俄國內戰(俄語:Гражданская война в России,羅馬化:Grazhdanskaya voyna v Rossii),也稱為蘇聯國內戰爭、蘇俄國內戰爭、第12次俄土戰爭、俄國革命或對蘇干涉戰爭,是於1917年11月—1922年10月,在前俄羅斯共和國境內發生的一場戰爭,交戰雙方是紅軍和由共和國臨時政府力量組成的聯合力量白軍,還有協約國出兵干涉,部分戰事還蔓延到蒙古和波斯。
在西伯利亞,海軍上將高爾察克的軍隊被擊潰。他在失去鄂木斯克和任命格里戈里·謝苗諾夫為西伯利亞白軍新的指揮官後放棄了指揮權。不久,高爾察克在他沒有軍隊保護下抵達伊爾庫次克並在伊爾庫次克被憤怒的捷克斯洛伐克軍團逮捕,之後被移交給社會革命黨的政治中心(英語:Political Centre (Russia))。六天後,這一政權被布爾什維克控制的軍事革命委員會取代。2月6日至7日間,在白軍到達之前,高爾察克和他的總理維克托·佩佩利亞耶夫被擊斃,屍體從冰面被扔進冰冷的安加拉河。[49]
Bullock, p. 7 "Peripheral regions of the former Russian Empire that had broken away to form new nations had to fight for independence: Finland, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan."
Williams, Beryl, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921, Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (1987), ISBN 978-0-631-15083-1, ISBN 978-0-631-15083-1: Typically, men of conscriptible age (17–40) in a village would vanish when Red Army draft units approached. The taking of hostages and a few exemplary executions usually brought the men back.
Orlando Figes, A people's tragedy – History of the Russian Revolution (Penguin Books 1996): To mobilize the peasants Kolchak's army resorted increasingly to terror. There was no effective local administration to enforce the conscription in any other way, and in any case the Whites' world-view ruled out the need to persuade the peasants. It was taken for granted that it was the peasants place to serve in the White army, just as he had served in the ranks of the Tsar's, and that if he refused it was the army's right to punish him, even executing him if necessary as a warning to the others. Peasants were flogged and tortured, hostages were taken and shot, and whole villages were burned to the ground to force the conscripts into the army. Kolchak's cavalry would ride into towns on market day, round up the young men at gunpoint and take them off to the Front. Much of this terror was concealed from the Allies so as not to jeopardize their aid. But General Graves, the commander of the US troops, was well informed and was horrified by it. As he realized, the mass conscription of the peasantry 'was a long step towards the end of Kolchak's regime'. It soon destroyed the discipline and fighting morale of his army. Of every five peasants forcibly conscripted, four would desert: many of them ran off to the Reds, taking with them their supplies. Knox was livid when he first saw the Red troops on the Eastern Front: they were wearing British uniforms. From the start of its campaign, Kolchak's army was forced to deal with numerous peasant revolts in the rear, notably in Slavgorod, south-east of Omsk, and in Minusinsk on the Yenisei. The White requisitioning and mobilizations were their principal cause. Without its own structures of local government in the rural areas, Kolchak's regime could do very little, other than send in the Cossacks with their whips, to stop the peasants from reforming their Soviets to defend the local village revolution. By the height of the Kolchak offensive, whole areas of the Siberian rear were engulfed by peasant revolts.
Overy, R.J., The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, W.W. Norton & Company (2004), ISBN 978-0-393-02030-4, ISBN 978-0-393-02030-4, p. 446: By the end of the civil war, one-third of all Red Army officers were ex-Tsarist voenspetsy.
Orlando Figes (In A people's tragedy – History of the Russian Revolution, Penguin Books 1996) is quoting such comments from the peasant soldiers during the first weeks of the war: We have talked it over among ourselves; if the Germans want payment, it would be better to pay ten roubles a head than to kill people. Or: Is it not all the same what Tsar we live under? It cannot be worse under the German one. Or: Let them go and fight themselves. Wait a while, we will settle accounts with you. Or: 'What devil has brought this war on us? We are butting into other people's business.'
Orlando Figes, in A people's tragedy – History of the Russian Revolution (Penguin Books 1996), wrote: As Brusilov saw it, the soldiers were so obsessed with the idea of peace that they would have been prepared to support the Tsar himself, so long as he promised to bring the war to an end. This alone, Brusilov claimed, rather than the belief in some abstract 'socialism', explained their attraction to the Bolsheviks. The mass of the soldiers were simple peasants, they wanted land and freedom, and they began to call this 'Bolshevism' because only that party promised peace. This 'trench Bolshevism', as Allan Wildman has called it in his magisterial study of the Russian army during 1917, was not necessarily organized through formal party channels, or even encouraged by the Bolshevik agents.
Orlando Figes, in A people's tragedy – History of the Russian Revolution (Penguin Books 1996) wrote: It was partly a case of the usual military failings: units had been sent into battle without machine-guns; untrained soldiers had been ordered to engage in complex manoeuvres using hand grenades and ended up throwing them without first pulling the pins. But the main reason for the fiasco was the simple reluctance of the soldiers to fight. Having advanced two miles, the front-line troops felt they had done their bit and refused to go any further, while those in the second line would not take their places. The advance thus broke down as the men began to run away. In one night alone the shock battalions of the Eleventh Army arrested 12,000 deserters near the town of Volochinsk. Many soldiers turned their guns against their commanding officers rather... than fight against the enemy. The retreat degenerated into chaos as soldiers looted shops and stores, raped peasant girls and murdered Jews. The collapse of the offensive dealt a fatal blow to the Provisional Government and the personal authority of its leaders. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed. Millions of square miles of territory were lost. The leaders of the government had gambled everything on the offensive in the hope that it might rally the country behind them in the national defence of democracy. The coalition had been based upon this hope; and it held together as long as there was a chance of military success. But as the collapse of the offensive became clear, so the coalition fell apart.
