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At the age of 16, I briefly joined the International Socialists, a small British Trotskyist party. Though I soon became disillusioned, it was a formative experience that left me with a lifelong fascination with communism and the Soviet Union. Over the following decades, I read everything I could about the subject, both fiction and non-fiction. In the years after the fall of communism, the ideas that eventually culminated in the writing of this book began to form in my head.
Grossman consciously attempted to write the War and Peace of the Second World War, and in this panoramic masterpiece, he pulled it off. Like War and Peace, the book focuses both on the travails of a single family and the broader sweep of history, as we witness events from the perspective of persecuted Jewish scientists, soldiers (both Soviet and German), partisans, peasants, and generals.
This is an intensely personal work – Grossman covered the battle of Stalingrad for the Soviet press and knew his subject matter firsthand. Writing it was also an extremely courageous act. The KGB confiscated the manuscript and Grossman never lived to see the book published.
Based around the pivotal WWII battle of Stalingrad (1942-3), where the German advance into Russia was eventually halted by the Red Army, and around an extended family, the Shaposhnikovs, and their many friends and acquaintances, Life and Fate recounts the experience of characters caught up in an immense struggle between opposing armies and ideologies. Nazism and Communism are appallingly similar, 'two poles of one magnet', as a German camp commander tells a shocked old Bolshevik prisoner. At the height of the battle Russian soldiers and citizens alike are at last able to speak out as they choose, and without reprisal…
At the age of 16, I briefly joined the International Socialists, a small British Trotskyist party. Though I soon became disillusioned, it was a formative experience that left me with a lifelong fascination with communism and the Soviet Union. Over the following decades, I read everything I could about the subject, both fiction and non-fiction. In the years after the fall of communism, the ideas that eventually culminated in the writing of this book began to form in my head.
A brilliant evocation of the paranoia of the Stalin regime and the extraordinary extent of its surveillance of members of the Communist elite. We follow the story of a young girl as her family is destroyed and she is sent to the GULAG. Although it delves deep into the horrors of Stalinist persecution, this book is also an uplifting tale of love, courage, and survival.
In the dangerous time of Russia’s Great Terror, a knock on the door late at night could mean only one thing!
Moscow, 1937. As mortal fear engulfs the capital city, a singular man cements his lethal grip of absolute power over an entire nation. Accusations, mass arrests, executions, and deportations become de rigueur. Stalin’s cult of personality is so fearsome, that even a simple question could get you killed—or worse. Stalin’s dreaded secret police, the NKVD, would pit neighbor against neighbor in the insatiable hunt for the spies and saboteurs which threaten the supreme leader’s tyranny. The crisis will irrecoverably…
At the age of 16, I briefly joined the International Socialists, a small British Trotskyist party. Though I soon became disillusioned, it was a formative experience that left me with a lifelong fascination with communism and the Soviet Union. Over the following decades, I read everything I could about the subject, both fiction and non-fiction. In the years after the fall of communism, the ideas that eventually culminated in the writing of this book began to form in my head.
This short novel is not set in the Soviet Union but in an unnamed post-Communist country that bears a striking resemblance to Bulgaria. The central character is the deposed Communist dictator, on trial for his crimes. The story is seen through his eyes, and he paints himself not as a villain but a misunderstood hero, a man who devoted his life to building socialism and a better life for his people. I know of no other book that is so good at getting into the head of a former dictator.
The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending trains his laser-bright prose on the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.
Stoyo Petkanov, the deposed Party leader, is placed on trial for crimes that range from corruption to political murder. Petkanov's guilt—and the righteousness of his opponents—would seem to be self-evident. But, as brilliantly imagined by Barnes, the trial of this cunning and unrepentant dictator illuminates the shadowy frontier between the rusted myths of the Communist past and a capitalist future in which everything is up for grabs.
At the age of 16, I briefly joined the International Socialists, a small British Trotskyist party. Though I soon became disillusioned, it was a formative experience that left me with a lifelong fascination with communism and the Soviet Union. Over the following decades, I read everything I could about the subject, both fiction and non-fiction. In the years after the fall of communism, the ideas that eventually culminated in the writing of this book began to form in my head.
Serge was a supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, though he never lost sight of its flaws.
This extraordinary novel centres on Petrograd at the height of the civil war, as economic collapse, hunger, the threat from the Whites, and the depredations of the Red Terror crush the city’s spirit and ultimately destroy the revolution, even if the Bolshevik regime it spawned survives.
1919–1920: St. Petersburg, city of the czars, has fallen to the Revolution. Camped out in the splendid palaces of the former regime, the city’s new masters seek to cement their control, even as the counterrevolutionary White Army regroups. Conquered City, Victor Serge’s most unrelenting narrative, is structured like a detective story, one in which the new political regime tracks down and eliminates its enemies—the spies, speculators, and traitors hidden among the mass of common people.
Conquered City is about terror: the Red Terror and the White Terror. But mainly about the Red, the Communists who have dared to pick up…
We have co-written three books on the Russian Revolution, a defining event of the twentieth century. It gave birth to the communist Soviet Union, which inspired millions and terrorized an equal number. World War II and the Cold War would have looked very different—or not happened at all—without the Soviet Union. The Russian Revolution was a Big-Bang-type event: it raged for a few years, but its economic, social, political, and geopolitical consequences reverberated for decades and can be felt to this day. Our advice to anyone interested in learning about the Russian Revolution: prepare to be amazed!
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.
