100 books like Interpreting the Russian Revolution

A lot of people have heard about a crazy monk called Grigorii Rasputin, who, by the way, was neither crazy nor a monk. We read many volumes about him when researching our book on the myths of the Russian Revolution. We thought we had seen it all. Yet Douglas Smith’s book about Rasputin was still an eye-opener.

This scholarly book, based on years of archival work, reads like a work of fiction. Page after page lifts the veil of mystery surrounding Rasputin! We also deeply appreciated how Smith placed the powerful courtier in the social context of his time—the peasants, the priests, the aristocrats, the imperial court—many of which perished in the Revolution. 

Few Americans wind up in Siberia. Yet President Woodrow Wilson dispatched General William S. Graves and 8,000 soldiers to Siberia just as it was plunging into civil war. Contrary to many outsiders who viewed the Russian Civil War as a struggle between the bad guys (the Bolsheviks) and the good guys (their opponents), he discovered that many of the “good guys” were pretty bad also.

We found Graves’s book full of fascinating stories, including skirmishes Americans engaged in while in Siberia. Graves sounds a little cranky, but we think his book is a must-read not only for those who want to make sense of the Russian Revolution but also for those interested in the complicated history of twentieth-century American military interventions.   

We knew that Russia mobilized more female volunteers in World War I than any other country. But we are so grateful that Maria Bochkareva, a semi-literate peasant and the founder of the first Russian female death battalion, took the time to share her story with a reporter. It sheds dazzling light on soldiers’ experiences on the Eastern Front. We had often marveled at this untrained woman’s success as a combatant and a commander.

The book’s first chapters show that she learned grit and toughness from living with an abusive husband, resisting the sexual advances of a Siberian governor, and standing her ground in male soldier barracks. By the time she had to face the Germans on the frontline, she was ready. Read her book and be inspired!   

Richard Pipes wrote huge, authoritative books on the Russian Revolution. But he cared enough about accessibility to distill all his learning on the topic into a 100-page booklet. We love how clearly he wrote, without jargon or talking down.

Page after page makes sense of the most burning questions of the revolution: Why the tsar fell. How the Bolsheviks came to power. Whether Stalin's coming to power was inevitable. We felt ourselves being taken into the confidence of a truly brilliant mind.

The disasters of the revolution and civil war were experienced differently across the empire and by distinct social groups. For those of material means in European Russia who understood that their lives could never be the same, the priority was escape; most often, this was initially to a safe part of the former empire, and then, as the civil war and the prospect of Soviet rule encroached upon their safe enclave, into a life of exile abroad.

Nadezhda Teffi was an exceptionally popular writer and humorist at the time of the revolution, and her memoir (written a few years after departing Russia) is an account of how her world was turned upside down in 1917, and it documents the ways in which life had been similarly upended in each place she observed during her journey into exile.

The book is unusual in that it retains her light touch and humor,… show more.

It is a compelling epic of the bloody Russian Revolution to show how Don Cossack suffered and fought during World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the following civic war. The love story is beautiful and moving. The main character Grigori was moving between the White and Red army, with pain and daze. Like other Cossack people, he was torn between royalty and betrayal, right and wrong, justice and barbarism.

This book goes back to the chaos of the years after the Bolshevik revolution. It is set in Kyiv, which changed hands more than a dozen times during the brutal civil war that followed. The story is very autobiographical and focuses on a middle-class family that supports a pro-German faction in its struggle against Bolsheviks, Russian Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists. This isn’t a panoramic novel in the style of War and Peace but a worm’s-eye view of the chaos that has been unleashed. Brilliant.

Gorky, the author of The Lower Depths, was appalled by czarism and by Russia’s conduct in the First World War, yet this series of essays communicates a profound disillusionment with revolution. Russia, he wrote, was “splitting all along its seams and falling apart like an old barge in a flood.” He lamented “our stupidity, our cruelty, and all that chaos of dark, anarchistic feelings, that chaos which has been cultivated in our souls by the monarchy’s shameless oppression, by its cynical cruelty.” The old regime, he wrote, had successfully suppressed the human spirit in its subjects, and now that it was gone Russia would have to live with the consequences.

Of the hundreds of books on revolutions I have read in a decades-long career, this remains the most powerful and enthralling of them all.  Unfolding like a grand Russian epic in the manner of War and Peace, Trotsky tells the story of the Russian Revolution and the triumph of the Bolshevik Marxists over every challenge and tribulation.  No other book gives you the feeling of being a revolutionary like this one, as Trotsky takes you from the meetings of workers in the factories of St. Petersburg to the halls of the Winter Palace, all the while debating whether the events he is witnessing, indeed the history he knows he is making, conform to the Marxist vision of history that inspires him. No other account of revolutions offers such a combination of theoretical brilliance and detailed, almost cinema-like descriptions of feelings and events. 

Amazingly, in the spring of 1917 an Interview Commission was formed in Russia to obtain oral histories of the revolution that led to the abdication of Czar Nicholas II. Thirteen key players were interviewed about their role in the sweeping and often violent events that had occurred just two months earlier. You can sense the ambivalence that they were struggling with. Of special note is Alexander Kerensky, who would become the leader of the Provisional Government, describing how he called Nicholas’ brother Michael in the middle of the night, waking him up, and persuading him to renounce the throne.