On the Russian Civil War

For anyone looking to learn about the Russian Civil War, skip this piece. Although it does tell about military strategy during the Civil War, it doesn’t offer much more. It seems that Mawdsley is looking more to challenge other historians while dropping any pretense of impartiality (generally this is ok if the author makes it clear what they’re trying to do, but the Russian Revolution & Civil War are still fundamentally political subjects). At the same time, this work is only sparsely sourced and does not offer much in the way of detail.

More significantly, it ignores the complexity of the Civil War, simply classifying people as Reds, Whites, and foreign groupings. This was not the reality on the ground. Both sides forced people across Russia to join them, and the same individual may have fought on both sides of the Civil War at different times, yet we don’t hear about them at all. The book ends with a “settling the scores” by counting those who died in the war, which is generally a fair topic of discussion, but in this case it seems to miss the point. The Russian Civil War was excruciating, obviously. But it’s also impossible to give any sort of accurate statistics on “whites” and “reds” who died, as these were not entirely discrete groupings.

Anyhow, there is one quote in the book that made me laugh a bit, but only because in my head I imagined Josef Svejk leading the charge against the Bolshevik government:

“At first sight it might seem incomprehensible that some Czechoslovak Corps, which has wound up with us in Russia through the tortuous ways of the World War, should at the given moment prove to be almost the most important factor in deciding the questions of the Russian Revolution. Nevertheless, that is the case.” - Trotsky, 29 July 1918