They weren’t hard to identify, people noticed them at the time. The Bolsheviks were not popular, they were not particularly competent, and they made plenty of mistakes that should have been fatal. On a military level, the Bolsheviks were inferior to the Whites (who secured the loyalty of far more former Russian military officers and specialists) for most of the war despite the Bolsheviks’ great advantage in raw numbers and material.

However, the various White armies formed to oppose the Bolshevik coup suffered from a profound political retardation. They could not agree on what they wanted, who was in charge, how they should act, or that they even needed to have “a side.” It is truly sobering to realize just how many unforced errors the Whites, who could and should have won, made as the Bolshevik freight train hurtled towards them.


One of the main contributors to the Whites’ defeat was political inexperience. This concept is frequently mentioned in Peter Kenez’s excellent books Red Attack, White Resistance and its sequel Red Advance, White Defeat, which are the best military histories of the Russian Civil War, as well as The White Generals by Richard Luckett, which I think is the best overall summary of the conflict (but not the Revolution more generally, if you want a good survey of that I’d recommend The Russian Revolution: A New History by Sean McMeekin). Although I was already planning a different article on this exact topic, Elon Musk’s recent very public breaks with President Trump offer a good launching point to explore this concept.
https://www.theconundrumcluster.com/p/elon-musks-reddit-retard-rebellion