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Meanwhile, Rendle's balanced account detailing the failures as well as the successes of the tribunals complicates the trend in Soviet historiography of praising their heroic role in the Bolshevik civil war victory. Rendle traces Narkomiust's constant efforts to centralise the tribunal structure, and in so doing, systematise and professionalise legal procedure throughout the Soviet territory. It does this through the prism of the revolutionary tribunal, the court the Soviet government set up shortly after the October Revolution to provide a legal forum for fighting counter-revolutionary activity. [Extracted from the article]

Western leaders began to realise Russia's adversarial position when Putin returned to power in 2012 and especially after Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014. Mitchell A. Orenstein's I The Lands in Between i lays bare the results of the Russian hybrid war in Eastern and Western Europe, in a liminal area situated geographically or politically between Russia on the one hand, and the European Union and the United States on the other. Russia vs. the West and the New Politics of Hybrid War: Mitchell A. Orenstein, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019, xv + 232pp., £16.99/$24.95 h/b. [Extracted from the article]

Thinking more about not only the possible future convergence but also about the common historical roots of state-society relations in Russia and China would enrich the volume and allow for a deeper conceptual contribution to the studies of authoritarianism. The last comment is informed by my own work on state-society relations in Russia, which focuses on the state as an authority that unites people and different social groups into one collective. The edited volume I Citizens and the State in Authoritarian Regimes i is a very rich and much needed collection of studies discussing state-society relations in Russia and China. [Extracted from the article]

Schneer also rather follows Lockhart in over-estimating the extent to which the British government, and British generals, ever had any intention of moving their forces out of Archangel and Murmansk to support uprisings against Bolshevik rule. Schneer shows how in spring 1918 Lockhart moved from seeking to build better relations between the Bolsheviks and British government to become the most important architect of efforts to destroy the government of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotskii. Schneer uses collections of Russian documents to show how the Cheka became aware of these moves and sought to infiltrate the plotters and protect the Bolshevik regime. [Extracted from the article]