The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (63 page)

Burundi, Rwanda:
Two bites of German East Africa were given to the Belgians, putting Tutsi and Hutu in the same country even though they hate each other. There have been countless massacres back and forth for the past half century.

Czechoslovakia, Poland:
Two new polyglot nations were carved out of the Slavic borderlands of Austria, Germany, and Russia. The hope was that these would form a safe buffer between implacable enemies, but they lasted only long enough to spark a new world war and get quickly conquered.

Darfur:
In Muslim solidarity, the sultan of Darfur in the Sahara switched his allegiance from the British to the Ottoman Turks during World War I. The British then occupied and abolished the sultanate, attaching it to Sudan. Today, Darfur is facing genocide by its Sudanese overlords.

Iraq:
All of the oil-producing provinces of the Ottoman Empire were bundled together and given to the British, even though this arbitrarily mixed Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, and Kurds into one country. These three groups have been fighting an ongoing civil war over who gets control of the country and its oil revenue.

Israel:
This slice of the Ottoman Empire was handed to the British and soon set aside for Jewish immigration. The neighboring Arab states have been trying to remove this ethnic blemish for over a half century.

Lebanon:
Local Christian enclaves of Syria were carved out of the Ottoman Empire in order to create a little country with a Christian majority. During the 1970s and 1980s, the local Muslims fought a civil war with the Christians over power sharing.

Soviet Union:
When war-weary Russia turned to Communism, it created a monstrously powerful nation, ideologically opposed to the West. It took three-quarters of a century and the daily threat of nuclear annihilation to get Russia back on the same page as the rest of Europe.

Yugoslavia:
All of the Balkan Slavs of the Austrian Empire were combined with Serbia into one big, polyglot nation. During the 1990s, they all fought a series of civil wars to get out of it.

RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR

Death toll:
9 million
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(including 1 million military deaths, 5 million famine deaths, and 2 million deaths by epidemic disease; the rest are civilian deaths by terror, crossfire, and so on)

Rank:
16

Type:
ideological civil war, failed state

Broad dividing line:
Reds vs. Whites

Time frame:
1918–20

Location:
Russia

Full state participants:
France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, United States

Quantum state participants:
Armenia, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russian Provisional Government, Soviet Russia, Ukraine

Quasi-state participants:
Czech Legion, Don Cossacks, Free Territory, Green Army, Komuch, Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia, Volunteer Army

Who generally gets the most blame:
The Left blames the Right, and the Right blames the Left.

Fall of the Romanov Dynasty

The First World War was such a monumental mess for everybody involved that many participants came out of it with their governments wrecked beyond repair. The first major country to crack under the strain was Russia. Food shortages and strikes disrupted urban life. Supply shortages and boneheaded strategy shattered the army. As the years of endless slaughter continued, thousands of Russian soldiers simply gave up and went home, carrying their guns in case anyone tried to stop them.

The February Revolution (actually in March 1917) started when protests in the capital at Petrograd turned violent.
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Soldiers sent to put down the strike joined it instead. Tsar Nicholas was on a train hurrying to Petrograd to restore his authority when it became obvious that events had passed him by. Still outside the city, he formally abdicated. The crown was offered to relatives, but no one else in the Romanov family wanted to inherit the basket case that Russia had become. For the moment the parliament was in charge, although the local workers’ group, the Petrograd Soviet, controlled most of the workers, making it the noisiest faction in the capital. One leader of the Soviet, Aleksandr Kerensky, formerly of the Socialist Revolutionary Party,
*
became the most influential power broker in Russia. For a few months, the new government tried to muddle through with a minimum of changes to the social and political fabric of Russia. The war against Germany continued without an end in sight.

In 1903 a schism had split the Russian socialists between a moderate minority and a radical majority. The radicals are therefore known to history as Bolsheviks, from the Russian word for majority, while the moderates were known as the Mensheviks, from the word for minority.

The leader of the Bolsheviks was a hard-working, intense, and humorless intellectual who was born Vladimir Ulanov, but was long known by the alias Lenin. Exiled from Russia for revolutionary activity, he had been bouncing around western Europe for many years. At the outbreak of the First World War, socialist parties all over Europe had lined up behind their various national governments in support of the war rather than uniting across national boundaries to force an end to the madness. Lenin cursed them for their spineless patriotism, and he quickly became unwelcome across the continent, until he found a safe haven in neutral Switzerland.

After the February Revolution, political prisoners and exiles of the tsar’s regime found themselves welcomed home. The Germans allowed Lenin and his entourage to travel across Germany to the Baltic Sea, where he returned to Petrograd via neutral Sweden. Lenin immediately began to agitate for a radical agenda, and getting Russia out of that senseless war was right at the top of the list. As the Russian battlefront continued to deteriorate, the Bolsheviks under Lenin gained more supporters and a stronger hand. Finally they seized control of the government in the October Revolution (in November 1917). Over the next few months, they consolidated their hold over the government and then moved the capital deep inland to Moscow to avoid the German armies and unruly mobs that endangered the government in Petrograd.

