Russian Civil War

The Russian Civil War was fought from 1917 to 1923 following the Bolshevik seizure of power in the October Revolution, pitting the Bolshevik Red Army against a fragmented coalition of anti-Bolshevik forces collectively known as the White movement, alongside nationalist, anarchist and foreign interventionist forces across the collapsing Russian Empire. Fighting spread across a vast and shifting set of fronts, from Siberia under Admiral Alexander Kolchak to southern Russia under Anton Denikin and later Pyotr Wrangel, complicated further by foreign intervention from Britain, France, the United States, Japan and others in support of White forces, and by a parallel Polish-Soviet War in 1919 to 1921. Leon Trotsky's organization of the Red Army and the Bolsheviks' control of Russia's industrial heartland and rail network proved decisive advantages, and by 1920 the main White armies had been defeated, with mopping-up operations against remaining resistance, including in Central Asia and the Far East, continuing into 1923. The war killed millions through combat, disease and famine, and its Bolshevik victory secured the survival of Soviet Russia and established the political order that led to the founding of the Soviet Union in 1922.