The Russian Revolution and Civil War in the years 1917 to 1921 is one of the most widely studied periods in history. It is also somewhat inevitably one that has generated a huge flow of literature in the decades that have passed since the events themselves. However, until now, historians of the revolution have had no dedicated bibliography of the period and little claim to bibliographical control over the literature. The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921offers for the first time a comprehensive bibliographical guide to this crucial and fascinating period of history. The Bibliography focuses on the key years of 1917 to 1921, starting with the February Revolution of 1917 and concluding with the 10th Party Congress of March 1921, and covers all the key events of the intervening years. As such it identifies these crucial years as something more than simply the creation of a communist state.

“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.

“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.

Author's Note -- Part I: Last Years of the Old Empire, 1904-1914 -- Part II: The Great War : Imperial Self-Destruction -- The Great War Begins -- Germans, Jews, Armenians -- Tearing Themselves Apart -- Conflict and Collapse -- Part III: 1917 : Contest for Control -- Five Days that Shook the World -- The Provisional Government and the War -- August-September : From Putsch to Coup -- Bolshevik October -- Death of the Constituent Assembly -- Politics from Below -- Part IV: Sovereign Claims -- The Peace that Wasn't -- Treason and Terror -- Finland's Civil War -- Baltic Entanglements -- Ukrainian Drama, Act I -- Colonial Repercussions -- Part V: War Within -- The Unquiet Don -- Foreign Bodies -- Trotsky Arms, Siberia Mobilizes -- Kolchak : the Wild East -- Ukraine, Act II -- War Against the Cossacks -- Miracle on the Vistula -- War Against the Jews : 1919-1920 -- The Last Page -- War Against the Peasants -- Part VI: Victory and Retreat -- The Proletariat in the Proletarian Dictatorship -- The Revolution Turns Against Itself -- Conclusion: Revolution Against Itself

Often the drama of the October Revolution and the Bolshevik seizure of power overshadow the disastrous Russian-German war that preceded it and the extended, confusing, many-sided civil war between the Reds and the Whites that followed. But Nik Cornishs vivid photographic history gives equal coverage to each of these momentous events and shows how the Russian empire of the Romanovs was transformed into the Soviet dictatorship. Contemporary photographs show the leading characters in the drama Tsar Nicholas II, Kerensky, Lenin and Trotsky and other Bosheviks, and the White commanders Denikin, Kolchak, Wrangel and the rest. But they also record, in an unforgettable way, the ordinary people who were caught up in the surge of events civilian crowds on the city streets, peasant groups in the villages, the faces of common soldiers on all sides who fought on multiple fronts across Russia from Poland, the Baltic states and the White Sea to the Black Sea and Siberia. The scale of the conflict was remarkable, as was the intensity of the experience of those who took part and witnessed it, and this collection of historic photographs gives a poignant insight into the conditions of their time. It is a fascinating introduction to a period that saw a sea change in Russian history.

From the preface Many historians outside the Soviet Union have sought to explain why the Bolsheviks won the civil war. Some have focused on the military history of 1918-20. Others have connected the victory of the Red Army to the growth of the Soviet State. But none has made a detailed study of the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the peasantry, the overwhelming majority of the Russian population, during the formative years of the Soviet regime. None has seriously investigated the ways in which the Bolshevik victory was made possible by the transformation of the Russian countryside in the years leading up to and during the revolution. That is the purpose of this book.