After his monumental works on Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin, Antony Beevor’s history of the Russian Revolution triumphantly confirms him as Britain’s leading military historian.
The narrative brio, magpie eye for telling facts and confident handling of a vastly complex cast of characters and stories that made his previous books modern classics are fully in evidence.
One of the great strengths of Beevor’s writing is use of little-known sources (the book is chivalrously dedicated to his long-time researcher, Lyuba Vinogradova). The conservative politician Vasily Shulgin, one of these sources, delivers this pithy verdict on Tsar Nicholas II’s vacillating
