The Russian Civil War

The October Revolution of 1917 and the outcome of the ensuing Civil War (1917-1921) were to transform the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially and culturally. These events profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of the 20th century.

The Russian Civil War was primarily fought between the Bolsheviks, a determined group of socialist revolutionaries, and the Whites, mainly former officers of the tsarist army. But it also involved peasant rebels, nationalists, especially in Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states, expeditionary forces of the victorious Allied powers, determined to crush the revolution, and remnants of the German army. It was one of the most brutal and tragic periods in Russian history, which did much to shape the new Soviet order after 1922.  Professor Stephen Smith will consider how it was that, after the idealism of the October Revolution, the events of the Civil War ended up crushing hopes for democratic socialism.

Professor Smith, who is steeped in the history of this period, will provide an up-to-date, illustrated historical analysis of the key events of the Civil War which ensued in the wake of the 1917 October Revolution.

Professor Stephen Smith is a British historian and academic of considerable distinction. Since 2012 he has been Professor of History at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1995, and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2014.

Professor Smith read modern history at Oriel College, Oxford. He was then awarded a Master of Social Science degree in Soviet studies from Birmingham University, where he was subsequently awarded a Ph.D for his thesis "The Russian Revolution and the factories of Petrograd, February 1917 to June 1918".

While completing his Ph.D, Professor Smith studied at Moscow State University from 1976 to 1977, and then joined the history faculty of Essex University as a lecturer in 1977. He was promoted to a senior lectureship in 1984 and was then appointed Professor of History in 1991. He was Professor of Comparative History at the European University Institute in Florence from 2008-2012, when he was appointed Professor of History at Oxford University and a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. From 2009- 2014 he was also editor of the journal Past & Present.

In his profile on the All Souls College website, Professor Smith declares that his "research interests are in the histories of modern Russia and China and in comparative Communism."

He is the author of Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge University Press, 2008).