It was with great anticipation that the reviewer awaited the arrival of this interestingly titled monograph. An initial glance through the table of contents indeed revealed a number of intriguing chapter headings and subheadings, based on a wide ranging array of topics which have formed the focus for many historians of Russia’s civil war years and are of particular interest to the reviewer. Army mobilisation, war communism, desertion, the peasantry, military officers and the Red and White terror are but some of the vast topics which are set out for discussion within the body of the book. However, to tackle such topics in under two-hundred pages is an ambitious venture.

Vourkoutiotis states at the outset that his aim is to address the civil military relationship during the civil war by providing an overview of contemporary ideas and opinions from the revolutionary years to the military reforms of Mikhail Frunze. Furthermore, the book by “assessing the thoughts of significant figures of the time with regard to civil-military relations as expressed through their writing and in the press, examines how they evolved during the course of the wars, and attempts to ascertain the role of ideology versus pragmatism in their development” (p. 1). From the beginning then the prose is not entirely clear and the reader is left pondering issues of clarity. It is not made explicit what chronological time frames the author exactly aims to address and the reader is left unsure what contribution such a general focus will add to the scholarship of the civil war and why the author has attempted to tackle such a broad topic in this manner. This is left unexplained except to state that he believes the voices of some of the lesser known figures of the civil war “deserve to be heard” (p. 1). With regards to sources, published soviet memoir materials are used alongside contemporary documents from Lenin and Trotsky, most of which are now available on the internet.

From the first section of the book, covering a historical overview of the civil war, the reader is left questioning the author’s command of the historiography. For instance, it is stated that in early September 1918 the Americans arrived in Murmansk and seized the railways leading to that city (p. 4). This is simply not true. The Americans arrived in significant numbers at Arkhangel’sk on 4 September but they were not responsible for securing the railway line from Soroka to Murmansk, which took place over June and July 1918 and was undertaken by a consortium of other Allied troops. If this is a minor factual gripe then the justification for it derives from the fact that Vasilis Vourkoutiotis has neglected the wide ranging and valuable work of other civil war historians throughout his monograph. A total of three secondary sources are listed in the bibliography, with little engagement of even them within the text.

A lack of engagement with the sources is indeed a major problem with the work as a whole. In attempting to offer an overview of contemporary opinions of the various topics, which the author believes are necessary to discuss the civil-military relationship, he simply summarises choice extracts from participants of the civil war and makes absolutely no attempt to imprint his own analysis or comment on these extracts. A seeming lack of caution in the use of memoirs and reminiscences by participants of the civil war published in the soviet era is also apparent throughout. For example, the memoirs of Semen Budennyi are used, published in 1958, to state that in 1920 the local populations “admired Soviet power” and the soldiers received a political education from the Red army (p. 79). This is summarised with a lack of supporting documentary evidence or reference to the secondary literature, which could further elucidate this assertion, and without acknowledging that the latter-day testimony of soviet political and military leaders should not be taken at face value since they generally had a vested interest in describing the success of the Red army’s political work. Furthermore, the favourable appraisal of Lenin’s role in the revolution, something very much underlined within soviet historiography, is apparent in the use of the memoirs of a former soviet pilot, A.K. Tumanskii, published in 1962. Describing Tumanskii’s indecision on whether to support the soviets in the winter of 1917, the author outlines that an encounter with Lenin left Tumanskii with an “admiration for Lenin’s down to earth qualities and attentiveness to simple people. The meeting reinforced Tumanskii’s confidence that he had chosen the right side.” (p. 78)

The structure of the book is unbalanced and certain topics receive more attention than others with little explanation as to why. For instance, the discussion of the Red and White terror, extremely short in any case and dealt with in less than two pages, sees the Red terror receiving only seven lines of text and the White terror three paragraphs (pp. 131-133). The book also lacks continuity and clarity on a number of occasions. This is made worse by the fact that there are regular large chronological jumps from paragraph to paragraph. For example, in the space of four short paragraphs in the final chapter, the chronology moves from October 1918 to August 1919, to August 1920 and then back to August 1919 (pp. 152-153). Vourkoutiotis does once mention the part of soviet historians in deemphasising the role of former tsarist officers in the Red army within the historiography, so he is aware of issues concerning bias (p. 98). Nevertheless, the general impression appears to be that the author has largely forsaken considerations of prejudices within the sources and used convenient extracts to emphasise that the Reds built a closer bond to the populace throughout the civil war than the Whites and this is why they won. If this is not the case then it is impossible for the reader to recognise because the author does not participate in historical debate or challenge what is written in the contemporary accounts. Even the conclusions at the end of the book offer no relief and simply paraphrase what has already been narrated within the chapters.

If the content leaves something to be desired then the presentation of the monograph equally does so. The text is regularly flawed by clumsy paraphrasing from Russian sources and confusion over past and present tenses. On one occasion three such examples come in a single paragraph (p. 75, middle paragraph). A few mistakes could perhaps be overlooked but a host of grammatical errors cannot and make for frustrating reading. At the last count a total of sixty-three errors were recorded including typing mistakes, present and past tense confusion, missing words or letters, word repetition and paragraphs which are not indented. Thus, the publisher must bear at least an equal responsibility for these flaws in editing, which give the appearance of a hastily produced piece of work.

It is therefore with regret that little positive can be said about this monograph. At the very least it offers a bibliography which gives an idea of the amount of published Russian primary source material on the civil war now available on the internet but unfortunately it adds little else to the literature of the period.