The forces led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks were called the “Reds” because red has been the color of revolution since the French Revolution while forces opposed to him where termed “White” because white has traditionally been the color of royalty. There were many other “colours” participating in the revolution as well:

Greens were a close-knit coalition that came together to resist Soviets, and consisted of peasants, mostly. The group was particularly enraged by the communists’ policy of confiscating crop harvests and livestock to feed the urban poor and the Red Army. Thousands of farmers from western and central Russia joined the Greens to violently resist the practice, which Moscow called Prodrazvyorstka or the “surplus appropriation system.” Starting in 1917, the groups waged a five-year struggle against the Bolsheviks in which they ambushed, harassed and sometimes even massacred whole Red Army units, in addition to “liberating” towns from Moscow’s grip and sabotaging Soviet infrastructure.

Bolsheviks were also opposed by some intellectuals, and from 1917 until 1919, factions of urban intellectuals and workers devoted to the idea of anarchism waged a terrorism campaign against Soviet authority in Russia as well as the Ukraine. Founded by a 32-year-old revolutionary and former vodka distillery employee named Maria Nikiforova, the BlackGuards, as they became known, were formed by the oddly named Moscow Federation of Anarchists. Notable are Anarchists led by Nestor Makhno. While the movement succeeded in assassinating some Bolshevik security leaders, the group was crushed in an April 1918 crackdown in the Soviet capital.

The Blue Army were mainly foreign interventionists who came from France. They were called Blue because they had blue uniforms from France. The Blue Army or the Haller Army is a Polish military association, which in May-July 1919 fought in Galicia under the command of General Józef Haller. It was formed by the Entente and the US in France for the purpose of using it by the Polish government in the struggle against the Bolshevik troops. By the end of the war, its composition reached six divisions and numbered up to 80 thousand soldiers.

After an anti-Soviet coup in May 1918, several democratic governments (sometimes called pink forces) were formed throughout Ural and Siberia. The major ones were Komuch (Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly) and the Provisional Siberian Government (sometimes ever referred to as the Siberian Republic). These two united into the Directory in Ufa in September 1918. And only in November Kolchak (war minister of the Directory) took over.