Belaya gvardiya

I speak Russian. I'm familiar with the history of the Russian revolution and it's aftermath (from an American college course on the time and having heard a pro-monarchist White Guard version as well). I still could barely follow what was going on or which side everyone was on. I think you need to read the book or be a student of Ukranian history to have followed this.

I'm almost curious to read the book just so I could make sense of it. In the end what I felt was that the Ukranian nationalists were shown to be ignorant peasants who burned schools; the Hetman government was shown as cowardly and supported by foreign governments; the people who lived in Ukraine but considered themselves as Russians were upper class intelligentsia and naive; the expat Russians who flooded in were delusional monarchists fighting for something that could not be resurrected. The only unifying factor was that they were all pretty much anti-semitic.

In the end the ever shifting alliances seem to have fractured the country, it was just a bloody and tragic circumstance for all involved.