter-offensive he withdrew his forces back towards the Don area in what became known as the “Ice March.” This book was written as an emigré in France in 1930.

The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920-1941 (Book)

• Robinson, Paul. The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920-1941 . Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2002.
• This book traces the fate of the soldiers of the White Armies who fled Russia at the end of the Russian Civil War. Even as the troops dispersed throughout the world, they continued to think of themselves as soldiers, kept their organization intact and in some cases even continued their military training. In this book, Robinson provides the reader a detailed outline of the activities of White military organizations in exile, especially the army of General P. N. Wrangel and its successor the Russkii Obsche-Voinskii Soiuz (ROVS), including their underground struggles against the Soviet Union, the humanitarian aid supplied to members, the ideological debates in which they participated, and efforts to collaborate with Germany in the Second World War. When placing the book in context of its historiography, it is one of the first books that forms a narrative about the aftermath of the Civil War according the Whites. In this way the book furthers understanding of the White movement, of Russian émigré military organizations, and of the history of the inter-war Russian emigration.

White Siberia: The Politics of Civil War (Book)

• Pereira, N. White Siberia: The Politics of Civil War . McGill-Queen’s Press, 1996.
• Pereira argues that the White counter-revolution failed in Siberia because of the political weakness of the anti-Soviet governments vying for power in the region and especially because of their policies toward the Siberian peasantry. He highlights similarities and differences among their constitutional programs and ideologies, paying particular attention to the Kolchak government as the chief anti-Bolshevik force in the region. Through his analysis of the conflict Pereira attempts to determine whether parliamentary democracy stood any real chance under the extraordinary circumstances or whether it was, as the Bolsheviks alleged, merely window-dressing hiding the real agenda of counter-revolution by military means and restoration of the ancien régime.

Greens and Others

Who were the “greens” rumor and collective identity in the russian civil war (article).

• Landis, Erik C. “Who Were the ‘Greens’? Rumor and Collective Identity in the Russian Civil War.” The Russian Review 69 (2010), 30-46.
• In this article, Landis revisits the term “greens” –used to label certain groups that did not recognize with the Red or the White Armies. The author intends to clarify the exact nature of the (what he calls) “so-called greens.” He argues that the term “Green” suggests that they –as a “historiographical phenomenon”– belong to a more generalized search for the popular will, when others were taking polarized positions during the time. With this article, Landis aims to break away with popular myths that came from either side of the conflict (with a position.)

The Origins of the Russian Civil War (Book)

• Swain, Geoffrey. The Origins of the Russian Civil War . London: Longman, 1996.
• This book offers an account of the first phase of the civil war that followed the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd in 1917. Swain provides the reader with a picture of the extraordinarily complicated developments that initiated the armed conflict between the Bolsheviks and their opponents. The author focuses on the conflict between the Red Army and the Greens forces, ex-allies that ended as their enemies because of the suspicion, unwillingness to compromise, and deliberate isolationism of Lenin’s party. Swain’s fundamental argument is that throughout the Civil War the Bolsheviks considered their main opponents not to be the forces representing the old regime of tsarism, but the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), who represented a vision for a socialist Russia that was quite different from the Bolshevik one. Having decided that the SRs were their primary enemies, the Bolsheviks engaged themselves in a war from which they emerged as victors who were consciously isolated from all other groups throughout Russia’s entire political spectrum. Swain concludes that it was the Red-Green civil war, rather than the Red-White one, that determined the nature of the Soviet regime that would dominate Russia for the next seven decades. It may be relevant to note that the author’s research is based on both published materials and newly opened archives in the former Soviet Union.

Russian Anarchists and the Civil War (Article)

• Avrich, Paul. “Russian Anarchists and the Civil War.” The Russian Review 27 (1968), 296-306.
• “Soviet anarchists” took the side of the Red Army and the Communists early in the war with “zeal and courage” (enough to impress Lenin). In this article, Avrich comes to show the position that the Anarchists took up, either taking active roles in the war against the Whites, or conforming to minor roles in the newly rising Soviet bureaucracy.

The Awareness Department of the Don Government in 1919 (Article, Source in Russian)

• Yegorov, A. “The Awareness Department of the Don Government in 1919.” Vestnk 6 (2013), 103-7.
• This article is devoted to the Department of Awareness of the Don Government and its activities during the Russian Civil War. The author describes the structure of the organization, its principal activities, and the reasons behind its closure. The author focuses on the political situation in Russia in 1919 and the importance of agitation during the disintegration of the old foundations of the state.

Foreign Influences and Expansion

The russian civil war in chinese turkestan (xinjiang), 1918-1921: a little known and explored front (article).

• Share, Michael. “The Russian Civil War in Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang), 1918-1921: A Little Known and Explored Front.” Europe-Asia Studies 62 (2010), 389-420.
• A very important yet little known front in the Russian Civil War existed in neighboring Xinjiang, a region in China’s northwest, that was at that time self-governing. In Xinjiang, Russian White Commanders and their troops gained sanctuary, financial assistance, food and shelter from Chinese provincial leaders, and then used those sanctuaries to launch operations against Soviet forces. However, by 1921, Red Army troops destroyed any remaining organized White forces, which then melted into the Chinese landscape. The ramifications of the Russian Civil War in Xinjiang had important impacts on the people of Xinjiang, and on Russia and China as well.

Vanguard of “Socialist Colonization”? The Krasnyi Vostok Expedition of 1920 (Article)

• Argenbright, Robert. “Vanguard of ‘Socialist Colonization’? The Krasnyi Bostok expedition of 1920.” Central Asian Survey 30 (2011) 437-54.
• During the Russian Civil War, special vehicles visited the vast country’s diverse regions as emissaries of central authority. The so-called ‘agitational’ vehicles carried out the functions of propaganda and agitation, ‘instruction’ (governance) and surveillance in the pursuit of two overarching, and sometimes contradictory, goals: state building and the radical transformation of society. The Krasnyi Vostok (Red East) expedition to Turkestan in 1920 was exceptional in the degree to which the train interfered in local governance regimes. The author presents how the Krasnyi Vostok activists concluded that “socialist colonization” was the essential task in Turkestan, and was seen as a potential weapon to win the war.

The Volunteer Army and Allied intervention in South Russia, 1917-1921: a study in the politics and diplomacy of the Russian Civil War (Book)

• Brinkley, George A. The Volunteer Army and Allied intervention in South Russia, 1917-1921: a study in the politics and diplomacy of the Russian Civil War . Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966.
• This book deals with one question: why was there a foreign intervention in the South, and why did it fail to oust the Bolsheviks? The author concludes that these plans failed not due to the adequacy of Lenin’s forces, but due to the inadequacy of the foreign aid. A good introductory book to foreign aid during the Civil War.

The Great White Train: Typhus, Sanitation, and U.S. International Development during the Russian Civil War (Article)

• Irwin, Julia. “The Great White Train: Typhus, Sanitation, And U.S. International Development during the Russian Civil War.” Endeavour 36 (2012), 89–96.
• This article examines the work of the American Red Cross in Siberia from 1919 to 1921, and specifically on the organization’s anti-typhus work along the Trans-Siberian Railway. It analyzes the political and diplomatic function of humanitarian assistance and the successes and failures of this venture.

Society Throughout the Civil War

Party, state, and society in the russian civil war: exploration in social history (book).

• Koenker, Diane P.,  William G. Rosenberg and Ronald Grigory Suny. Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Exploration in Social History. Purdue: Indiana University Press, 1989.
• A good introductory book on the role of politics on society, and vice versa.

Arkhangel’sk, 1918: Regionalism and Populism in the Russian Civil War (Article)

• Kotsonis, Yanni. “Arkhangel’sk, 1918: Regionalism and Populism in the Russian Civil War.” The Russian Review 51 (1992), 526-44.
• Arkhangel’sk, in Northern Russia, was believed by the Whites to have to potential to serve as a bastion again the Red Army. In addition, they believed that the Socialist Revolutionaries had popular support. Nonetheless, when the cabinet fell they were surprised by the lack of such support. The author of this article intends to give explanation to the failure of this Northern opposition by examining regionalism in the area of Arkhangel’sk.

