Ordeal, Book Two

Here is how this novel describes the creation of the Red Army in the autumn of 1918. Communists mobilised from Moscow, Petrograd and Ivanovo-Voznesensk, travelling to the fronts by train, breaking down sabotage on the line. A stern regime of terror established in the army. Cowardice tantamount to treason. Kazan taken by one sharp blow.

Every word of it is true. The Revolutionary Military Council that imposed that will had a chairman: the man who assembled the Communists, who lived on the train, who stood at Sviyazhsk through August and September and took Kazan back. His name was Leon Trotsky and it does not occur in this book.

In a hundred and twenty-eight thousand words about 1918, Lenin is named fifteen times, Stalin once, Trotsky not once. Kazan happens to no one. Tsaritsyn happens to Stalin.

The erasure is not a later retouching. Tolstoy wrote this in 1927 and 1928 - the months Trotsky was expelled from the Party and deported to Alma-Ata - while it was being decided what the civil war had consisted of.

The second book of the trilogy throws the four people of The Sisters across a continent coming apart: Dasha adrift, Katya under German occupation in the Ukraine, Telegin with the Reds, Roshchin with the Whites.

Progress Publishers, 1965. Translated by Ivy and Tatiana Litvinov.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.