The 20 Wars Russia Has Fought in the Past Century

After Tsar Nicholas II was deposed in the Russian Revolution, a civil war erupted between the Bolshevik communists, or Red Russians, and the Mensheviks, or White Russians. Despite help from Western countries such as Great Britain and the United States, the White Russians lost, and the communists gained control of Russia and held it for almost 70 years. As many as 10 million people died during the conflict through combat, disease, malnutrition, and execution.

During the chaos of the Russian Civil War, a conflict developed between Russia and Poland. After World War I, German armies in Eastern Europe began to withdraw from the western part of the former Russian Empire, parts of which would become the new Polish state. As the German army withdrew, the Red Army tried to occupy the territory. The Poles objected and took up arms against the Russians.

After Russia took territory gained by the Poles early in the war, the Polish side, which included Lithuanian and Ukrainian allies, and Western advisers, gained needed supplies and drove the Russians back into Russia. The Treaty of Riga was concluded on March 18, 1921, with large sections of what is now Belarus and Ukraine ceded to Poland. Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin had hoped to spread revolution through Poland into Germany and his strategy failed.

Georgia, located in the Caucasus region bordering the Black Sea, enjoyed a very brief period of independence after the Russian Revolution toppled the Romanov dynasty in 1917. The Bolshevik-led revolution pushed into Georgia under the pretext that the Red Army was supporting a peasant and workers revolution. Two Georgian-born Soviet leaders – Joseph Stalin and Grigoriy (Sergo) Ordzhonikidze – strongly supported the invasion. After heavy fighting, Georgia became one of the republics of the Soviet Union.

After the communists took over Russia and created the Soviet Union, it was their aim to spread revolution to other parts of the world. For almost 70 years, the Soviet Union and its allies and the West, led by the United States, confronted each other in a series proxy wars around the globe known as the Cold War. The conflict ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Anti-Bolshevik Uprising in Georgia, also known as the August Uprising, was an unsuccessful attempt to expel Soviet Russian control in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1924. The insurrection was led by a group of anti-Soviet political organizations, including the Mensheviks. The Soviet reaction was swift and brutal. The Red Army repressed the population and carried reprisals, killing whole families. The uprising was one of the last major rebellions against the early Soviet government.