LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Russian Civil War: Red Army
built 655 days ago
The tragedy of the civil war is precisely that the impact of the war and isolation on Russian society increasingly reduced the scope of political decisions and choices available. The Bolsheviks’ politics and organisation, and the conviction of the mass of workers and peasants in Russian society in the project they were embarked on, enabled them to continue to fight for the survival of the revolution for an astonishingly long time. But ultimately they could not break out of the cage of material circumstances, and neither could they remain unchanged by life as it really was.
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Some historians have identified a continuity in the militarism of Soviet society that ran from the civil war through to the subsequent Stalinist regime. Mark von Hagen, for example, argues that the 'discourse of the show trials of the 1930s is one example of the fundamental reorientation of political culture that had been occurring at least since the mid-1920s, and arguably since 1917' [my emphasis].59 It is true that the massive size and importance of the army distorted the ideals of the revolution and that many of the Red Army soldiers were to become key elements in the Stalinist bureaucracy. However, there is no seamless connection between the army built to defend the revolution and that which fought the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942 or invaded Hungary in 1956. Leon Trotsky, who, as Commissar for War, was put in charge of creating an armed force that could defend the revolution, argued that 'the army is a copy of society and suffers from all its diseases, usually at a higher temperature',60 and even a brief examination of the army shows the extent to which it reflects the priorities of the state. The army alone did not dictate the trajectory of the Soviet state; rather, the fate of the army was interlaced with the strangulation of the Russian Revolution.
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One historian of the civil war, Evan Mawdsley, argues that the “military operations of the Central Powers from February to May 1918 were the most important foreign intervention in the civil war. Hundreds of thousands of German, Austrian and Turkish troops were involved; 17 Russian provinces (as well as Poland) were occupied”. [17] In the Ukraine the Red Army had captured Kiev from the nationalist, RSR-dominated Rada (council) in February 1918, only to be driven out by the German army which established a puppet government led by the vicious General Skoropadsky: “Once in full occupation of the Ukraine the Germans hastened to turn the wheel of social revolution backwards”. [18]
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The civil war between the Bolsheviks (Reds) and the anti-Bolsheviks (Whites) ravaged Russia until 1920. The Whites represented all shades of anti-Communist groups, including members of the constituent assembly. Several of their leaders favored setting up a military dictatorship, but few were outspoken czarists.
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Civil wars are totally lame, and this was no exception. It was started on December 31, 1918, which really sucked, because they wanted it to be in 1919, 'cause that has the same number twice, but they were one day off. There were four sides fighting: the Well-Read Army (made up of soldiers with an interest in literature), the Tsardines (loyalists to the king), the White Army (the goth's army), and the Black Army (an army of superheroes led by Batman, who totally stole the color black from the goths, so they had to call it the White Army).
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