Civil War and the Making of the Soviet State

In March 1918 Lenin pulled Russia out of World War I by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. The price was brutal: Russia gave up Ukraine, the Baltic provinces, and Poland, losing roughly a third of its population, a huge share of its farmland, and much of its industry. Lenin accepted this because the Bolsheviks needed to stop fighting Germany and turn fully to the fight at home, where their grip on power was still shaky.

That fight was the Russian Civil War, 1918 to 1921, between the Bolshevik Red Army and a patchwork of White armies, former tsarist officers, liberals, socialists, and foreign troops, scattered around the edges of the former empire. The map looks lopsided: Whites attacking from Siberia, the south, and the northwest, Reds boxed into the center. But the center held Moscow, Petrograd, and the densest rail lines in Russia. Leon Trotsky used that network to move troops and supplies quickly from front to front, hitting one White army hard while the others, isolated and badly coordinated with each other, sat waiting their turn. Interior lines beat a wide perimeter.

Winning the war still meant running an economy. War communism, the emergency policy of 1918 to 1921, seized grain from peasants and nationalized industry to supply the Red Army, and output collapsed as peasants stopped producing surplus they would only lose. In 1921 Lenin reversed course with the New Economic Policy, allowing small-scale private trade and letting peasants sell surplus grain, which slowly pulled output back up and set the stage for Stalin's later industrialization drive.