The following are lecture notes for Dr. Jonathan Smele's course The Russian Revolution: From Tsarism to Bolshevism for use in my IBDP HL History class. Smele is a senior lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, and a distinguished historian of Russian revolutionary history. With a PhD from the University of Wales and a Fellowship at the Royal Historical Society, Smele draws on his extensive research, including works like Civil War in Siberia and The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921, to explore the political and international dynamics of Russia’s transition from Tsarist rule to Bolshevik power. The series examines the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, the Russian Civil War, and related themes like Russian foreign policy and Siberian history, offering students a rather detailed analysis of this transformational period.
IntroductionThe Russian Revolution of 1917 was a pivotal event shaping modern history. This course explores its origins and why the Soviet Union emerged from it. It begins with mid-nineteenth-century Russia, examining its vast geography, multi-ethnic society, and serfdom. In 1861, Tsar Alexander II freed twenty million serfs, triggering changes that led to revolution half a century later. Russia industrialised, became an imperial power, and saw growth in its working and middle classes, yet remained an autocracy under the tsar. The 1905 revolution forced Nicholas II to grant a parliament, the State Duma, creating a contradictory constitutional state. The First World War strained this system, leading to the tsar's overthrow in February 1917 in a largely bloodless uprising, ending Romanov rule and establishing a republic under a Provisional Government of liberals and socialists. Eight months later, the Bolsheviks, a Marxist group led by Lenin, seized power. Despite limited support, they prevailed after years of civil wars against various opponents, costing millions of lives and compromising their ideals, setting the stage for twentieth-century ideological conflicts.
Lecture 1: Russia: The Geographical Setting
To grasp Russian history, one must first understand its geography, as historian Edward Acton emphasised. Russia’s vast territory and unique land-water distribution profoundly shaped its history, culture, and society before the 1917 revolutions. By the late nineteenth century, the Russian Empire sprawled across 8.6 million square miles, one-sixth of the world’s land surface, dwarfing Canada (3.8 million square miles), China (3.6 million), and the United States (3 million). Stretching over seven thousand miles from Poland to the Pacific, it encompassed diverse climates and landscapes, from Arctic tundra to Central Asian deserts. This immense scale created logistical challenges; until the Trans-Siberian Railway’s completion in 1916, travelling from St Petersburg to Vladivostok was faster by sea around the globe than overland. Yet, this vastness provided strategic advantages, including abundant natural resources like timber, furs, and minerals, enabling potential self-sufficiency, and the capacity for defence in depth, as demonstrated in repelling Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941–45. Russia is traditionally divided into European Russia (west of the Ural Mountains) and Asiatic Russia (Siberia, east of the Urals). Russian civilisation emerged in European Russia from the ninth century, with expansion into Siberia beginning in the late sixteenth century under Ivan IV. The Urals, often low at 1,500–2,000 feet with peaks up to 6,200 feet, posed little barrier, easily traversed via passes or the Caspian Gate, used by Mongol invaders in the thirteenth century. A more insightful framework is the lateral ecological zones: the northern tundra, with permafrost soils supporting only lichens and mosses, remained sparsely populated until twentieth-century industrialisation; the central taiga, the world’s largest coniferous forest belt between 50 and 60 degrees north, offered timber and game, enabling Russians to build wooden settlements and evade invaders or overlords; and the southern steppe, a vast grassland from Hungary to Mongolia, ideal for nomadic pastoralism. Soil types mirror these zones: barren permafrost in the north, acidic podzols in the taiga, and fertile chernozem (black earth) in the steppe, capable of high yields but vulnerable to irregular rainfall, causing famines every three to four years in the nineteenth century. Russia’s northern latitude limits its growing season to four months near St Petersburg and six in the south, compared to eight to ten months in western Europe, hampering agriculture. Extreme continental climate, with harsh winters and hot summers due to distance from moderating oceans, further constrained development. Despite long coastlines, access to the sea was limited: the Arctic ports froze, the Baltic and Black Seas were controlled by rivals like Germany and the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, and Pacific ports were distant from population centres. Russia’s rivers, such as the Volga, Dnieper, and Don, radiating from the Moscow region, served as critical transport arteries, functioning as ice roads in winter and linking the empire before the railway era, facilitating trade and military movements.
