The Red Tempest

In the space of a single year, the largest country on Earth tore up three centuries of monarchy, briefly became the freest nation in the world, and then fell to a party of revolutionaries who promised bread, peace, and land - and delivered a civil war, a secret police, and a new kind of state that would shadow the entire twentieth century. This is the story of the Russian Revolution: how the Romanov empire collapsed, how the Bolsheviks seized what fell, and how a dream of liberation hardened into one of history's most total tyrannies.

Here is the whole tempest, from the last tsar and the killing cold of the trenches, through the February days that toppled Nicholas II, to the October night when Lenin's Bolsheviks stormed a hollow government and dared the world to stop them. Here are the men and women who made it and were consumed by it - Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the millions of soldiers, workers, and peasants who filled the streets - and the savage civil war, famine, and terror that followed, out of which the Soviet Union was born.

Drawn from the standard scholarship and clear-eyed about a record still fought over a century later, this is a fast, human narrative of how an old world was turned upside down - and a sober reckoning with why a revolution made in the name of freedom ended by building a prison, and what that terrible transformation still has to teach us.