The Russian Revolution seized a backward, violent, peasant country and turned it into the world's first 'worker's state'. The cost in blood and misery is now known, but no fully modern narrative of those events is available which explains their violence, or the uncontrolled use of power to which they led. Figes has been able to exploit the newly-opened files in Moscow and other cities and to take a truly free look at these nightmare years, including the long civil war that ended in 1923.