ABSTRACT
Recent studies of the Civil War stress its sheer complexity, a complexity that defies both simple narration and analysis. Debates continue about when it first started. Recently, Evan Mawdsley persuasively argued that it ‘began with the October Revolution’ (Mawdsley 1987:3). Its initial phase, he continues, lasted through the winter of 1917–18. First, the Bolsheviks easily rebuffed the feeble Cossack forces sent by General Petr Krasnov to restore the Kerensky government in Petrograd in late October. Then, in the early months of 1918, they quelled the resistance of the various Cossack hosts, notably the Orenburg Cossacks led by Ataman Dutov in the Urals and the Don Cossacks of General Aleksei Kaledin. Finally, in the spring, the embryonic Volunteer Army (composed of nationalist army officers) that had formed in the south of Russia, in the Don region, was defeated and its commander, Lavr Kornilov, killed (Mawdsley 1987:16–22). It is little wonder that on 23 April Lenin declared ‘with confidence that in the main the civil war is at an end’.
