As it turns out, backing the losing side in a civil war does not ingratiate you with the winner.
Most foreign wars have surprisingly banal reasons for taking place...
Also they appealed to the proletariat in the world and showed the potential of revolution to be real.
Lastly they simply weren’t integrated with the western global financial and economic system. Really the source of the friction, more so than ideological reasons. For centuries before Russia was a virtual colony of the West, sort of like the third world today.
Supposed the term jubilee comes from ancient rulers recognizing the problem of debt slavery and thus every X years would annul all outstanding debt.
Look up Lenin's train full of gold and how Trotsky made his way back to Russia through several countries despite being a wanted criminal.. or the actual start of the war w/r/t austrian occupation of serbia and nicholas II's slavic brotherhood movement and things become far more murky as to who 'the west' was backing.. esp. when one considers what position russia would have been in in to negotiate with the fallen ottomans and what that would mean for french/british hegemony in the near east..
As for afterwords - the USSR still traded with the west, and some people still made money.. look into the NEP beyond seeing it as a curious historical footnote and it too is not so clear..
Funny, kind of sounds like the last 20 years or so... hmm..
Russian Empire was allied with the Serbians, who were considered fellow Slavs.
Germans/Austrians were not keen on fighting on the eastern front with the powerful Russian empire and thus wanted to destabilize the country making it incapable of fighting against them (which they actually succeeded: the Soviets signed a humiliating treaty ending the war on the eastern front while ceding huge territories to Germany/Austria). Thus, they assisted the revolutionaries, among them Trotsky and Lenin.
>...The United States government was initially hostile to the Soviet leaders for taking Russia out of World War I and was opposed to a state ideologically based on communism. Although the United States embarked on a famine relief program in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s and American businessmen established commercial ties there during the period of the New Economic Policy (1921–29), the two countries did not establish diplomatic relations until 1933. By that time, the totalitarian nature of Joseph Stalin's regime presented an insurmountable obstacle to friendly relations with the West.
US sent soldiers to secure shipments sent to Tsarist Russia. And surprisingly bolsheviks declared themselves "free" of any Tsarist Russia financial burden(s), so allying with Whites was logical.
So it wasn't hostile at that time.
the bolsheviks sold to the West heaps of art pieces and treasures from museums and expropriated private collections - for food and other vital goods. that would largely explain the "relief program".
Why do you think treasures were involved is beyond me.
That is complete nonesense. The West has had, currently has, and will always have friendly relations with dictators and killers of all shades and stripes, as long as they are useful to us.
There is nothing about their domestic policies that we consider insurmountable.
But the reality is that, once the situation was stable in the USSR, the West was plenty willing to play ball there. Even the Koch patriarch was more than willing to build refineries there.
A combination of ingrained Russian xenophobia and ideological commitments drove the USSR to go haywire, not a small interventionary force a couple thousand strong.
Drive-by slurs aren't allowed here. Please read the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit all nationalistic flamebait out of your posts. Other flamebait too.
Citation needed.
(Unless you can't back it with statistics and then it becomes a slur)
The Russian state has always had a fraught and conflicted relationship with the West. It had a fairly unique place in being geographically situated to avoid economic and political domination by the West, but being less developed and near enough that its interactions with the Western powers led to a persistent inferiority complex. The court ladies excitedly took up the latest fashions and fads from Paris, while the political leadership attempted difficult reforms, partially to ensure their continued ability to resist Western domination and partially because they wanted approval of the more cosmopolitan powers. (The quasi-apocryphal Potemkin villages were built in order to impress Catherine II and a group of Western ambassadors.)
Pan-Slavism emerged in the 19th century. Instead of focusing myopically on aping Western powers, its intellectuals wanted to build a pan-Slavic identity and nationalism, centered around the Slavic folk, the Orthodox church, and the Tsar. This naturally led to conflicts with the more-Westernized countries that dominated Slavic peoples, as well as the Ottoman Empire. The people who questioned religion and the Tsar, for their part, were filthy liberals who were stooges of Western intellectuals (sound familiar?) And, for what its worth, most of the liberals were relatively privileged folk who looked down on the idiocy of the countryside, who made up the heartland of Russia (sound familiar?) It formed a useful dialectic for everyone involved.
Revolution and war come. Through an unlikely series of (un)fortunate accidents, the Bolsheviks come into power. They were a very funny set of people to rule over Russia, but they ruled. Their opinions of the Western ranged from (at best) negative to incredibly bitter and angry. But some compromises were made, in the first decade of Soviet rule. Ultimately, though, Stalin came to power. Mostly because he was the most ruthless autocrat. But he was more than happy to deploy xenophobia and the trope of his enemies being stooges of foreign powers when it suited him, as it often did. The scars of WW2 made him and Russian society even more sclerotic, leading to the present day.
> I could just as easily demand you prove the existence of Russia using statistics
I exist and I am a citizen, I can take my photo with a passport in hand. Pfft.
> most of the liberals were relatively privileged folk who looked down on the idiocy of the countryside, who made up the heartland of Russia (sound familiar?)
Are you referring to Hillary's campaign here?
As for the rest of your comment, nowhere you have got close to describing any actual xenophobia, much less show anything unique to Russians.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: I was too quick here, as explained below.
"You are all Russian xenophobes" is precisely that. It's amazing what one gets away with.
You could say the same thing with the west's relation with china and vietnam and almost every other non-western nation on earth.
It's difficult to form a deep relationship with china or russia or vietnam or anyone else when you back the losing side.
Is there a bigger thorn in the side of the sino-american relationship than taiwan?
[NB I'm not trying to defend the Soviets, who were a thoroughly unpleasant bunch, but the colossal failure to understand their motivations and just how one side the Cold War was for most of the time almost ended things.]
The West had many reasons to believe the USSR was stronger than it was, hawks on the right wanted to believe it, fellow travellers on the left wanted to believe it, the Russian political system wanted to believe it (and lied to itself repeatedly).
I wouldn't agree with that - I think the Civil war, and the subsequent domestic uprisings were that impetus. Outside of the Second World War, most of the fighting the Red Army did was against its own people.
That is a whole lot of fighting to leave out.
In any case, these things compound. Immediately after WW2, the USSR still felt threatened by the West, which was not an unfounded fear. Multigenerational paranoia about being invaded by more powerful nations is precisely the kind of thing that damages institutions to the point where they no longer serve any purpose but preserving themselves.
If your ideas require you to impose a dictatorship to implement them, then maybe they're not such good ideas.
Under the accounting methods used, capitalist systems of government would dwarf that number. Of course, uneven standards are par for the course.
> It was always the plan of the Marxists to grab all the power and run a dictatorship.
"The Marxists". Do you know how many groups participated in the Russian civil war, how many of them considered themselves Marxists, and how many of them were purged by the sole political entity that seized power? Since you uncritically cited that 100 million figure, I'm going to guess no.
Have you ever tried yourself? It's not a very hard thing to start to compile. The problem here is ideological though. Everything that would be added to the capitalism list would be rationalized away even if it uses the same measurement stick.