Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921
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'A masterpiece of history' DAILY TELEGRAPH Between 1917 and 1921 a devastating struggle took place in Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist empire. Many regard this savage civil war as the most influential event of the modern era. 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. Using the most up to date scholarship and archival research, Antony Beevor, author of the acclaimed international bestseller Stalingrad, assembles the complete picture in a gripping narrative that conveys the conflict through the eyes of everyone from the worker on the streets of Petrograd to the cavalry officer on the battlefield and the woman doctor in an improvised hospital.
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My history textbooks and English articles had always referred to the Russian Revolution and Civil War as a well-understood monolith of an event, but they never treated the events with any more detail. “The Russian Revolution caused Russia to exit World War I, and then they descended into a Civil War, and then Stalin!” I'm glad that Beevor wrote this astounding book, since it's part of a departure from the current oversight of the Anglophone histories.
Beevor elucidates the unimaginable scale of the terror and destruction brought about by the Civil War. Every person in every town had something to fear. The Cheka, unbelievably sadistic torture, “food detachments,” starvation, hypothermia, typhus, cholera, reprisals by retreating armies, looting by advancing armies, pogroms. Reading from the vantage point of a well-off American, I just can't comprehend the total suffering of the population. It's almost otherworldly. It's insane. It happened, and it's hard to grasp.
Beevor mostly focuses on the experience of the Whites. Now, although some may denounce him as biased or revisionist, the Whites' is a story too often overlooked. Beevor is primarily a military historian, but he examines the character of the White leadership in satisfying detail. In fact, he identifies it as perhaps the primary reason why the Whites lost the Civil War.
If you want to learn more about the Russian Revolution and Civil War, I can confidently say that you can look no further!
