Rob Attar: Most of your previous books have focused on the Second World War. What made you decide to head back 20 years earlier for this one?

Antony Beevor: The most important thing for me was to understand the chain of disasters of the 20th century – the impacts of which actually are still with us today, as we see in Ukraine. Around 12 million people died in the Russian Civil War. This wanton destruction created a terrible fear among the middle classes, but also galvanised the left – the Bolsheviks and other communists – and marked the start of a vicious circle of rhetoric that developed, above all, in the 1930s. This is really what dominates the whole of the 20th century, yet I think that the Russian Civil War is not understood well enough.

This book was always going to be a tremendous challenge, and was made possible almost entirely by the wonderful research done by my great Russian colleague, Lyuba Vinogradova, over the past five years.

What new insights have emerged from the work that you and Lyuba have done over these past few years?

What has stood out is the sheer horror of the civil war. There’s a savagery and a sadism that is very hard to comprehend; I’m still mulling it over and trying to understand it. It was not just the build-up of hatred over centuries but a vengeance that seemed to be required. It went beyond the killing; there was also the sheer, horrible inventiveness of the tortures inflicted on people. We need to look at the origins of the civil