Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914 - 1921

by Laura Engelstein

Overview

October 1917, heralded as the culmination of the Russian Revolution, remains a defining moment in world history. Even a hundred years after the events that led to the emergence of the world's first self-proclaimed socialist state, debate continues over whether, as historian E. H. Carr put it decades ago, these earth-shaking days were a "landmark in the emancipation of mankind from past oppression" or "a crime and a disaster." Some things are clear. After the implosion of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty as a result of the First World War, Russia was in crisis—one interim government replaced another in the vacuum left by imperial collapse.

In this monumental and sweeping new account, Laura Engelstein delves into the seven years of chaos surrounding 1917—the war, the revolutionary upheaval, and the civil strife it provoked. These were years of breakdown and brutal violence on all sides, punctuated by the decisive turning points of February and October. As Engelstein proves definitively, the struggle for power engaged not only civil society and party leaders, but the broad masses of the population and every corner of the far-reaching empire, well beyond Moscow and Petrograd.

Yet in addition to the bloodshed they unleashed, the revolution and civil war revealed democratic yearnings, even if ideas of what constituted "democracy" differed dramatically. Into that vacuum left by the Romanov collapse rushed long-suppressed hopes and dreams about social justice and equality. But any possible experiment in self-rule was cut short by the October Revolution. Under the banner of true democracy, and against all odds, the Bolshevik triumph resulted in the ruthless repression of all opposition. The Bolsheviks managed to harness the social breakdown caused by the war and institutionalize violence as a method of state-building, creating a new society and a new form of power.

Russia in Flames offers a compelling narrative of heroic effort and brutal disappointment, revealing that what happened during these seven years was both a landmark in the emancipation of Russia from past oppression and a world-shattering disaster. As regimes fall and rise, as civil wars erupt, as state violence targets civilian populations, it is a story that remains profoundly and enduringly relevant.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199794218
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/17/2017
Pages:	856
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 2.10(d)

About the Author

Laura Engelstein is Henry S. McNeil Professor Emerita of Russian History at Yale University, where she served as chair of the History Department, and Professor Emerita at Princeton.

Table of Contents

List of Maps
Author's Note
Introduction

Part I: Last Years of the Old Empire, 1904-1914

Part II: The Great War: Imperial Self-Destruction
1: The Great War Begins
2: Germans, Jews, Armenians
3: Tearing Themselves Apart
4: Conflict and Collapse

Part III: 1917: Contest for Control
1: Five Days that Shook the World
2: The War Continues
3: From Putsch to Coup
4: Bolshevik October
5: Death of the Constituent Assembly
6: Politics from Below

Part IV: Sovereign Claims
1: The Peace that Wasn't
2: Treason and Terror
3: Finland's Civil War
4: Baltic Entanglements
5: Ukrainian Drama, Act I
6: Colonial Repercussions

Part V: War Within
1: The Unquiet Don
2: Foreign Bodies
3: Trotsky Arms, Siberia Mobilizes
4: Kolchak-the Wild East
5: Ukraine, Act II
6: War Against the Cossacks
7: Miracle on the Vistula
8: War Against the Jews
9: The Last Page
10: War Against the Peasants

Part VI: Victory and Retreat
1: The Proletariat in the Proletarian Dictatorship
2: The Revolution Turns Against Itself

Conclusion: Revolution Against Itself

Acknowledgements
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

09/25/2017
Engelstein (Slavophile Empire), professor emerita of Russian history at Yale, chronicles the violence that preempted the “unprecedented and monumental” Russian Revolution and did not cease at the conclusion of the ensuing civil war, which ushered in a state that “substituted the forced mobilization of popular participation for the formal institutions of political democracy.” Social unrest in the Russian Empire predated the country’s entry into WWI. An unsuccessful war with Japan, pogroms against Jews, domestic terrorism, and the widening gulf between monarchists and the social, cultural, and economic groups “trying to lead Russia into the future” all contributed to an atmosphere of increasing instability, Engelstein writes. By the time “the old regime effectively crumbled” in February of 1917, mutinous soldiers, sailors, and workers had taken to the streets of Petrograd. The efforts of new legislative bodies, including the Duma Committee and the Soviet Executive Committee, to regain control, proved insufficient and were undermined by the Bolsheviks, who “were busy calculating the best strategy for knocking out the political center.” Engelstein delivers a clear-eyed, if dry, account of the difficulties confronting the population, now citizens of a country where “the dream of democracy had been abandoned,” and everyone was subject to the “arbitrary swing of the sword.” (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

