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Acton, Edward,
RETHINKING THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
. VG, trade PAPERBACK.
(Arnold Publishers, 1990). 240 pages.
~~~ For its admirers, the Russian Revolution is a milestone in
human progress; for its critics, it is a catastrophe of monstrous
proportions. Edward Acton's stimulating study combines an introduction to
the momentous events of 1917 with an analysis of this controversy.
~~~
Few events have provoked fiercer or more highly politicized historical controversy than the Russian Revolution. Edward Acton's stimulating new study combines an introduction to the momentous events of 1917 with an analysis of the controversy. As well as allowing an evaluation of a broad spread of traditional interpretations, his approach brings home the full implications of recent "revisionist" work and the radical reinterpretation of the revolution to which it points.
~~~ This edition currently in print at $29.95.
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$25.00
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Bailey, F.M. and Peter Hopkirk,
MISSION TO TASHKENT.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK. (Oxford). 3145 pages.
~~~ Colonel F. M. Bailey, whose extraordinary adventures are told here, was long
accused by Moscow of being a British master-spy sent in 1918 to overthrow the
Bolsheviks in Central Asia. As a result, thirty-five years after his death, he
still enjoys an almost legendary reputation there - that of half-hero,
half-villain. In this remarkable book he tells of the perilous game of
cat-and-mouse, lasting sixteen months, which he played with the Bolshevik secret
police, the dreaded Cheka. At one point, using a false identity, he actually
joined the ranks of the Cheka, who unsuspectingly sent him to Bokhara to arrest
himself. Told with almost breathtaking understatement, Bailey's narrative - set
in a region once more back in the headlines - reads like vintage Buhan.
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Bolsover, Philip,
ONE DAY IN RUSSIA 1917.
VG/VG. Jacket in mylar. (NY: Abelard-Schuman, 1975). First American Edition. "Day Book Series".
Illustrated throughout. Glossary, Further Reading, 48 pages.
For young readers.
~~~ At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia was a very different country from what it is today. Life for the nobility and royalty was elegant and splendid, while the poor lived an incredibly squalid existence.
~~~ by 1917, the people, particularly the poor and the working class, were ready to use force to bring about complete change within their country. On November 7, 1917, that change began, and, under the leadership of Lenin and his Bolshevik party, the Russian Revolution took place.
~~~ We follow the day's activities of people of various levels of Russian society from the soldier to the noble, from the street orphan to the wife of a member of the French Embassy staff. As we learn of the changes that the Revolution creates in the lives of these people, we better understand its effects on the entire country.
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Bonnell, Victoria E. (ed),
THE RUSSIAN WORKER: Life and Labor Under the Tsarist Regime.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK. (University of California Press, 1983).
Reprint edition. 240 pages.
~~~ Here, for the first time in English translation, are contemporary accounts of
working-class life during the final decades of the Russian Empire. Written by
workers and other close observers of their milieu, these five selections
recreate the world of Russian labor during a period of rapid industrialization
and social change, a world far more complex and varied than has often been
assumed.
The accounts in The Russian Worker explore the daily
experiences, social relations, and aspirations of factory, artisanal, and
sales-clerical workers, both in and outside the place of employment. Through the
eyes of contemporaries we see the routine, the organization of work, and
authority relations on the shop floor as well as conditions that workers
encountered in providing for food and lodging and their experiences in the areas
of religion, recreation, cultural activities, family ties, and links with the
countryside. ~~~ With its vivid and detailed descriptions of working-class life,
The Russian Worker provides new material on such important topics as the
formation of workers' social identities, the position of women, patterns of
stratification, and workers' concepts of status differentiation. An introductory
essay by Victoria Bonnell places the selections in an historical context and
examines some of the central issues in the study of Russian labor. The
collection will be of value not only to specialists in the Russian field, but
also to historians, sociologists, economists, and others with an interest in the
sociology of work, and the history of working women.
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Brovkin, Vladimer N. and Robert Hessen (eds),
DEAR COMRADES: Menshevik Reports on the Bolshevik Revolution
and the Civil War.
NEW copy, hardcover with dust jacket. (Hoover
Institution Press, 1990). 296 pages.
