Russian Civil War

[© tweed]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_civil_war

[Bugs]

I wonder how much the people reallly knew about the Bolshevics.  Everyone stood to lose their land and most everything they had of value.  The Whites were no better.  They had no unity, no leadership, and no postwar plan.  It was like South Vietnam.  The best course of action would have been to leave the country. 

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The Greens or Blacks.

Neither side here was good at all. We all know how bad the Reds turned out, and the Whites would've just given more of the same old aristocratic garbage and eventually would've been overthrown again, possibly by some sort of Nazi type regime. Of course they did have a small socialist anti-Bolshevik faction, but they would've been overwhelmed after a victory. So without hindsight, the Reds.

[Josh/Devilman88]

I think the whites.

[DanielX]

The Whites. Even though a lot of them were antisemitic trash.

[TeePee4Prez]

Fled!

[Democratic Hawk]

Whites

Dave

[afleitch]

The Whites. They were an eclectic bunch of royalists and republicans but the were better than the Bolsheviks.

[KEmperor]

The Whites. They were an eclectic bunch of royalists and republicans but the were better than the Bolsheviks.

^^^^^^^^^^^

[Platypus]

The Finns.

[minionofmidas]

There was no such thing as "the" Whites.

[Middle-aged Europe]

Not that I'm a racist or something... but the Whites.

[MasterJedi]

Whites

[Bdub]

Whites

[© tweed]

Aw, Kramer used to have a post in this thread saying he'd have supported the Reds.  But somewhere along the way he realized few agreed with him, and he deleted it.

So Kramer, here's some reassurance:

I'd have been a Bolshevik too!

[??????????]

Rather a royalist then a communist.

[Cubby]

At the Time: Reds, since I would see it as a Utopian Society, I wouldn't have known about the horrors of Stalin or the Cold War.

Today: Whites, since communism is incredibly flawed and not capable of tolerating democracy.

[WMS]

The Whites, because I would've been a Kerensky supporter during the real Russian Revolution that toppled the Czar and would've turned against those traitorous backstabbing Reds following their coup.

[© tweed]

I have trouble believing that only 1/4 of the forum would have supported the Bolsheviks in 1917, without hindsight/foresight.

Read the commie manifesto... doesn't it at least sound like a boatload of fun?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Why I would not have supported the Bolsheviks: Once they took over, they banned vodka (considering it a product used to exploit the working class or whatever). Interestingly, they were forced to legalize it in 1924 due to the possibility of popular rebellion if they didn't. A ban on vodka is the number one thing the Russians couldn't take and could've ended the Soviet Union rather early.

[© tweed]

Why I would not have supported the Bolsheviks: Once they took over, they banned vodka

On Wikipedia's article on Prohibition, it said Russia had prohibition from 1914-1925, meaning that is began under the czar. 

[The Dowager Mod]

The Whites had that war won and they blew it over petty squabbles

[ag]

The Whites, because I would've been a Kerensky supporter during the real Russian Revolution that toppled the Czar and would've turned against those traitorous backstabbing Reds following their coup.

I guess, you are unaware that Kerensky didn't become a PM (or, for that matter, a major player), until about 4 months after the overthrough of the Czar.  He may have been in the first Provisional Government (in fact, I vaguely recall he was), but in some very secondary role (something like directing the post office? I am, probably, wrong here). The first PM after the abdication, in early March (late February by the Julian calendar) was Prince Lvov, the largest party in the first Provisional Government was the Constitutional Democratic Party, whose head was the Provisional Foreign Minister P.N. Milukov. The Kerensky's Popular Sociallists weren't really significant until almost the summer.

[ag]

I have trouble believing that only 1/4 of the forum would have supported the Bolsheviks in 1917, without hindsight/foresight.

You don't know the history. At the time the Bolsheviks were just one of the many sociallist parties, not even the most popular, nor was it even the only Marxist party. A lot, if not most, of the "white" politicians were actually sociallists and/or Marxists themselves.

