war gave respite to the southern White Army
and even enabled Denikin's successor General Baron Peter Wrangel to recapture a large section of southern Russia. But with the end of the Polish war in the autumn, the Red Army concentrated again on the southern front. After more bitter fighting, Wrangel, his remaining army, and a considerable number of civilians, altogether about 100,000 people, were evacuated on Allied ships to Constantinople in mid-November. Other and weaker counterrevolutionary strongholds, such as that in Archangel, had already fallen. By the end of 1920 the White movement had been effectively defeated.
The great Civil War in Russia was complicated by Allied intervention, by the war between the Soviet government and Poland, and by bids for national independence on the part of a number of peoples of the former empire of the Romanovs who were not Great Russians. The intervention began in 1918 and involved fourteen countries; the Japanese in particular sent a sizeable force into Russia - over 60,000 men. Great Britain dispatched altogether some 40,000 troops, France and Greece two divisions each, and the United States about 10,000 men, while Italy and other countries - except for the peculiar case of the Czechs - sent smaller, and often merely token, forces. The Allies originally wanted to prevent the Germans from seizing war materiel in such ports as Archangel and Murmansk, as well as to observe the situation, while the Japanese wanted to exploit the opportunities presented in the Far East by the collapse of Russian power. Japanese troops occupied the Russian part of the island of Sakhalin and much of Siberia east of Lake Baikal. Detachments of American, British, French, and Italian troops followed the Japanese into Siberia, while other Allied troops landed, as already mentioned, in northern European Russia, as well as in southern ports such as Odessa, occupied by the French, and Batum, occupied by the British. Allied forces assumed a hostile attitude toward the Soviet government, blockaded the Soviet coastline from October 1919 to January 1920, and often helped White movements by providing military supplies - such as some British tanks for Denikin's army - and by their very presence and protection. But they often avoided actual fighting. This fruitless intervention ended in 1920 with the departure of Allied troops, except that the Japanese stayed in the Maritime Provinces of the Russian Far East until 1922 and in the Russian part of Sakhalin until 1925.
The Soviet-Polish war was fought in 1920 from the end of April until mid-October. The government of newly independent Poland opened hostili-
ties to win the western Ukraine and western White Russia, which the Poles considered part of their 'historic heritage,' although ethnically the areas in question were not Polish. The ancient struggle between the Poles and the Russians resumed its course, with this time the Russians, that is, the Soviet government, in an apparently desperate situation. Actually the war produced more than one reversal of fortune. First, in June and July the Poles overran western Russian areas; next the Red Army, led by Michael Tukhachevsky and others, staged a mighty counteroffensive that reached the very gates of Warsaw; then the Poles, helped by French credits and Allied supplies, defeated the onrushing Reds and gained the upper hand. The Treaty of Riga of March 18, 1921, gave Poland many of the lands it desired, establishing the boundary a considerable distance east of the ethnic line, as well as of the so-called Curzon Line, which approximated the ethnic line and which the Allies had regarded as the just settlement.
National independence movements in the former empire of the Romanovs during the years following 1917 defy comprehensive description in a textbook and have to be left to special works, such as Pipes's study. As early as 1917 Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and White Russia declared their independence. They were followed in 1918 by Estonia, Ukraine, Poland - once German troops were evacuated - the Transcaucasian Federation - to be dissolved into the separate states of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia - and certain political formations in the east. The Soviet government had proclaimed the right of self-determination of peoples, but it became quickly apparent that it considered independence movements as bourgeois and counterrevolutionary. Those peoples that were successful in asserting their independence, that is, the Finns, the Estonians, the Latvians, and the Lithuanians, as well as the Poles, did so in spite of the Soviet government, which was preoccupied with other urgent matters. Usually they had to suppress their own Communists, sometimes, as in the case of Finland, after a full-fledged civil war. All except Poland and Lithuania became independent states for the first time. In other areas the Red Army and local Communists combined to destroy independence.
Developments in Ukraine turned out to be perhaps the most complicated of all. There the local government, the Rada or central council, and the General Secretariat, proclaimed a republic of the Ukrainian people after the fall of the Provisional Government in Petrograd. Soviet authorities recognized the new republic, but in February 1918 the Red Army overthrew the Rada. Soviet rule, established in the spring of 1918, was in turn
overthrown by the advancing German army. The Germans at first accepted the Rada, but before long they sponsored instead a Right-wing government under Paul Skoropadsky. After the Germans left, the Directory of the Rada deposed Skoropadsky in December 1918, only to be driven out in short order by Denikin's White forces. Following Denikin's withdrawal in the autumn of 1919, Soviet troops restored Soviet authority in Ukraine. Next the Directory of the Rada made an agreement with the Poles, only to be left out at the peace treaty terminating the Soviet-Polish War, which simply divided Ukraine between Soviet Russia and Poland. Ukrainians supported different movements and fought in different armies as well as in countless anarchic peasant bands. Political divisions survived the collapse of the Ukrainian bid for independence and later divided Ukrainian emigres. Yet it remains an open question to what extent the young Ukrainian nationalism, nurtured especially among the Ukrainian intellectuals in Austrian Galicia, had penetrated the peasant masses of the Russian Ukraine.
Among the peoples living to the south and southeast of European Russia, many of whom had been joined to the Russian Empire as late as the nineteenth century, numerous independence movements arose and independent states were proclaimed. The new states included the Crimean Tartar republic, the Transcaucasian republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, the Bashkir, Kirghiz, and Kokand republics, the emirates of Bokhara and Khiva, and others. Time and again local interests clashed and bitter local civil wars developed. In certain instances foreign powers, such as Turkey, Germany, and Great Britain, played important roles. The Men-shevik government of Georgia distinguished itself by the relative stability and effectiveness of its rale. But - without going into complicated and varied detail - whether new authorities received much or little popular support, they succumbed eventually to Soviet strength allied with local Communists. The fall of the independent Georgian government in 1921 marked essentially the end of the process, although native partisans in Central Asia, the 'Basmachi,' were not finally suppressed until 1926.
Few observers believed that the Bolsheviks would survive the ordeal of Civil War, national independence movements, war against Poland, and Allied intervention. Lenin himself, apparently, had serious doubts on that score. The first years of the Soviet regime have justly become a legendary Communist epic, its lustre undimmed even by the titanic events of the Second World War. Yet, a closer look puts the picture into a better focus and helps to explain the Bolshevik victory without recourse to magic in
Marxism or superhuman qualities of Red fighters. To begin with, Allied intervention - the emphatic Soviet view to the contrary notwithstanding - represented anything but a determined and co-ordinated effort to strangle the new Communist regime. Kennan, Ullman, and other scholars have shown how much misunderstanding and confusion went into the Allied policies toward Russia, which never amounted to more than a half-hearted support of White movements. Allied soldiers and sailors, it might be added, saw even less reason for intervening than did their commanders. The French navy mutinied in the Black Sea, while the efficiency of American units was impaired by unrest as well as by a fervent desire to return home. The Labor party in Great Britain and various groups elsewhere exercised what pressure they could against intervention. Ill-conceived and poorly executed, the Allied intervention produced in the end little or no result. The Poles, by contrast, knew what they wanted and obtained it by means of a successful war. Their goals, however, did not include the destruction of the Soviet regime in Russian territory proper. National independence movements also had aims limited to their localities, and were, besides, usually quite weak. The Soviet government could, therefore, defeat many of them one by one and at the time of its own choosing, repudiating its earlier promises when convenient, as in the cases of Ukraine and the Trans-caucasian