Lecture 2: Russia: Empire and People
The Russian Empire, evolving from its ninth-century Kievan Rus’ origins to its nineteenth-century Romanov peak, was the world’s largest contiguous land empire, distinct for its slow expansion and multinational character. From the Slavic tribes around Kiev, who invited Varangian (Viking) rulers in 862, Kievan Rus’ flourished until the Mongol invasion of 1237–40 fragmented it. Muscovy rose as the dominant principality by the fifteenth century, consolidating power under Ivan III. Expansion accelerated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, incorporating the Volga basin, Ukraine, and Siberia by 1689. Peter the Great (1682–1725) seized Baltic territories from Sweden, while Catherine the Great (1762–96) annexed parts of Poland and the Black Sea coast from the Ottoman Empire. By the nineteenth century, the empire spanned Finland, Poland, Bessarabia, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and the Far East, covering one-sixth of the globe before contracting after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) and the revolutions of 1917–21. Expansion was driven by the need for fertile land, as Muscovy’s poor soils limited agriculture; the quest for ice-free ports for trade and naval power; the strategic imperative to secure borders on the vulnerable north European plain; and weak resistance from fragmented neighbours like the Mongol khanates or declining Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Governance varied by region: Baltic German nobles were integrated into state service, retaining privileges; Finland’s legal system was preserved until the 1890s; Polish Catholics faced repression due to repeated uprisings; and in the North Caucasus, resistance led to ethnic cleansing and forced migration to the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s. The empire’s militaristic nature prioritised state security and administration over societal needs, with a standing army of over one million by the nineteenth century. Its multinational composition, with over one hundred ethnic groups including Russians (44 percent of the population in 1897), Ukrainians, Poles, and Tatars, lacked a clear metropolitan-colonial divide. However, deep social hierarchies subordinated all groups, including Russians, to an autocratic state, effectively colonising its own people through serfdom and rigid class structures.
By the early nineteenth century, serfdom had disappeared in western and most of eastern Europe, while Britain spearheaded the industrial revolution. Russia, however, remained agrarian, with 90 percent of its thirty-six million people in 1825 tied to the land, including twenty million private serfs under the control of roughly one hundred thousand landowners. Serfdom developed from Kievan Rus’ elites subjugating peasants by the eleventh century. Initially, peasants on noble estates were free tenants with the right to leave during a two-week period around St George’s Day, as codified in the 1497 and 1550 law codes. By the 1649 Law Code, peasants and their descendants were bound to the land and landowner, losing mobility and becoming serfs subject to the landowner’s administrative and judicial authority. By the eighteenth century, landowners could relocate, sell, or use serfs as domestic or industrial labour, treating them as property and setting arbitrary tributes of labour (barshchina) or goods/money (obrok). Serfdom supported the state by supplying army recruits and taxes, sustained noble privilege, and provided serfs with minimal security. Its abolition came under Alexander II in 1861, prompted by Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56), which exposed military and economic weaknesses, including an outdated transport system and an inflexible army of one million conscripted serfs serving twenty-five-year terms. Post-service freedom for serfs posed risks of unrest if terms were shortened without reform. Advised that military modernisation required ending serfdom, Alexander initiated reforms in 1856, culminating in the 1861 Emancipation Manifesto, freeing twenty million serfs. The 1874 military reform reduced service to six years active and nine in reserves, with universal conscription for men over twenty-one. Additional reforms in the 1860s included judicial changes, introducing trial by jury, and local government reforms creating elected zemstva councils to manage education and infrastructure. These aimed to erode the caste system and promote civic equality, though peasants remained a distinct legal class with limited rights. The reforms prioritised state power and military needs over social welfare, reflecting Russia’s autocratic priorities.
