The most recommended books on the Russian Revolution of 1917 (October Revolution)

This is the go-to book for the early Communist movement in Iran. Unlike the Arab countries of the Middle East, where Communism slowly spread in the early decades of the twentieth century, Iran experienced Communism as Soviet foreign policy in a direct manner. Bordering the Soviet Union, northern Iran was the subject of early attempts to spread the Communist creed in the aftermath of the October Revolution. Zabih’s book tells the story of those early inroads and the Iranian activists supporting the new ideology. The early attempts failed, but by the 1940s, the Communist Tudeh Party had emerged as a popular mass party. Zabih’s narrative is lucid, and his research is based on Soviet and Iranian materials. 

How could a bunch of creative, courageous, but also somewhat crazy activists make the authoritarian regime of Poland under communist rule tremble? By bringing a moment of joy and laughter to an otherwise dull and grey world. That is what the Polish Orange Alternative Movement did during the late 1980s.

Lives of the Orange Men tells the story of the group. It’s a book that simply made me laugh a lot. Written as a series of captivating autobiographies—and not every word is to be taken seriously!—it is full of anecdotes of activists playfully mocking authorities. “What are those pills,” police once wondered after searching the backpack of an arrested activist. “Happy pills,” the man replied. One officer was eager to try them; happy pills just sounded too good. They turned out to be mints.

And finally, this is Lockhart’s own recounting of his adventures in Russia during 1917-18. He was a liar, but the cameos he provides are brilliant, e.g. of Cheka leader, Felix Dzerzhinsky: “he never blinks, he never smiles.” Here it is, from the horse’s mouth: complete with descriptions of revolutionary Petrograd, and clandestine meetings with counter-revolutionaries, and shootouts with police, and above all, the torrid romance he conducted with alluring, mysterious Moura von Benckendorff, who may have been a spy herself. 

Rutherford's Russka was the first novel about Russia that I read nearly thirty years ago, and its descriptions and plotting still resonates. Through the lens of four families divided by ethnicity, the book sweeps the reader from Russia's Slavic origins to the Bolshevik Revolution. The chapter in which Tsar Ivan the Terrible plays a major role is especially riveting. What impressed me the most was how the author crafted a story of Russian rule and culture spanning 1,800 years and its impact on the characters. 

This book brings to life the story of the little-known Frederick Bruce Thomas, born in 1872 to ex-slaves who had become successful farmers in Mississippi. I was amazed at how the entrepreneurial Frederick found employment in various cities across Europe before becoming a successful nightclub owner in Moscow and then in Istanbul after the Bolshevik Revolution. Well-researched and documented, the book critiques American racism and, in my opinion, offers a new and refreshing insight into the politics and society of Russia and Turkey.

Beautifully written, the book follows the lives of Russia’s two great aristocratic families in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. Their fate was typical of the entire Russian aristocracy. It is a story of the Bolsheviks' cruelty and a painful survival of their many victims.

This deeply researched book explores the massive upheavals that followed the Bolshevik Revolution in the young Soviet Union. By mining a rich body of archival research, Goldman reveals just how radical Soviet policies to emancipate women really were in their historical context. More importantly, she uncovers the heated debates that characterized this early period of Soviet history before the rigidity and paranoia of Stalinism takes over and he reverses many of the early gains.

Robert Service’s unbiased analytical biography Lenin, discloses a range of important new insights about its subject, drawn from original research. Legends and erasures based on previous political hagiography are neatly set aside. The remarkably driven, intellectually acid, and in some ways autistic character that emerges comes across as one of the most influential political movers of the last century. If he was cold and austere when it came to dispensing affection to his family and closest companions, Lenin was surprisingly bourgeois in his habits while remaining disinterested in the real lives of the working classes of Russia.

Service shows how the execution of his brother by the Romanovs engendered in him a vindictive and unquenchable urge for payback, accomplished when in 1918 a local Bolshevik firing squad executed almost the entire royal family in Siberia. It was an act that Lenin endorsed but did not openly authorize.

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