The face of civil war

The civil war unleashed on the Russian people a brutality that exceeded the worst Tsarist-era atrocities

Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921

Author: Antony Beevor

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 576

Price: Rs 1,399

The popular view of the Russian revolution is that Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power on the back of widespread popular urban support, fought off resistance from reactionary Tsarist generals thanks to Trotsky’s brilliant generalship and established the world’s first proletariat-ruled nation. Post-war scholarship has done much to blur this storied communist legend that John Reed’s 1919 bestseller Ten Days that Shook the World did much to create.

In his monumental 1990 book historian Richard Pipes, for instance, argued persuasively (if controversially) that the Bolshevik’s rise