The 1861 emancipation abolished serfdom, eliminating legal distinctions between free and unfree peasants and curtailing landowners’ authority, aligning with the Great Reforms’ goal of reducing class barriers. Some historians argue it spurred economic modernisation by freeing labour, but serfdom was not the primary obstacle to industrialisation, which was hindered more by Russia’s vast size, harsh climate, and resource distribution. Industrial growth required connecting Donbass coal and Krivoi Rog iron ore to urban centres via railways, a process underway only in the 1890s. Alexander Gershchenkron argued that emancipation created more barriers than it removed. Freed serfs were compelled to accept land allotments to prevent a landless proletariat, as seen in the Baltic provinces’ 1816–18 reforms, but received smaller, often inferior plots, insufficient for self-sufficiency. Redemption payments, spread over forty-nine years (later extended to ninety-eight), were often 50 percent above the land’s value in fertile black earth regions, burdening peasants. Communes gained authority, restricting labour mobility by making members collectively responsible for taxes, discouraging urban migration. Repartitional communes redistributed land every twelve to fifteen years based on family size, incentivising large families, which doubled Russia’s population from sixty million in 1861 to one hundred and twenty million by 1914, intensifying land hunger and perpetuating inefficient strip-farming. Soviet and Western historians linked this to peasant distress, citing the 1891–92 Volga famine, where one million died, and unpaid redemption payments. Recent scholarship, including James Y. Simms Jr., suggests nonpayment reflected strategic saving, not poverty, and rising indirect tax revenues indicated growing consumption. Nobles, however, suffered significantly: redemption payments were channelled to the state, which deducted up to 40 percent for debts, and nobles received depreciating state bonds. Stripped of their role as peasant overseers, most lacked the capital or expertise to transition to commercial farming, leading to land sales or mortgages. By 1905, nobles had lost 20 percent of their land in European Russia, marking their decline as a dominant class in the north and centre.
The assassination of Alexander II in March 1881 by People’s Will terrorists marked a turning point, ushering in a reactionary era under Alexander III, guided by his tutor K.P. Pobedonostsev, Procurator of the Holy Synod. Pobedonostsev rejected representative government and nationalism in the multinational empire, advocating autocracy. The regime arrested radicals, executed key figures, and sidelined reformists. The 1881 Laws on Exceptional Measures allowed governors to declare martial law, undermining 1860s judicial reforms. Censorship tightened in 1882, church schools expanded to counter progressive zemstva education, and access to secondary and university education was restricted to curb radicalism. The state bolstered noble power through the 1885 Nobles’ Land Bank, the 1889 Land Captain system to control peasant governance, and 1890 zemstva laws increasing noble representation. However, bureaucratic inefficiency and an undertrained police limited these counterreforms; notably, Karl Marx’s works remained legal. Russification policies, enforcing Russian language, laws, and Orthodoxy, alienated loyal groups like Baltic Germans and radicalised Poles, Georgians, and Jews, with anti-Jewish pogroms in 1881–82 exacerbating tensions. Alexander III resisted industrialisation to avoid social upheaval, but Nicholas II, less influenced by Pobedonostsev, recognised its necessity for great power status. Under Finance Minister Sergei Witte in the 1890s, state-led industrialisation balanced the budget, attracted French and British investment, and imposed high tariffs, achieving 8 percent annual growth. The Trans-Siberian Railway was completed, and the gold standard adopted in 1897. However, high indirect taxes and low grain prices burdened peasants, while the 1898–1902 global slump hit Russian producers. Rapid urbanisation, with five million migrating to cities by 1900, strained housing and sanitation, fostering unrest. Worker strikes, peasant uprisings, and non-Russian revolts culminated in the 1905 revolution, triggered by Bloody Sunday, when troops fired on a peaceful St Petersburg demonstration.
Lecture 6: Russia and the World in the Late Nineteenth Century
In the late nineteenth century, Russia’s European influence declined as its Asian ambitions grew, driven by the Eastern Question: the Ottoman Empire’s weakening and control of the Black Sea Straits, through which 40 percent of Russia’s grain exports passed. The 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War, supporting Slavic independence movements, secured Russian victories but failed to establish a large Bulgaria at the Treaty of San Stefano due to British, Austrian, and German opposition at the 1878 Congress of Berlin. This diplomatic setback pushed Russia towards the 1892 Franco-Russian Alliance, strengthened by the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention, which resolved colonial disputes in Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. This followed Britain’s 1904 Entente Cordiale with France, surprising given Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia’s Great Game. From the 1870s, Russia expanded southwards, conquering Turkestan by 1885 to secure cotton and influence Persia, alarming Britain over India’s security, especially after the Transcaspian railway’s completion in 1888. Britain countered by supporting Japan, its 1902 ally, in the Far East. Russia’s expansion into Manchuria and Korea, leasing Port Arthur in 1898, provoked Japan, which saw Korea as its sphere. Sergei Witte’s 1890s policies aimed for economic penetration, but Nicholas II’s aggressive stance, dismissing Witte in 1903, led to Japan’s surprise attack in February 1904. Japan’s naval superiority and proximity enabled victories at Port Arthur (January 1905), Mukden (February 1905), and Tsushima (May 1905). The Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by Theodore Roosevelt in September 1905, ceded southern Manchuria to Japan but fostered Russo-Japanese cooperation. The war exposed Russia’s military vulnerabilities, with its Baltic Fleet taking seven months to reach the Pacific, and fuelled domestic unrest, contributing to the 1905 revolution.
