ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some of the issues, but at the outset it is worth nothing that it is unlikely that any one macro-level explanation will satisfactorily account for the scale and multiplicity of forms of violence that characterized the twentieth-century or the Civil War in Soviet Russia. The levels of unparalleled violence have stimulated much new historiography and it reviews some influential perspectives on this violence and point to interesting new topics of research. The chapter discusses some of the ways in which scholars have shown how violence manifested itself and sought to deepen our understanding of its meanings and dynamics. Richard Bessel, a British historian of Germany, has suggested that violence has become a preoccupation of historians in inverse proportion to its presence in our lives. In the post-Communist era there has been a considerable body of literature by Russian historians on the Cheka, much of it taking the form of regional studies.
