The unbearable brutality of the Bolsheviks

For far too long,’ Sir Antony Beevor writes, ‘we have made the mistake of talking about wars as a single entity.’ In Russia: Revolution and Civil War he sets the record straight for the bitter years between 1917 and 1921, revealing the myriad ways in which individual actions constellated and 12 million people perished. This is not a story about winners and losers. As the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn once wrote about every conflict everywhere: ‘There is neither victory nor defeat; there is only catastrophe.’

It seems wrong to categorise this book as military history. It is like reading a film. Typhus-bearing lice in hospitals at the front are so abundant that they crunch under nurses’ feet ‘like sugar’. Nadezhda Krupskaya is ‘washing up’ in the squalid Zurich flat when ‘a breathless friend burst in’ bringing Lenin news of the February revolution. In starving Petrograd, ‘through broken panes, the only glimmer came from starlight reflected off the less than pristine snow’.