"Allied intervention was of dubious value: foreign arms and supplies aided the Whites, but were insufficient to insure victory and let the Reds pose as defenders of Mother Russia. Bolshevik propaganda portrayed White generals (wrongly) as reactionary tools of Western imperialism, and (more correctly) as aiming to restore the landlords. Conversely, the Reds possessed able leadership, a disciplined party, clever propaganda, and a flexible policy of national self-determination. The Red Army had central positions, better discipline, and numerical superiority" (Rempel 2009)
The Whites opposed the Reds, but did not really provide a coherent, singular ideological rallying point to marshal support in opposition to Lenin. Furthermore, the nationalist revolts in the provinces, although anti-Leninist, were by definition regional rather than cohesive in nature, and caused many ethnic Russians to support the Reds. Eventually, "The Bolsheviks gradually reasserted military and political control over the tsarist borderlands, except for Poland, Finland,...
In the west, they…incorporated Belorussia. After the Central Powers withdrew from the Ukraine at the end of 1918," the Ukraine's bounty could once again serve Russia's need for agricultural production (Rempel 2009).
Given the knowledge of what this would yield, in terms of the
blood,
pain, and suffering caused by subsequent Soviet repression, it is had to cheer the result of the Russian Civil War. However, it is important to remember that the Whites were not pro-democratic, for the most part, and that the
land had suffered oppression under the rule of the czar. As Russia lacked a formal sense of the democratic process, Marxist ideology evolved into a new tyranny under Lenin. The communists were faced with the challenges of attempting to create a new
government in the midst of a civil war for unwieldy, fractious, and sickly empire. From Lenin's point-of-view, brutality seemed the only way to create his idealistic, collectivist utopia.
Works Cited
Rempel, Gerhard. The Russian Civil War. Western New England College. July 5, 2009.
http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/russia/lectures/28civilwar.html
