ABSTRACT
By staging the coup in Omsk on 18 November 1918, the White generals hijacked the civil war, turning it from a war between Bolsheviks and patriotic socialists, a Red versus Green civil war, into a war between Whites and Reds. The Russian Civil War did much to form the nature of the Bolshevik regime; but it was in the Red versus Green civil war that the Bolsheviks’ nature was first revealed. The unpractical people of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia (URR) could not so easily resort to terror, indeed in Archangel the question of restoring the death penalty had almost brought the directorate down. The URR’s fellow socialists, the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, had always been suspicious of Allied motives, and with the defeat of Germany on 11 November 1918 could see little justification for continued Allied involvement, and none at all after the 18 November 1918 coup.
