Zara Steiner

Zara Steiner a fellow of New Hall, Cambridge, is the author of The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy 1880-1914 and Britain and the Origins of the First World War.

Carve-Up

Zara Steiner, 2 July 1981

The Allied intervention in the Russian civil war had far more important consequences than the events of this comic tragedy deserved. If it had little influence on the outcome of the First World War or on events within the Soviet Union, it left memories which shaped the Cold War and have not been totally effaced even to the present day. The intervention was to intensify the Soviet belief that their country was a beleaguered state faced by hostile forces, particularly after the hopes for a European revolution faded. On the Allied side, the feeling that the Bolsheviks represented a new kind of threat to the social and economic fabric was confirmed, without correcting the illusions which led them to send money, agents and finally troops into Russian territories.

Casino Politics: writing European history

David Stevenson, 6 October 2005

The Oxford History of Modern Europe belongs to a more leisured era. Its first volume, A.J.P. Taylor’s The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918, appeared in 1954. Half a century later...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences