H.
McNeil Professor Emerita of Russian History at Yale University, where she served as chair of the History Department, and Professor Emerita at Princeton.These were years of breakdown and brutal violence on all sides, punctuated by the decisive turning points of February and October. Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914 - 1921, Paperback - Laura Engelstein The Bolsheviks managed to harness the social breakdown caused by the war and institutionalize violence as a method of state-building, creating a new society and a new form of power. As Engelstein proves definitively, the struggle for power engaged not only civil society and party leaders, but the broad masses of the population and every corner of the far-reaching empire, well beyond Moscow and Petrograd.