donald rayfield
Four Years That Shook the World
Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917–1921
By Antony Beevor (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 576pp £30)
history
Bolshevik demonstrators scattered by machine gun fire, Petrograd 1917
Almost every year since the Soviet archives opened in 1991, a new his- tory in English of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War has been published. Russian archives now release only a trickle, yet hitherto unknown memoirs, diaries and photographs still surface, and historians do not stop arguing about the causes, the determining factors and even the outcome of the unprecedentedly cruel and violent implosion of the Russian Empire. Antony Beevor brings to his book some forty-seven years’ experience of writing about wars and catastrophes. Perhaps for the first time, Russia’s history between 1917 and 1921 is examined by a military historian capable of explaining why so many heroic campaigns ended in a rout and why a rabble army achieved victory. It is a story of appalling incompetence and the stupid wastage of men, goodwill and materiel, with just an occasional flash of genius, such as when Trotsky journeys by luxury train across western Russia and inspires to enthusiastic self-sacrifice men who were only months earlier demoralised deserters.
Particularly refreshing is Beevor’s unsparing criticism of the so-called ‘Allied’ intervention, in which British, French, Italian, Japanese, American and Finnish (and later Polish, Czechoslovak, Hungarian and even German) forces each pursued uncoordinated, sometimes conflicting aims and generally made the situation worse. Winston Churchill, in particular, emerges as a deluded optimist, ignoring Lloyd George’s cautions, believing that mad, self-glorifying White generals, given sufficient munitions, could win the Civil War. If Beevor’s book had appeared in the 1930s, Churchill would never have been allowed to lead Britain’s war effort.
Beevor is a better narrator than most of his competitors: he is witty and detached, with an eye for telling details and anecdotes. The first half of this chronologically organised book, taking the reader up to the end of 1918, has, like the events themselves, a logic that is easy to follow: Bolshevik coups in Moscow and Petrograd gradually engendered resistance all over the Russian Empire, and a White
Army of many officers and too few soldiers confronted a Red Army of many soldiers and too few officers. The narrative becomes tangled, however, when it reaches the confusion of 1919–20, at the end of which period it was finally clear to all except the most deluded that the Reds had triumphed. By 1919, the Civil War involved not just Reds and Whites, but also Greens (armed peasant groups), ‘left’ (violent) and ‘right’ (garrulous) Socialist Revolutionaries, Cossacks of several persuasions and numerous ethnic minorities – Kalmyks, Tatars, Chinese (including many railway labourers who went on to form secret police detachments), newly independent Estonians, Latvians and Ukrainians. All of them were in fluid opposition or alliance with one another, united only by their readiness to rob, rape, torture and kill. For this period, chronology alone is inadequate; one needs to be a geographer to follow the conflict as it flared up in the Siberian tundra or the Kuban steppe. Even with the maps that Beevor provides, these seemingly disconnected confrontations are hard to fit july 2022 | Literary Review 5
