Oil! by Upton Sinclair

There were very few people in the world who thought the Russians would be able to defend themselves against the hosts of all the world. Yet somehow they were managing it. There was a peculiar thing to be noticed in the newspaper despatches from the various anti-Bolshevik fronts. The allied troops would win great victories; they would take Perm, or Ufa, or whatever city it might be, and capture vast thousands of the enemy. A month or two later they would win another victory, and again the patriots would be cheered up -- until it occurred to them to get the map, and compare the location of the two places, and discover that the second place was one or two hundred miles farther back than the first one!

Later on Bunny found out what this meant. The peasants had a way of staying quiet while the allied forces advanced, and then rising up behind their lines and forcing them to retreat. So mighty was Bolshevik propaganda -- it was working thus at Archangel, and all along the western front from the Baltic to the Crimea, and all over Siberia; no victory ever lasted. Admiral Kolchak got all the way across Siberia, General Denikin, in the Ukraine, got within a hundred and twenty-five miles of Moscow; but it all came to nothing.