Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War

by W. Bruce Lincoln

Release Date: April, 1999

Edition: Paperback

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Very engaging history on a very complex subject

Lincoln very engagingly takes the reader into the private memoirs of hundreds of principal characters, into the thinking of Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin, and into the changing and complex fabric of Russian life during its Civil War. Every page breathes the idea "revolution" as the cure-all in the Reds' minds for every ill in Russian society, while the Whites seem more bent on democracy or a dictatorship (like the tsarist days), so long as there was some kind of order, during a period when "corruption" was their own festering and ultimately destructive cancer. Politics, the maker of strange bedfellows, and a background as broad and as varied as Russia itself, make for key components in this fascinating examination of political theory and efforts at self-government on the heels of the First World War.

would give it two and a half but...

this book just doesnt cut it as professional history. It is aimed too much toward general laymen interest of the public. A topic as horrific as the Russian Civil War cannot be dealt with in such a conventional manner. Lincoln tells us what happened as opposed to why. The Whites get almost no attention and most of the work focuses on the Reds. This book is divided into sections 1918, 1919, 1920 ect... but there is almost no chronological order to the work and Lincoln jumps from the October Revolution to Cheka atrocities with no sense of transition. The White administration of territories and the White military unitis along with their regimental level commanders receive not attention at all. This book gives the impression that all Whites were nothing but a motley collection of disgrunteled front commanders from the German war, muderous rascists, and drug addicted psychotics. They were no saints but Trotsky and Lenin were just as bad...if not worse. The book is over long and actually gives more importance Stalin's terror in the late 30s then it does on the apocolyptic war at the front in 1919. The section on the Kronstad uprising should have been cut out altogeather and more focus should have been given to the Tambov peasant rising. Stick with Mawdsley's more academic and convincing work on this terrible tragedy.