Urbanization and Deurbanization in the Russian Revolution and the Civil War (Article)

• Koenker, Diane. “Urbanization and Deurbanization in the Russian Revolution and the Civil War.” The Journal of Modern History 57 (1985), 424-450.
• This article talks about the process of mobilization from city to countryside of both urban workers and rural workers (peasants) during the Civil War.

Le travail d’enquête des organisations juives sur les pogroms d’Ukraine, de Biélorussie et de Russie soviétique pendant la guerre civile (1918-1922) (Article, Source in French)

• Miliakova, Lidia, and Irina Ziuzina. “Le travail d’enquête des organisations juives sur les pogroms d’Ukraine, de Biélorussie et de Russie soviétique pendant la guerre civile (1918-1922)” Le Mouvement social 222 (2008), 61-80.
• In this article, the authors present different Jewish organizations that organized during the Civil War in Ukraine (KOPE, OZE), Belorussia, and Soviet Russia (GARF) to bring to light the pogroms, very prominent in these areas.

Woman and Violence in Artistic Discourse of the Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917–1922) (Article)

• Eremeeva, Anna N., and Dan Healey. “Woman and Violence in Artistic Discourse of the Russian Revolution and Civil War.” Gender & History 16 (2004), 726-43.
• This article examines visual and literary representations of violence against women produced during the period. The image of a woman suffering from violence is presented from different points of view in literary art works of the Revolution and Civil War time. It was created and circulated among Red and White camps mainly in accordance with the task of propaganda bodies. Among the object of violence there are allegoric women’s figures, symbolising Russia, revolution, freedom, well-known heroines from literature, historic personages and contemporary women – ordinary victims of civil confrontation and direct participants of the Revolution and war. Men or symbols traditionally personifying masculine origin were nearly always the perpetrators of violence, and the image of the female victim was exploited for the strong emotions it evoked. In most cases physical violence against women was treated as anomaly. But the control of the regime over the woman’s emotional sphere had become a standard everywhere.

Hungry Moscow: Scarcity and Urban Society in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1921 (Book)

• Borrero, Mauricio. Hungry Moscow: Scarcity and Urban Society in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1921 . Bern: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003.
• Severe food shortages and unremitting hunger served as the background to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the civil war that followed. Hungry Moscow examines the impact of these food shortages on Moscow residents, focusing on the survival strategies they devised to overcome or minimize hunger. Also examined is the interplay between these short-term individual survival strategies and the formulation and development of long-term government book contributes to our understanding of important issues in early Soviet history, such as the relationship between central and local institutions, rationing, the growth of black markets, Bolshevik social policies, and the reordering of urban life during revolutionary times.

Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917-1921) (Book)

• Figes, Orlando. Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917-1921) . London: Oxford University Press, 1979.
• Often overlooked as a crucial factor in the Bolsheviks’ victory was the role of the peasantry. Here is an enthralling portrait of this poor but sizable population on the eve of the uprising; of the breakdown of state power in the countryside; and, most important, of the relationship between the serfs and the Bolsheviks during the civil war. An enlightening approach, illustrated with disturbing contemporary images. This is the first non-Soviet history of the Volga countryside during the Russian revolution and civil war of 1917-1921. The product of extensive study of numerous archival sources–many of them from central government archives, and previously considered highly secret–it reconstructs the revolutionary experience of the peasantry in the crucial Volga region, situated immediately behind the military fronts between the Reds and the Whites. Figes examines in detail the impact of the revolution on the villages. With the destruction of the old agrarian state, the task of reforming the social life of the countryside was left to the peasants, who set about reconstructing the order according to traditional peasant notions of social justice. The ability of the Bolsheviks to mobilize the peasantry is explained in terms of political and social developments at the village level during the civil war. The civil war, Figes argues, left a deep scar on the peasant economy and peasant-state relations, which influenced the entire development of the Soviet regime.

Chapayev and Company: Films of the Russian Civil War (Article)

• Menashe, Louis. “Chapayev and Company: Films of the Russian Civil War.” Cinéaste 30 (2005) 18-22.
• While these films were made later, this is an article that talks about the themes that came forth in the representation of the Civil War in Soviet film, especially with the Civil War hero Chapayev.

Caffeinated Avant-Garde: Futurism During the Russian Civil War 1917-1921 (Article)

• Glisic, Iva. “Caffeinated Avant-Garde: Futurism During the Russian Civil War 1917-1921.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 58 (2012) 353-66.
• Scholarship on Russian Futurism often interprets this avant-garde movement as an essentially utopian project, unrealistic in its visions of future Soviet society and naïve in its comprehension of the Bolshevik political agenda. This article questions such interpretations by demonstrating that the activities of Russian Futurists during the Civil War period represented a measured response to what was a challenging contemporary socio-political reality. By examining the development of Futurist ideology through this period, considering first-handFuturist descriptions of dealing with the fledgling Soviet system, and recalling Slavoj Žižek’s interpretations of revolution and utopianism, a different image of the Futurist project emerges. Futurism, indeed, was a movement far more aware of the intricacies of its historical period than has previously been recognised.

The Great War, the Russian Civil War, and the Invention of Big Science (Article)

• Kojevnikov, Alexei. “The Great War, the Russian Civil War, and the Invention of Big Science.” Science in Context 15 (2002), 239-75.
• The transformation in Russian science toward the Soviet model of research started even before the revolution of 1917. This article argues that such a revolutionary transformation was triggered by the crisis of World War I, in response to which Russian academics proposed radical changes in the goals and infrastructure of the country’s scientific effort. Their drafts envisioned the recognition of science as a profession separate from teaching, the creation of research institutes, and the turn toward practical, applied research linked to the military and industrial needs of the nation. The political revolution and especially the Bolshevik government that shared or appropriated many of the same views on science, helped these reforms materialize during the subsequent Civil War. By 1921, the foundation of a novel system of research and development became established.

Propaganda of the Civil War

Unlike other forms of art and expression, propaganda tends to be more directed by a specific groups that is or yearns to be in power. This section mostly contains the primary source itself: posters. The two articles point out how Reds and Whites used propaganda and mass mobilization as weapons of war.

White Propaganda Efforts in the South during the Russian Civil War, 1918-19 (The Alekseev-Denikin Period) (Article)

• Lazarski, Christopher. “White Propaganda Efforts in the South during the Russian Civil War, 1918-19 (The Alekseev-Denikin Period).” The Slavonic and East European Review 70 (1992), 688-707.

The Red Army and Mass Mobilization during the Russian Civil War 1918-1920 (Article)

• Figes, Orlando. “The Red Army and Mass Mobilization during the Russian Civil War 1918-1920.” Past & Present 129 (1990), 168-211.
• This article discusses the Red Army’s capability to raise in number, and turn a volunteer groups of armed peasants into a militarily-capable and victorious army. Figes not only points at Trotsky’s abilities, but also at their capability to mobilize the already supportive working class and to bring to their side a large peasant force.

Views and Re-Views: Soviet Political Posters and Cartoons (Website)

• Brown University Library. “Views and Re-Views: Soviet Political Posters and Cartoons.” http://library.brown.edu/cds/Views_and_Reviews/index2.html.
• This website, set up by the Brown University Library, has a large collection on Soviet political posters, including Civil War propaganda. While it is not their main focus, it is still interesting to look at.

Bolsheviks – Russian Civil War – Propaganda Posters and Military Art (Website)

• Digital Poster Collection. “Bolsheviks – Russian Civil War – Propaganda Posters and Military Art.” http://digitalpostercollection.com/propaganda/1917-1923-russian-civil-war/bolsheviks/
• This collection can also serve as another source of more propaganda posters. Also includes military art of or depicting the Civil War.
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Book/Printed Material Essays on the History of the Civil War of 1917-1920.

