I enjoyed this book and learned many things from it. The author's erudition and assimilation of a broad array of sources is astounding. The 108 pages of endnotes and 47-page bibliography are extremely useful to scholars and a fascinating read in their own right. At its best the narrative is full of unfamiliar details, quirky excursions, bold assertions, and colorful anecdotes. Scholars interested in this period should add it to their shelf.

Jonathan Smele is a divider, not a lumper. He repeatedly takes on simple interpretations and reveals contradictions and complexities. His strongest argument is that we should not see this as a single civil war, but rather as many overlapping, sometimes interrelated, sometimes unrelated civil wars. He effectively brings the non-Russian regions into the story—with particularly strong sections on Ukraine and the Caucasus and the incredibly complex array of contending forces in those regions. His depictions of the devastation of urban life throughout the Soviet Union and the raw violence of all sides in the war are powerful. I appreciated his sprinkling of rarely used words through the text: my favorite for promotion to a key word in revolution and war studies is ochlocracy. His chapter on the home front is a gem. The conclusion includes a convincing argument that the Bolsheviks did not really “win” the civil wars. Finland, the Baltic states, and Poland defeated the Reds and all of Europe staved off revolution and spread of the communist model. The Bolsheviks retreated from the countryside where 85% of the population lived. In a more cosmic sense, “the Soviet government, in the terrible violence it exerted against its erstwhile most fervent supporters … had tragically forfeited its moral right to rule and to represent the prospect of human progress that the Russian Revolution had seemed to offer” (241).

While the book effectively challenges many commonly held views about the period, it would be difficult to name the “Smele” interpretation of the civil wars in terms of what they were rather than what they were not. The title and introduction make a big deal about expanding the chronology of the civil war. This is a promising line of analysis. But Smele's account does not explicitly identify specific lines of continuity from his detailed narrative of the 1916 steppe rebellion to the civil wars of 1918–21. Extension of the end of the civil wars deep into the 1920s is also promising, although I find scholars who look to the 1928–33 era as a resumption of civil war modes of politics more convincing than Smele's argument that because pacification of Siberia and Central Asia stretched to the mid-1920s we should reclassify 1921–26 as part of the civil war era. Ultimately, this book did not convince me to shift the dates of the civil wars from the old standard 1918–21.

As a reference, the scholarly apparatus is unparalleled, but this text should be cited with care. It seems particularly loose with statistics, often citing figures on the high end of the spectrum. For example, Smele claims that by 1920 “at least 500,000 alleged enemies of the Soviet state had perished in Cheka dungeons” (194). I checked the footnote because I have not seen anywhere close to this number and found a cite to George Leggett, who actually claimed 140,000 victims. The other cite is to Lennard Gerson, who quotes Robert Conquest (without a title or page reference) as claiming over 500,000 executions. More importantly, the narrative did not often engage other scholars and other interpretations, missing the chance to serve as a last word on scholarship on the topic and help the reader see where his interpretations differ from others.

Used with care, this book will be of great use to academics and general readers who are familiar with the period. In the classroom, as my students made clear to me, it may be less successful. The text assumes a lot of background knowledge and is not very user friendly. The strength for experts of providing lots of unfamiliar detail and questioning standard assumptions can be a problem for the novice—especially without introductions to a dizzying array of actors, ideas, and factions.

But maybe it is in some larger sense appropriate to leave the reader with a longing for some unifying purpose or theme that simply did not exist in a kaleidoscopic swirl of events that left its participants bewildered and uncertain about what it all meant.