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Syria a Russian “hybrid armed conflict”  The two common features of the Russian Military Doctrines of 1987, 1993, 2000, 2010 and 2014 is their defensive nature and the growing attention paid to the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) phenomena. Despite widespread belief in the West, the key thesis of Russian Doctrine is to avoid […]

The Red versus White struggle was decided on the battlefield, but the outcome of civil wars also depends on the contenders’ ability, through politics and propaganda, to convince people to fight for them (or at least not to raise arms against them). In this field, governance, the Whites were a spectacular failure. Consequently, no matter […]

The supreme achievement of the Soviet government in the civil-wars years: the creation of the Red Army. Much of the credit for this has, rightly, been apportioned to war commissar L. D. Trotsky. The foregoing account of the 1919 campaigns concentrated on the White advances because the Reds tended not to make grand strategic decisions […]

Soldiers of the Don Army in 1919; a White infantry division in March 1920; soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Army; Leon Trotsky in 1918; hanging of workers in Yekaterinoslav (Dnipro) by the Austro-Hungarian Army, April 1918. The Bolsheviks’ victory in the Russian Civil War, was also made possible by the weakness of their enemies. The […]