The 1905 revolution saw the emergence of formal political parties. The Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (SRs) gained legal status, while the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) coalesced from liberal zemstva and intellectual movements. The Kadets influenced the First State Duma (1906), the 1917 Provisional Government, and anti-Bolshevik White governments but secured only 6 percent of the vote (seventeen of seven hundred and three seats) in the 1917 Constituent Assembly, compared to three hundred and seventy for SRs and one hundred and seventy-five for Bolsheviks, reflecting their limited appeal. Liberalism struggled due to restricted freedoms, a weak Duma, a small middle class (2 percent of the population), and public distrust of compromise. Kadet roots lay in zemstva liberalism and university intellectualism, unified through Peter Struve’s journal Liberation and the 1904 Union of Liberation, forming the Kadets in 1905. Their programme, led by P.N. Miliukov, demanded civil liberties, universal suffrage, and radical land reform through compulsory purchase, alienating both the tsar and socialists. The SRs, successors to 1860s–70s Populists inspired by Alexander Herzen’s peasant communism, formed in 1901, balancing terrorism via their Fighting Organization with broad appeals to peasants, workers, and students for a federal state. Their 1905 programme, drafted by Viktor Chernov, called for land socialisation but faced splits: Maximalists pushed extreme measures, Popular Socialists sought moderation, and a First Duma boycott reduced membership from fifty thousand to twenty thousand by 1908. The 1909 exposure of Fighting Organization leader Envo Azef as a tsarist agent deepened divisions, with N.D. Avksent’ev advocating legal work and Chernov resisting, weakening the SRs into 1917 and the civil war.
Bolshevism, a Russian Marxist variant, developed amid evolving revolutionary thought. From Marx’s 1848 Communist Manifesto to the 1880s–90s, Populist groups like People’s Will, which assassinated Alexander II, prioritised peasant-based terrorism. Marx’s 1870s analysis suggested Russia could skip capitalism via the peasant commune, influencing Populists but not G.V. Plekhanov’s Marxist Emancipation of Labour group, which stressed inevitable capitalist development and intellectual-led worker consciousness. V.I. Lenin, arrested in 1895 and exiled to Siberia, argued in 1902’s What Is to Be Done that a vanguard of intellectuals was needed to guide workers beyond trade unionism. At the 1903 Russian Social Democratic Labour Party Congress in London, Lenin’s push for a clandestine party of professional revolutionaries was outvoted, but he named his faction Bolsheviks (majoritarians) against Mensheviks (minoritarians). The split weakened the party in 1905, with both factions viewing the revolution as bourgeois, expecting socialism later. Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, allying workers and peasants for land reform and anticipating European revolutions, was initially rejected by Lenin, who insisted on majority support for a lasting dictatorship. The First World War’s devastation, centralising state economies, arming workers, and shattering European socialism, alongside Lenin’s 1916 theory of imperialism as capitalism’s final stage, shifted his views. In the 1917 April Theses, Lenin called for overthrowing the Provisional Government for a soviet-based workers’ state, aligning with Trotsky, who joined the Bolsheviks. Their adaptability and focus on urban workers and soldiers, numbering twenty thousand by February 1917, positioned them for the October coup.
