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lenin personally killed the entire invading force and they're victims of communism
You joke but the invaders are certainly in the black book, as are all the civilians they killed and blamed on the reds.
Red and People Liberation Armies do have a knack for handing out Ls to better equiped , founded and even numerous reactionary armies
The Long March (aka the greatest strategic retreat in military history) saw a ,supported by no one externaly, the PLA drop from 200k+ to sub 30k numbers and party to sub 50k members while escaping encriclement from the (,backed by basicaly everyone,controlling 90% of China and being millions strong) nationalists for 7k miles under the harshest conditions. 1-2 years later at the start of the Sino-Japanese war they already had recovered most of their numbers and by the end of the Sino-Japanese war they were 4 million strong and supported by a hundred million peasants
Legit shounen anime tier against all odds arc
Turns out workers and peasants are more willing to support and shelter you when you don't plunder their belongings and conscript them into warlord armies.
Yeah, the civil war afterwards also had numbers that made it look like a sure thing victory for the KMT. Something like 10x the amount of soldiers, artillery and air support from the US etc. yet they lost swift and hard. Turns out that support from the people makes a pretty big difference.
that is the power of the people's protracted war :mao-aggro-shining:
Leadership Incompetence, poor supply and logistics routes, shitty communications between forces, incoherent ideologies of the white movement, and general dislike of continuing fighting after finishing ww1
I imagine it's difficult to defeat an insurgency like the taliban but in a country the size of russia
Don't fight a land war in Asia
But also most of the support from the imperialists was not direct intervention, rather supplying and advising White Armies. The only country that wasn't war weary was the US and we only sent soldiers to Archangel under British officers (I believe some of the American soldiers there actually supported the revolution but I lost my source). The Bolsheviks were almost right about every capitalist power being about to explode in revolution so it was smarter to disarm.
The Czechs didn't even become a country until after the intervention was well underway. The Czechoslovak legion fought its way through Russia to get to Poland IIRC, so not like it counts as a real allied power any more than Poland
The latter steeled their resolve, and got those who previously had little love for the Bolsheviks to join the Red Army. Tanks rolling through and planes bombing workers and peasants and killing your people in the crossfire tends to make you empathize with the practically defenseless people the major militaries are firing at you in order to hit
My dad claims that when he was a child, he lived next to a guy who was a member of the British force that participated in the invasion of Russia. If I remember correctly he was still bitter about losing, and he was half deaf from an injury sustained in WWI. How anyone could live through that fucking nightmare and then think "more war? sign me up!" is beyond me.
:le-pol-face: (capitalists) vs (communists) :gigachad-hd:
:stalin-feels-good:
https://imgur.com/a/ks0rOK3
The Wikipedia page for the White Movement lol. Democratic socialists purged you say. Who would have guessed
There is not one K-12 history class in the US that teaches this actually happened.
Reading the memoirs of the British officers there is a real fun time. The Whites were so fucking incompetent. Half their generals thought the bayonet was the weapon of choice and the rest were there to grift and loot before fleeing to Paris (as was half the allies.)
Are there any good books about this time period? Preferably audio books.
It's not a whole book, but chapter 8 from History of the CPSU(B) that covers that whole period. It's also not super long: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1939/x01/ch08.htm
And here's a text-to-speech recording of the chapter: https://youtu.be/CICY79HKEYo
