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’. In a rare interlude of calm during the short-lived German protectorate, ‘ox-eyed beauties of Kyiv roller-skate on the city’s rinks with officers’.

Like a cameraman, Beevor twists his lens between the close-up and the wide-angle. On the White Volunteers Ice March during the first Kuban campaign, ‘a bloody tail’ several miles long drags carts heaped with wounded men. Mounted police known as ‘pharaohs’ appear in black capes with red braid and flat astrakhan hats plumed with black feathers. Both Beevor and his research assistant have a novelist’s eye for the telling detail, even though their canvas is half the size of the planet. General Rodola Gajda’s troops, advancing on Kazan, find their boots rotting in spring mud and rain known as rasputitsa. On the train from Switzerland, Lenin, chugging home to free his people from their Tsarist chains, organises a rota for the use of the train’s two lavatories.