An incompatible White alliance of moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against Trotsky''s Red Army and Lenin''s single-minded Communist dictatorship. Terror begat terror, which in turn led to even greater cruelty with man''s inhumanity to man, woman and child. The struggle became a world war by proxy as Churchill deployed weaponry and troops from the British empire, while armed forces from the United States, France, Italy, Japan, Poland and Czechoslovakia played rival parts.