He can with the greatest ease see the parallels between the defeat of the Whites during the Russian Civil War in and the loss of the Second Spanish Republic to Franco in Despite ideological differences, both had fronts that were obsessed with ideological divisions. These divisions weakened leadership and military fighting power. Both wars were international civil wars. Both were smeared with violence from both sides. Through a deep sense of the basic political social conditions for historical change. Beevor switches effortlessly between different levels in the explanations from the individual to the heavy guides in history, economics, geography and demography.
All in non technical, clear and jargon free language. At the same time he acknowledges that nothing was given coincidences could have changed the course fundamentally. Let s do a counterfactual here. Think e.g. if someone had shot Lenin on the way home to Petrograd from Zurich whatsapp mobile number list in the spring of Then the opponents of his coup plans both inside and outside the Bolshevik Party would probably have won. Bukharin, Zinoviev, even Trotsky doubted whether the Bolsheviks had enough strength to defeat the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky. Russia might have been set on a constitutional course and avoided the excesses of Stalinism. Stefan Zweig called such borderline situations the eternal moment of history.
Above all, Beevor is relentless in exposing the mistakes and lack of judgment of the actors in the story. His explanation of why the White side lost in is illustrative. We shall dwell on his hypotheses below. Beneath Beevor s texts there is also often one main concern. This book begs the question why civil wars are so much more terrible than ordinary wars. Where does the massive sadism come from scalping, burning, torture, chopping with sabers, burials alive, gouging out eyes, castrations, prisoners thrown into blast furnaces, skin peeled off after hot baths, routine rapes Who was the worst in the Russian Civil War In an attempt to summarize, Beevor writes More than often the white side represented the most degraded types of the human species.