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• Essays on the History of the Civil War of 1917-1920.
• Essays on the History of the Civil War of 1917-1920 is an early history of the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The book was written by Anatolii Anishev, a researcher at the Tolmachev Military-Political Academy in Leningrad (present-day Saint Petersburg), and published in Leningrad in 1925. In his introduction, Anishev notes that archival sources relating to the war were in poor condition and that almost no monographs existed. This forced him to rely on articles in White Russian magazines and newspapers, which were biased and unreliable. Many documents produced by the revolutionary side were also biased and overly optimistic. In view of these limitations, Anishev states that his goal is to provide a framework for a more authoritative history to be written in the future. He focuses on highlighting what he sees as the four main stages of the revolution and its aftermath. Stage one, October 1917--March 1918, was marked by the Bolshevik overthrow of the government, formation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ending Russian participation in World War I. Stage two, April--May 1918, saw the emergence of counterrevolution in the south and the offensive by the Czechoslovak legion that swept away Bolshevik control in large parts of Russia. Stage three, June--November 1918, was the high point of war communism, as the alliance of the proletariat and the peasants struggled against the counterrevolution and as starvation spread in the villages. Stage four, November 1918--spring 1920, was marked by the fight of the proletariat, in alliance with the serednyaks (middle-income peasants), against counterrevolution led by the landlords. This final stage saw the elimination of three key White Russian commanders: Admiral Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak, who had established a dictatorial reactionary government in Siberia and who was executed; and Nikolai Nikolayevich Yudenich and Anton Ivanovich Denikin, White Russian generals who fled Russia and went into exile. The book is preserved in the State Public Historical Library of Russia.
• Anatolii, Anishev Author.

Created / Published

• [place of publication not identified] : Government Press, 1925.
• -  Czech Republic
• -  Germany
• -  Russian Federation
• -  Slovakia
• -  Ukraine
• -  1917 to 1920
• -  Communism
• -  Revolutionaries
• -  Revolutions
• -  Socialism
• -  Soviet Union -- History -- Revolution, 1917-1921
• -  World War, 1914-1918
• -  Title devised, in English, by Library staff.
• -  Original resource extent: 288 pages.
• -  Original resource at: Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library.
• -  Content in Russian.
• -  Description based on data extracted from World Digital Library, which may be extracted from partner institutions.
• 1 online resource.

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• World War I
• https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.wdl/wdl.12905

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• Anatolii, Anishev
• Czech Republic
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• 1917 to 1920
• Revolutionaries
• Revolutions
• Soviet Union

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Chicago citation style:

Anatolii, Anishev Author. Essays on the History of the Civil War of -1920 . [place of publication not identified: Government Press, 1925] Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/2021666632/.

APA citation style:

Anatolii, A. A. (1925) Essays on the History of the Civil War of -1920 . [place of publication not identified: Government Press] [Pdf] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2021666632/.

MLA citation style:

Anatolii, Anishev Author. Essays on the History of the Civil War of -1920 . [place of publication not identified: Government Press, 1925] Pdf. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2021666632/>.

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New Guide to Russian Civil War Pictorial Maps

October 5, 2017

Posted by: Ryan Moore

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The Geography and Map Division (G&M) is pleased to announce the release of Triumph and Liquidation : An Essay and Guide to a Series of Ten Pictorial Wall Maps Created to Illustrate the Successes of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922 . The maps celebrate the victory of Bolshevism over its enemies. Critical commentary was provided by Senior Reference Specialist Michael Klein.

Michael Klein, the writer and visionary for the project, spent many hours researching the materials and communicated with experts in Russia. The project was a joint effort that involved Michael Klein, this blog’s author as project leader and editor, G&M catalogers Charlie Peterson and Tammy Wong, G&M Digital Specialist Diane-Schug-O’Neill, Senior European Division Reference Specialist Kennith Nyirady, European Division Chief Grant Harris, and now retired G&M Senior Reference Specialist Tony Mullan.

While the Soviet propaganda maps are stunning to view, Mr. Klein goes well beyond the immediate visual experience and details their historical significance in his introductory essay :

In 1929, the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress acquired a series of ten visually striking Russian pictorial propaganda maps published in 1928 by the Division of Military Literature of the State Publishing House of the Red Proletariat. The maps commemorate the tenth anniversary of the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and the subsequent Bolshevik victory in the Civil War, 1918-21. They are the first set of uniformly drawn and thematically coherent pictorial maps issued by the new Soviet state. Vibrant, dynamic, and blatantly political, they detail myriad episodes and events connected with the period and tell the story of how the Bolsheviks defeated their enemies, both internal and external, to save the communist revolution and bring socialism to Russia.

Artistic elements and antecedents of the maps are explored throughout the guide by Mr. Klein. He states that the communist artists who created the posters drew on rich traditions of religious iconography, children’s literature, and folk art. They relied heavily on the color red, which has important significance in the Eastern Orthodox Church, specifically that it signifies martyrdom. Mr. Klein explains that red “was exploited as a revolutionary color by the Soviets, who combined it in the ‘symbolism of blood, triumph, victory, hope, and faith.’ Its meaning was transformed even further by fixing it to the names of state institutions, such as Red Army, Red Star, and Red Flag.”

Each of the ten maps in the collection are investigated and supplemented with photographs and other images from the Library of Congress’ collections. The guide is part of a larger effort by G&M to provide context to materials and collections for readers and researchers. Guides, bibliographies, blogs, and finding aids can be found on the division’s homepage .

It is hard to find anything whatsoever concerning The russian Civil war. You found something very important for History and understanding of the revolutionary process. The peculiarity of russian comunist propaganda and the use of it by the then russian government. Soviet Union. Smithsonian is the best in the world!

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Russian Revolutions and Civil War, 1917–1921

Introduction, general overviews.

• Bibliographies and Reference Works
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Russian Revolutions and Civil War, 1917–1921 by Michael Kort LAST REVIEWED: 22 September 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 22 September 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199743292-0088

The Russian Revolution has not permitted Western historians the comfort of neutrality. It led to the establishment of a regime, the Soviet Union, that on the basis of Marxist ideology claimed to be building the world’s first nonexploitative and egalitarian society. As such, the Soviet regime further claimed to represent humanity’s future and therefore the right to spread its communist revolution worldwide. These pretentions, however dubiously realized in practice, won the Soviet Union millions of loyalists over the world. At the same time, because these pretentions also threatened any society organized according to different principles, including those of liberal democracy and free enterprise, they made the Soviet regime the object of intense fear and opposition. This reaction was reinforced as the Soviet Union quickly became a brutal dictatorship and, after World War II, emerged as one of the world’s two nuclear superpowers. For these reasons Western scholarship on the Russian Revolution has had an element of contentiousness not often seen in other fields. That, in turn, is why any serious student of the Russian Revolution must be familiar with its historiography, and why this article not only contains a major section on historiography but also includes historiographic commentary in many of the individual entries. The term Russian Revolution itself refers to two upheavals that took place in 1917: the February Revolution and the October, or Bolshevik, Revolution. The former was a spontaneous uprising that began in Russia’s capital in late February 1917 and led to the collapse of the tsarist monarchy and the establishment of the Provisional Government, a regime based on the premise that Russia should have a parliamentary government and free-enterprise economic system. The latter took place in late October and was the seizure of power by a militant Marxist political party determined to rule alone, turn Russia into a communist society, and spark a worldwide revolution. (These dates are according to the outdated Julian calendar in use in Russia at the time, which trailed the Gregorian calendar used in the West by thirteen days. According to the Gregorian calendar, the two revolutions took place in March and November, respectively.) Because the Bolsheviks did not consolidate their power until their victory in a three-year civil war, many histories ostensibly about the “Russian Revolution” include not only the events of 1917 but also their immediate aftermath in early 1918, and then the civil war, which began in mid-1918 and lasted until 1921. That framework has been adopted for this article as well. Matters of evidence and documentation have additionally complicated this subject. In this case the key date is 1991, as that is when the collapse of the Soviet Union finally made many important Russian archives available to scholars for the first time. This significant development is covered in the Published Documentary Collections section of this article.

