began banning other political parties, including the Mensheviks. The Russian Civil War broke out between the Bolsheviks (The Reds) and the anti Bolsheviks (The Whites) and it lasted from 1918 – 1921 (See the Russian Civil War).
The ban against all non-Bolshevik political activity and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk were a major factor in the Civil War. This peace treaty between the Bolsheviks and the German Empire and the Central Powers, committed large parts of the Russian Empire to Imperial Germany and the Ottoman Empire in exchange for peace.
A loose group of anti-Bolshevik forces aligned against the Bolshevik Communist government. It included land-owners, republicans, conservatives, middle-class citizens, reactionaries, pro-monarchists, liberals, army generals, non-Bolshevik socialists and democratic reformists. (The Whites)
The civil war began in earnest in June 1918. Early victims of the war were Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their children who had been moved in the spring of 1918 to Yekaterinkburg. The local soviet feared that anti-Bolshevik forces in the area might free them, so in the evening of July 16, 1918, the entire family was taken to the cellar of their prison house and shot.
The Soviets responded to the growing anti-Bolshevik sentiment by launching a campaign of Red Terror (see Cheka). This gave extraordinary powers to the secret police, then known as the Cheka. The Cheka then initiated a period of mass arrests, imprisonments and executions of people not based only on their specific actions, such as sabotage, but also for their beliefs and class origins.
The Cheka also started the infamous slave labor camps (Gulag prison system) and by the end of 1920, Soviet Russia had 84 of these concentration camps with about 50,000 prisoners. Perhaps the greatest crime committed by the Cheka during the Red Terror, was the executions and starvation of the peasantry. In what became known as the “Bread War”, the Cheka executed not only individual peasants but entire families and whole villages as well, for “disobeying national Soviet policy on wheat and bread production and distribution.”
During the Red Terror, an estimated 100,000 to 500,000 were executed by the Checka. The killings were approved by Lenin.
“This was also the period when, contrary to the situation before 1917, where less than one thousand Jews were Bolsheviks, that larger and larger numbers of Jews first entered the Soviet Government, and second entered the Communist Party. This was unimaginable opportunity for Jews, who before 1917 could not even be policemen or postmen or government clerks under the Tsars, and now the Bolsheviks said, you can go as far as your talents, energies and desires will take you.