Antony Beevor’s new book, a history of the Russian Civil War, is “easily the most horrifying war story I’ve ever read”, said Gerard DeGroot in The Times. The four-year conflict, a period of “unrelenting terror”, caused as many as ten million deaths.
Beevor begins by “speeding through the familiar ground of the revolution”: the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March 1917, the establishment of a provisional government soon afterwards, and its toppling in November, which marked the beginning of Bolshevik rule.
Next came what he calls a “kaleidoscope of chaos”, as the Bolsheviks fought to resist the counter-revolutionary White Russian forces. In a war of wild strategic swings – one railway station in Ukraine changed hands 28 times – both sides showed “boundless cruelty”, with “ordinary Russians” (and women especially) suffering the most. Finally, in 1921, the Bolsheviks prevailed – mainly because “White aspirations were incompatible with 20th century ideals”.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Meticulously researched and superbly written, this is an “unceasingly agonising, yet always irresistible” work. Beevor has always been “keener on gory detail than analysis”, said Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times – and much of the violence he describes here is “mind-bogglingly horrible”.
In Azerbaijan, women smeared themselves with excrement to avoid being raped by the Cossack soldiers fighting for the Whites – but “the soldiers simply wiped it off with rags and raped them anyway”. No less inhumane were the Bolshevik Cheka (secret police), who carried out the Red Terror – Lenin’s campaign against bourgeois “vermin”. When transporting prisoners by train, Chekists would randomly roast some alive in the locomotive’s furnace. One of their favourite torture techniques was to burn a prisoner’s hand, before slowly peeling off the skin in a perfect “glove”.
Although the Russian Civil war was “one of the most colossally damaging conflicts of the 20th century”, there haven’t been many general accounts of it, said Noel Malcolm in The Daily Telegraph. Beevor’s “grimly magnificent” book makes you see why – for this was a conflict that was “complex to the point of near-chaos”.
Military action was often indistinguishable from “foraging and plunder”, and the war sucked in many foreign powers (including Japan, China, America and Britain) and extended across a mammoth area (not only the whole of Russia, but also the “crescent of bordering states” to its west). It’s a story that’s hard to make sense of – but “Beevor tells it supremely well”.
W&N 576pp £30; The Week Bookshop £23.99 (incl. p&p)
The Week Bookshop
To order this title or any other book in print, visit theweekbookshop.co.uk, or speak to a bookseller on 020-3176 3835. Opening times: Monday to Saturday 9am-5.30pm and Sunday 10am-4pm.
-
Will California tax its billionaires?Talking Points Proposed one-time levy would shore up education, Medicaid
-
Blue Origin launches Mars probes in NASA debutSpeed Read The New Glenn rocket is carrying small twin spacecraft toward Mars as part of NASA’s Escapade mission
-
Trump DOJ sues to block California redistrictingSpeed Read California’s new congressional map was drawn by Democrats to flip Republican-held House seats
-
Train Dreams pulses with ‘awards season gravitas’The Week Recommends Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton star in this meditative period piece about a working man in a vanished America
-
Middleland: Rory Stewart’s essay collection is a ‘triumph’The Week Recommends The Rest is Politics co-host compiles his fortnightly columns written during his time as an MP
-
‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ and ‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary’feature The culture divide in small-town Ohio and how the internet usurped dictionaries
-
6 homes with fall foliagefeature An autumnal orange Craftsman, a renovated Greek Revival church and an estate with an orchard
-
Bugonia: ‘deranged, extreme and explosively enjoyable’Talking Point Yorgos Lanthimos’ film stars Emma Stone as a CEO who is kidnapped and accused of being an alien
-
The Revolutionists: a ‘superb and monumental’ bookThe Week Recommends Jason Burke ‘epic’ account of the plane hijackings and kidnappings carried out by extremists in the 1970s
-
Film reviews: ‘Bugonia,’ ‘The Mastermind’ and ‘Nouvelle Vague’feature A kidnapped CEO might only appear to be human, an amateurish art heist goes sideways, and Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless’ gets a lively homage
-
Book reviews: ‘Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity’ and ‘Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice’feature An examination of humanity in the face of “the Machine” and a posthumous memoir from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, who recently died by suicide
