The Russian Civil War 1918-1922
The plot of the thriller Red Snow, Gold Clouds by Marianna Baker and Anna Baker is based on the diary of Lidia Markov, the great-grandmother of Andrew Bartholomew, the book’s main character. The diary narrates Lidia’s dramatic escape from the Russian Civil War in 1919 to Harbin, China, and tells of Lidia’s tragic love affair with General Baratov and how they and two White Army officers hid seven boxes of the Czar’s Gold in the Siberian taiga. Chapters seven and eight focus on their dramatic journey to a new life. You may want to read a short account of the Russian Civil War to help you better understand the story’s setting.
Two revolutions, two armies, millions of deaths. Russian Civil War can be told in numbers if we’re trying to create a general background, but in this case, the facts are more important.
When the October Revolution of 1917 finally came to an end, giving the victory to the Bolsheviks, (renamed as the Red Army), they had to confront a new difficulty: the inevitable union of all their enemies. The new unified force was known as the great White Army or the White Movement. It was made up of the Czar’s imperial army, the fierce Kozakhs, the Mensheviks and some other left groups defeated in the revolution, and nationalist groups from every territory of the recently extinct empire.
In the wake of the Czar’s assassination and later with the end of the European war; new armies, regional governments, foreign interventions and all kinds of factions started to form in order to continue their own agendas (with the promise of exterminating all the others eventually.) Czarists, liberal republicans, communists, anarchists, Czechs, Ukrainians, Mongols, Allies from other countries, and many others, confronted each other restlessly in what was probably the cruelest and most bloody civil war of the western history.
We’re talking about nearly six years of civil war between November 1917 and June 1923. Historical leaders such as Czar Nicholas II and Alexander Kolchak on the white side (both killed in different moments) and Lenin and Trotsky on the red side (whose implacable strategies would result victorious), headed this long and messy battle for power in the vast territory that would eventually turn into the controversial world power of the Soviet Union. According to some, the final death toll was above three million souls, evaporated between blood and gold, deception and secrecy.
If you want to learn more about the Russian Civil War you can visit these sources:
http://spartacus-educational.com/RUScivilwar.htm
http://www.answers.com/topic/civil-war-of-1917-1922
You can also watch this video: