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This chapter provides a brief summary of the main events of the Russian Civil War leading up to the evacuation of the Crimea in November 1920. It explains the origins of the White movement, especially of the units which constituted Wrangel’s Russian Army, namely the units of the Volunteer Army and of the various Cossack hosts. The chapter also examines the modes of thought of the Russian officer corps and explains that in rising up against the Bolsheviks, the White officers were seeking both revenge and the restoration of their own and Russia’s honour. These motivations provided them with unifying notions that held them together regardless of their political opinions and personal origins.

This chapter begins with an account of the early phases of the Russian Civil War, ending at the moment in August 1918 when the Bolsheviks surrendered Kazan. Russia was reduced to a small rump state that could no longer be described as an empire. The chapter then recaps the processes of imperial challenge, state failure, and social collapse over the previous four years that led to this moment of decolonization. The book ends with a description of how the new Soviet regime rebuilt the state and reconquered much of the territory of the former Russian Empire. It suggests that Soviet power was imperial in nature, but also that it was deeply affected by the process of decolonization that preceded it, most notably in the federal structures of the state, the attempts to build a multi-ethnic elite, and the troubled efforts to deal with the weaknesses of a post-colonial society.

World War I interrupted Arnautoff’s plans for art school. After cavalry officer school, he served with some distinction to the end of the war, when his unit was significantly affected by the Bolshevik seizure of power. After the army was dissolved, Arnautoff made his way to Simbirsk where he was recruited into a White army unit in the Russian Civil War, probably that of KOMUCH. He spent from July 1918 to November 1920 retreating from the Volga across Siberia to northeastern China.

This chapter describes the intervention of the USSR in the Spanish Civil War as the most extensive Soviet military action since the close of the Russian Civil War. More troops had been involved in the domestic campaigns against Muslim rebels, finally subdued by 1936, and more had also been used in the conquest of Outer Mongolia and in the Manchurian operation, while other actions such as those in Iran and Sinkiang had involved no more than a handful of troops. Altogether, the number of military personnel was limited, and Soviet sources recognize little more than 3,000 in all, of whom 200 were killed. The Soviet manpower involved in Spain was far exceeded by the approximately 16,000 Germans and 70,000 Italians who at one time or another served in Spain.

Igor Narskij examines the experience of Russian soldiers on the eastern front, an experience significantly different from that undergone by soldiers on the western front because of the vast area of the eastern theater of war and the fact that it was largely fought as a mobile war, not a static one. Maintaining that prevalent arguments put forward by historians to explain Russia’s failure in the war―including the alleged backwardness of the country’s peasant soldiers and the lack of adequate supplies―have been overstated, the chapter posits that the war actually had a significant civilizing and disciplining effect. The chapter also argues that because for Russia the First World War segued into internal dissension in the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War of 1918–1920, Russians never completely integrated the experience of the world war into its cultural memory.

Chapter 9 begins with “primordialism” or essentialized views of race which continue to exist in post-Soviet society (including Russia) and in the Russian language. Then, we review and debunk the myth of “Russian” as the most loyal Soviet people (of all the various nationalities). This was due to the Russian Civil War when entire regions and cities changing loyalties from Bolsheviks to the Whites (Greens, SR’s, zemstvo governments, etc.) and then back again (continuously for five years). All of the anti-Bolshevik forces were supplied, armed, funded and supported by the Allied Interventionists. Meanwhile, five thousand Soviet Koreans fought for the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. Finally, we review the case of Gum Nam Kim and the Soviet use of Soviet Koreans to further their political relationship(s) with North Korea.

This chapter first reviews the literature suggesting that military intervention or the threat to actually use gunboat diplomacy may prompt sovereigns to honour their debts. Military threat and not just actual intervention had in the past a real impact on how markets valued the likelihood of default. In the Russian case, the situation was extremely complex. Most leaders of counter-revolutionary movements declared their willingness to repay Russia’s debt should they come to power. A change of government could thus have paved the way to reimbursement. To understand the role played by the White armies the chapter details the evolution of the Russian civil war, including the role played by foreign military intervention, and the changes brought by the Russo-Polish war.

The focus of this chapter is on the complex developments in the North Caucasus during the time of Revolution and Civil War (1917-1921). If the period of the February and October revolutions was characterized by attempts of the North Caucasian political and religious elite to form a single state entity, the outbreak of civil war brought societal and ethnic cleavages to the fore, undermining common state-building efforts. Caucasians fought on all sides of the front, but most of the North Caucasian Muslims allied themselves with the forces of the Bolsheviks, with whom they shared a common cause: to prevent the re-establishment of the old regime. While the “White” troops under former tsarist General Anton Denikin fought for a Russia “one and united,” the Bolsheviks promised the non-Russian peoples land and freedom. Shortly after the triumph of the Bolsheviks, cracks began to appear in these alliances. By mid-1920, the mountainous parts of Chechnia and Dagestan had been set aflame in a large-scale anti-Bolshevik uprising led Imam Gotsinskii. Only in late 1921 did the Bolsheviks, with assistance from regular units of the Red Army, manage to crush this rebellion and establish military superiority.

This chapter describes the chaos and disruptions that overtook the Chukchi and Yupik peoples during the Russian Civil War, which culminated with the Soviet takeover of the peninsula in 1923 and was followed by the seizure of trading posts and foreign trading vessels and the confiscation of traders’ supplies and money.

The genocidal impulses that erupted during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War (1917–21), together with the recurring claim of Jewish ritual murder and its multiple permutations, became necessary components for the events that unraveled in the so-called Bloodlands. The persistence, the permutation, andthe responses to anti-Jewish violence and memories of violence suggest that Jews (and non-Jews alike) cohabited with a legacy of blood that did not vanish. It is in fact difficult to fully grasp thedynamics of violence unleashed during World War II in the region of Eastern Europe, which comprised present-day Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, without integrating the historical violence and memories of violence that earmarked Jews. The blood legacies played a central role in the carnage of European Jewry and made the Bloodlands likely. Under the Soviets, who from the beginning outlawed antisemitism, violence against Jews did not supersede entirely, and even when it was forbidden (like in the case of the pogroms), it was not forgotten. There is an unexplored history of antisemitism in the Soviet lands that sheds light on the complicated experience of concurrent Jewish empowerment and vulnerability in Soviet society.