Orlando Figes, A people's tragedy – History of the Russian Revolution (Penguin Books 1996):
This new civic patriotism did not extend beyond the urban middle classes, although the leaders of the Provisional Government deluded themselves that it did. The visit of the Allied socialists – Albert Thomas from France, Emile Vandervelde from Belgium, and Arthur Henderson from Britain – was a typical case in point. They had come to Russia to plead with "the people" not to leave the war, yet very few people bothered to listen to them. Konstantin Paustovsky recalls Thomas speaking in vain from the balcony of the building that was later to become the Moscow Soviet. Thomas spoke in French, and the small crowd that had gathered could not understand what he said. "But everything in his speech could be understood without words. Bobbing up and down on his bowed legs, Thomas showed us graphically what would happen to Russia if it left the war. He twirled his moustaches, like the Kaiser's, narrowed his eyes rapaciously, and jumped up and down choking the throat of an imaginary Russia." For several minutes the Frenchman continued with this circus act, hurling the body of Russia to the ground and jumping up and down on it, until the crowd began to hiss and boo and laugh. Thomas mistook this for a sign of approval and saluted the crowd with his bowler hat. But the laughter and booing got louder: 'Get that clown off!' one worker cried. Then, at last, someone else appeared on the balcony and diplomatically led him inside.
Chamberlain, William Henry, The Russian Revolution: 1917–1921, New York: Macmillan Co. (1957), p. 131: Frequently the deserters' families were taken hostage to force a surrender; a portion were customarily executed, as an example to the others.
Daniels, Robert V., A Documentary History of Communism in Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev, UPNE (1993), ISBN 978-0-87451-616-6, ISBN 978-0-87451-616-6, p. 70: The Cheka special investigations forces were also charged with the detection of sabotage and counter-revolutionary activity by Red Army soldiers and commanders.
Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, transl. & edited by Harold Shukman, HarperCollins Publishers, London (1996), p. 180: By December 1918 Trotsky had ordered the formation of special detachments to serve as blocking units throughout the Red Army. On 18 December he cabled: "How do things stand with the blocking units? ... It is absolutely essential that we have at least an embryonic network of blocking units and that we work out a procedure for bringing them up to strength and deploying them."
Berland, Pierre, Mhakno, Le Temps, 28 August 1934: In addition to supplying White Army forces and their sympathizers with food, a successful seizure of the 1920 Ukrainian grain harvest would have had a devastating effect on food supplies to Bolshevik-held cities, while depriving both Red Army and Ukrainian Black Army troops of their usual bread rations.
Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy – History of the Russian Revolution (Penguin Books 1996): At the root of the Whites' defeat was a failure of politics. They proved unable and unwilling to frame policies capable of getting the mass of the population on their side. Their movement was based, in Wrangel's phrase, on 'the cruel sword of vengeance'; their only idea was to put the clock back to the 'happy days' before 1917; and they failed to see the need to adapt themselves to the realities of the revolution. The Whites' failure to recognize the peasant revolution on the land and the national independence movements doomed them to defeat. As Denikin was the first to acknowledge, victory depended on a popular revolt against the Reds within central Russia. Yet that revolt never came. Rather than rallying the people to their side, the Whites, in Wrangel's words, 'turned them into enemies'. This was partly a problem of image. Although Kolchak and Denikin both denied being monarchists, there were too many supporters of a tsarist restoration within their ranks, which created the popular image – and gave ammunition to the propaganda of their enemies – that they were associated with the old regime. The Whites made no real effort to overcome this problem with their image. Their propaganda was extremely primitive and, in any case, it is doubtful whether any propaganda could have overcome this mistrust. In the end, then, the defeat of the Whites comes down largely to their own dismal failure to break with the past and to regain the initiative within the agenda of 1917. The problem of the Russian counter-revolution was precisely that: it was too counter-revolutionary. [...] This is clearly shown by the story of the return of the peasant deserters to the Red Army. Until June, the Reds' campaign against desertion had relied on violent repressive measures against the villages suspected of harbouring them. This had been largely counter-productive, resulting in a wave of peasant revolts behind the Red Front which had facilitated the White advance. But in June the Bolsheviks switched to the more conciliatory tactic of 'amnesty weeks'. During these weeks, which were much propagandized and often extended indefinitely, the deserters were invited to return to the ranks without punishment. In a sense, it was a sign of the Bolshevik belief in the need to reform the nature of the peasant and to make him conscious of his revolutionary duty – thus the Reds punished 'malicious' deserters but tried to reform the 'weak-willed' ones – as opposed to the practice of the Whites of executing all deserters equally. Between July and September, as the threat of a White victory grew, nearly a quarter of a million deserters returned to the Red Army from the two military districts of Orel and Moscow alone. Many of them called themselves 'volunteers', and said they were ready to fight against the Whites, whom they associated with the restoration of the gentry on the land.
佛拉迪米爾·N·布羅夫金. Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922.普林斯頓大學出版社, 1994. ISBN 978-0-691-03278-8