08/01/2017
At some point in their careers, almost all scholars of Russian and Soviet history write about the complex period between the first Russian Revolution in 1905 and the final submission of the Basmachi insurrection two decades later. Engelstein (history, Yale Univ; The Keys to Happiness) waited until her retirement to tackle this task; as such, she succeeds in presenting a thorough history of these wars and revolutions in an understandable and engaging manner. In this full, richly detailed study, the author effectively argues the Bolsheviks were ultimately triumphant because they focused on power and were more willing to employ violence against their adversaries, and one another, with horrific results. This volume will compete with Jonathan Smele's The Russian Civil Wars, 1916–1926, and Richard Pipe's A Concise History of the Russian Revolution for space on the shelf, but Engelstein's expertise in Russian cultural history offers new and unique insights. VERDICT This comprehensive examination of the tragic, tumultuous, and violent period marking the end of the Imperial Russian Empire and the beginning of the Soviet Union is recommended for students and scholars of Russian and Soviet history, as well as anyone interested in social change.—Michael McCarthy, Independent Scholar, Tampa

Library Journal

★ 2017-07-12
A simultaneously sweeping and focused history of the Bolshevik Revolution as a brutal co-opting of the legitimate democratic groundswell.On the 100th anniversary of Lenin's 1917 coup, Engelstein (Emerita, Russian History/Yale Univ.; Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia's Illiberal Path, 2009, etc.) concentrates on the ferocious state-building of the Bolsheviks, which allowed them to assume power through civil war, social control, and economic collapse, defeating the counterrevolution and establishing a top-down socialist state. The author revisits the Revolution of 1905 that shook the Russian Empire "from stem to stern" and first provided the model for the 1917 February Revolution. The Bolshevik coup of the duly elected provisional government brought on a savage four-year civil war that Engelstein asserts was "implicit in the revolution from the beginning." Taking Russia out of World War I and gambling instead on the sparking of worldwide revolution fractured the opposition: "men versus officers, peasants versus landowners, workers versus factor owners, poor versus rich, drunk versus sober." The Bolsheviks exploited the divisions rather than contain them, and what Engelstein sees as the legitimate "procedures of democratic life," which were reflected in the many committees and conferences—she notes that a third of the population, about 50 million people, voted for the Constituent Assembly—could, by the dominant Bolshevik party, "be dispensed with, or refashioned as instruments of rule." Moreover, the Cheka, the police-state ancestor to the KGB, was put in place within weeks after the October Revolution, instigating the Red Terror, which was, as one official noted, "the rational direction of the punishing arm of the revolutionary proletariat." Engelstein astutely and methodically examines the unquiet regions in turn, from Finland to the Baltics to Ukraine to central Asia to Poland. Crushing the rebellion of the Kronstadt sailors in 1921 was just the beginning of the revolution's turning against itself. A comprehensive, ideologically detached, and enormously enlightening work of Russian history.

Kirkus Reviews

"The excellent Russia in Flames...covers not just the two revolutions and their prelude, but also the civil war that ensued..." — Wall Street Journal

"This is the first history of the Russian Revolution that takes seriously the fact that Russians were a minority in the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Russian empire. With verve and ambition, Engelstein chronicles the history of war and revolution as they swept across this vast empire. In this centenary year there will be many books on 1917, but none will be as original in conception and as bold in argument as this. This is history written on an epic scale by a historian at the height of her powers." — S. A. Smith, All Souls College, Oxford, author of Russia in Revolution

"A simultaneously sweeping and focused history of the Bolshevik Revolution . . . A comprehensive, ideologically detached, and enormously enlightening work of Russian history." —Kirkus, STARRED REVIEW

"[Engelstein] succeeds in presenting a thorough history of these wars and revolutions in an understandable and engaging manner. In this full, richly detailed study, the author effectively argues the Bolsheviks were ultimately triumphant because they focused on power and were more willing to employ violence against their adversaries, and one another, with horrific results."—Library Journal

"Engelstein delivers a clear-eyed . . . account of the difficulties confronting the population, now citizens of a country where "the dream of democracy had been abandoned," and everyone was subject to the "arbitrary swing of the sword.""—Publishers Weekly

"Destined to become the standard English language history of this period." —Mark Edele, Australian Book Review

"Laura Engelstein's magnificent volume provides a fresh and comprehensive...vision of the Russian Revolution. Positives abound...most important is her powerful and metaphorical language." —Slavic Review

"The past year has seen a considerable wave of books on revolutionary Russia, few as good as Russia in Flames, which is likely to become a standard work on the subject." — Los Angeles Review of Books

"It is meticulously researched and brilliantly written." —Washington Book Reveiw

"Magisterial . . . . Engelstein's monumental achievement is to have wrestled the sprawling ideological, ethnic and social conflicts, the shifting fronts, the coalescing and disintegrating armies and political fiefdoms, and the foreign entanglements into a compelling account of the disintegration of the old empire and the birth of the new." —Times Literary Supplement

"The meticulously researched and fluently written story she relates is, of course, familiar, but is rarely told with the coherence and clarity achieved by Engelstein, who has come up with an unexpected page-turner." —Mark Glanville, Jewish Chronicle

"Through her engaging prose, Engelstein brings clarity to an extremely complex period of Russian history that dramaiclaly shaped the rest of the twentieth century." — Army History

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