At the beginning of 1917 the most popular Russian party was the non-sociallist Constitutional Democratic Party ("cadets"). They formed the first Provisional government at abdication. Unfortunately, they did not believe they could do anything until the Constituent Assembley could be elected and convened. In particular, they refused to withdraw from the War. When the telegram from the FM (the party head Milukov) to the allies promising to continue fighting was published in April, the government was forced to resign. During the summer, after they were linked to a military coup attempt, they were banned outright.

When the Bolsheviks took over (overthroughing what was by then a 5-party sociallist coalition), they still allowed an election to the Constituent Assembley to happen (they took over just a couple of weeks prior). They lost, and they lost miserably. The winner of the election was the Sociallist Revolutionary Party ("eser") - a non-Marxist Agrarian Sociallist party, that had always been viewed as the main violent threat to the Imperial Government, since it was linked to a major terrorist organization. Bolsheviks got just under a quarter of the seats, mostly from the military, since they were the only party calling for the immediate withdrawal from the war. Mensheviks (non-Communist Marxist Social-Democrats), other sociallists, Constitutional Democrats (though barely, due to them having been banned for most of the campaign) and a whole bunch of ethnic minority parties were represented as well. Most of the rural vote went to the Sociallist Revolutionaries, most of the working class vote went to Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks took the soldiers' vote.

The Sociallist Revolutionaries split into the more radical "Left SR" and the more moderate "Right SR". Though the Left SR were allied to the Bolsheviks at first, the Right SR still could control the Constituent Assembley. The Assembley was convened right after the start of 1918 and in its first action elected the Right SR Chernov as its Chairman. At the end of the first day of procedings, the Bolshevik guards entered the hall and announced that "the guards are tired". The Assembley was never allowed to reconvene. A demonstration in its favor a week later was met with gunfire.

The first Commie gov't was, actually, a coalition of the Bolsheviks and the left SR. However, unlike the Bolsheviks, the left SR were not willing to conclude peace w/ Germany at any cost. After the Bolsheviks went ahead and surrendered to the Germans Ukraine, a left SR Blumkin (remember, SR had always been terrorists) assassinated the German ambassador von Mirbach in June 1918. The Bolsheviks used this as a pretext to ban the left SR (together with the other opposition parties).

Note, that all of this happened before the actual start of the Civil War (up until then there had been only minor skirmishes). The Civil War started later that summer, after the Bolsheviks went on to create the "Committees of the Poor" in the countryside, charged with confiscating grain from all but the poorest peasants to be redistributed between the village poor and the urban "proletariat". Most of the peasants took this - rightly, since Bolsheviks always openly despised the peasant majority, believing it to be inferior to the urban proletariat - to be an attack on them and rebelled. Of course, the opposition party politicians as well as monarchist generals (as well as many other groups) joined in the rebellions, and the Civil War started.

By the start of the Civil War,  the population had already directly experienced a wave of "Red Terror", the economic disintegration of the "Military Communism", etc. The Bolsheviks were just one of the many sociallist parties, and they had been physically destroying their sociallist opponents, including those, like SR, that had been much more popular and had been much more prominent in the pre-revolutionary anti-monarchist movement. Their primary strength was concentrated among the rank-and-file soldiers, whom they had promised to take out of the World War. They had little support either among the Sociallist-Revolutionary peasants, or among the Social-Democratic workers, or elsewhere.

[ag]

To sum up, by mid 1918, when the Civil War erupted in serious, the bloody nature of the Bolshevik regime was extremely obvious to all, left, right or orthogonal.  The Bolshevik strength was in their control of the military rank-and-file, that originally supported them, ironically, as the party that promised to get out of the World War immediately.  I know what I would have been doing, had I been alive (and belong to the class I belong to now, not the class I would have belonged to then): flee to the Ukraine, and then try to take a ship to Istambul (Constantinople, as the refugees still insisted on calling it back then) and on to Paris. This is what most educated people were desperately trying to do. Horrible, horrible time.

To put it into the family perspective, one of my direct ancestors actually fought in the White Army (he had been an officer before the war). He actually did take the ship to Istambul with his entire unit, and then spend some months in Paris as a cab driver. Unfortunately for him, he returned (his family had been left behind) and was executed after a few years.