--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> Well, the American revolutionaries were supported by
> a minority too --
> about 1/3 of the pop.
>
> If there was so little support for the bolshies why
> was it such a quiet
> revolution? Why did the civil war have to be
> fomented by outside powers?
> Why did the bolshies win the civil war?
>
> I am not an expert but I hazily remember that the
> twenties was an era of
> high hopes in the USSR.
>
>
I am not an expert either, but my impression (which may be totally wrong) is that the Bolsheviks had the support of large chunks of the urban proletariat. As Lenin said (I paraphrase), "you only need to control the capital." The peasantry and lots of other people were turned off by the Civil War and War Communism. The Civil War was AWFUL. The Whites would come into your village and slaughter everybody who supported the Reds. Then the Reds would come into your village and slaughter everybody who supported the Whites. Then the Anarchists would come and slaughter everyone who had through some miracle managed to survive. There was famine. And the "let's blow up churches and mosques" policy wasn't too popular either.
IMO the main reason the Red Army won the civil war is that the arms and ammunition factories were located in Bolshevik-controlled territory.
By the mid-1920s, huge numbers of people had fled Russia. The NEP was working very successfully. That's a much different situation from 1917-1920.
But then maybe I'm just feeling an exaggerated burst of anti-Bolshevik feeling because I'm currently on the Don, which Lenin called a "nest of counter-revolution," and the Cheka went on a rampage here. The Bolsheviks shot 19,000 Cossack atamans here in 1919. The scars are deep.
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