One division which proved very difficult for the White Army leaders to deal with were between the monarchists and the Don Cossacks. Generals often did not trust each other, refusing to fight alongside each other and often withheld military information like strategy and enemy movements from one another due to concerns about where their loyalties truly lay. The broad banner of former Tsarists, progressives, and other socialist parties like the Kadets and Mensheviks meant there were deep ideological and personal divisions between their own men and the commanders. This mixed nature of the Whites would eventually become their main downfall. However, it is known that the Red Army was solely made up off Bolsheviks and, as there were 40,000 members of the party, it can be estimated that they had around that number of soldiers fighting for them against the Whites, who consisted of every other party, paramilitary or political force within Russia. At the start of the civil war, the White Army was much bigger than the Reds, although exact numbers for the sizes of the two armies are hard to establish. The White Army’s weaknesses were the most significant factor in the Whites losing the civil war. This article will illustrate how the civil war began in the favour of the Whites, but through the previously established factors, it brought what should have been their victory to a trembling downfall. Historians such as Pipes credit the White Army as being better, but suggests that they failed due to its internal weakness, whereas Watts claims that the intervention, while initially being helpful, became a significant hindrance. These factors were the Whites own weaknesses, foreign intervention, unpopularity before the war, as well as Trotsky’s leadership of the Reds. The factors that decided the civil war were centred around the Whites (anti-Bolsheviks) more than they were the Reds (Bolsheviks). It was the final battle in what had been years of fighting for ultimate control of Russia. The fact that this one party had managed to take power in the Russian soviets against all other parties, including the right-wing Tsarists, would provide the political backdrop for the Russian civil war. The Russian revolution, and more specifically the October revolt in 1917, was the last phase in not only the takeover of the Russian state but in the Bolshevik takeover of power. The Russian civil war that started in 1917 was the climactic end to a tumultuous period within the Russian empire’s history, in which the Tsar was deposed, the first communist state in the world was established and the First World War was hammering Russia harder than most.

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