Sunday, November 05, 2017

(17) October Revolution: Aftermath of war and civil war

Returning again to the October Revolution as a part of the First World War, the devastation left by the world war and the civil war that was quickly followed by the civil war that lasted until 1921, even into 1922 in east Siberia, left incredible damage behind.

As Jerry Hough and Merle Fainsod put it How the Soviet Union Is Governed (1979):
... the real test of the Bolsheviks came not in November [1917, New Style] but in the coming three years. They had to demonstrate an ability to rule that no one expected this group of fractious extremists to have; they had to build an army from a war-weary population after having promised peace; that had to win a Civil War while extracting grain by force from peasants in the countryside, while attempting to reinstitute authority relations in the army and the factory, and while ending the wildly free politics of 1917 and emasculating the soviets in whose name they came to power. It was in 1917-1921 that the Bolshevik revolution was really won. [p. 73]


The magnitude of the human cost can be seen, in one of many ways, by the effect on children. Michael Sontheimer writes („Das Kollektiv erziehen" Russland: Vom Zarenreich zur Weltmacht/Spiegel Geschichte 6:2016):
Nach Krieg und Bürgerkrieg gab es in der Sowjetunion bis zu neun Millionen heimatlose Kinder und Jugendliche, die in furchtbarem Elend zu überleben versuchten, als Bettler, Diebe oder Prostituierte; traumatisierte Kinder, von denen manche nicht einmal ihren Namen kannten.

[After war and civil war, in the Soviet Union there up up to nine million homeless children and young people who tried to survive in terrible misery as beggars, thieves or prostitutes; traumatized children, many of whom didn't even know their names.]
The civil war was widespread. And though the seizure of power in Petrograd on October 25-26 was relatively bloodless, the following three years were a bloodbath. Ralf Zerback writes ("Land in Blut und Feuer" Russland: Vom Zarenreich zur Weltmacht/Spiegel Geschichte 6:2016):
Immer wieder rennen die Weißen gegen die Roten an, umkreisen deren Herrschaftszone. Immer wieder ziehen Truppen beider Seiten durch dieselben Dörfer, rauben und morden. Moderne Waffen wie Artillerie und Maschinengewehre steigern die Todesraten. Allein die Zahl der zivilen Opfer in dem dreijährigen Blutvergießen wird auf acht Millionen geschätzt. Alles ist Front, alles Krieg, der Kampf gegen den äußeren Feind vermengt sich mit dem gegen den inneren.

[Again and again, the Whites {counterrevolutionary forces} rushed against the Reds, encircling their zone of control. Again and again, the troops of both sides moved through the same villages, robbing and murdering. Modern weapons like artillery and machine guns drove up the death rate. The number of civil victims in the three-year bloodbath is estimated at eight million. Everything is the front, everything war, the fight against the outer enemy commingled with that against the inner.]

Counting bodies is always grim business, even at the distance of a century in the history books. One can easily find hardline anti-Russian and anti-Communist claims that seem to claim everyone who died in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1945 of all causes as victims of Communist dictatorship. So numbers of casualties reported for the USSR need to be viewed carefully and critically for this whole period. There are, sadly, no shortage of bodies to found as the results of internal state actions.

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