In Petrograd on October 25, 1917, the Bolshevik Party seized power over the Russian Provisional Soviet Government, which had been operating ineffectively since the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II eight months before. So began the Russian Civil War, which in three years would cost the largest country in the world more than seven million lives, and out of which would rise a new social order: the Soviet Union. Evan Mawdsley draws upon a wide range of sources—including high-level government documents, military memoirs, and political tracts—to offer this lucid, superbly detailed account of the men and events that shaped 20th-century communist Russia.
"The best book ever written on the Russian civil war. A first-rate work of scholarly synthesis."—Robert McNeal
