Member of the Civil War in Russia - who is he?

Civil war, the beginning of which is officiallyconsidered to be 1918, is still one of the most terrible and bloody pages in the history of our country. Perhaps, in some ways it is even more terrible than the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, since this conflict presupposed incredible chaos in the country and the complete absence of a front line. To put it simply, a participant in the Civil War could not be sure even in his immediate family. It happened that whole families destroyed themselves because of cardinal differences in their political views.

The history of those events is still full of mysteries andriddles, but the common man in the street rarely thinks about them. Where is more interesting than the other - who was an ordinary participant in the Civil War? Is the propaganda of those times right, and the red is an animal-like peasant, dressed almost in the skin, white - the ideological "mister officer" with the views of the idealist, and the green one - an analog of the anarchist Makhno?

Of course, everything is much more complicated, since similarthe division exists only in the pages of the most radical historical books, which now, unfortunately, are still used to defile the history of our country. So, of all the most difficult periods, the Civil War continues to remain the most vague one. The reasons, participants and consequences of this conflict continue to be studied by venerable scientists, and they still make many interesting discoveries in the history of that period.

The first period of the war

Perhaps the most uniform was the composition of troopsexcept in the very first period of the war, the bright prerequisites of which began to appear as far back as 1917. During the February coup in the streets there was a huge number of soldiers who simply did not want to go to the front catastrophically, and therefore were ready to overthrow the tsar and make peace with the German.

The war deeply disgusted everyone. The devil's attitude of the tsarist generals, the theft, illnesses, the lack of everything that was most necessary - all this pushed more and more soldiers to revolutionary ideas.

Paradoxes of the prewar period

The beginning of the Soviet period, when Lenin promisedsoldiers to the world, could be marked by the complete cessation of the inflow of experienced front-line soldiers into the Red Army troops, but ... On the contrary, throughout the whole of 1918 all parties to the conflict regularly received a mass influx of new soldiers, almost 70% of whom had previously fought on the fronts of the Russo-German war. Why did this happen?

Why did the Civil War participant, who had barely escaped from the disgusted trenches, again wanted to take up his rifle?

Why, wishing peace, did the soldiers go to war again?

There is nothing complicated here. Many of the experienced soldiers were in the army for 5, 7, 10 years ... During this time, they simply lost the habit of the hardships and vicissitudes of a peaceful life. In particular, the soldiers are already accustomed to having no problems with food (of course, they were, but rations were still issued almost always), that all questions are simple and understandable. Disappointed in a peaceful life, they again and willingly took up arms. In general, this paradox was known long before the Civil War in our country.

The initial backbone of the Red Army and White Guard formations

As subsequently recalled participants of the Civilwars in Russia (regardless of their political views), virtually all major formations of the Red and White armies began in the same way: an armed group of people was gradually gathering, to which the commanders subsequently joined (or left their milieu).

Very often, large military formationswere obtained from self-defense units or certain groups of military liaison officers seconded by the officers of the tsarist army to guard some railway stations, warehouses, etc. The backbone were former soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and sometimes "full-time" officers for one reason or another were in isolation from those units, which they commanded initially.

It was more interesting if the participantThe Civil War was a Cossack. There are many known cases when the village for a long time lived exclusively as raids, terrorizing the central regions of the country. Cossacks most often deeply despised "uncouth muzhiks," reproaching them for "inability to stand up for themselves." When these "muzhiks" were finally brought to "condition", they also took up arms and remembered all the insults to the Cossacks. This was the beginning of the second stage of the conflict.

Confusion

During this period, participants in the Civil War inRussia became more and more heterogeneous. If earlier the backbone of the various gangs or "official" military formations were former tsarist soldiers, now a real "vinaigrette" has flown along the roads of the countries. The standard of living finally fell, and therefore for weapons taken all without exception.

To this same period, there are also "special" participantsThe Civil War of 1917-1922. We are talking about the so-called "green". In fact, they were classic bandits and anarchists, who had a golden time. True, they were very disliked by both the Reds and the Whites, and therefore they were shot immediately and on the spot.

Independence and pride

A separate category is different nationalminority and former outskirts of the Russian Empire. There, the composition of the participants was almost always extremely homogeneous: it is a local population deeply hostile to Russians, regardless of their "color". Almost the same gangsters in Turkmenistan, the Soviet authorities were able to understand almost before the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The Basmachi were stubborn, they received financial and "rifle" supplies from the British, and therefore were not particularly poor.

Participants of the Civil War of 1917-1922. on the territory of present-day Ukraine were also very heterogeneous, and their goals were very different. In most cases, everything amounted to attempts to form one's own state, but there was such disorder in their ranks that nothing sensible eventually came to pass. The most successful were Poland and Finland, which nevertheless became independent countries, having received their statehood only after the collapse of the Empire. Finns, by the way, again differed in extreme rejection of all Russians, not much inferior to this Turkmens.

Peasants come

It must be said that around this time in the ranksall the armies of the Civil War turned out to be many peasants. Initially, this social layer did not participate in combat operations at all. The participants in the civil war (red or white, no matter what) recalled that the original centers of armed clashes resembled tiny dots surrounded on all sides by the "peasant sea".

What forced the peasants to take up arms? In many respects to this outcome resulted in a constant drop in the standard of living. Against the backdrop of the strongest impoverishment of the peasants, more and more people became interested in "requisitioning" the last grain or livestock. Naturally, this state of affairs could not last for a long time, but because initially the inert peasantry also hotly entered the war.

Who were these participants of the Civil War - whiteor red? In general, it's hard to say. The peasants were rarely puzzled by some complicated questions from the field of political science, and therefore often acted on the principle of "against all". They wanted all the participants in the war to simply leave them alone, finally stopping requisitioning food.

End of conflict

Again, at the end of this confusion, people whoformed the backbone of the armies, also became more homogeneous. They, like the participants in the Civil War of 1917, were soldiers. Only it was already people who had passed through a severe school of civil conflict. They became the basis for the developing Red Army, many talented commanders came out of their ranks, later they stopped the terrible breakthrough of the fascists in the summer of 1941.

It remains only to sympathize with the participantsCivil War, since many of them, having begun to fight back in the First World War, never saw the peaceful sky above their heads in their entire life. I would like to hope that our country will not know the shocks like this war. All countries, whose population at some period of history were at war with each other, came to similar conclusions.