Although all of the volumes listed in this section can be called general overviews, they vary considerably in their structure and approach. Carr 1950–1953 provides a multivolume and extraordinarily detailed institutional narrative of the establishment and consolidation of the Bolshevik regime, which the author essentially endorses. Chamberlin 1965 is a traditional, sweeping narrative that is critical of the Bolshevik regime, as is Figes 1998 , which begins the story in 1891 and carries it to 1924. Pipes 1996 provides a broad narrative in the condensation of two large volumes on this subject, and provides a view that is highly critical of the Bolshevik regime. Schapiro 1984 , likewise, is an interpretive essay, albeit from a liberal perspective critical of the Bolsheviks. Read 1996 is a revisionist narrative that, while scholarly, comes close to being a textbook. (See the introduction to the Historiography section for the definition of revisionist and related terms in the context of Soviet history.) Shukman 1998 is a short survey with a conclusion critical of the Bolshevik regime. Engelstein 2017 covers the period 1914 to 1921 with an emphasis on how the Bolsheviks betrayed the prevailing democratic sentiments in Russia in 1917 and successfully mobilized power to crush their opponents between 1917 and 1921. McMeekin 2017 begins in 1905 and covers through 1922, stressing how blunders first by Nicholas II and then by the Provisional Government under Kerensky’s inept leadership opened the gates for Lenin and the Bolsheviks to come to power. Smith 2017 covers the period 1890 to 1928, focusing on economic and social factors that caused the revolutions of 1917 and affected the Bolshevik regime into the late 1920s.

Carr, Edward Hallett. A History of Soviet Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923 . 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1950–1953.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-63648-8

The first three volumes of a series that, first under Carr and then R. W. Davies, eventually totaled fourteen volumes and thousands of pages upon reaching its terminus in 1929. Some scholars argue these volumes constitute a classic work; others, largely because Carr writes as if the Bolshevik regime was the inevitable outcome of the revolution that ended the tsarist regime, dismiss them as an apologia for Bolshevism and therefore largely useless.

Chamberlin, William Henry. The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921 . 2 vols. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965.

Originally published in 1935, this work remains an extremely valuable source. The author, who covered Russia for the Christian Science Monitor from 1922 to 1933, was a skilled writer, objective observer, and careful researcher. Many specialists believe it has still not been surpassed as an overall history of the period. Volume 1, 1917–1918: From the Overthrow of the Czar to the Assumption of Power by the Bolsheviks . Volume 2, 1918–1921: From the Civil War to the Consolidation of Power .

Engelstein, Laura. Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914–1921 . New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

This broad narrative faults the tsarist regime for fomenting internal tensions as it fought World War I, most notably but not exclusively by targeting Jews, which weakened its authority during a time of crisis. Engelstein views the February Revolution as broadly democratic. It unfortunately was undermined by the Provisional Government’s inability to deal with the urgent problems caused by World War I and with disorder at home. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were fundamentally undemocratic and exploited the disorder in Russia to seize power in a coup d’état, after which they succeeded in applying brutal force, especially through the Cheka and Red Army, to crush their political opponents and social and ethnic groups resisting their rule during and immediately after the Civil War.

Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 . New York: Penguin, 1998.

A panoramic narrative that draws on recently opened archives and numerous anecdotes with great effect. Figes argues, on the one hand, that Russia’s long history of serfdom and its autocratic traditions doomed the 1917 effort to establish a democratic regime and, on the other, that it was Bolshevism and Lenin’s policies after the seizure of power that put in place the basic elements of the Stalinist regime.

McMeekin, Sean. The Russian Revolution: A New History . New York: Basic Books, 2017.

McMeekin argues that Lenin’s improbable path to power was paved by errors on the part of Tsar Nicholas II, liberals who supported Russia’s entry into World War I and then proved to be inept as leaders of the Provisional Government, massive amounts of German money funneled to the Bolsheviks during 1917 in the hope that Lenin and his comrades would undermine Russia’s government and war effort, and Lenin’s fierce will to power and political skill. The ultimate Bolshevik victory was far from inevitable; it took a combination of blunders by others, Lenin’s skill and ruthlessness, and, not infrequently, pure luck for the Bolsheviks to be able to seize power in 1917 and then hold it in the battles and turmoil that followed through 1922.

Pipes, Richard. A Concise History of the Russian Revolution . New York: Vintage, 1996.

The author calls this volume a “précis” of his two massive, pathbreaking earlier volumes, The Russian Revolution ( Pipes 1990 , cited under the October Revolution and the Establishment of the Bolshevik Regime ) and Russia under the Bolshevik Regime ( Pipes 1994 , cited under the Civil War and Its Immediate Aftermath ). Pipes argues that with the coup of October 1917 fanatical intellectuals seized control of the upheaval of 1917 intent on establishing a socialist utopia, but, in the end, they reconstituted Russia’s authoritarian tradition in a new regime that laid the basis for totalitarianism. Excellent for advanced undergraduates, this volume covers the period from 1900 to 1924.

Read, Christopher. From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution . New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

A comprehensive but reasonably concise (three hundred pages) overview written from a revisionist social history perspective. As the subtitle suggests, Read stresses the activities and efforts of workers and peasants to defend their interests. While sympathetic to Lenin, Read also is critical of the Bolsheviks for suppressing popular movements after seizing power. Includes an extensive bibliography, which increases its value to undergraduates and graduate students.

Schapiro, Leonard Bertram. The Russian Revolutions of 1917: The Origins of Modern Communism . New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Schapiro argues that the Bolsheviks ruthlessly sabotaged the Provisional Government’s effort to lay the basis for democracy in Russia and, having seized power in a coup d’état, laid the basis for a totalitarian regime. A concise account that sums up the lifetime work of a distinguished historian of Soviet Russia. Excellent for undergraduates.

Shukman, Harold. The Russian Revolution . Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1998.

A short but up-to-date survey by the editor of The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution ( Shukman 1988 , cited under Bibliographies and Reference Works ). This work concludes that Lenin prepared the way for Stalin. Suitable for undergraduates.

Smith, Stephen A. Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Smith argues that neither the collapse of tsarism nor the fall of the Provisional Government were preordained. The basic reason tsarism collapsed was that it was a barrier to modernizing forces in Russian society, but the severe additional social and economic strains imposed on Russia by World War I played a vital role in that collapse. The Provisional Government might have saved itself had it withdrawn from the war. The Bolshevik Revolution was driven by egalitarian and democratic ideals but was a failure since it produced a repressive and cruel society. The degeneration of the Bolshevik regime during the civil war was caused by the authoritarianism embedded in Leninist ideology and the desperate struggle the regime faced in its effort to survive. While Smith assigns considerable responsibility to Lenin for Stalin’s coming to power, he rejects the view that Stalinism was the inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution.

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The Russian-Ukrainian war: An explanatory essay through the theoretical lens of international relations.

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The Russia-Ukraine war and its ramifications for Russia

Subscribe to the center on the united states and europe update, steven pifer steven pifer nonresident senior fellow - foreign policy , center on the united states and europe , strobe talbott center for security, strategy, and technology , arms control and non-proliferation initiative.

December 8, 2022

• 24 min read

This piece is part of a series of policy analyses entitled “ The Talbott Papers on Implications of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine ,” named in honor of American statesman and former Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott. Brookings is grateful to Trustee Phil Knight for his generous support of the Brookings Foreign Policy program.

Nine months into Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine, the outcome of the war remains unclear. The Russian military appears incapable of taking Kyiv or occupying a major portion of the country. Ukrainian forces have enjoyed three months of success on the battlefield and could well continue to make progress in regaining territory. The war also could settle into a more drawn-out conflict, with neither side capable of making a decisive breakthrough in the near term.

