The traditional narrative of the Russian Civil War is one of revolution against counterrevolution, Bolshevik Reds against Tsarist Whites. Liudmila Novikova convincingly demonstrates, however, that the struggle was not between a Communist future and a Tsarist past; instead, it was a bloody fight among diverse factions of a modernizing postrevolutionary state. Focusing on the sparsely populated Arkhangelsk region in Northern Russia, she shows that the anti-Bolshevik government there, which held out from 1918 to early 1920, was a revolutionary alternative bolstered by broad popular support.

Novikova draws on declassified archives and sources in both Russia and the West to reveal the White movement in the North as a complex social and political phenomenon with a distinct regional context. She documents the politics of the Northern Government and its relations with the British and American forces who had occupied the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk at the end of World War I. As the civil war continued, the increasing involvement of the local population transformed the conflict into a ferocious "people's war" until remaining White forces under General Evgenii Miller evacuated the region in February 1920.

Liudmila Novikova is the deputy director of the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. She is the coeditor of two books, including Russia's Revolution in Regional Perspective. Seth Bernstein is an assistant professor of history at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He is the author of Raised under Stalin: Young Communists and the Defense of Socialism and the translator of Alexander Vatlin's Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police.

"Novikova’s challenging work, originally published in 2011, has finally reached English-speaking audiences thanks to the translation work of Seth Bernstein. . . . Readers will quickly find that the book has a great deal to contribute toward multiple fields, including political, social, and military history, each given a fair deal of attention. . . . Any scholar studying this period of revolution, civil war, and crisis should add this book to their repertoire."—H-War