Engelstein, Laura. Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War 1914-1921. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
For all my reading on the First World War, I’ve dealt with one of the key players surprisingly little. Behind Germany, the Russian Empire bears perhaps the most responsibility for expanding what should have been a localized Balkan tiff into a pan-European conflagration. Despite this, I’ve only really encountered that side of the narrative either indirectly, through histories of Russia’s adversaries like Ring of Steel and Robert Gerwarth’s The Vanquished, or as part of wider general histories of the war like Hew Strachan’s The First World War or Peter Hart’s The Great War. Laura Engelstein’s Russia in Flames, then, seemed like just the corrective I needed, with a little more besides to round out my understanding of the country’s exit from the conflict and bloody metamorphosis into what would become one of the titans of the twentieth century.
As it turned out, I had the weight of Engelstein’s narrative entirely backwards. While the First World War does indeed make up its first two sections, Russia in Flames is primarily focused on the final two thirds of its subtitle and only explores the period 1914-17 (as well as a few decades prior for context) in service of understanding the revolution, fall of the tsar, democratic infighting, and civil war that would ultimately result in Bolshevik victory. In doing so, Engelstein seeks to emphasize both the fundamental chaos of a state coming apart at the seams and the inherently undemocratic nature of its eventual rulers through examining the factors that led to Lenin and his communists’ success. This is primarily a narrative of high politics, and while economic, cultural, social, and ethnic factors necessarily flesh out some chapters, Russia in Flames is overwhelmingly concerned with events in the halls of power and, to a lesser extent, on the battlefield. That narrative, though, is fantastically detailed and forcefully delivers Engelstein’s arguments. The sheer incompetence of the tsarist state in waging war (and administration in general) is on full display in those initial sections, as is the mindset and strategy of Lenin’s Bolsheviks as they suborned Russia’s fledgling democracy and exploited chaos to their own authoritarian benefit. Engelstein is clear that that any ideas of a “pure,” “democratic” communism/Bolshevism/Leninism in Russia being betrayed by Stalin or other successors is a myth—Lenin himself was always opposed to principles of democratic governance, and his party took their own bad faith and use of force against their opponents not as regrettable necessities but as points of pride. In short, the Soviet Union came about not because the communists had the most support, or even because they governed better, but because Lenin and his ilk brought a knife to a parliamentary debate and wielded it with ruthless efficiency.
All that said, there remain some noticeable gaps in Engelstein’s coverage of the Russian Civil War in particular. Organizing her work geographically lends clarity to each individual theater, yet this almost feels like a bad thing at times, taking away from the overall picture of chaos and anarchy throughout the country as well as diluting the grand strategic picture. Certain key events are also glossed over, though for space or other reasons is never clear. Trotsky’s near-miraculous feat of whipping a functional Red Army into shape out of the undisciplined veterans, militias, and Red Guard units available was one of the pillars of Soviet power and victory even by Engelstein’s own admission, yet that actual process is never examined in its own right, happening largely off-page.
For someone who had never read a devoted history of Russia’s revolution, however, Russia in Flames certainly provided an easily understandable guide to one of the more pivotal periods in twentieth-century history. Even more so, its overall theme of how those uncommitted to democracy can use selective lip service to its principles in pursuit of dismantling the system and constructing a new one more to their egotistical liking is a relevant and necessary one for the times we find ourselves in today.