If Myaskovsky hoped that conditions might improve sufficiently to permit his return to civilian life before too long, he was to be disappointed. As it transpired, he would have to remain in the armed forces for three further years – a period that proved the most turbulent in the country's history.

In the months following the October Revolution, Lenin's grip on power remained tenuous. The Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (renamed the Russian Communist Party [Bolsheviks] in 1918) had at most two hundred thousand members and its support was essentially confined to the major industrial centres of European Russia. Having seized power, it refused to share it with other socialist parties, but won less than a quarter of the votes in the national elections to the new Constituent Assembly held in November 1917. Lenin responded by dissolving the assembly after its first session, effectively instituting single-party rule. Although he promptly sued for peace with the Central Powers, the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918 exacerbated rather than alleviated domestic tensions. The punitive terms imposed by the Germans, which forced Russia to cede a quarter of the former territories of its empire (including the Baltic states, Belorussia, and Ukraine – populous regions with fertile agricultural land and important concentrations of industry and natural resources) were widely regarded as unacceptably humiliating. Members of the army high command objected to Russia's withdrawal from the war as a dishonourable betrayal of its commitments to the Allies. General Mikhail Alekseyev, who had been instrumental in persuading Nicholas II to abdicate, set up a volunteer army in the southern Don region with the aim of resuming hostilities against Germany: it quickly grew into a formidable fighting force. Disparate factions antagonistic to the Bolsheviks – including monarchists, local separatist movements, and other left-wing parties – formed similar forces in Siberia and elsewhere. These so-called ‘White’ armies initially received significant supplies of men and matériel from the Allied powers, which were eager for conflict to resume on the eastern front and divert German troops from the western one. In the face of hardening opposition, the Bolsheviks resorted to repression to consolidate their dominance. Russia swiftly descended into a chaotic civil war during which millions met violent deaths or perished from starvation and disease.