Against all odds the Russian Revolution fought off counter-revolution and foreign intervention for three years in a bloody civil war. Eighty years after that war's conclusion it is still a battleground for revolutionary socialists. The conflict remains a favourite target for right wing attacks on the Russian Revolution, and is a major focus of left wing critics who imprint their ideological confusion in the aftermath of the collapse of Stalinism onto the revolutionary period. The policies associated with War Communism ending workers' control of the factories, requisitioning grain from the peasants and the constriction of democracy are seen as the seedbed of forced industrialisation, collectivisation, the show trials and the gulag. A collection of documents from the civil war is introduced with this argument: "The events of 1918-1922 ... foreshadow all the horrors of the Stalin period". [1]
In assessing the trajectory of the revolution, however, it is important to separate......
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