I’m preparing a series on a subject that has fascinated me for a long time: a revolutionary struggle that shook the world and that we call, for want of a better name, the Russian Civil War.

At issue was the destiny of an empire covering one-sixth of the land surface of the earth. The world’s first socialist revolution had triumphed in the October Revolution of 1917 when workers’ councils, known as Soviets, seized power under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party.

The Reds were not fighting for a totalitarian one-party state, but for a participatory democracy of workers and peasants. Rising from their factories and slums, they saw themselves as the spearhead of an international working-class revolution that would build a new and better world based on reason, equality and humanity. The Whites were fighting to smother the ‘barbarism and anarchy’ of the Soviet democracy; they wanted to restore tradition and hierarchy, the empire, law and order.

What makes this struggle so fascinating also makes it daunting. The human suffering was terrible. Famine and disease killed a far greater number than bullets and shells. At times, great cities lay semi-deserted. Both sides used the grisly weapon of terror. The scope of the war was epic: in the north, the armies were supplied by sleds across the ice, in the south by camel caravans. It was fought with weapons that don’t seem to belong in the twentieth century: cavalry with swords and lances, armoured trains, horse-drawn carts with machine-guns bolted onto them. But less conventional weapons were even more decisive: a political appeal could make an army melt away overnight, or win a battle without a shot being fired. It was sincere political commitment that welded a ragged and untrained workers’ militia into an army unlike anything ever seen before.

I’m currently preparing this series and I expect to air the first few parts weekly over August-September 2021. So get on the subscriber list and keep an eye on those emails.