Projecting the ultimate outcome of the war is challenging. However, some major ramifications for Russia and its relations with Ukraine, Europe, and the United States have come into focus. While the war has been a tragedy for Ukraine and Ukrainians, it has also proven a disaster for Russia — militarily, economically, and geopolitically. The war has badly damaged Russia’s military and tarnished its reputation, disrupted the economy, and profoundly altered the geopolitical picture facing Moscow in Europe. It will make any near-term restoration of a degree of normalcy in U.S.-Russian relations difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

Russia’s war against Ukraine

This latest phase in hostilities between Russia and Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin directed his forces to launch a major, multi-prong invasion of Ukraine. The broad scope of the assault, which Putin termed a “special military operation,” suggested that Moscow’s objectives were to quickly seize Kyiv, presumably deposing the government, and occupy as much as the eastern half to two-thirds of the country.

The Russian army gained ground in southern Ukraine, but it failed to take Kyiv. By late March, Russian forces were in retreat in the north. Moscow proclaimed its new objective as occupying all of Donbas, consisting of the oblasts (regions) of Luhansk and Donetsk, some 35% of which had already been occupied by Russian and Russian proxy forces in 2014 and 2015. After three months of grinding battle, Russian forces captured almost all of Luhansk, but they made little progress in Donetsk, and the battlelines appeared to stabilize in August.

In September, the Ukrainian army launched two counteroffensives. One in the northeast expelled Russian forces from Kharkiv oblast and pressed assaults into Luhansk oblast. In the south, the second counteroffensive succeeded in November in driving Russian forces out of Kherson city and the neighboring region, the only area that Russian forces occupied east of the Dnipro River, which roughly bisects Ukraine.

Despite three months of battlefield setbacks, Moscow has shown no indication of readiness to negotiate seriously to end the war. Indeed, on September 30, Putin announced that Russia was annexing Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts, even though Russian forces did not fully control that territory and consistently lost ground there in the following weeks. The Russian military made up for battlefield losses by increasing missile attacks on Ukrainian cities, aimed in particular at disrupting electric power and central heating.

As of late November, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government insisted on conditions that included Russian withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory (including Crimea and all of Donbas), compensation, and punishment for war crimes. While these are understandable demands given what Ukraine has gone through, achieving them would prove difficult. Still, Kyiv appeared confident that it could liberate more territory even as winter approached.

After nine months of fighting, the Russian military has shown itself incapable of seizing and holding a large part of Ukraine. While the war’s outcome is uncertain, however the conflict ends, a sovereign and independent Ukrainian state will remain on the map of Europe. Moreover, it will be larger than the rump state that the Kremlin envisaged when it launched the February invasion.

Whether the Ukrainian military can drive the Russians completely out or at least back to the lines as of February 23 is also unclear. Some military experts believe this is possible, including the full liberation of Donbas and Crimea. Others offer less optimistic projections. The U.S. intelligence community has forecast that the fighting could drag on and become a war of attrition.

Forging a hostile neighbor

Today, most Ukrainians regard Russia as an enemy.

Of all the pieces of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union that Moscow lost when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, no part meant more to Russians than Ukraine. The two countries’ histories, cultures, languages, and religions were closely intertwined. When the author served at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv at the end of the 1990s, most Ukrainians held either a positive or ambivalent view regarding Russia. That has changed. Today, most Ukrainians regard Russia as an enemy.

Putin’s war has been calamitous for Ukraine. The precise number of military and civilians casualties is unknown but substantial. The Office of the U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights estimated that, as of the end of October, some 6,500 Ukrainian civilians had been killed and another 10,000 injured. Those numbers almost certainly understate the reality. U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley on November 10 put the number of civilian dead at 40,000 and indicated that some 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed or wounded (Milley gave a similar number for Russian casualties, a topic addressed later in this paper).

In addition, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees placed the number of Ukrainians who have sought refuge outside of Ukraine at more than 7.8 million as of November 8. As of mid-November, the Russian attacks had caused an estimated 6.5 million more to become internally displaced persons within Ukraine.

Besides the human losses, the war has caused immense material damage. Estimates of the costs of rebuilding Ukraine run from $349 billion to $750 billion, and those appraisals date back to the summer. Finding those funds will not be easy, particularly as the war has resulted in a significant contraction of the Ukrainian economy; the World Bank expects the country’s gross domestic product to shrink by 35% this year.

All this has understandably affected Ukrainian attitudes. It has deepened the sense of Ukrainian national identity. An August poll showed 85% self-identifying as Ukrainian citizens as opposed to people of some region or ethnic minority; only 64% did so six months earlier — before Russia’s invasion. The invasion has also imbued Ukrainians with a strongly negative view of Russia: The poll showed 92% holding a “bad” attitude regarding Russia as opposed to only 2% with a “good” attitude.

Ukrainians have made clear their resolve to resist. A September Gallup poll reported 70% of Ukrainians determined to fight until victory over Russia. A mid-October Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll had 86% supporting the war and opposing negotiations with Russia, despite Russian missile attacks against Ukrainian cities.

It will take years, if not decades, to overcome the enmity toward Russia and Russians engendered by the war. One Ukrainian journalist predicted last summer that, after the war’s end, Ukraine would witness a nationwide effort to “cancel” Russian culture, e.g., towns and cities across the country would rename their Pushkin Squares. It has already begun; Odesa intends to dismantle its statue of Catherine the Great, the Russian empress who founded the city in 1794.

Ironically for an invasion launched in part due to Kremlin concern that Ukraine was moving away from Russia and toward the West, the war has opened a previously closed path for Ukraine’s membership in the European Union (EU). For years, EU officials concluded agreements with Kyiv, including the 2014 EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. However, EU officials avoided language that would give Ukraine a membership perspective. In June, four months after Russia’s invasion, the European Council recognized Ukraine’s European perspective and gave it the status of candidate country. Kyiv will need years to meet the EU’s standards, but it now has a membership perspective that it lacked for the first 30 years of its post-Soviet independence.

As for NATO, 10 alliance members have expressed support for a membership path for Ukraine, nine in central Europe plus Canada . Other allies have generally remained silent or noncommittal, reflecting the fact that many, while prepared to provide Ukraine financial and military assistance, are not prepared to go to war with Russia to defend Ukraine. Even though Kyiv cannot expect membership or a membership action plan any time soon, it will have continued NATO support in its fight against Russia and, once the war is over, help in building a modern and robust military to deter a Russian attack in the future.

The Kremlin has sought since the end of the Soviet Union to keep Ukraine bound in a Russian sphere of influence. From that perspective, the last nine years of Russian policy have been an abysmal failure. Nothing has done more than that policy to push Ukraine away from Russia and toward the West, or to promote Ukrainian hostility toward Russia and Russians.

A disaster for Russia’s military and economy

While a tragedy for Ukraine, Putin’s decision to go to war has also proven a disaster for Russia.

While a tragedy for Ukraine, Putin’s decision to go to war has also proven a disaster for Russia. The Russian military has suffered significant personnel and military losses. Economic sanctions imposed by the EU, United States, United Kingdom, and other Western countries have pushed the Russian economy into recession and threaten longer-term impacts, including on the country’s critical energy sector.

In November, Milley put the number of dead and wounded Russian soldiers at 100,000, and that could fall on the low side. A Pentagon official said in early August Russian casualties numbered 70,000-80,000. That was more than three months ago, and those months have shown no kindness to the Russian army. Reports suggest that newly-mobilized and ill-trained Russian units have been decimated in combat.

