Russian Civil War | Casualties, Causes, Combatants, & Outcome

Assassination of the tsar and the battle for Ukraine

Among the early victims of the civil war, which may be considered to have begun in earnest in June 1918, were the former imperial family. Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, and his children had been moved in August 1917 to Tobolsk and in the spring of 1918 to Yekaterinburg. With the development of anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia, the local soviet feared that Nicholas might be liberated. In the night of July 16–17, 1918, all the members of the family were taken to the cellar of their prison house and shot.

In the late summer the Communists’ hastily reorganized armed forces, the Red Army, recovered most of eastern European Russia. At Omsk, which became the centre of the anti-Communists, a new army was hastily trained under the command of Adm. Aleksandr V. Kolchak, with the assistance of British and U.S. military missions. Meanwhile the British forces at Murmansk were at war with the Communists. In August further British forces landed at Arkhangelsk, and the Japanese forces in the Far Eastern territories of Russia had been greatly reinforced.

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In Omsk relations between the Socialist Revolutionaries and Kolchak steadily deteriorated. Kolchak and his officers disliked the left-wing views of the politicians and found it difficult to distinguish between Socialist Revolutionaries and Communists, lumping together all “Reds” as enemies. The conflict came to a head when, on November 18, 1918, Kolchak set up his own dictatorship. Kolchak’s coup d’état coincided with the collapse of Germany and the end of the European war.

Quick Facts Date: June 1918 - 1920 (Show more) Location: Russia (Show more) Participants: Bolshevik France Japan Socialist Revolutionary Party United Kingdom United States White Army (Show more) Key People: Anton Ivanovich Denikin Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze Aleksey Maksimovich Kaledin Vladimir Lenin Boris Viktorovich Savinkov (Show more) See all related content

At the beginning of 1919 Red Army forces invaded Ukraine. The remnants of the forces of the Socialist Revolutionaries, headed by Symon Petlyura, retreated westward, where they joined forces with Ukrainian nationalist forces from formerly Austrian Galicia. For the next months the mixed Petlyurist-Galician forces held parts of Ukraine; other areas were in the hands of anarchist bands led by Nestor Makhno; and the main cities were held by the Communists, ruling not directly from Moscow but through a puppet Ukrainian “government” in Kharkov (now Kharkiv). The defeat of Germany had also opened the Black Sea to the Allies, and in mid-December 1918 some mixed forces under French command were landed at Odessa and Sevastopol, and in the next months at Kherson and Nikolayev.