Russia : Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921 /by Anthony Beevor - 2022 - 576 Pages

 Russia : Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921 /by Anthony Beevor - 2022 - 576 Pages is a highly informative well documented history of a shape shifting era in not just Russian History but that of the world.  

"Riveting . . . There is a wealth of new information here that adds considerable texture and nuance to his story and helps to set Russia apart from previous works.”—The Wall Street Journal

An epic new account of the conflict that reshaped Eastern Europe and set the stage for the rest of the twentieth century.

Between 1917 and 1921 a devastating struggle took place in Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist empire. The doomed White alliance of moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against Trotsky’s Red Army and the single-minded Communist dictatorship under Lenin. In the savage civil war that followed, terror begat terror, which in turn led to ever 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 contingents 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 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 doctor in an improvised hospital." From the publisher 

Beevor details how White Russian force, dedicated to the restoration of the monarchy, were animated by extreme hatred for Jews who they saw as behind the revolution.  This hatred fed that of the Germans and other European countries and directly contributed to the start of World War Two and the Holocaust. There is not a terrorist organisation existing today that does not share extreme Anti-Semitic ideological views.

"The Whites lost the civil war largely because of their inflexibility, including their refusal to contemplate land reform until it was far too late or to allow any autonomy to the nationalities of the Tsarist Empire. Their civil administration was so useless that it barely existed. Paradoxically, they also lost for reasons very similar to the way the left-wing side lost the Spanish Civil War less than two decades later. In Spain, the fractious anti-fascist alliance of the Republic could not hope to prevail against Franco’s disciplined and militarised regime. In Russia, an utterly incompatible alliance of Socialist Revolutionaries and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against a single-minded Communist dictatorship. Extremes fed on each other in both cases, and the vicious circle of rhetoric and violence was a major factor leading to the rise of Hitler and the Second World War itself. For far too long we have made the mistake of talking about wars as a single entity, when they are often a conglomeration of different conflicts, mixing national resentments, ethnic hatreds and class warfare. And when it comes to civil wars, there is also a clash of centralism against regionalism and authoritarianism against libertarianism. The idea of a purely ‘Russian’ civil war is another misleading simplification. It prompted one historian recently to describe it instead as ‘a world war condensed’." From Beevor's conclusion 

The author's website details his many accomplishments, awards and other books.

 Russia : Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921 /by Anthony Beevor is history at its highest level.

Mel Ulm