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The Russian civil war
In the five years after the fisrt shots in the Bolshevik uprising in 1917 life became Russias cheapest camodity. Czarist troops mutinied, murdering their officers . Soon cities seethed with mobs of rampaging soldiers and sailors whose numbers swelled when a quickly concluded peace with Germany releasedmillions of men from the front.This was a golden chance to settle grudges political or personel thousands did but soon this grew into the more methodical death dance of a civil war.
Red armies of Bolsheviks battled the White forces of the counter revolutionaries all around the edeges of the former Russian Empire. Guerrillas harried both sides and few oportunities for slaughter were missed, on the battle field or elsewhere . At Stavrapol in southern Russia, White Genral Peter Wrangel captured 3000 Red soldiers and -to induce the rank and file to join his forces -shot all of their 370 officers and noncoms. At Nikolaevsk , one Siberian partisan band massacred 6000 Russian men,women and children along with a Japanese garrison. Red sailors at Sevastpol killed hundreds of men women and children.Siberian forces under the White commander Alexander Kolchak exucuted 1,500 captives at Omsk. White Cosacks dragged in prisoners at the ends of Lariats reds nailed the epaulettes of captured White officers to their shoulders a troublesome Red guerrilla who fell into White hands was roasted alive in the firebox of a locamotive.
Horroifying though these military killings were , what happened to civilians was if any thing worse Whit progroms in southern Russia alone killed some 100,000 jews. The Cheka or Red secret police executed scores of thousands including 500 luckless victims in Petrograd slain in retaliation for the assassination of the local Cheka boss. Disease and hunger, sweeping the land in wake of national chaos took 3.5 million russians from Typhus and another two million more from starvation. Altogether, Those five ghastly years of civil war, accompanied by famine and pestilence killed upto 15 million russians 6.5 million more than the total deathes on all fronts during World War One.
Last edited by Kurttis Thomas; July 8th, 2008 at 03:45 AM.
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July 8th, 2008, 02:53 AM
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