Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921
ANTONY BEEVOR
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 576 PP, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £27 • tel 020 7799 4064

In early 1919, the leaders of the victorious Entente were hopelessly divided over the ongoing chaos in Russia. Just over a year after seizing power, the Bolsheviks had proved astonishingly ruthless in maintaining it. They were using class war as an excuse for generalised terror: conscripting peasants and grabbing their grain, and threatening to spread revolutionary fire in all directions. On the other hand, a disorderly array of White forces was determined to overthrow the Reds and felt confident that, with international help, they could.

Antony Beevor, a master chronicler of diplomatic as well as military history, describes very well how America’s Woodrow Wilson hoped to reconcile Russia’s warring parties while France’s Georges Clemenceau longed to punish the Bolsheviks. In Britain, arguments raged between Lloyd George, the prime minister, and Winston Churchill, his minister of war. The latter wanted a “plan of war” against the Reds; the Welshman retorted that intemperate action could “strengthen Bolshevism in Russia and create it at home”. Winston’s hawkish stance, he jibed, reflected his own blue blood, which was boiling because of the “wholesale elimination of grand dukes in Russia”. In the end, the anti-Communist forces were effective enough, and sufficiently supported externally, to make some impressive advances in the course of 1919. There were moments when it seemed very possible they would capture Petrograd, the heart of the Revolution, or the new capital of Moscow.