The Wars After the Fall.

This would not have troubled Lenin, who correctly saw that his revolutionary vanguard was more likely to attract support in "the extra-parliamentary than in the parliamentary struggle", and he anticipated "the strength" that the Bolsheviks could "develop in civil war", Beevor writes. Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921, by Antony Beevor (Viking, 592 pp., $38) Despite a subtitle that suggests that it covers Russia's two revolutions and the subsequent civil war, Antony Beevor's new book is best seen as a history of that war (or, more accurately, wars) prefaced by a lengthy prologue chronicling the events that triggered it. The czarist regime had rotted away, but that rot, rather than a determination to build on the promise of the February revolution, thrived in the White armies. [Extracted from the article]