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Other White forces gathered along the Volga and in Siberia. Perhaps most significant was the Czech Legion, tsarist POWs scheduled for repatriation; ordered to disarm, they resisted and soon found themselves at war with the Bolsheviks. In Siberia (with its strong tradition of autonomous regionalism and great ethnic diversity), moderate SRs and Kadets created the ‘Siberian Regional Council’ at Omsk. On the Volga, radical SRs under Chernov established the ‘Committee to Save the Constituent Assembly’ (Komuch). These SRs evoked little popular support and deemed White generals a greater menace than the Bolsheviks—a sentiment reciprocated by the military. In September 1918 they met at Ufa in a lame attempt to re-establish the Provisional Government (as a ‘Directory’), but it lacked even a programme, much less an apparatus to implement it. In November 1918 the military ousted the radicals (in a coup marked by executions and brutality that were becoming the norm) and installed Admiral A. Kolchak as military dictator and ‘Supreme Ruler’. Kolchak was emblematic of White leadership: a man of deep personal integrity, courage, and patriotism, but a taciturn and erratic personality completely lost in the world of politics. His forces never mounted a sustained threat; he even failed to obtain diplomatic recognition from the allies (at the instigation of Woodrow Wilson, who heeded Kerensky’s advice). He was finally captured and executed by the Cheka in early 1920.

The previous year had already marked the high point of the White assault, mounted from the south by A. I. Denikin’s Volunteer Army. He launched the offensive in the spring of 1919, but made the fatal blunder of splitting his army into two units: a smaller force under Baron P. N. Wrangel (which captured Tsaritsyn on 30 June), a larger formation advancing into the Donbas. In the ‘Moscow Directive’ of 3 July Denikin ordered an assault on the capital along a very broad front stretching from Samara to Kursk. It was an all-or-nothing gamble, for Denikin realized that the Red Army was growing more powerful by the hour, and that further Allied support was dubious. He counted on enthusiasm from the momentary flush of victory, as his armies rapidly captured Kursk, Voronezh, Chernigov, and (on 13–14 October) Orel—a town just 300 kilometres from Moscow. Simultaneously White forces under N. N. Iudenich advanced on Petrograd. But White fortunes soon changed: on 18–19 October Semen Budennyi’s Red Cavalry counter-attacked and smashed the White army advancing on Tula; it was only a matter of time before victory followed in the north, the Crimea, and Ukraine. The final denouement came in 1920, as the remaining White forces, under General Wrangel, were evacuated to Constantinople.

Bolshevik victories, which seemed unlikely, were due to several factors. Geography afforded great strategic advantage: the Bolshevik hold on the central provinces permitted shorter lines of supply and communications, whereas White forces were stretched out along the periphery—in the south, along the Volga, in Siberia, western borderlands, and Ukraine. Moreover, Bolsheviks were better prepared to mobilize human and material resources, for their state administration capitalized on the personnel and organizations of preceding regimes. Whites, by contrast, were inept administrators; their camp was a mobile army engaged in field operations, with neither the skill nor the inclination to put down administrative roots.

Ideology was also important in the Bolshevik victory. The socialist vision had not lost its lustre for many workers, peasants, and white-collar workers. Although Bolshevik social and economic polices unquestionably provoked considerable opposition, the government at least had policies and, more important, provided a public discourse to rationalize these as essential for plebeian victory in a class war. By contrast, the Whites symbolized property and privilege; they utterly failed to articulate an alternative vision acceptable to workers, peasants, and other plebeians caught up in the revolutionary storm.