The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism [Hardcover]

Anthony Read (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 17, 2008

“We are running a race with Bolshevism and the world is on fire.”—President Woodrow Wilson, 1919

While the Western leaders were hammering out a peace treaty in Paris to end the Great War, a new war had already begun. Bolshevism—the creed of the Russian Revolution—had burst on the scene in 1917 and seared itself into the world’s consciousness even faster than al-Qaeda would some eighty years later. The Allied powers tried to destroy it at its source by intervening, controversially and unsuccessfully, in the civil war in Russia. Elsewhere there were bloody revolutions and bloodier counterrevolutions in Germany, Hungary, and the Baltic States; massive strikes and civil unrest broke out in Britain, Western Europe, and in both North and South America. In the United States, a series of terrorist bombings created a wave of hysteria, later labeled the Great Red Scare, that threatened the very foundations of a free and democratic society. This book chronicles and examines the running battle with terror during the most revolutionary year since 1789.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Read (The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle) offers a lucid, gripping history of how the leaders of Western democracies reacted to the Russian revolution. Bolsheviks made clear their intention to unleash a worldwide revolution, and Churchill and others feared similar uprisings on their own soil. On December 30, 1918, bombs exploded at the houses of prominent Philadelphia businessmen and civic leaders. Fearing this was a Bolshevik attack, Philadelphians warned that other cities might come under the radicals' fire next. In Britain, unemployment was on the rise and worker morale was plummeting. Strikes rocked cities from Glasgow to Seattle. When workers and peasants in Spain began organizing, local estate owners blamed Red Russia, as did foreign journalists, like the French correspondent who opined that [a] wave of Bolshevism is passing over Andalusia. That spring also saw a spike in American panic about radicalism—when an alert postal worker barely managed to avert mailing out more than a dozen bombs in New York, everyone noticed that the bombs would have arrived around May Day. This sweeping, brilliant history, which travels from Turin, Italy, to Winnipeg, Canada, makes one crucial year in the history of global politics and labor come alive and has obvious resonance with the present moment. 16 pages of illus. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Anthony Read is the author of many books, most recently The Devil’s Disciples: Hitler’s Inner Circle. He lives in England.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition, First Printing edition (March 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393061248
• ISBN-13: 978-0393061246
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,100,704 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The Bolsheviks are coming"!, June 9, 2008

By 

Frank J. Konopka (Shamokin, PA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism (Hardcover)

This well-written book should be read in conjunction with "Savage Peace" by Ann Hagedorn, which I reviewed on June 28, 2007. They both offer insights into what was happening in the U.S. right after the end of World War I, and particularly the hysteria caused by the Russian Revolution. There are some of the same incidents in both books, but this latest one goes beyond happenings in the U.S., and gives us views of events in Europe, where the fear of a Communist take-over was much more reality-based. This was a very nervous time, and the author captures that feeling quite well. I learned many things that I did not know, not only about my own country, but about European events and countries. It only goes to show that one's education is never complete, particularly as it applies to history. I don't think that I will ever stop learning something new until I am, for one reason or another, unable to read anymore.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Global Overview, October 6, 2009

By 

Richard Rice (Chattanooga TN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism (Hardcover)

I disagree strongly with some of the other reviewers of this fascinating book; I find Read's writing both skillful and full of dry understated ironies and humor. It has real literary value as well as historical analysis. I found it hard to put down and in fact went out and purchased another of his books, the 2004 Devil's Disciples, on the immediate circle of Hitler's advisers. So much for the claim that the author is only a writer of children's literature. Perhaps that experience is why his writing is so much better than academic writers or political theorists. Do we critique E.B. White's essays because he wrote Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little? I think not.

Previous reviewers have largely missed the point (and the theme) of this book: it is not about the Russian Revolution. It does cover that event in a marvelously brief and powerful Prologue. And it goes on with an overview of the Civil War. But what Read really does show -- did the reviewers read the entire book? -- how the hysteria Bolshevism produced played out in many other parts of the world. While this global perspective may include some mistakes (I am not a European historian so I cannot comment on that), it does provide a truly global comparative view, and it is full of interesting gems that those trained in national histories might miss. And while there is little detail beyond 1919 -- a common fault in "pivotal year" books -- he does indeed mention in passing later developments. I found the brief reference to post 9/11 hysteria relevant. As Twain said, history does not repeat itself, but it echoes. I suppose one could also use 1949, the year of Communist China, as another catalyst of political hysteria, evidenced by McCarthyism in the United States.

I do wish he had used Japan as another example. After all, Japanese troops did stay in Siberia for a disastrous three years in hopes that the revolution would fail. Few nations had a greater fear of communism in that era than Japan, and it blinded them to danger from the right. The Tokyo urban riots of 1919 scared the leadership so much they imposed rice price controls that impoverished farmers.

Still, the book is an excellent read and frequently provocative. Readers should judge for themselves if the reviewers have a political axe to grind or are fair to this book. I think you will enjoy reading it.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Filling in the Gap, April 5, 2008

By 

R. Mansmann (Boonton, NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism (Hardcover)

I thought I was somewhat familiar with events in America in 1919, but this book put a lot of information in perspective... really gave me an understanding of the collapse of the German government and the unceratin foundations of the new central European countries> iwas a bit disappointed by the limted information about the Russian Civil War, but all in all, a good book about particulars in a period that most works have omitted.