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The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism Hardcover – March 17, 2008

by Anthony Read (Author)

4.1 17 ratings

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“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

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company (March 17, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393061248
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393061246
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.01 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.6 x 1.3 x 9.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,540,218 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,759 in Communism & Socialism (Books)
- #5,871 in Deals in Books
- #5,961 in Russian History (Books)

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4.1 17 ratings

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Frank J. Konopka

"The Bolsheviks are coming"!

Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2008

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.

12 people found this helpful

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Richard Rice

A Global Overview

Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2009

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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 people found this helpful

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K. L.

How to write a bad history 101

Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2013

I must concur with most of the negative reviews. The book was overly biased. The comparison between al-Qaida/Taliban and the Bolshevik party/Sovjet Russia shocked me. No serious historian could write something like that. The comparison makes no sense. In Read's view the Western governments only had good intention while the Bolsheviks and Marxists always wanted to cheat people and are portrayed as extremely violent. I regard this book as the example of how to write a bad history.

I can understand that the author wants to convey the fear of Western elites but he doesn't have to believe everything they've written. A historian has to be critical and Read lacks this essential quality.

3 people found this helpful

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Magickal Merlin

'The World on Fire' Fizzles Out-

Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2008

I was so dissappointed with this book.I thought it was going to be a juicy thriller timelining the Russian Revolution to vivid life.The author has no concept of the writings and philosophy of Vladimer Lenin.What the author has done is read a bunch of quasi-biographies of Lenin,and then rehashes them into this concise book.This book is for newspaper historians,who enjoy the sensational aspects of history.This is not intellectual reading for real thinkers.Now,if you're doing a grade school project for history class,this book may help you out.But,I feel the budding intellectual is really getting short-changed here.The best book about the Oktober Revolution crisis is still John Reed's ,'Ten Days that Shook the World'.That book is a historical gem,that still is enchanting reading today.This book,'The World on Fire',fails to explain why Lenin lumed the Soviet-Labour torch ,enlightening the peasant masses,all from Marx's revolutionary spark.And sheds no light,on why Lenin's fight for Bolshevik equality,was dashed by hard-line totalitarian stalwarts.

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R. Mansmann

Filling in the Gap

Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2008

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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.

13 people found this helpful

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