During the Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik party and its supporters were called the Reds as they had socialist views and recognized the legitimacy of the Soviet power, supporting its activities and sharing its goals. The global victory of the socialist revolution was the main reference point for the Reds. They considered the Civil War as the highest form of class struggle, the inevitable stage of suppression of the exploiting classes to build a society of working people, a global state of workers and peasants. A red banner was used as a symbol.

The Bolsheviks used the following slogans: the proletarian dictatorship establishment in the form of the Soviet power, the confiscation of the landowners’ land and the nationalization of the entire land, the improvement of working conditions for workers, the speedy withdrawal of Russia from the First World War, the nationalization of banks and enterprises, the right of nations to self-determination, etc. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks seized state power in Petrograd and formed a new government, the Council of People’s Commissars. Since March 1918, Moscow became the political center of Soviet Russia.

The Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Internationalists) was the largest party to support the Bolsheviks until July 1918. The Soviet government was also supported by the Socialists Revolutionaries Maximalists, some of the Internationalist Social Democrats, some of the anarchists, national organizations, parties, and movements that shared radical socialist ideas (for example, the Muslim Socialist Committee of Kazan). The Reds were partially supported by the Ukrainian Communist Party (borotbists), left-wing Belarusian Socialist Hramada, Young Bukharans, Young Khivans, etc. During the Civil War, groups seceded from all these parties and movements, as well as from the parties of the Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, the Bund, Poale Zion, and others to join the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) – RCP(b). The remaining organizations gradually collapsed in the 1920s under the Bolshevik repressions.

The course of the Bolsheviks towards radical transformations, their intolerance of political opponents led to the formation of a broad anti-Bolshevik front and the expansion of armed confrontation in the country. The Whites became the main opponents of the Reds in the Civil War. Revolutionary Democrats also acted against them. Some internal policy measures of the Bolsheviks provoked the Greens. Foreign intervention was also directed against the Reds. However, thanks to the established control over the main industrial regions, emergency measures in all areas of public life, as well as inconsistent actions of opponents and ideological differences between them, the Reds won the Civil War in Russia. The decisive role in the outcome of the conflict was played by the mass support of the revolutionary transformations by the workers and peasants and their fears about the possible restoration of the old regime.

During the war, the Reds formed new state and territorial-political entities on the territory of the former Russian Empire: Russian SFSR, North-Caucasian SSR, Turkestan ASSR, Azerbaijan SSR, Armenian SSR, Georgian SSR, Transcaucasian SFSR, Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic, Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic, Ukrainian People’s Republic of Soviets, Ukrainian SSR, Odessa Soviet Republic, Finnish Socialist Workers’ Republic, Far Eastern Republic, Socialist Soviet Republic of Lithuania and Belarus (Litbel), Belarusian SSR, Commune of the Working People of Estonia, Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic, Latvian SSR, etc. Some of them were short-lived, others later entered the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) established in December 1922.

The Reds