The Russian Civil War followed the Bolshevik overthrow of the tsarist regime in October 1917. The struggle between the Reds and the Whites, and the intervention of English, French, and American forces against the Bolsheviks, made Russia an active battlefield and an absence at the postwar settlement. The episode also framed a wider argument about the new Soviet government: whether its revolutionary dictatorship could remake economic life, and what kind of political order that promised.

Background and participants

The old tsarist regime was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in October 1917. A civil war then raged between the Reds, identified with the Bolsheviks, and the Whites. The account presents the conflict against the backdrop of a broader European war settlement: after the First World War, the victorious and defeated powers met at the palace of Versailles, outside Paris, to set the terms of peace, while Russia had no representation there.

The conflict was not only a domestic contest. English, French, and American forces sent an expeditionary force to fight against the Bolsheviks. Their involvement made the struggle part of the international response to the revolution, even as the postwar conference proceeded without a Russian delegation.

The Moscow mission

Amid the conflict, a mission led by the young diplomat William Bullitt and the veteran intellectual and journalist Lincoln Steffens went to Moscow to meet Lenin. Its purpose was to understand the Bolsheviks’ intentions and explore the terms on which relations and peace might be possible. Steffens’s presence helped make the mission appear credible and not excessively hostile: he was known as an iconoclastic muckraker who had persistently denounced the evils of capitalism in the United States, and he had been in Russia during the revolution.

The mission returned with the outlines of an offer from Lenin concerning what would be required for peace with the newly created Soviet Union. The account emphasizes Steffens’s response to the Soviet regime’s perceived potential. In his 1931 autobiography, he described a dictatorship supported by a trained minority that planned a gradual reorganization of economic forces, with economic democracy preceding political democracy. That statement records Steffens’s interpretation of the regime, not an outcome established by the civil war itself.

Significance and limits of the account

The civil war’s place in the narrative is closely tied to the Soviet Union’s emergence and to competing hopes for its future. Steffens understood the Soviet project as a revolutionary government pursuing long-term change rather than trying to abolish poverty, privilege, and tyranny through immediate action. His account conveys the appeal the project held for a critic of American capitalism, while also naming the price of its proposed sequence: dictatorship first, political democracy later.

The evidence here establishes the war’s opposing sides, foreign intervention, Russia’s absence at Versailles, and the Moscow mission’s attempt to assess Lenin’s aims. It does not detail the military course, the war’s duration, its outcome, or the human and political consequences of particular campaigns. The event’s significance in this account therefore rests on the clash over the new Soviet order and the international effort to understand—and oppose—it.