Before 1905, Russia’s absolute monarchy granted the tsar supreme authority. The 1905 revolution, sparked by the Russo-Japanese War, peasant revolts, worker strikes, and non-Russian uprisings, forced Nicholas II, advised by Sergei Witte, to issue the October Manifesto, promising civil rights, political parties, trade unions, and an elected State Duma. The 1906 Fundamental Laws, however, curtailed the Duma’s powers, and Nicholas dissolved the first two Dumas (1906, 1907), rigging electoral laws in the 3 June 1907 coup to ensure a conservative assembly. Historians debate whether this system could have fostered liberal reform. Optimists, prevalent in Western scholarship before the 1960s, saw post-1907 stability, disrupted by the 1914 war. Pessimists, including Soviet and later Western historians, stressed persistent crises, arguing the war either accelerated or delayed collapse. Nicholas’s resistance, backed by his court and military, and the Octobrist Party’s fragility hindered cooperation. P.A. Stolypin’s reliance on Nationalists, restricting Finnish and Polish autonomy, alienated moderates. His agrarian reforms, encouraging peasants to leave communes for private smallholdings, saw only 10 percent of households exit by 1914, limited by cultural attachment to communes. Siberian migration, with five million moving from 1904–13 and two million returning, failed to ease land hunger. Industrial growth from 1909–11 drew three million urban workers, but poor living conditions sparked strikes, culminating in the 1914 St Petersburg general strike with two hundred thousand participants. The war’s disruption, with fifteen million mobilised, makes assessing the constitutional monarchy’s viability challenging, as social and political tensions persisted.
In 1913, as Nicholas II celebrated three hundred years of Romanov rule, Russia faced mounting political and social tensions. His 1914 mobilisation against Germany and Austria-Hungary, supporting Serbia, aimed to bolster Russia’s great power status but proved disastrous. Initial patriotism and a Duma truce, backed by liberals, socialists, and Jewish deputies, supported the war effort. By February 1917, Nicholas was ousted with minimal resistance, ending Romanov rule with fewer than fifteen hundred deaths, compared to ten million during the Bolshevik consolidation. Early defeats, like the loss of two hundred and fifty thousand men at Tannenberg in 1914, contrasted with successes against Austria in Galicia and Turkey in the Caucasus. By 1916, Russia overcame armament shortages, but Germany occupied Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, displacing three million refugees. The war intensified pre-1914 revolutionary trends: fifteen million mobilised, including six million peasants, disrupted agriculture; new bodies like the Union of Zemstvos and War Industry Committees assumed state roles; and officer losses (thirty thousand of forty thousand by 1916) shifted the army towards lower-class recruits. Social inequities, with 1.2 million dead, 4.2 million wounded, and three million captured, fuelled resentment, exacerbated by war profiteering. Economic collapse saw peasants hoard grain, causing urban food and fuel shortages; Petrograd’s bread queues sparked February 1917 riots. Nicholas’s discredit, tied to rumours of Empress Alexandra’s pro-German sympathies and Rasputin’s influence, alienated elites, the army, and masses. Rasputin’s 1916 murder failed to restore trust, and the dynasty collapsed as generals and Duma leaders pressured Nicholas to abdicate, leaving the Provisional Government to navigate ongoing crises.
On 23 February 1917, Petrograd’s food riots, coinciding with International Women’s Day and a lockout of thirty thousand Putilov factory workers, escalated into revolution. By 26 February, two hundred and fifty thousand demonstrators clashed with police and troops. On 27 February, the Petrograd Garrison’s mutiny handed power to a Duma committee, forming the Provisional Government, and the Petrograd Soviet, representing workers and soldiers. Nicholas II, stranded at Pskov, abdicated on 2 March after generals’ advice, and his brother Mikhail refused the throne, ending the monarchy. The 1917 revolution, unfolding amid global war, was chaotic, with historiography clouded by political biases. It divides into four phases. From February to April, dual power emerged, with the Soviet backing but not joining the liberal-led Provisional Government; protests over P.N. Miliukov’s imperialist war aims note ended this phase. From May to July, a coalition government of Mensheviks, SRs, and Kadets struggled with land reform and industrial regulation, collapsing when Kadets exited over non-Russian autonomy demands. The July Days followed a failed June offensive, with two hundred thousand demanding soviet power; socialists refused, banned Bolsheviks as German agents, and A.F. Kerensky’s deal with General Kornilov failed, discrediting both. From September, Bolsheviks gained Soviet majorities, and Lenin, expecting a German army revolt, urged a coup. On 10 October, Trotsky, via the Petrograd Garrison’s Military-Revolutionary Committee, organised the 25 October coup, timed for the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, arresting the government and forming the Council of People’s Commissars, issuing decrees for peace and land redistribution.