The Russian military has lost significant amounts of equipment. The Oryx website reports 8,000 pieces of equipment destroyed, damaged, abandoned, or captured, including some 1,500 tanks, 700 armored fighting vehicles, and 1,700 infantry fighting vehicles. Oryx advises that its numbers significantly understate the true nature of Russian losses, as it counts only equipment for which it has unique photo or videographic evidence of its fate. Others report much heavier losses. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin commented that the Russian military had lost “staggering” numbers of tanks and other armored vehicles, adding that Western trade restrictions on microchips would inhibit production of replacements.

As a result of these losses, Russia has had to draw on reserves, including T-64 tanks first produced nearly 50 years ago. It reportedly has turned to tanks from Belarus to replenish its losses. To augment its own munitions, Russia has had to purchase attack drones from Iran and artillery shells from North Korea . As the Russian military has drawn down stocks of surface-to-surface and air-to-surface missiles, it has used S-300 anti-aircraft missiles against ground targets. The Russian defense budget will need years to replace what the military has lost or otherwise expended in Ukraine.

Poor leadership, poor tactics, poor logistics, and underwhelming performance against a smaller and less well-armed foe have left Russia’s military reputation in a shambles. That will have an impact. Over the past decade, Russian weapons exporters saw their share of global arms exports drop by 26%. Countries looking to buy weapons likely will begin to turn elsewhere, given that Russia’s military failed to dominate early in the war, when its largely modernized forces faced a Ukrainian military armed mainly with aging Soviet-era equipment (that began to change only in the summer, when stocks of heavy weapons began arriving from the West).

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As Russia went to war, its economy was largely stagnant ; while it recorded a post-COVID-19 boost in 2021, average real income fell by 10% between 2013 and 2020. It will get worse. The West has applied a host of economic sanctions on the country. While the Russian Central Bank’s actions have mitigated the worst impacts, the Russian economy nevertheless contracted by 5% year-on-year compared to September 2021. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development expects Russia’s economy to contract by 3.9% in 2022 and 5.6% in 2023, and a confidential study supposedly done for the Kremlin projected an “inertial” case in which the economy bottomed out only in 2023 at 8.3% below 2021. One economist notes that the West’s cut-off of chips and microelectronics has devastated automobile, aircraft, and weapons production, with the output of cars falling by 90% between March and September; he expects a long run of stagnation.

In addition to coping with the loss of high-tech and other key imports, the Russian economy faces brain drain, particularly in the IT sector, that began in February as well as the departure of more than 1,000 Western companies. It also has a broader labor force challenge. The military has mobilized 300,000 men, and the September mobilization order prompted a new flood of Russians leaving the country, with more than 200,000 going to Kazakhstan. Some estimates suggest several hundred thousand others have fled to other countries. Taken together, that means something like three-quarters of a million men unavailable to work in the economy.

Russia thus far has staved off harsher economic difficulties in part because of its oil and gas exports and high energy prices. High prices have partially offset the decline in volume of oil and gas exports. That may soon change, at least for oil. The EU banned the purchase of Russian crude oil beginning on December 5, and the West is prohibiting shipping Russian oil on Western-flagged tankers or insuring tankers that move Russian oil if the oil is sold above a certain price, now set at $60 per barrel. The price cap — if it works as planned — could cut sharply into the revenues that Russian oil exports generate. The cap will require that Russian exporters discount the price of oil that they sell; the higher the discount, the less revenue that will flow to Russia.

Weaning Europe off of Russian gas poses a more difficult challenge, but EU countries have made progress by switching to imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Moreover, European companies have found ways to cut energy use; for example, 75% of German firms that use gas report that they have reduced gas consumption without having to cut production. EU countries face a much better energy picture this winter than anticipated several months ago. If Europe successfully ends its import of Russian piped natural gas, that will pose a major problem for Gazprom, Russia’s large gas exporter. Gazprom’s gas exports move largely by pipeline, and Gazprom’s gas pipeline structure is oriented primarily toward moving gas from the western Siberian and Yamal gas fields to Europe. New pipelines would be needed to switch the flow of that gas to Asia. If Europe can kick the Russian gas habit, Gazprom will see a significant decline in its export volumes, unless it can build new pipelines to Asian markets and/or greatly expand its LNG export capacity, all of which will be expensive.

A further problem facing Russia’s energy sector is that, as existing oil and gas fields are depleted, Russian energy companies must develop new fields to sustain production levels. Many of the potential new fields are in the Arctic region or off-shore and will require billions — likely, tens of billions — of dollars of investment. Russian energy companies, however, will not be able to count on Western energy companies for technical expertise, technology, or capital. That will hinder future production of oil and gas, as current fields become exhausted.

Another potential economic cost looms. The West has frozen more than $300 billion in Russian Central Bank reserves. As damages in Ukraine mount, pressure will grow to seize some or all of these assets for a Ukraine reconstruction fund. Western governments thus far show little enthusiasm for the idea. That said, it is difficult to see how they could turn to their taxpayers for money to assist Ukraine’s rebuilding while leaving the Russian Central Bank funds intact and/or releasing those funds back to Russia.

Western sanctions did not produce the quick crash in the ruble or the broader Russian economy that some expected. However, their impact could mean a stagnant economy in the longer term, and they threaten to cause particular problems in the energy sector and other sectors that depend on high-tech inputs imported from the West. Moscow does not appear to have handy answers to these problems.

Changed geopolitics in Europe

In 2021, Moscow saw a West that was divided and preoccupied with domestic politics. The United States was recovering from four years of the Trump presidency, post-Brexit politics in Britain remained tumultuous, Germany faced September elections to choose the first chancellor in 16 years not named Angela Merkel, and France had a presidential election in early 2022. That likely affected Putin’s decision to launch his February invasion. In the event, NATO and the EU responded quickly and in a unified manner, and the invasion has prompted a dramatic reordering of the geopolitical scene in Europe. European countries have come to see Russia in a threatening light, reminiscent of how they viewed the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. NATO’s June 2022 summit statement was all about deterrence and defense with regard to Russia, with none of earlier summits’ language on areas of cooperation.

Few things epitomize the change more than the Zeitenwende (turning-point) in German policy. In the days following the Russian invasion, Berlin agreed to sanctions on Russian banks that few expected the Germans to approve, reversed a long-standing ban on exporting weapons to conflict zones in order to provide arms to Ukraine, established a 100-billion-euro ($110 billion) fund for its own rearmament, and announced the purchase of American dual-capable F-35 fighters to sustain the German Air Force’s nuclear delivery role. Just days before the assault, the German government said it would stop certification of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Berlin’s follow-up has been bumpy and, at times, seemingly half-hearted, which has frustrated many of its partners. Still, in a few short weeks in late February and early March, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government erased five decades of German engagement with Moscow.

Other NATO members have also accelerated their defense spending. According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, European allies and Canada have boosted defense spending by a total of $350 billion compared to levels in 2014, when the alliance — following Russia’s seizure of Crimea — set the goal for each member of 2% of gross domestic product devoted to defense by 2024. Stoltenberg added that nine members had met the 2% goal while 10 others intended to do so by 2024. Poland plans to raise its defense spending to 3% next year, and other allies have suggested the 3% target as well.

Moscow did not like the small multinational battlegroups that NATO deployed in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland beginning in 2017. Each numbered some 1,000-1,500 troops (battalion-sized) and were described as “tripwire” forces. Since February, NATO has deployed additional battlegroups in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Slovakia and decided on a more robust forward presence, including brigade-sized units, while improving capabilities for reinforcement. The U.S. military presence in Europe and European waters has grown from 80,000 service personnel to 100,000 and includes deployment of two F-35 squadrons to Britain, more destroyers to be homeported in Spain, and a permanent headquarters unit in Poland.

In addition to larger troop deployments, the Baltic Sea has seen a geopolitical earthquake. Finland and Sweden, which long pursued policies of neutrality, applied to join NATO in May and completed accession protocols in July. They have significant military capabilities. Their accession to the alliance, expected in early 2023, will make the Baltic Sea effectively a NATO lake, leaving Russia with just limited access from the end of the Gulf of Finland and its Kaliningrad exclave.

