The Russian Civil War is also instructive because the Cold War was quintessentially a military confrontation and a key episode in military history, a… - Russian Civil War

While all these untoward events were taking place, amid a ceaseless chatter of well-meant platitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, a new and more terrible cause of quarrel than the imperialism of czars and kaisers became apparent in Europe. The Civil War in Russia ended in the absolute victory of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviet armies which advanced to subjugate Poland were indeed repulsed in the Battle of Warsaw, but Germany and Italy nearly succumbed to Communist propaganda and designs. Hungary actually fell for a while under the control of the Communist dictator, Bela Kun. Although Marshal Foch wisely observed that “Bolshevism had never crossed the frontiers of victory,” the foundations of European civilisation trembled in the early post-war years. Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism. While Corporal Hitler was making himself useful to the German officer class in Munich by arousing soldiers and workers to fierce hatred of Jews and Communists, on whom he laid the blame of Germany’s defeat, another adventurer, Benito Mussolini, provided Italy with a new theme of government which, while it claimed to save the Italian people from Communism, raised himself to dictatorial power. As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into even more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction.

The same problems, of defeat at the hands of Germany, political division and social strain, weakened the Romanovs’ republican Social Democratic replacement, and this weakness provided the opportunity for a Bolshevik (Soviet Communist) coup in Russia later in 1917. The victory of the Bolsheviks over domestic foes and foreign intervention in the subsequent Russian Civil War (1918–21) ensured that their regime would not be short-lived, as for example was Communist rule in Hungary in 1919. The victory also furthered the identification of the Soviet regime with struggle, as well as giving such struggle a specific character. The war provided the regime with a strong rationale for opposition to Western states, notably the leading European empires, Britain and France, as well as the USA and, indeed, Japan.

In military history, the Russian Civil War is often brushed into a brief cul-de-sac, after a lengthy treatment of World War One, with the latter conventionally understood as the move into modern and total warfare. That approach is mistaken, not least because it fails to accept the military significance of the Russian Civil War and the modern and total war it represented, but also the degree to which the Soviet Union was born in the experience of civil war, and took on part of its character accordingly. This was a civil war that for long appeared to hang in the balance. For both sides, force was linked to fear in a sense of assault from linked threats, internal and external. The reaction on the part of the Communists was one of unparalleled brutality, although, even without the civil war, the Communists would probably have conducted themselves pretty much the same. Much of the content and tone of the writings before the Russian Civil War of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the Communist leader, predicted what would happen. However, a dream of violence was superseded by a grimmer reality. Such a trajectory was more generally the case for the establishment of Communist regimes. Others were born in the experience of civil war, including Albania, Yugoslavia, China, Cuba, Vietnam and Ethiopia, and such a trajectory would also have been true for would-be Communist regimes. Moreover, as with the Soviet Union, such civil war frequently overlapped with international conflict. This was frequently presented in terms of revolutionary struggle with imperial and colonial powers.