Engelstein narrates the events that took place between the February Revolution and the October Bolshevik coup the culminated the months of tension and deteriorating relationships within the socialist coalition government. Her analysis of how the coalition government disintegrated into Civil War disproves the misconception that the death and destruction brought on by the Civil War altered the "original character of the Bolshevik party." She asserts that violence and coercion were intentionally at the core of the party plan to assume full control in Russia and its empire and that the Bolsheviks saw the "civil war as the path to triumph."