The Red Army

Trotsky and the soldiers of Kronstadt pursue the retreating rebel forces. America, Japan and the British send in support of 200,000 to support the White Army in its battle against the Lenin and the Bolshevik Regime's Red Army.

The Bolshevik leadership believed the Kronstadt sailors were the most resolute and loyal of forces of the Red Cause.

Trotsky and the Kronstadt sailors went back on the river chasing the retreating rebel forces. Aboard the ship that had previously belonged to the murdered Royal family, now a staff ship, Larisa Reisner was exploring her new position as commissar and wife of Fedor Raskolnikov, now commander of the Baltic Fleet.

While aboard, Larisa Reisner noticed the former Czarena Alexandria had etched her name in the window, and she replaced it with her own.

A few months later, on the 11th of November 1918, the war with Germany ended.

Europe seemed to be at peace, but for Russia there was no end to death and killing. The country had exploded into massive civil war that would cause more deaths in Russia, than all the bloody years of the first world war.

The Civil War had grown into a power struggle between the Bolshevik Reds and Conservative White Generals. These men wanted a return to Imperialists rule, to life before the Revolution.

Unlike the trench war with the Germans in the West, the Civil War was fast-moving, troops covered thousands of miles on armored trains and swept across the country-side on horseback.

While the Reds struggled in the War against Germany, the Whites had the advantage. Hurriedly, the government moved the capitol from Petrograd to Moscow as the area controlled by the Bolsheviks shrank to not much more than the core of European Russia. The Whites also had the support of the newly victorious European powers. They saw Lenin's worldwide Communist mission as a clear threat to Democracy and capitalism. Britain, France, America and Japan together sent 200,000 troops to help supply the Whites and strangle any Bolshevik expansion, by keeping them busy at home.

With the collapse of Germany came intervention, or at least support for the Whites becomes a much more serious possibility. The Baltic Sea and Black Sea is open, Turkey has pulled out of the war, and for that allies can move forces into Central Russia.

References

Russian Revolution in Color (DVD)
The Russian Revolution and Civil War, this bloodsoaked time from the battlefields, testimonies, and colorized archives help unfold the dramatic story of the Communist rise and seizure of power in 1917.