The Russian Civil War (1918-1924) in Asiatic Russia was like the American Wild West as one regime after another tried to establish its rule over the freedom-loving peasants and miners of the West Siberian plains and mountains. A key role in this struggle was played by the partisan armies put together by anarchists, which fought first against the Whites, then against the Reds. Like the better known Ukrainian peasant movement led by Nestor Makhno- known as the Makhnovshchina - the Siberian anarchists aimed to establish free federations of rural communes and worker-managed industrial enterprises. Long ignored or stigmatized as bandits by Soviet historians and their nationalist successors, the Siberian anarchist-partisans are rescued from oblivion in this pioneering study.

De la révolution d'octobre 1917 aux derniers événements de 1922, la guerre civile russe a fait des ravages : des millions de morts, épidémies de typhus et de choléra, famine et misère, terreur et déportation des populations. On connaît surtout la lutte des rouges contre les Russes blancs. Mais une troisième force issue du monde rural émergeait. Bandes de pillards ou années de partisans, paysans insurgés, les "verts" se sont battus contre les blancs et les rouges : ils ont refusé la circonscription, la réquisition de récoltes ou se déclaraient pour la liberté du commerce et contre la dictature de la ville, rejetant les "communes", anarchistes, socialistes révolutionnaires ou ultra-nationalistes. Leur histoire est ici revisitée à la lumière de documents russes, souvent inédits en français, traduits par Jean-Jacques Marie. Ces témoignages sont rares. Ils ont disparu ou ont été qualifiés de "bandits" ; Staline les a gommés de l'histoire pour réduire la révolution à un conflit manichéen. L'historiographie, quant à elle, leur réserve une place presque inexistante. Le récit des événements - ponctué de ces textes et de témoignages forts - fait apparaître des acteurs mythiques : Makhno et son armée, le général Wrangel, les révoltés de Cronstadt, le baron fou Ungern ou le chef partisan Kotovski...

This book is the only comprehensive history of the total experience of the Russian Civil War. Focusing on the key Volga city of Saratov and the surrounding region, Donald Raleigh is the first historian to fully show how the experience of civil war embedded itself into both the people's and the state's outlook and behavior. He demonstrates how and why the programs and ideals that had propelled the Bolsheviks into power were so quickly lost and the repressive Soviet party-state was born. Experiencing Russia's Civil War is based on exhaustive use of previously classified local and central archives. It is also bold and ambitious in its breadth of thematic coverage, dealing with all aspects of the war experience from institutional evolution and demographics to survival strategies. Complicating our understanding of this formative period, Raleigh provides compelling evidence that many features of the Soviet system that we associate with the Stalin era were already adumbrated and practiced by the early 1920s, as Bolshevism became closed to real alternatives. Raleigh interprets this as the consequence of a complex dynamic shaped by Russia's political tradition and culture, Bolshevik ideology, and dire political, economic, and military crises starting with World War I and strongly reinforced by the indelible, mythologized experience of survival in the Civil War. Fluidly written, replete with new information, and always engaged with important questions, this is history finely wrought.

This collection of 22 essays analyses the Russian military in its social, political, economic, cultural and ideological contexts from 1450 to 1917.The essays are synthetic, and often based on new archival research.

This book, mainly based on primary sources from various countries, provides fascinating new insights into the origin and development of the Admiralty and maritime policy in the Low Countries before the Dutch Revolt, including government interference with maritime strategy, warfare, privateering, prize law, commerce, and fishery.

An examination of how the Netherlands combined espionage, deterrence, diplomacy, and economic policy to avoid World War I.

This is a study of war between Sung China and Kitan Liao, the treaty at Shan-yuan in 1005 that ended it, and the forms and textures of peaceful diplomatic contact between the two states that prevailed for the rest of the eleventh century."

This book offers an original approach to the study of the Scottish diaspora in Europe. It highlights the activities of a group of emigrants and exiles who served the twin-headed Habsburg dynasty during the first half of the seventeenth century.