Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921, Beevor - B

                      "The only disaster which could make life even worse for the poor in Russia was a major European conflict." That conflict was entered into without much apparent thought, and over 15 million Russian men were called to arms. "The drift to revolution was clear to all except the willfully blind." In late February 1917, the Petrograd garrison stopped following orders, shared weapons with workers, and ignited the flame of revolution. Abdication and a provisional government followed in March. Violent retribution against the wealthy spread throughout the empire. The Kerensky government insisted on continuing the war. An offensive in late June lasted but a few days before the Germans pushed them back. The Bolsheviks prepared for a takeover."Like most successful coups, the outcome in Petrograd would depend mostly on the apathy of the majority and the government's loss of confidence with itself." In October, the Bolsheviks waltzed into power in Petrograd. The country was wracked with violence from coast to coast with the aristocrats, military officers, and anyone who wasn't with the Reds the favored targets. In November, Lenin asked Germany for a cease fire. 

                       A Red terror descended on the nation with endless, indiscriminate torture and murder of 'former peoples.' Lenin stayed in power by agreeing to the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, whereby Poland, Belarus, the Baltics and the Ukraine were ceded to the Germans. The government moved to Moscow because of the proximity of Petrograd to the Germans.  The class warfare initiated by the Bolsheviks inevitably led to a counter-revolution centered in the Don region, which became the stronghold of the Whites. The Germans occupied the center of the country, the British and Americans landed in Murmansk, and the Japanese in Vladivostok. Czech POW's thought that after Brest-Litovsk  they could return home. When they were refused, they headed east on the Trans-Siberian RR, and in Vladivostok joined the Allies in unseating the Reds. When the Czechs passed close to Yektarinburg, Lenin used it as an excuse to murder the Tsar and his family. The Reds were incredibly sadistic and violent. Russia was the scene of personal violence not seen in Europe in three centuries. People were torn apart and tossed in rivers and blast furnaces. Dzerzhinsky's Cheka set up a fake Brazilian Embassy, sold false exit visas, and then murdered the estimated 5,000 applicants. Both sides fought up and down the Volga in the summer of 1918, frequently covering the vast distances on the steppe before the Reds took control. In November, the armistice required Germany to return to its 1914 borders. The German withdrawal opened up vast regions of the interior to conflict. The Baltic states declared their independence. As the year closed, Russia was wracked with violence from one end to the other. There were Allied soldiers in the north, in the Baltics, in the Caucasus and the far east. Red and White forces battled in the Ukraine and the Don River basin, while starving people shifted their allegiance daily. It was a cauldron of desperation, poverty, chaos, violence and confusion.

                       The Allies departed the Murmansk-Arkangel region over the summer. However, the ambitious Japanese increased their forces to 85,000 in Siberia and the British continued to use naval and land forces in the Baltics. Churchill's dream of a Baltic anti-Soviet alliance failed when Moscow signed treaties granting Finland and the three Baltic countries their independence. The British also aided the White attack north from Tsaritsyn which had Moscow as its objective. The advance failed, the Cossacks went home, Britain withdrew its material help, and the Whites fled south. By year's end, even Churchill had concluded the cause of the Whites was hopeless. 

                   The Reds pursued the Whites into Siberia. In Krasnoyarsk, they encircled an army and captured 20,000 men. Unable to feed them, they murdered them. They captured Odessa while Allied ships took soldiers and civilians away leaving desperate thousands at the waterfront. As the Whites collapsed in 1920, a new force entered the fray. Under the command of Gen. Pilsudski, an army of Poles uncertain of what the boundaries of their country would be, began to fight the Reds in Poland and Ukraine. Pilsudski advanced as far east as Kiev before the Reds threw him back. In the Miracle on the Vistula, the Poles destroyed a Red army and assured themselves of their freedom. In October, the Whites made their last stand in the Crimea. It ended with 146,000 people evacuated by 126 Allied ships. The Reds slaughtered those the Whites had left behind. The author suggests the SS Einsatzgruppen took lessons from the Reds in the Crimea. For all intents and purposes, the civil war was over, but not the suffering. Reprisals and mass executions continued. Starvation soon followed.

                 "The Whites lost the civil war largely because of their inflexibility, including their refusal to contemplate land reform until it was far too late or to allow autonomy to the nationalities of the Tsarist Empire." Of equal import "an utterly incompatible alliance of Socialist Revolutionaries and reactionary monarchists had too little chance against a single-minded Communist dictatorship. All too often Whites represented the worst examples of humanity. For ruthless inhumanity, however, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable." 

                   In light of the disaster that Bolshevism was for Russia and the world, I read this with an eye on the what ifs that might have spared us from the Reds. The first was when the provisional government asked Nicholas to abdicate in favor of his son with an eye toward a constitutional monarchy. He refused. The other opportunity that spring was if Kerensky had not insisted on fighting. Perhaps Lenin might have failed. But once Lenin had power, he was so iron-willed, disciplined and inhumane that Red victory was inevitable. Only for a brief few months in 1918 did the Whites or the half-hearted Allies really pose a threat. We know that the bloodlands of Poland, the Baltics, Belarus, and Ukraine in WWII set the benchmark for 20th century horror. This tragedy was pretty close and possibly was a foreshadowing of what evildoers would later undertake . An estimated twelve million died.