America's foremost authority on Russian communism—the author of the definitive studies The Russian Revolution and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime—now addresses the enigmas of that country's 70-year enthrallment with communism.
Succinct, lucidly argued, and lively in its detail, this book offers a brilliant summation of the life's work of "one of America's great historians" (Washington Post Book World).
"The author has distilled his arguments concerning several key questions: Why did tsarism fall? Why did the Bolsheviks triumph? Why did Stalin succeed Lenin? The book, based on lectures given at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, has a nicely colloquial…
I’m a longtime Moscow correspondent, having worked there for The Baltimore Sun in the 1990s and for The Washington Post in the 2010s. It was an exciting time to be in Russia, and I couldn’t help noticing parallels between the Russian revolutions of 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I think American policymakers, in particular, profoundly misunderstood both events. In my newspaper career, I am a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the George Polk Award, an Oversea Press Club award, and other honors. In the fall of 2018, I taught for a semester at Princeton University.
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.
One of the most renowned Soviet writers of the twentieth century, Maxim Gorky was an early supporter of the Bolsheviks who became disillusioned with the turn of events after the 1917 revolution. This brilliant and controversial book is a collection of the critical articles Gorky wrote that describe the Russian national character, condemn the Bolshevik methods of government, and provide a vision of the future.
Things have always been a window into the past for me, and from an early age I was fascinated by communism as a rejection of the world in which I was raised. Looking at how people from a very different society made and used stuff allows you to access aspects of their experience that are deeply human. As such my research has focused on how people interacted with things as a way to examine how politics, ideology, and major historical events play out on the ground – as a way of capturing individual human experience.
I love how O’Donnell’s subtle narration, akin to the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, highlights the absurdities of a state improvising its way to power. She shows how the Bolsheviks were trying to figure out how to replace a capitalist concept of ownership with something. They hadn’t figured out what that something was and were simultaneously trying to establish their government and control over people and things.
O’Donnell makes this story vivid through following a variety of people’s attempts to create and navigate this new system, often with tragic consequences.
A history that reframes the Bolsheviks' unprecedented attempts to abolish private property after the revolutions of 1917
The revolutions of 1917 swept away not only Russia's governing authority but also the property order on which it stood. The upheaval sparked waves of dispossession that rapidly moved beyond the seizure of factories and farms from industrialists and landowners, envisioned by Bolshevik revolutionaries, to penetrate the bedrock of social life: the spaces where people lived. In Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution, Anne O'Donnell reimagines the Bolsheviks' unprecedented effort to eradicate private property and to create a new political economy-socialism-to replace…
I have studied revolutions for over forty years, trying to understand how people fought for liberty and democracy--but also to understand how things so often went wrong! I have worked at universities in the US, the UK, Japan, Germany, Russia, and Hong Kong, gaining a global view of how societies change. I have learned that everywhere people have to struggle for their rights. Whether in ancient Greece or in modern Cambodia, the resulting revolutionary drama unfolds sometimes with wonderful results, but sometimes with tragedy. No events better display the very best and worst that we can accomplish. I’ve chosen the books on this list to convey the power of revolutions, their grand successes and tragic failures.
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.
Regarded by many as among the most powerful works of history ever written, this book offers an unparalleled account of one of the most pivotal and hotly debated events in world history. This book, released to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, reveals, from the perspective of one of its central actors, the revolution's profoundly democratic, emancipatory character. Originally published in three parts, Trotsky's masterpiece is collected here in a single volume. It serves as the most vital and inspiring record of the Russian Revolution to date. "During the first two months of 1917 Russia was still…
I grew up in the United States, completed my undergraduate degree there, and then pursued a doctorate in Modern History at the University of Cambridge. Now, I teach European history at Oxford Brookes University and publish research on Russia and the Soviet Union. I have always been fascinated by revolutions and civil conflicts, especially how people navigate the disruption of stability and normality. How they process fragmentary information, protect themselves, and embrace new ideas to give meaning to their threatened lives is central to my work as a historian. The Russian Revolution and Civil War offer a rich tapestry for exploring these dilemmas.
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,…
WINNER OF THE 2018 READ RUSSIA PRIZE AND THE PUSHKIN HOUSE BEST BOOK IN TRANSLATION IN 2017
Considered Teffi’s single greatest work, Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea is a deeply personal account of the author’s last months in Russia and Ukraine, suffused with her acute awareness of the political currents churning around her, many of which have now resurfaced.
In 1918, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Teffi, whose stories and journalism had made her a celebrity in Moscow, was invited to read from her work in Ukraine. She accepted the invitation eagerly, though she had…
I am a retired lecturer at Southampton University, but used to live in China for many years. I experienced the horrible Chinese Cultural Revolution between the 1960s and 1970s, which was similar to Stalin’s Great Purges. I was put in jail and suffered cruel torture. So personally, I can more understand how, in all revolutionary movement, people were struggling with the threat of death and hopelessness; how they were torn between the new value of the revolution and the damage to the existing moral system; and how the strength of humanity could shine in the bloody darkness of terror.
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 is the first of four books of the novel, And Quiet Flows the Don. The second and third books are due to be put into ebook format in late 2016, with book four coming available in 2017.
And Quiet Flows the Don is an epic novel in four volumes by Russian writer Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov. The first three volumes were written from 1925 to 1932 and published in the Soviet magazine October in 1928–1932, and the fourth volume was finished in 1940. The English translation of the first three volumes appeared under this title in 1934.
