Письменно переведите следующие словосочетания на русский/белорусский язык:

The hated October Provisional Government; top-rate leaders; the Great powers; a military genius in command; the powers; the Bolshevik regime; the Constituent Assembly; the democratically elected parliament; the Social revolutionaries; the First World War; a peace treaty; iron-producing areas; the supreme ruler of Russia.

Прочтите текст и ответьте на вопрос: Is there any difference between the official Soviet version of events and the real state of things?

The Russian Civil War

Did the Whites stand a chance?

The story of the Russian Civil War looks deceptively simple, and for a long time it suited Soviet governments. Essentially the official Soviet version of events looked like this:

The Bolsheviks overthrew the hated Provisional Government in the October Revolution, and their enemies joined forces to attack them. The Bolsheviks had no experience of leading armies and they were short of troops, ammunition and food. Their enemies, the ‘Whites’, were well trained and experienced, they had top-rate leaders, and they had plenty of military equipment. Above all, they had military support from all the Great Powers of the world – Britain, France, Japan and the USA. The Whites controlled huge areas of Russia. But they didn’t win. By an immense effort the Bolsheviks were able to recruit men and train them to fight. When the peasants withheld food, the Cheka (Bolshevik secret police) sent squads into the countryside to seize it. Above all, the Bolsheviks found – to their delight – that they had a military genius in command, in the person of Leon Trotsky.

This version looks simple, but if it is true even in outline, then it raises a lot of questions:

Why Was There a Civil War Anyway?

Let’s look at how the Civil War actually started. It is difficult to be precise about this because there was no point when one side ‘declared’ war on the other, but historians agree that there were two main events that triggered opposition to the Bolshevik regime and started the Civil War:

January 1918: Lenin closes down the Constituent Assembly

The Constituent Assembly was the democratically elected parliament.

Danger: a lot of groups who opposed the Tsar and the Provisional Government, such as the Social Revolutionaries, were angry at this move by Lenin. One of them, Fanya Kaplan, even managed to shoot Lenin and very nearly killed him.

March 1918: the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk