The White troops gain Tsaritsyn in July and Kazan in August. However, the trigger for the release of cruelty is the murder of Uritsky, a member of the Petrograd Cheka, and Fanny Kaplan’s attempt to kill Lenin on the same day, August 30. Both terrorist attacks are conducted by the Socialist-Revolutionaries. However, the Reds say: We will respond to the White terror with the Red Terror”. The corresponding decree is signed on September 5. In the same month, the Bolsheviks win the first major victory — they occupy Kazan.

 In November 1918, as the result of the coup in Ufa, Admiral Kolchak comes to power. He declares himself the supreme ruler of Russia. Together with the army of General Denikin on the Don and General Yudenich in the Baltics, Kolchak forms three main centers of the White movement. First, the Red Army attacks Yudenich, and in November an attack on the Baltics begins. The Bolsheviks gain Kiev in March 1919 and Odessa in April.

 In the summer, the Red Army dislodges Kolchak from Ufa (the Whites lose the Urals) and repels Yudenich’s attack on Petrograd. However, Denikin is making progress in the south: Kharkov and Tsaritsyn are gained in June, Kiev in the late summer, Kursk in September and Orel in October. The White army is on its way to Moscow. The counterattack of the Red began in October. The Reds regained Kharkov and Kiev by the end of the year, and Tsaritsyn, Krasnoyarsk and Rostov in January 1920. They drove out the armies of the White generals and consolidated a strategic advantage.

 In January, Kolchak renounces his title in favor of Denikin. In February, the admiral is shot in Irkutsk. However, Denikin’s leadership does not last long — in March, he retreats to Crimea and transfers power to Wrangel. After the short Soviet-Polish war, which began in March, the Red Army begins the siege of Crimea in October and gains it completely by November. The remainder of the White movement and civilians, about 140 thousand people, leave the peninsula on ships of the Allies.


Visualization in the Road to Calvary

Telegin delivers guns and equipment on a towboat to Tsaritsyn, besieged by the Whites. Upon arrival, he is appointed commander of the battery and takes part in battles. Tsaritsyn fights off the attack of the Whites. Dasha, working in the infirmary, recognizes Telegin in the wounded commander. She hasn’t seen him since the time in St. Petersburg. Roshchin, who fails to find Katya, returns to the army, but thinks about desertion, as he is completely disappointed in the White movement. He is captured by Makhno’s detachment and when he joins the Red Army, Roshchin is charged with a task to develop a plan for the uprising in Ekaterinoslav. After successful operations in Kiev, Roshchin is appointed Chief of Staff of Telegin’s brigade. The old friends sort things out at last and realize that they are on the same side of the barricades.

The very sources of inspiration of the Russian people were a mystery… The peasants who told fairy tales, the workers from the broken-down factories, with their tall chimneys long cold, wrestling with famine, typhus, and economic collapse, were routing and pursuing Denikin and his first-rate army, had stopped Yudenich’s shock troops at the very-gates of Petrograd, hurling them back upon Estonia, had overcome and scattered over the Siberian snows the vast army of Kolchak… believed themselves to be stronger than all the rest of the world, believed that they could build up, on the ruins of their impoverished state, a just communist society in the near future”.

The Road to Calvary by A. N. Tolstoy