Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922

This volume attempts to re-evaluate the Russian Civil War by countering the powerful myth that the civil war in Russia was largely between the "Whites" and the "Reds," viewing the struggle instead as a multifaceted social and political process. The Whites benefited from popular resistance to the Reds, and the Reds, from resistance to the Whites. In Brovkin's view, neither regime enjoyed popular support. Pacification campaigns, mass shooting, deportations, artillery shelling of villages, and terror were the essence of the conflict, and when the Whites were defeated, the war against the Greens, the peasant rebels, went on. Drawing on an array of previously untapped sources, the author convicts the early Bolsheviks of crimes similar to those later committed by Stalin. What emerges "behind the front lines" is a picture of how diverse forces--Cossacks, Ukrainians, Greens, Mensheviks, and SRs, as well as Whites and Bolsheviks--created the tragic victory of a party that had no majority support.