The most recommended Russian Revolution books

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.

There are many excellent histories of the Russian Revolution that chronicle the main events, but none convey the complexity of experiences in Tsarist Russia during its final years and the Soviet regime in its initial phase as Mark Steinberg’s short but powerful and original work. This book gives us the bird’s-eye view of developments as they unfold, but also places them under the microscope to give us personal stories and experiences from different wakes of life. Using contemporary journalism and diaries, Steinberg recovers the voices of a range of ethnic groups in various regions of the empire—Jews, Ukrainians, and Central Asians--as well as workers, peasants, women, and members of the intelligentsia. As we witness their lives being thrown into upheaval by rapid political and economic transformation in the first years of the 20th century, followed by World War I, the two revolutions of 1917, and civil war, we gain… show more.

This classic book, unlike others in the list, is not so much about memory, as a collection of the author’s memories of his childhood and early years.

Nabokov was born into a wealthy family in pre-Revolutionary Russia in 1899. His childhood in St. Petersburg and at the family’s country estate are described in loving detail, as are aspects of later years in England, Germany, and France. Nabokov was one of the great writers of the 20th Century, and the memories are recounted in his glowing and evocative prose.

His writing is nostalgic, but also wryly humorous, aware that many aspects of his early life are gone forever. Many of the chapters first appeared as articles in The New Yorker; all are eminently readable. 

Houghteling was a young Commerce Department official who was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Petrograd. He arrived in January 1917, by sleigh across the border into Russian Finland, seemingly full of American self-confidence. Traveling back and forth from Petrograd to Moscow, he was surprised at how openly Russians were talking about impending revolution, and maybe a little surprised at himself for being so taken by the country and its people. Over just weeks, from the run-up to the revolution to the collapse of the regime, his writing became less arch and more penetrating, his jokes less inane, and his perspective more complex even as he retained his optimism about Russia. Houghteling’s account features prominently in Helen Rappaport’s wonderful book from 2016, Caught in the Revolution.

This is my favorite comfort read, the perfect book for days when life has too many sharp corners. I must have read this one at least twenty times. It has all the virtues of a classic fairytale: a pure-hearted, brave heroine; an honorable, steadfast hero; and a happy ending earned through suffering and effort and against all the odds. It tells the story of Countess Anna Grazinsky, a young refugee from the Russian Revolution, who finds work as a maid at a stately home in the English countryside, where she falls in love with the gallant war hero who owns the house. But the Earl of Westholme is promised to another woman. Heartwarming, triumphantly romantic, wise, and funny, A Countess Below Stairs is one of those rare books that makes the world seem a better place.  

The Seattle General Strike was the local event that escalated a national Red Scare at the beginning of 1919 and caused a wave of panic that the Russian Revolution was coming home. Friedheim is great at explaining how this extraordinary event occurred, sketching the key factions in the city, and narrating the drama of the big moments. This classic account of strikers running a city until the troops were called in, first published in 1964, is back in print in a great new edition with photos.

This book is incredible, because it tells the story of Stalinist terror through a single house. Moreover, Slezkine creates a world history around this house of victims and perpetrators, which literally begins in the primordial mud and ends on the Day of Judgment. Slezkine takes no prisoners: either you follow him and the apocalyptic horsemen, or you don't, he doesn't care. Like a man possessed, he tells the story of one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century and I found it almost impossible to escape his spell. 

While Russia had had a parliament for nearly a decade before the outbreak of World War One, its politics were extremely limited by the Tsarist government, which clung to the ideal of autocracy. The Revolution of 1917 produced an explosion of politics, with the Russian people either saturated in political speech and conflicting claims or otherwise desperate for information about what was going on in the capital and with the direction of the revolution.

Boris Kolonitskii is the foremost contemporary Russian historian of 1917. His book explores the chaotic and contradictory political culture of this moment by focusing on Alexander Kerensky, the central figure of the revolution in 1917. This is not a biography of Kerensky, although it does cover his activities over the course of much of 1917.

Instead, by describing Kerensky as both a central actor in the drama and as a symbolic figure and touchstone for so… show more.

I love books that include unusual locations and little-known events. Red Winter takes place in the 1920s in Siberia when the pogroms came and disrupted the peaceful existence of a small town in the frozen north. Like my book, which is about the creation of a Scottish colony in Central America, Red Winter offers the reader an opportunity to learn about a largely unknown history.  

Yuri Zhivago, a physician and a poet—strives to adhere to his ideals of integrity throughout his tragic life—though not always successfully. His medical skills allow him to heal others, and his poetry lets him explore truth in the volatile world of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War. 

Although he is in love with Lara, a married woman with whom he has a passionate affair, his sense of duty and honor allow him to remain devoted to his wife, Tonya.

His belief that humans should be true to themselves and maintain independent thoughts ultimately makes him a target for the Bolsheviks. 

As a writer who believes in the importance of truth—and as a flawed human being who makes mistakes and regrets them—I relate to Yuri.