Russian Civil War · War Crimes & Atrocities

The Darkest Hours

The Russian Civil War was characterized by systematic atrocity on all sides — the Red Terror and White Terror, mass pogroms against Jews, the use of chemical weapons against Russian peasants, and the massacre of prisoners and civilians on a scale that shocked even contemporary observers hardened by the First World War. The Cheka's execution of hundreds of thousands of 'class enemies' established the template for Soviet political violence that culminated in the Stalinist terror. White forces and Ukrainian nationalist armies conducted some of the worst anti-Semitic pogroms in history, killing between 150,000 and 200,000 Jews in Ukraine alone — a preview of the Holocaust that took place two decades later over the same ground. The suppression of the Tambov peasant rebellion by Tukhachevsky's forces, using poison gas against Russian villages, was among the first uses of chemical weapons against a civilian population anywhere in the world. These atrocities were not incidental to the war but integral to how all sides fought it.