The Age of Civil Wars

The world wars have long framed our understanding of Europe’s violent twentieth century, yet for millions the fighting did not end in 1918, or even in 1945. Between 1917 and 1949, two connected waves of civil war swept the continent, from Finland and Ireland to Spain and Greece, as the collapse of empires and the spread of revolution turned old divisions into wars that allowed no bystanders and often grew bloodier after victory.

Beginning with the fallout from the Russian Revolution, The Age of Civil Wars traces how these conflicts shaped one another, as fighters, ideas and methods of violence crossed borders – from the German general who helped the Finnish Whites win in 1918 and led Freikorps troops in the Baltic in 1919, to the veterans of the Allied intervention in Russia who later policed partitioned Belfast, and the Spanish Republicans who, defeated by Franco, joined the resistance across occupied Europe during World War II.

Drawing on military and party archives, private papers and memoirs, Robert Gerwarth reveals how civil conflict transformed European politics and warfare, bringing paramilitarism, the persecution of civilians and the coerced remaking of populations to the centre of the continent’s history.