In December, Lenin called a cease-fire with Germany and began to negotiate terms. Under the final Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed in March 1918, Soviet Russia accepted defeat and gave up the Baltic, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian provinces to German occupation.

The Civil War

Most history books stop here and fast-forward through the next few years of Russian history. Everything that would affect the rest of the twentieth century had already happened by this time. Russia was Communist and out of the war. In the vast sweep of history, that’s all that really mattered. The rest is pointless and depressing, so let’s get right to it.

Not everyone was willing to roll over and accept the Bolshevik power play. The other factions of Russian government fled Petrograd after the October Revolution and started gathering armies in the provinces. The capitalist countries of the West obviously weren’t happy to welcome the first Communist government in history to the community of nations. Ethnic minorities in the Russian Empire wanted to take advantage of the chaos to stake out new nations. It was going to get messy.

The timeline of the civil war can be reduced to a few simple landmarks, each about a year apart:

From November 1917 to November 1918, the Germans were dominant and the Bolsheviks subservient.

From November 1918 to November 1919, the Germans were gone and the Bolsheviks were on the defensive against anti-Bolsheviks.

From November 1919 to November 1920, the Bolsheviks were on the offensive against anti-Bolsheviks.

After November 1920, the anti-Bolsheviks were gone and the Bolsheviks consolidated power.

The map of the Russian Civil War is both simple and complex. The simple part is that the Communists (the Reds) held the center, and they were being attacked on all sides by hostile forces, generally known as the Whites. The complex part is that just about every direction was being attacked by a completely different hostile force—not just home-grown Whites, but Germans, Poles, Cossacks, British, French, Americans, and Japanese too.
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Let’s describe them in a clockwise spiral, starting with 4:30:

Cossacks (Southeast)

Almost from the start, the Don Cossacks refused to acknowledge the authority of the Bolsheviks, and they asserted their independence by force of arms in July 1918, which is usually considered the official beginning of the Russian Civil War. The Reds tried to enforce their authority during the early months of 1919 by sweeping through Cossack territory and systematically executing some 12,000 Cossack counterrevolutionaries. A renewed Cossack uprising against this terror aided the offensive of the nearby White Army under General Anton Denikin.
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Germans (Southwest)

The German occupation did not reach much of the ethnic heartland of Russia, but the Germans seized almost all of the European lands inhabited by non-Russians—those that would become independent republics in 1991. Germany started to organize these into vassal states, but the worldwide armistice in November 1918 led to a hasty withdrawal. Most of the occupied territories then tried to stake out an independent existence. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland succeeded. The Ukrainians and the peoples of the Caucasus Mountains didn’t.

Whites (Northwest)

After Germany was out of Russia, General Nikolai Yudenich led a small army of Whites out of Estonia toward Petrograd in October 1919. For a few weeks, this was a deadly spearhead pointing at the tottering Bolshevik regime, but they were driven off about the same time that the White offensives elsewhere collapsed.

Allies (North)

A few thousand British and American troops began arriving at the subarctic ports of Archangel and Murmansk in July 1918 to guard stockpiles of Allied war materiel and prevent them from falling into either German or Bolshevik hands. As Russia became more chaotic, this force grew. Because every country in the West wanted to earn a seat at the eventual peace conference and maybe pick up valuable trade concessions and colonies inside the new Russia, all of the other allies—Australians, French, Canadians, Italians, Serbs, and so on—sent small units as well. As the Allies began to stake out defensive perimeters around the ports, they found themselves in open but sporadic combat with the Bolsheviks, although reluctantly. No one seriously expected these Allied forces to affect the outcome of the civil war, so after a couple of years, when they saw which way Russia was heading, the Allies finally abandoned the northern Russian ports.

The battle against the Bolsheviks killed 304 Americans—more than twice the number of Americans killed in combat during the 1991 Gulf War—but Americans don’t like to talk about it, probably because they lost, but also because the intervention seemed to justify Russian paranoia during the Cold War. You never see the Russian Civil War on the official list of America’s wars.
⁴

Whites (East)

Probably the most confusing label on any map of the Russian Civil War is the appearance of a Czech army under a Russian admiral campaigning in the middle of Siberia, thousands of miles from both Prague and navigable oceans.

During the First World War, the Allies had organized 60,000 Slavic prisoners and deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army on the Russian front into the Czech Legion to help liberate Bohemia from the Austrian Empire, but after pulling Russia out of the war, the Bolsheviks didn’t need them, and the Czech Legion was sent to connect with Allies elsewhere. The plan was for the Czechs to return to the war the roundabout way, out the Trans-Siberian Railroad to the Pacific, which was the only way the Germans didn’t block.
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At one Siberian railroad station, the local Soviets tried to disarm the Czechs, but this only made them angry. The Czechs turned around and started fighting their way back into Russia along the railroad. They eventually became the backbone of the White forces in the east.
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The admiral on the maps of Siberia was Aleksandr Kolchak, former commander of the Russian Black Sea fleet who resigned in June 1917, before the Bolsheviks came to power. He drifted around Russian émigré communities for a while and finally ended up organizing anti-Bolshevik forces in Manchuria. He then moved inland to Omsk, where he became war minister of the conservative government of Russia.