A revolution is a terrible time of death and destruction. Some revolutions are justified, some are not; some are begun with the highest of intentions, some are started with the most common of intentions. If followed by a civil war, the misery and destruction to lives, property, morals, industry, and traditions is even greater. Finally, add an ignorant and easily led mass of humanity that has suffered under a form of government which has only used those masses for its own enrichment, and you will begin to understand the revolution and civil war in what was known as Russia from 1917-1921. Millions of people, most of them innocent and caught between forces they neither supported nor understood were tortured, raped, robbed, and murdered often by methods that only the most insane and hate filled savages could have devised.

Anthony Beevor, an excellent military historian has tried to put together in one place a comprehensive history of the Russian revolution and civil war. It was a huge task as the period is filled with countless political, military and outlaw factions that ranged across a land that covers one-seventh of the globe. Each faction is filled with personalities guided by, for the most part, the basest of emotions, greed, illusions of grandeur, ignorance, hatred, etc. Few of those factions have any real program except survival and a hope that they can eliminate some other faction that is in the neighboring town or province. They are used and discarded by allies and often just as quickly ally themselves with yesterday’s foe.

All do except the Communist faction. Driven by a vision that was simple for the most ignorant to grasp, and enforced by a single-minded discipline, the Communists were, from a central position able to fight and defeat their poorly disciplined enemies. In a time when entire villages were destroyed for providing horses or food to one faction, normally at the point of a gun, the “Reds” as the Communists were called, were able to our terrorize the masses and their foes, the “Whites”, a loose group of armies over-officered, reactionary and possessing no simple program to offer anyone in the middle.