"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.
