Russian civil war

Bitter conflict in Russia (1918–21), which followed Russian setbacks in World War I and the upheavals of the 1917 Russian Revolution. In December 1917 counter-revolutionary armies, the Whites, began to organize resistance to the October Revolution of 1917. The Red Army (Bolsheviks), improvised by Leon Trotsky, opposed them, resulting in civil war. The Bolsheviks eventually emerged victorious.

The war was fought in the regions of the Caucasus and southern Russia, the Ukraine, the Baltic, northern Russia, and Siberia.

Foreign involvement
The Bolsheviks also had to fight against the armies of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland. In northern Russia the British and French landed troops at Murmansk in June 1918, seized Arkhangelsk, and set up a puppet government. They continued outbursts of fighting against the Bolsheviks until October 1919. In Siberia, Admiral Kolchak, with the assistance of a Czech legion (composed of prisoners of war) and of Japanese forces that had landed at Vladivostok, established a White government in Omsk, western Siberia. Kolchak was captured and executed by the Bolsheviks in February 1920.

Bolshevik victory
While each of the White armies was engaged in an isolated operation, the Soviet forces were waging a single war. Trotsky was an active agent for the Bolsheviks in all the crucial operations of the war. The Bolsheviks put down peasant uprisings in 1920 and the Kronstadt uprising, a mutiny by sailors of the Russian Baltic Fleet at Kronstadt, outside Petrograd (St Petersburg), in March 1921. Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky used severe measures to achieve the suppression of the peasant uprisings. Whole villages were burnt to the ground and their populations executed, while the inhabitants of local villages were forced to watch as a warning not to oppose the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks were far superior to the Whites in both organization and propaganda. The last foreign forces left Soviet soil in 1922 when the Japanese evacuated Vladivostok. The Soviet government was recognized by Britain in 1924 and by the USA in 1933.