Dune provides a reasonably objective account of the October Revolution and the Civil War without embellishment or historical name-dropping (Lenin and Trotsky are hardly mentioned). The editors have done history a service by making his writing available in this format.

There are numerous good books on the Russian Revolution of 1917, and this is one of them. There are few good books on the 1918 - 1923 Civil War, and Chamberlin's book, originally published in 1934, is still essential reading for anyone who wishes to know more than what's contained in Evan Mawdsley's `The Russian Civil War'. Chamberlin's book was chosen by the reviewers for `Foreign Affairs' in 1997 as one of the most important books on international relations published in the last 75 years; I agree. Chamberlin's book goes in and out of print; copies are easy to find even when it's out of print.

Chamberlin spent 1922 to 1934 as a foreign correspondent in the USSR; he was later a lecturer at Yale and Harvard. He had access to people, places and documents which no later writer on the Civil War had access to until about 1990. So his book is packed with important information about aspects of the Russian Civil War that it's hard to find discussed elsewhere. And his statements of fact are almost all accurate, which is more than one can say for many books on the subject. The organization of the book leaves something to be desired; finding all the places where a particular topic is discussed is difficult. Hence, it's a good idea to read Mawdsley's book before reading Chamberlin. But Chamberlin is still a `must read'.

Chamberlin set out to report facts. Therefore he was severely criticized by left-wing reviewers in the 1930's as being biased against the Soviet Union, and equally severely criticized by right-wing reviewers and scholars of the 1950s and 1960s as having been too sympathetic to the USSR. From the perspective of the 1990's this book contains a remarkably accurate account of the facts.