A review of A Nasty Little War: The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution by Anna Reid (John Murray Press, 2024), £12.99 From 1918 to 1920, a total of 180,000 allied troops conducted an undeclared war to overthrow the… Continue Reading
In 1919, the Communist International, or Comintern, was founded in high hopes that the Russian Revolution would spread globally.1 The focus was on western Europe with its mass working-class movement. Given the wave of revolutionary fervour, it seemed little was… Continue Reading
In traditional military parlance, the cadre referred to the nucleus of officers around which a unit of soldiers could be built.1 Like many military terms, it would be adopted by revolutionaries in the inter-war period: cadres were the core of… Continue Reading
A review of Radek: A Novel, Stefan Heym (Monthly Review Press, 2022), £20 Who was Karl Radek? At one point in this epic work of historical fiction, Radek refers to himself as belonging to “the second rank” of Bolshevik revolutionaries,… Continue Reading
A review of Brendan McGeever, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution, Cambridge University Press (2019), £22.99 Brendan McGeever’s meticulously researched book uncovers truly shocking revelations about the scale of antisemitism during the civil war that followed the October 1917 Russian Revolution.1… Continue Reading
The Russian Revolution unleashed a vicious struggle between revolutionaries (above all the Bolsheviks based among the miners of the Donbass in the east), Ukrainian and Polish nationalists, and red and white armies. This sentence in Alex Callinicos’s analysis of events… Continue Reading