The Red and White Armies fight the Russian Civil War
Five years of war and famine kill far more people than the revolution itself
Quick facts
- War dates
- 1917-1922
- Soldiers killed
- Approx. 800,000 (estimate)
- Civilian deaths
- At least 5 million (estimate)
- USSR declared
- 1922
What happened
The Russian Civil War began shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, pitting the Red Army against the loosely allied White armies, which included monarchists, capitalists, and rival socialists, alongside foreign intervention forces backing the Whites. The Bolsheviks held Russia's industrial heartland and could draw on a larger population for conscripts and supplies, while the Whites, fighting from Russia's peripheries on poor transport networks and never unified under one command, struggled to mount a combined offensive and often failed to win over local populations wary of a return to tsarism. Fighting continued in the Far East until October 1922, when Japanese forces withdrew from Siberia and the Bolshevik government could finally claim control of all former imperial territory. Around 800,000 soldiers died in the fighting, and at least 5 million civilians died from the accompanying famine, disease, and violence.
Why it matters
Bolshevik victory secured the new Communist state and led directly to the formal declaration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in December 1922. The war's brutal methods on both sides, including forced requisition of grain from peasants, set patterns of state violence against the countryside that would recur under Stalin's collectivization a decade later.
How we know
Military records from both Red and White forces, along with foreign intervention forces' own accounts, document the war's major campaigns; demographic estimates of the civil war's civilian death toll come from later historical reconstruction of famine and epidemic mortality.
Sources
- Mark Cartwright, World History Encyclopedia. Russian Civil War: The Failed Fightback Against Bolshevism · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Mark Cartwright, World History Encyclopedia. Russian Civil War: The Failed Fightback Against Bolshevism · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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