In early 2014, NATO deployed virtually no ground combat forces in countries that had joined the alliance after 1997. That began changing after Russia’s seizure of Crimea. The recent invasion has further energized NATO and resulted in its enlargement by two additional members. As Russia has drawn down forces opposite NATO countries (and Finland) in order to deploy them to Ukraine, the NATO military presence on Russia’s western flank has increased.

The Kremlin has waged a two-front war this year, fighting on the battlefield against Ukraine while seeking to undermine Western financial and military support for Kyiv. The Russians are losing on both fronts.

The Kremlin has waged a two-front war this year, fighting on the battlefield against Ukraine while seeking to undermine Western financial and military support for Kyiv. The Russians are losing on both fronts. The Russian military has been losing ground to the Ukrainian army and has carried out a campaign of missile strikes against power, heat, and water utilities in the country, which threatens a humanitarian crisis . Much will depend on how bad the winter is, but Ukrainians have shown remarkable resilience in restoring utilities, and the Russian attacks could further harden their resolve. Moreover, the brutality of the Russian missile campaign has already led Ukraine’s Western supporters to provide Kyiv more sophisticated air defenses, and pressures could grow to provide other weapons as well.

As for the second front, despite high energy prices, having to house the majority of the nearly eight million Ukrainians who have left their country, and concerns over how long the fighting might last, European support for Ukraine has not slackened. Russian hints of nuclear escalation caused concern but did not weaken European support for Ukraine, and Moscow has markedly deescalated the nuclear rhetoric in recent weeks. Given Russia’s relationship with China, the Kremlin certainly noticed Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent criticism of nuclear threats.

It appears Moscow’s influence elsewhere is slipping, including among post-Soviet states. Kazakhstan has boosted its defense spending by more than 50%. In June, on a stage with Putin in St. Petersburg, its president pointedly declined to follow Russia’s lead in recognizing the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk “people’s republics” as independent states. Neither Kazakhstan nor any other member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) — or any other post-Soviet state, for that matter — has recognized Russia’s claimed annexations of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. In a remarkable scene at an October Russia-Central Asia summit, Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon openly challenged Putin for his lack of respect for Central Asian countries. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan spoiled a late November CSTO summit; he refused to sign a leaders’ declaration and noticeably moved away from Putin during the summit photo op.

More broadly, in October, the U.N. General Assembly approved a resolution calling for rejection — and demanding reversal — of Moscow’s illegal annexation of the Ukrainian oblasts by a vote of 143-5 (35 abstaining). A recent article documented how Russia has found its candidates rejected and its participation suspended in a string of U.N. organizations, including the International Telecommunications Union, Human Rights Council, Economic and Social Council, and International Civil Aviation Organization. Putin chose not to attend the November G-20 summit in Bali, likely reflecting his expectation that other leaders would have snubbed him and refused to meet bilaterally, as well as the criticism he would have encountered in multilateral sessions. The summit produced a leaders’ declaration that, while noting “other views,” leveled a harsh critique at Moscow for its war on Ukraine.

A deep freeze with Washington

While U.S.-Russian relations had fallen to a post-Cold War low point in 2020, the June 2021 summit that U.S. President Joe Biden held with Putin gave a modest positive impulse to the relationship. U.S. and Russian officials that fall broadened bilateral diplomatic contacts and gave a positive assessment to the strategic stability dialogue, terming the exchanges “intensive and substantive.” Moreover, Washington saw a possible drop-off in malicious cyber activity originating from Russia. However, the Russian invasion prompted a deep freeze in the relationship, and Washington made clear that business as usual was off the table.

U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and CIA Director Bill Burns nevertheless have kept channels open to their Russian counterparts. These lines of communication seek to avoid miscalculation — particularly miscalculation that could lead to a direct U.S.-Russia or NATO-Russia clash — and reduce risk. But other channels remain largely unused. Burns’s November 14 meeting with Sergey Naryshkin, head of the Russian external intelligence service, was the most senior face-to-face meeting between U.S. and Russian officials in nine months. Biden and Putin have not spoken directly with one another since February, and that relationship seems irretrievably broken.

In a positive glimmer, Biden told the U.N. General Assembly “No matter what else is happening in the world, the United States is ready to pursue critical arms control measures.” Speaking in June, the Kremlin spokesperson said “we are interested [in such talks]… Such talks are necessary.” U.S. officials have privately indicated that, while they have prerequisites for resuming the strategic dialogue, progress on ending the Russia-Ukraine war is not one of them. This leaves room for some hope that, despite their current adversarial relationship, Washington and Moscow may still share an interest in containing their competition in nuclear arms.

Beyond that, however, it is difficult to see much prospect for movement toward a degree of normalcy in the broader U.S.-Russia relationship. With Moscow turning to Iran and North Korea for weapons, Washington cannot count on Russian help in trying to bring Tehran back into the nuclear deal (the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) or to increase pressure on North Korea to end its missile launches and not to conduct another nuclear test. Likewise, coordination on Syria is less likely. It may well be that any meaningful improvement in the overall bilateral relationship requires Putin’s departure from the Kremlin. A second requirement could be that Putin’s successor adopt policy changes to demonstrate that Russia is altering course and prepared to live in peace with its neighbors.

What happens will depend on how the Russian elite and public view his performance; while some signs of disaffection over the war have emerged, it is too early to forecast their meaning for Putin’s political longevity.

This does not mean to advocate a policy of regime change in Russia. That is beyond U.S. capabilities, especially given the opacity of today’s Kremlin. U.S. policy should remain one of seeking a change in policy, not regime. That said, the prospects for improving U.S.-Russian relations appear slim while Putin remains in charge. What happens will depend on how the Russian elite and public view his performance; while some signs of disaffection over the war have emerged , it is too early to forecast their meaning for Putin’s political longevity.

Still, while it remains difficult to predict the outcome of the war or the impact it may have on Putin’s time in the Kremlin, there is little doubt that the fighting with Ukraine and its ramifications will leave Russia diminished in significant ways. It must contend with a badly-damaged military that will take years to reconstitute; years of likely economic stagnation cut off from key high-tech imports; a potentially worsening situation with regard to energy exports and future production; an alarmed, alienated, and rearming Europe; and a growing political isolation that will leave Moscow even more dependent on its relationship with China. Putin still seems to cling to his desire of “regaining” part of Ukraine, which he considers “historic Russian land.” But the costs of that for Russia mount by the day.

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How to Write War Essay: Russia Ukraine War

Understanding the Purpose and Scope of a War Essay

A condition of armed conflict between nations or between groups living in one nation is known as war. Sounds not like much fun, does it? Well, conflicts have been a part of human history for thousands of years, and as industry and technology have developed, they have grown more devastating. As awful as it might seem, a war typically occurs between a country or group of countries against a rival country to attain a goal through force. Civil and revolutionary wars are examples of internal conflicts that can occur inside a nation.

Your history class could ask you to write a war essay, or you might be personally interested in learning more about conflicts, in which case you might want to learn how to write an academic essay about war. In any scenario, we have gathered valuable guidance on how to organize war essays. Let's first examine the potential reasons for a conflict before moving on to the outline for a war essay.

• Economic Gain - A country's desire to seize control of another country's resources frequently starts conflicts. Even when the proclaimed goal of a war is portrayed to the public as something more admirable, most wars have an economic motivation at their core, regardless of any other possible causes.
• Territorial Gain - A nation may determine that it requires additional land for habitation, agriculture, or other uses. Additionally, the territory might serve as buffer zones between two violent foes.
• Religion - Religious disputes can stem from extremely profound issues. They may go dormant for many years before suddenly resurfacing later.
• Nationalism - In this sense, nationalism simply refers to the act of violently subjugating another country to demonstrate the country's superiority. This frequently manifests as an invasion.
• Revenge - Warfare can frequently be motivated by the desire to punish, make up for, or simply exact revenge for perceived wrongdoing. Revenge has a connection to nationalism as well because when a nation has been wronged, its citizens are inspired by patriotism and zeal to take action.
• Defensive War - In today's world, when military aggression is being questioned, governments will frequently claim that they are fighting in a solely protective manner against a rival or prospective aggressor and that their conflict is thus a 'just' conflict. These defensive conflicts may be especially contentious when conducted proactively, with the basic premise being that we are striking them before they strike us.

