The Bolshevik "Red Army" clashed with the counter-revolutionary "Whites" throughout western Russia and the Ukraine. For their part, the Whites were an ungainly coalition of former tsars, liberals who had been alienated by the Bolshevik takeover of the Duma (Russian representative assembly), members of ethnic minorities who wanted political independence, an anarchist peasant army in the Ukraine, and troops sent by foreign powers (including the United States) terrified at the prospect of a communist revolution in a nation as large and potentially powerful as Russia.
·