The book is a continuation of his previous two books on the Russian Revolution. I found his listing of key characters at the beginning of the book very helpful to further understand their role during and sometimes after the revolution. The picturesadd to the realism of what happened. I am sure it was hard to find some of the photos that were included.Having met people who had fled Russia during this time and then reading W Bruce Lincoln's works makes me feel a better informed citizen of our world. Were I an educator these would be mandatory reading in my class.Anyone who is down on life should read these books for an immediate appreciation of life today.I wish the author was alive today so I could thank him.Good insight into the evolution of the Bolshevik state. Very readable. Forms the last volume of a loose trilogy -- see Lincoln's In War's Dark Shadow and Passage Through Armageddon. Read them in order to get a good picture of the tragedy of Russian history in the early 20th century.This book is a well researched book on the Russian Civil War. However, the glory of the book is that it starts off reading like a novel and never stops reading like novel. It is easy and exciting to read.here is so much gross misreprresentation of events discussed in the book that I would not recommend it to anyone who lacks a solid background in in Russian history.An excellent account of a significant episode in history.Well written. Accurate.Readers of this book about Russia's Civil War should find themselves cringing from the graphic depictions of unspeakable atrocities that characterized those dreadful years from 1918 to 1921 when supporters of the recently proclaimed Bolshevik regime of Lenin and Trotsky (the Reds) battled for survival against an eclectic array of monarchists, socialist, liberal, national liberationist, Cossack and foreign opponents (the Whites).The Russian Civil War that generated savagery of an unprecedented scale came at a juncture when the nation's resources and citizens were completely spent: 7 million lay dead from the butchery and disease of world War I, while millions more suffered on the verge of starvation. Lincoln depicts how fighting continued unabated through scores of epidemics, hundred of battles, thousands of executions and widespread famine to claim another 20 million lives. Never, according to Lincoln, had a modern society killed its own people so readily. Lincoln argues that raw ideological passions spurred both sides to sanction teror as a justifiable weapon to be used in eradicating visions of the future that did not coincide with their own.Lincoln is evenhanded in his reporting of the atrocities, but he lays the blame for precipitating the bloodlust principally on the Bolsheviks. Shortly after seizing power, Lenin faced the possibility that the population of Petrograd might starve to death. To avert catastrophe, he decided on a policy of food requisitioning that precipitated class warfare in the countryside. Dispatched to rural Russia were bands of workers armed with weapons and the authority to use them as they saw fit on peasants suspected of hoarding grain. In practice, such proletarian justice boiled down to looking in a peasant's soup pot. If thre was meat, the peasant was an enemy of the people, shot by the firing squad. The law of gun inexorably became the land.No historian can know if starvation might have been averted more effectively if the Bolsheviks had followed a policy of cooperation with peasants rather than one of confrontation. Lincoln's contribution is to shed light on how the Bolsheviks' life-or-death struggle against crushing odds (14 foreign countries, including the U.S., eventually intervened on the side of the whites) forged their vision of the future. Victory came because the Reds relentlessly marshalled all human and natural resources within their grasp to protect a revolution that was staged in the name of the masses, but which ultimately sacrificed the people and the principles it had promised to empower. The unchecked tyranny of party officials and petty bureaucrats bred a pervasive despotism permeated with illegality that was to become the hallmark of the Soviet regime. Lincoln correctly asserts that "only by understanding [this civil war] experience can we start to unravel the mystery of the Soviet Union."This book completed Lincoln's trilogy on the Russian revolutionary period. As in all of his works, Lincoln wrote a comprehensive account of the subject that is based on exhhaustive research in primary and secondary sources. Other available studies of the period more narrowly focus on foreign intervention, military campaigns or bolshevik domestic policies. Covering all of these topics in a single study of moderate length does, however, cause some problems: the book presumes more knowledge of Russian history than is typical of a general reader, yet glosses over details that would be of interst to the specialist.Bruce Lincoln's recent death removes an important voice from the field of Russian history, but this book (along with the many others he wrote) will ensure that he will be remembered.This is a review of the W. Bruce Lincoln's trilogy on the Russian Revolution (In war's dark shadow, Passage through armageddon, Red victory). I have read the three books (rather 2.75, as the author copy-pasted whole chapters of the second book from the first) and it has been a real torture.Quote:"And the Duma's vicepresident Aleksandr Protopopov, a politician whose apointment as Russia's last minister of internal affairs Alexandra insisted "God will bless", was widely believed to be an ardent necrophiliac."W. Bruce Lincoln, "Passage through armageddon", 1986, p. 275-276The filthiest rag of the yellow press would not dare print such despicable slander. Protopopov was murdered by the bolshevist Cheka in 1918.Such is Bruce Lincoln's style:"Far more unsavoury that the gatherings at Baroness Rozen's and Burdukov's was the salon of Prince Mikhail Andronikov, the patron of Khovstov, friend of Beletskii, and inveterate intriguer who was thought by some who knew him well to be an homosexual."W. Bruce Lincoln, "Passage through armageddon", 1986, p. 280."Was widely believed", "was thought", "was rumoured", "as rumor had it"... If a proof-reader was told to read W. Bruce Lincoln trilogy and was paid 50 cents every time he found a similar expression, he would end up with a small fortune.So that is what you get from Lincoln's books: rumor, slander, lots of Soviet sources and plenty of dislike of tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra.One of the main sources for the living conditions of the workers under the zarist regime is a book called "Byt rabochikh trekhgornoi manufakyuri", by S. Lapistkaia, published in Moscow in 1935. Moscow 1935. Stalin, Cheka, GULAG, hunger (millions died during the man-made famine of 1932-1933), crowded and dirty living quarters, frequent work accidents. The American Communist John Scott, who lived in the Soviet Union, wrote about that time: "I would wager that Russia's battle of ferrous metallurgy alone involved more casualties than the battle of the Marne." So a book is commisioned to explain Soviet citizens that their life now is far, far better than it was under the zarist regime. The book is quite frank in the prologue: "The old mode of life is opposed to the new one, typical of our socialist family. The enthusiasm of workers, the liberation of women, the growth of culture, the education of the workers, the fundamental changes in their life, the huge political activity of working men and women - that is the result of the October Revolution.This contrast, this instructive comparison of the old and new mode of life is the main sense of this book." "Byt rabochikh trekhgornoi manufakyuri", S. Lapistkaia, Moscow, 1935.Bruce W. Lincoln translates and quotes the finding of those "Soviet sociologists" (!!!, his expression) without any qualification.To sum it up, Bruce W. Lincoln books are a leftover of a time when specialist on Russia had to keep a line that allowed them to be in friendly terms with Soviet authoties. To be thrown to the dustbin of History (books).Much better alternatives:- "Nicholas and Alexandra", Robert K. Massie- "The Russian Revolution, 1899-1919", Richard Pipes- "The Eastern front, 1914-1917", Norman Stone- "The Russian Civil War", Evan MawdsleyA very well written account of how the ruling classes of several countries combined their efforts to stop the Russian workers from consolidating their control of society.Rubbish. Solzhenicyn much better,