100 books like Three "Whys" of 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!   

This book was extremely important for helping us to understand the myths of the Russian Revolution. In a semi-literate country with strict censorship, how did ordinary people form negative opinions about Rasputin or come to believe that Grand Duchess Anastasia survived the massacre of the royal family?

Rumors spreading by word of mouth! Scurrilous pamphlets circulating from hand to hand! Rasputin’s braggadocio! People’s desire for scapegoats! The book answered so many of our questions about how myths in this era were formed and propagated.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.