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

Civil war, the beginning of which is officially considered 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. Simply put, a participant in the Civil War could not be sure even in his immediate family. It happened that entire families destroyed themselves because of cardinal differences in their political views.

The history of those events is still full of mysteries and riddles, but ordinary ordinary people rarely think 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 one is an animal-like peasant dressed almost in the skin, the white one is the ideological "mister officer" with the views of the idealist, and the green one is an analog of the anarchist Makhno?

Of course, everything is much more complicated, since such a division exists only in the pages of the most radical historical books, which now, unfortunately, are still used to desecrate the history of our country. So, of all the most difficult periods, the Civil War continues to remain the most vague one . The causes, 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 homogeneous was the composition of the troops except 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 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 conclude a peace with the German.

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

Paradoxes of the prewar period

The beginning of the Soviet period, when Lenin promised peace to the soldiers, could be marked by the complete cessation of the influx of experienced front-line soldiers into the Red Army troops, but ... On the contrary, throughout 1918 all parties to the conflict regularly received a mass influx of new soldiers, almost 70% of whom had previously fought on the Russian- -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, the soldiers again went to war?

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 the fact that they have no problems with food (of course, they were, but rations were still issued almost always), that all issues 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 the Civil War participants in Russia later recalled (regardless of their political views), practically all the 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 formations were obtained from self-defense units or certain groups of military liaison officers seconded by the tsarist officers for the protection of some railway stations, warehouses, etc. The backbone were former soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and sometimes " Full-fledged "officers, who for whatever reason found themselves in isolation from the units that they commanded initially.

"It was more interesting" if there was a Cossack participant in the Civil War. There are many known cases where 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 their "inability to stand up for themselves." When these "peasants" 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 the participants of the Civil War in Russia became more and more heterogeneous. If before the backbone of the various gangs or "official" military formations were former royal soldiers, now the real "vinaigrette" has been rolling along the roads of the countries. The standard of living finally fell, and therefore for weapons taken all without exception.

To this same period belong the "special" participants of the 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 national minorities 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 with the same gangsters in Turkmenistan, the Soviet authorities understood almost before the start 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 period in the ranks of all armies of the Civil War there were 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 led to a constant drop in the standard of living. Against the backdrop of the strongest depletion of the peasants, more and more people became interested in "requisitioning" the last grain or livestock. Naturally, such a state of affairs could not last for a long time, but because initially the inert peasantry also heatedly entered the war.

Who were these participants of the Civil War - white or 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 mess, the people who formed the skeleton 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, a number of 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 participants of the Civil War, since many of them, having begun to fight back in the First World War, have never seen a peaceful sky over 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.