Book Review

Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921: Searing analysis of USSR’s birth not for faint-hearted

Antony Beevor’s latest doorstopper, about the Russian Revolution and the chaos that followed it, teems with tales of gory cruelty

Vladimir Lenin: called for ‘war to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals’. Picture: Getty