Reds against Whites

On the 24–25 October 1917 (according to the Julian Calendar, or 7–8 November according to the Gregorian) the political disputes which had shaken the Russian empire reached a peak. The provisional government, or All-Russian Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (which had been formed in the wake of the February revolution and abdication of Tsar Nicholas II) was stormed by the Bolsheviks. These men and women — whom Churchill later described as ‘swarms of typhus-bearing vermin, vampires, troops of ferocious baboons’ — quickly consolidated power in Petrograd, now St Petersburg. Their leader, Vladimir Lenin, believed that Europe’s workers would soon rise in violent struggle against their bourgeois oppressors; and ‘Red’ October is rightly considered one of the seminal moments of modern times.

But there’s much more to Russian history than one evening of sabre-waggling pomp and rambunctious gaiety at the Winter Palace. As Jonathan Smele makes clear, the October revolution fell within a decade of internecine carnage, trans-continental torture and picaresque chaos —broadly defined as the Russian civil wars.