The Russian civil war,1917–1922

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521811446.007

5 - The Russian civil war,1917–1922

from Part I - Russia and the Soviet Union: The Story through Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Donald Raleigh

Edited by

Ronald Grigor Suny

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Ronald Grigor Suny: Affiliation:
University of Chicago and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Summary

While the story of the Russian Revolution has often been retold, thehistoriography of the event’s most decisive chapter, the civil war, remainsremarkably underdeveloped. A generation ago, the nature of available sources aswell as dominant paradigms in the historical profession led Western historians ofthe civil war to focus on military operations, Allied intervention and politics atthe top. This scholarship pinned the blame for the resulting Communistdictatorship on Marxist-Leninist ideology and/or Russia’sbackwardness and authoritarian political culture. In the 1980s, interest in socialhistory and Bolshevik cultural experimentation stimulated publication of newacademic and popular overviews of the civil war, and also of a landmarkcollaborative volume that shifted the explanation for the Communist dictatorshipfrom conscious political will and ideology to the circumstances of the ordeal. Thefirst full scale investigations of the civil war in Petrograd and Moscow appearedas well. Some studies issued at this time cast the period as a‘formative’ one, emphasising that the Bolshevik behaviour, language,policies and appearance that emerged during 1917–21 served as models forpolicies later implemented under Joseph Stalin.

Although Soviet historians writing on 1917 often produced results that were notentirely invalidated by ideological content, this is less the case in regard tothe civil war, whose history they patently falsified, undoubtedly owing to massdiscontent with Bolshevik practices after 1918. Focusing on the political andmilitary aspects of the civil war, Soviet historians published a‘canonical’ five-volume survey of the subject between 1935 and1960.

Keywords

Russian cultural practices Russian civil war social revolution Bolshevik economic practices Bolshevik party-state War Communism

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Russia , pp. 140 - 167

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521811446.007 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2006

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