Welcome to a history of Europe, the interwar years.

This is part three of four on the Russian Civil War.

The October Revolution of 1917 is a pivotal date in the history of Europe.

Looking back, it is extraordinary how easy the provisional government fell that fateful day, with hardly a shot fired. The Bolsheviks captured a winter palace and the rest of the city of St. Petersburg, then known as Petrograd, with astonishing ease.

The long-term consequences, however, were profound. For the next few years, a civil war shook Russia at the cost of millions of lives.

In the previous two episodes, I described the first months of the war, in which the Bolsheviks grew in strength,

consolidating their hold on all but the outer peripheries of the Russian Tsarist Empire, which they had inherited.

They must have hoped to finish the war as soon as possible.

Their other ambition was to recover part of the empire

which had effectively gained independence, both the Western borderlands which they had been

compelled to let go as part of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, and also some

regions which were logistically more difficult to get to from central Russia, such as the Caucasus Mountains.

Lenin and his Bolshevik party faced numerous acts of counter-revolution

from remnants of the old regime and also from other socialist groups with which they had disagreements,

but these were generally small and uncoordinated and

could be successfully put down by sending Red Guard troops along the railway lines to stamp

any descent. The main exception in the first months were the Cossacks, who were military-trained

and had a strong sense of identity, and most of whom opposed the Bolsheviks.

Even they, however, struggled against the much more numerous Red Guard armies, and by mid-1918 were on the run,

and looked like they would soon be defeated.

In 1918, the Western Allies, mainly Britain but also other countries, started to intervene after Lenin, decided to withdraw Russia from the First World War.

Initially, the motivation of the Allies was to prevent the central powers, principally Germany,

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