Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War

This is an immensely informative and enjoyable book. Lincoln is among the better narrative historians although he does interject some analyses as well. The book Red Victory is not only about the Russian Civil War but about the almost insurmountable obstacles...political, economic, and military...faced by Lenin and the Bolsheviks after their seizure of power. The Russian Civil War was a confusing chaotic affair with numerous factions and personalities but Lincoln does a commendable job sorting out the details in a comprehensible manner. As he implies in his text, there are few geunuine heroes in this conflict as each side practiced attrocities as brutal as any in modern day civil wars. The one weakness is more detail should have been provided concerning the military aspects of the actual battles. Otherwise highly recommended.

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.

This is a great look at a bloody moment in Russian history. Fascinating, exciting, and well written, this is how hisotry should be written.

This is an excellent and highly readable history of the Russian Civil War. It gives plenty of details about the campaigns, the personalities of the leaders, what conditions were like for both sides during the war and miscellaneous stories (my favorite was the episode of the purple ray in the Ukraine) without ever losing track of the big picture. I've read other books on the subject, but none of them told the story as clearly and vividly as this one.