Introduction

To the general public all that is known of the Russian Civil War is a dim memory of the film version of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, of trains, of snow, and of bloodshed. The Russian Civil War was not just the war between the Reds and the Whites, Bolsheviks and generals, which is etched in the popular memory; indeed, this war did relatively little to shape the subsequent Soviet regime – although it did much to create its propaganda image. The parties of the right in Russia never commanded many followers, and the educated minority which belonged to them found itself opposed to the revolution and more and more isolated as time went on. After May 1918 the historian of the Russian Revolution and the historian of Russia’s forgotten civil war must follow very different roads, for by then serious fighting had begun between moderate socialists and Bolsheviks.