What was the consequence of the Russian civil war?

Answer 1

The main consequence was that Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik/Communist Party became the undisputed governmental power in Russia once all organized military opposition to them was crushed. The Bolsheviks were able to eliminate all political opposition to them as well making Russia a government by party and eventually a totalitarian one.

It also paved the way to the formation of the Soviet Union, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in 1922. Once Lenin held sway over lands comprising the Russian empire, he was able to bring the Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasus Federation together to form the USSR.

Answer 2

Well, yes - but it's more complicated than that!

There were two revolutions in 1917, not one. The February Revolution, which happened in March, was a more or less spontaneous uprising that triggered the abdication of Nicholas II and the replacement of tsarism by the Provisional Government, a loose alliance of liberals and socialists. It's one of the great What Ifs of history: what if it had survived? You could argue that it would have brought democracy to Russia for the first time, stabilising society and continuing the economic boom that was already under way.

But we'll never know, because it was swept away by the October Revolution, which happened in November. Anything but spontaneous, this was actually a coup d'état masterminded by Lenin and conducted by a handful of Bolsheviks, nearly all of whom got what they richly deserved 20 years later when Stalin wiped out anybody he considered a threat - which meant virtually everybody.

So there was now a "government" in Petrograd of hard-line communists with no legitimacy of any sort, facing enemies ranging across the entire political spectrum from Mensheviks and SRs (very, very slightly less hard-line communists than the Bolsheviks) through well-meaning social reformers and constitutional democrats to the Far Right who would have thought Genghis Khan a dangerous liberal. The Civil War was fought among all these groupings, plus foreign armies with their own differing agendas. You'd have bet good money that the Bolsheviks wouldn't last six months, but they lasted just under 75 years.

So: yes, the Civil War was an effect of the second (October) revolution of 1917. Look it all up in Wikipedia or Britannica.

Answer 3

Birth of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).