HISTORY
Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921
Antony Beevor
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $55

Charles Dickens’ almost exact contemporary, the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), once predicted that “one day Genghis Khan will return with the telegraph”. As can be seen today in the former Soviet Union, modern weapons and means of control are far more powerful and destructive than in Herzen’s time.

With Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine now in its fifth month, any resemblance between Genghis Khan and Vladimir Putin might still seem a tad far-fetched. Even so, Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde has now been supplanted by hoarders of gold, with Putin and his associates well to the fore.

It is unlikely that Antony Beevor’s latest book will please Putin and his acolytes. To be sure, the anti-communists – or even non-communists – do not emerge universally well from this account of the first four years after the overthrow of the Tsarist regime in February 1917. While liberals, non-Russian minorities and non-Bolshevik socialists differed among themselves, they had to contend with an array of deluded and often inflexible – indeed, sometimes deranged – reactionaries on their right. The White forces, Beevor declares, “all too often represented the worst examples of humanity. For ruthless inhumanity, however, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable.”

His account is rightly wide-ranging, from the Pacific, where Japanese and Americans were numbered among the anti-Soviet forces, to Europe, in all its diversity. Though they are not mentioned in this otherwise, there were indeed some Australians fighting in the civil war that followed the Bolshevik takeover in November 1917.

Another Australian connection lies with mention of Madame Kurdyukova, a sort of Russian Mrs Malaprop, in a comic novel of 1840-44: “You suckling babes! Mouldering liberals ! You don’t know any more about the Russian people than that old fool Madame Kurdyukova!”

I remember meeting the then Soviet ambassador a few nights after John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in the American presidential election in November 1960. He was one Ivan Kurdyukov who declared that the American elections were simply a case of “Tweedledum and Tweedledee!” (Psephologists in the USSR itself had an easier time of it.)

In September 1917, Lenin wrote that “civil war is the sharpest form of the class struggle”. At that early stage he did not dare cancel elections to the promised Constituent Assembly, since that would have united all other parties against the Bolsheviks. It would be easier to dismantle the Constituent Assembly later, once the Bolsheviks were firmly in the saddle. Meanwhile, the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, was established on December 5, 1917, well before the Constituent Assembly met for what was to prove its first and last-session, before it was dispersed by Bolshevik guards claiming to be tired after a long day of well-meaning discussion.