The Ring of Fire

CHAPTER 6 · MAY–NOVEMBER 1918 · The Russian Revolution, 1905–1924

The civil war’s opening act was lit almost by accident, and its fuse ran the whole width of Asia. Some 40,000 soldiers of the Czechoslovak Legion — former prisoners of war who had agreed to fight for the Allies and were being shipped out via Vladivostok — were strung out along the Trans-Siberian Railway when a scuffle and a Bolshevik order to disarm them turned into a revolt. Follow the great arrow: in a matter of weeks a foreign legion seized the railway across 8,000 kilometers of Russia, and with it the spine of Siberia. Wherever the Legion cleared the Bolsheviks out, anti-Bolshevik governme

The turn: Trotsky’s train at Sviyazhsk, August 1918.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.