Russia

Between 1917 and 1921 a devastating civil war tore Russia apart after the collapse of the Tsarist empire. The doomed White alliance of moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists fought Trotsky’s Red Army under Lenin in a conflict marked by reciprocal terror and widespread cruelty to men, women, and children. The struggle drew in Britain, the United States, France, Italy, Japan, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, turning parts of it into a world war by proxy. Antony Beevor reconstructs the conflict using up to date scholarship and archival research and conveys it through the eyes of workers on the streets of Petrograd, cavalry officers on the battlefield, and doctors in improvised hospitals.