“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.

This book examines the dramatic and sometimes violent events which accompanied the fall of the Russian czars and the creation of the Soviet nation. In drawing upon the most recent research, especially on the nature of the popular movement during 1917, Beryl Williams examines how and why Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917. She considers the different interpretations of the nature of the revolution among the various revolutionary parties and among the Bolsheviks themselves, and explores how the Bolsheviks consolidated their control over the country. She concludes by asking to what extent their visions of a new society and a `new soviet man' were fulfilled by 1921.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has provided fresh perspectives from which to view the Russian Revolution. This book reviews the everchanging debate on the nature of the Russian Revolution.

This study examines one of the key events in history, the Russian Revolution. Since the late Gorbachev period, a wealth of new material has become available to historians that has triggered intense scholarly debate on the nature of revolution. This timely new book takes account of the new scholarship, including - for example - the role of Lenin. It is argued that the intial flexibility of Lenin and the Bolshevik party allowed them to take power, but that the conduct of both changed considerably once they were obliged to take steps to maintain their authority. This book charts the Febuary Revolution, the October Revolution, the Civil War and the main individuals involved, giving a remarkable degree of clarity to the tumultuous events in Russia whose consequences the world lived with for the rest of the twentieth century.

Laura Engelstein, one of the greatest scholars of Russian history, has written a searing and defining account of the Russian Revolution, the fall of the old order, and the creation of the Soviet state.