Civil War in Siberia by Jonathan D. Smele

The Bolsheviks also suppressed or co-opted many of the independence movements which had caused problems for various factions in the early phases of the war. The Whites retreated frantically further east and south their hopeless resistance persisted until 1923. When the White cause became a lost cause, the Entente powers withdrew and left the Whites basically defeated by late 1919. Kolchak's military offensives proved ineffective due to the unfavorable terrain of eastern Russia as well as the general lack of public support for the Whites, while the Red Army conscripted huge numbers of soldiers and controlled Russia's industry. The Whites were immediately weakened by infighting, though, as a coup brought Russian admiral Alexander Kolchak to power in Siberia and turned the rump Russia into a military dictatorship. While the Bolsheviks dominated much of European Russia due to their popularity with rural peasants and city laborers, the Whites established a rump state further east in Siberia. The October Revolution had caused the collapse of the Russian Provisional Government (in power from March to November 1917), meaning that warlords and separatists had the chance to rise up with little initial resistance. Some of the Central Powers including the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, also intervened to keep the territorial gains which Lenin had promised them in the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Many of the various Entente nations of WWI, including the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Japan, intervened in support of the White armies. Also involved were anarchists, peasant revolts, stray Czechs, and separatists from various fringe regions in the old Russian Empire, especially the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, the Baltic states, and Ukraine.

Opposing the Reds, the loosely-allied White Movement included just about every other political interest in Russia, the monarchists and capitalists and (some) social democrats, all of whom fought against the rise of Bolshevik rule. The Red Guards, inspired by the Bolshevik faction led by Vladimir Lenin, seized control of Petrograd (present-day Saint Petersburg) during the October Revolution and cast out the old Russian Provisional Government in the name of communism. It was the consequence of political upheaval in the era of World War I (WWI), which first caused the February Revolution, which overthrew the Tsar of Russia in March 1917, and then led to the October Revolution of the same year. The Russian Civil War was a multi-faction clusterfuck which tore Russia apart between the years 19.

Civil War in Siberia by Jonathan D. Smele