How to Write War Essay with a War Essay Outline

Just like in compare and contrast examples and any other forms of writing, an outline for a war essay assists you in organizing your research and creating a good flow. In general, you keep to the traditional three-part essay style, but you can adapt it as needed based on the length and criteria of your school. When planning your war paper, consider the following outline:

Introduction

• Definition of war
• Importance of studying wars
• Thesis statement

Body Paragraphs

• Causes of the War
• Political reasons
• Economic reasons
• Social reasons
• Historical reasons
• Major Players in the War
• Countries and their leaders
• Military leaders
• Allies and enemies
• Strategies and Tactics
• Military tactics and techniques
• Strategic planning
• Weapons and technology
• Impact of the War
• On the countries involved
• On civilians and non-combatants
• On the world as a whole
• Summary of the main points
• Final thoughts on the war
• Suggestions for future research

If you found this outline template helpful, you can also use our physics help for further perfecting your academic assignments.

Begin With a Relevant Hook

A hook should be the focal point of the entire essay. A good hook for an essay on war can be an interesting statement, an emotional appeal, a thoughtful question, or a surprising fact or figure. It engages your audience and leaves them hungry for more information.

Follow Your Outline

An outline is the single most important organizational tool for essay writing. It allows the writer to visualize the overall structure of the essay and focus on the flow of information. The specifics of your outline depend on the type of essay you are writing. For example, some should focus on statistics and pure numbers, while others should dedicate more space to abstract arguments.

How to Discuss Tragedy, Loss, and Sentiment

War essays are particularly difficult to write because of the terrible nature of war. The life is destroyed, the loved ones lost, fighting, death, great many massacres and violence overwhelm, and hatred for the evil enemy, amongst other tragedies, make emotions run hot, which is why sensitivity is so important. Depending on the essay's purpose, there are different ways to deal with tragedy and sentiment.

The easiest one is to stick with objective data rather than deal with the personal experiences of those who may have been affected by these events. It can be hard to remain impartial, especially when writing about recent deaths and destruction. But it is your duty as a researcher to do so.

However, it’s not always possible to avoid these issues entirely. When you are forced to tackle them head-on, you should always be considerate and avoid passing swift and sweeping judgment.

Summing Up Your Writing

When you have finished presenting your case, you should finish it off with some sort of lesson it teaches us. Armed conflict is a major part of human nature yet. By analyzing the events that transpired, you should be able to make a compelling argument about the scale of the damage the war caused, as well as how to prevent it in the future.

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Popular War Essay Topics

When choosing a topic for an essay about war, it is best to begin with the most well-known conflicts because they are thoroughly recorded. These can include the Cold War or World War II. You might also choose current wars, such as the Syrian Civil War or the Russia and Ukraine war. Because they occur in the backdrop of your time and place, such occurrences may be simpler to grasp and research.

To help you decide which war to write about, we have compiled some facts about several conflicts that will help you get off to a strong start.

Russia Ukraine War

Russian President Vladimir Putin started the Russian invasion in the early hours of February 24 last year. According to him. the Ukrainian government had been committing genocide against Russian-speaking residents in the eastern Ukraine - Donbas region since 2014, calling the onslaught a 'special military operation.'

The Russian president further connected the assault to the NATO transatlantic military alliance commanded by the United States. He said the Russian military was determined to stop NATO from moving farther east and establishing a military presence in Ukraine, a part of the Soviet Union, until its fall in 1991.

All of Russia's justifications have been rejected by Ukraine and its ally Western Countries. Russia asserted its measures were defensive, while Ukraine declared an emergency and enacted martial law. According to the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the administration's objective is not only to repel offensives but also to reclaim all Ukrainian land that the Russian Federation has taken, including Crimea.

Both sides of the conflict accuse the other of deploying indiscriminate force, which has resulted in many civilian deaths and displacements. According to current Ukraine news, due to the difficulty of counting the deceased due to ongoing combat, the death toll is likely far higher. In addition, countless Ukrainian refugees were compelled to leave their homeland in search of safety and stability abroad.

Diplomatic talks have been employed to try to end the Ukraine-Russia war. Several rounds of conversations have taken place in various places. However, the conflict is still raging as of April 2023, and there is no sign of a truce.

World War II

World War II raged from 1939 until 1945. Most of the world's superpowers took part in the conflict, fought between two military alliances headed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, and the Axis Powers, led by Germany, Italy, and Japan.

If you'd like to explore it more in-depth, consider using our history essay service for a World War 2 essay pdf sample!

After World War II, a persistent political conflict between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies became known as the Cold War. It's hard to say who was to blame for the cold war essay. American citizens have long harbored concerns about Soviet communism and expressed alarm over Joseph Stalin's brutal control of his own nation. On their side, the Soviets were angry at the Americans for delaying their participation in World War II, which led to the deaths of tens of millions of Russians, and for America's long-standing unwillingness to recognize the USSR as a genuine member of the world community.

Vietnam War

If you're thinking about writing the Vietnam War essay, you should know that it was a protracted military battle that lasted in Vietnam from 1955 to 1975. The North Vietnamese communist government fought South Vietnam and its main ally, the United States, in the lengthy, expensive, and contentious Vietnam War. The ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union exacerbated the issue. The Vietnam War claimed the lives of more than 3 million individuals, more than half of whom were Vietnamese civilians.

American Civil War

Consider writing an American Civil War essay where the Confederate States of America, a grouping of eleven southern states that seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861, and the United States of America battled each other. If you're wondering what caused the civil war, you should know that the long-standing dispute about the legitimacy of slavery is largely responsible for how the war started.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

After over a century, the Israel-Palestine conflict has evolved into one of the most significant and current problems in the Middle East. A war that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people destroyed their homes and gave rise to terrorist organizations that still hold the region hostage. Simply described, it is a conflict between two groups of people for ownership of the same piece of land. One already resided there, while the other was compelled to immigrate to this country owing to rising antisemitism and later settled there. For Israelis and Palestinians alike, as well as for the larger area, the war continues to have substantial political, social, and economic repercussions.

The Syrian Civil War

Pro-democracy protests broke out in southern Deraa in March 2011 due to upheavals against oppressive leaders in neighboring nations. When the Syrian government employed lethal force to quell the unrest, widespread protests calling for the president's resignation broke out.

The country entered a civil war as the violence quickly increased. After hundreds of rebel organizations emerged, the fight quickly expanded beyond a confrontation between Syrians supporting or opposing Mr. Assad. Everyone believes a political solution is necessary, even though it doesn't seem like it will soon.

Russia-Ukraine War Essay Sample

With the Russian-Ukrainian war essay sample provided below from our paper writing experts, you can gain more insight into structuring a flawless paper.

Why is there a war between Russia and Ukraine?

Final Words

To understand our past and the present, we must study conflicts since they are a product of human nature and civilization. Our graduate essay writing service can produce any kind of essay you want, whether it is about World War II, the Cold War, or another conflict. Send us your specifications with your ' write my essay ' request, and let our skilled writers help you wow your professor!

Having Hard Time Writing on Wars?

From the causes and consequences of wars to the strategies and tactics used in battle, our team of expert writers can provide you with a high-quality essay!

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specializes in creating authoritative content on marketing, business, and finance, with a versatile ability to handle any essay type and dissertations. With a Master’s degree in Business Administration and a passion for social issues, her writing not only educates but also inspires action. On EssayPro blog, Annie delivers detailed guides and thought-provoking discussions on pressing economic and social topics. When not writing, she’s a guest speaker at various business seminars.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.