ABSTRACT
The Russian Revolution and civil war may have been a "proletarian" revolution in the cities, but for the great bulk of the people of post-revolutionary Russia, the peasants, it was a "petty bourgeois" revolution. The Russian Revolution was a prolonged agony. Its origins lie both in the prewar social crisis that polarized Russian society between a lower urban class growing more radical and a middle and upper class also pulling away from the autocracy and in the devastation visited upon the country by the First World War. The Soviet government inherited a collapsing state structure that was rapidly being replaced by local authority both in Russian and non-Russian regions. The regathering of Russian lands was an effort carried out in conditions of civil war, foreign intervention, and state collapse by a relatively centralized party and the Red Army.