Three questions dominate 1917’s analysis: Why did the Provisional Government fail? Why did the SRs and Mensheviks fail? Why did the Bolsheviks succeed? The Provisional Government’s failure, per traditional Western and Soviet views, stemmed from its inability to address land reform, the war, and the Constituent Assembly’s delay. Western historians cited liberal inexperience; Soviet scholars blamed bourgeois self-interest. Revisionists argue the government faced constrained choices: Kadets prioritised the war, resisting territorial concessions and land reform, and delayed elections fearing socialist victories (SRs and Mensheviks won over 60 percent of the Constituent Assembly vote). The moderate left’s failure, traditionally attributed to weak organisation, is countered by revisionists highlighting leaders like Irakli Tseretelli and Karlo Chkheidze. Their refusal to govern without Kadets, fearing counterrevolution and needing Allied support, alienated workers and peasants, causing internal splits. Despite their electoral success, they couldn’t counter Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks, with 24 percent of the vote, succeeded, per Soviet historians, due to urban and army support and Lenin’s leadership, while Western scholars emphasised ruthlessness. Richard Pipes argued Bolsheviks misled the masses, promising land but delivering collectivisation. Revisionists contend Bolsheviks met mass demands for peace and land, their open membership (94 percent of 1917 Congress delegates joined post-1914) and Lenin’s State and Revolution reflected revolutionary zeal, with repression emerging from civil war pressures, not initial intent.
The Russian Civil War, spanning 1917–21, was a multifaceted conflict involving Reds (Bolsheviks) against Whites, non-Russian separatists, other socialists, anarchists, and foreign interventions, claiming ten million lives, mostly from disease, and five million more in the 1922 famine. Soviet historians mark its start with the May 1918 Czechoslovak Legion revolt, but Western scholars trace it to the October 1917 coup or the August 1917 Kornilov affair, suggesting two phases: October 1917 to spring 1918, when Bolsheviks consolidated central Russia, and post-Brest-Litovsk (March 1918), when anti-Bolshevik forces rallied with Allied support from Britain, France, and Japan. The Czechoslovak Legion, fifty thousand strong, seized the Trans-Siberian Railway in May 1918, backing socialist governments in the Volga and Siberia until Admiral A.V. Kolchak’s November 1918 Omsk coup established his dictatorship. Kolchak’s one hundred and thirty thousand-man Russian Army advanced across the Urals in 1919 but was repelled by summer. General A.I. Denikin’s one hundred thousand-man Armed Forces of South Russia reached Orel, five hundred miles from Moscow, in October 1919 but collapsed by 1920. General N.N. Iudenich’s fifteen thousand-man North-Western Army neared Petrograd in 1919, while smaller White forces attacked from Archangel. The 1920 Soviet-Polish War ended with Polish gains at the Peace of Riga. General P.N. Wrangel’s thirty-seven thousand-man Crimean force fell in November 1920. The Reds crushed Nestor Makhno’s twenty thousand-strong anarchist army in Ukraine by 1921 and cleared White resistance in the Far East by 1922, though Basmachi rebels in Central Asia persisted until the late 1920s.
The key question is how the Bolsheviks triumphed by 1921 despite widespread opposition. Their victory wasn’t due to superior policies; unfulfilled promises of peace, bread, and land sparked rebellions like Tambov (1920–21, twenty thousand rebels) and Kronstadt (1921, ten thousand sailors) after the Whites’ defeat. War communism, intended to centralise the economy, failed, relying on tsarist stockpiles and black-market trade. Lenin played a secondary role, with Trotsky’s five-million-man Red Army, incorporating sixty thousand tsarist officers under political commissars, proving decisive. Red cavalry, fifty thousand strong, countered White Cossacks. Propaganda’s impact was limited, as iconic works like Eisenstein’s films appeared post-war, and Whites sustained campaigns with minimal propaganda, avoiding reforms to maintain Allied support. White nationalism, notably Kolchak’s refusal to grant Finnish independence, alienated potential allies like Poland and Finland. Peripheral White bases in Siberia, South Russia, and the North-West weren’t the primary issue, as communication lines existed; overconfidence and premature offensives to impress Allies neglected rear consolidation, allowing local abuses to erode support. The Reds’ critical advantage was seizing central Russia’s thirty provinces (one million square miles, sixty million people) in 1917–18, with its Russian majority, munitions factories, and railway hub, enabling them to outnumber and outmanoeuvre opponents, securing victory despite comparable strengths and weaknesses.