~~~ From Booknews:
Presents, for the first time in English, a
collection of previously unpublished Menshevik
documents from the Hoover Institution Archives
on the Russian Civil War and the establishment of
the Communist dictatorship as witnessed by the Russian Social Democrats, or
Mensheviks. Brovkin has focused the collection not on governments and key
rulers, but on the accounts of ordinary citizens testifying to the power
struggle between the two political parties as they vied for supremacy within
postczarist Russia.
~~~ Paperback currently in print at $21.95;
hardcover currently OUT OF PRINT.
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[Bukharin], Nikolai (translated by George Shriver),
HOW IT ALL BEGAN: The Prison Novel.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK. (Eastern European Monographs, 1999).
400 pages.
~~~ The autobiographical novel and final work of one of the Communist Party's
youngest, most popular, and most intellectual members is both an astonishing
personal testament and a panoramic view of Russia on the eve of a revolution
that transformed the twentieth century.
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[Bukharin], Stephen F. Cohen,
BUKHARIN AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION:
A Political Biography, 1888-1938.
VG. Trade PAPERBACK. Upper front corner bumped,
otherwise in crisp, clean condition. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991). 560 pages.
~~~ This biography traces Bukharin's rise to and fall from power, focusing
particularly on the development of his theories and programmatic ideas during
the critical period between Lenin's death in 1924 and the ascendancy of Stalin
in 1929.
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Carey, Donald E. (edited by Neil G. Carey).
FIGHTING THE BOLSHEVIKS: The Russian War Memoir of Private First Class Donald E. Carey, U.S. Army, 1918-1919.
NEW copy, hardcover with dust jacket. (Novata, CA: Presidio Press, 1997). Photographs, 240 pages.
~~~ Most Americans are unaware of that historic time when American soldiers and sailors fought Russian
revolutionaries - the Bolsheviks - in north Russia and Siberia. This is the daily record and recollections of
Pfc. Donald E. Carey, one of the 5,600 American soldiers who fought the Bolsheviks there during 1918 and 1919.
Carey and his men were part of the U.S. Army's 339th Infantry Regiment. Their battleground was just a few miles
south of the Arctic Circle and though often outnumbered, these soldiers battled, and usually defeated, the Bolsheviks.
Ironically, most of their combat occurred after the Armistice of 11 November 1918 ended World War I. This segment of
history is condensed from the daily record maintained by 25-year-old Carey, a drafted school teacher who was proud to
serve his country as an enlisted man, but did not want to be responsible for the lives of others as an officer.
Carey records army life and duty with unvarnished observations of his fellow soldiers, officers, and events - the
brave and fainthearted, the humorous and the heart-rending.
~~~ Originally published at $24.95, now OUT OF PRINT.
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[Chagall], Jamie H. Cockfield,
CHAGALL: LOVE AND THE STAGE, 1914-1922.
NEW copy, hardcover with dust jacket. (London: Merrell Publishers, 1998).
9.5x10.5. 80 illustrations, 60 in color.
~~~ "Unable to leave Russia and return to Paris at the outbreak of World War I, Marc
Chagall returned to his roots in his hometown of Vitebsk. "Chagall: Love and the
Stage" focuses on this turbulent yet fruitful period in Chagall's artistic
development, which culminated in 1920 with a set of monumental murals painted
for the State Yiddish Chamber Theater in Moscow."
~~~
From Booknews: "Eighty illustrations, 60 in color, document this most
celebrated phase of Chagall's career, during which he was forced by the First
World War to remain in Russia, where he remained through the Bolshevik
Revolution. The period includes his famous murals for the State Yiddish Chamber
Theatre in Moscow. Accompanying essays discuss such topics as Chagall and the
theatre, and the quest for a Jewish art in revolutionary Russia."
~~~ Table of Contents:
Painting as Theatre, or Theatre as Painting? --
Marc Chagall: Love and the Stage --
Marc Chagall and the Theatre --
The Quest for a Jewish Art in Revolutionary Russia -- Catalogue -- List of Works.
~~~ OUT OF PRINT.
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$40.00
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Coates, Tim,
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, 1917.
NEW copy. PAPERBACK. (Stationery Office Books, 2000). Abridged edition. 244 pages. "This book is compiled from two government files: one describing events leading up to the revolution and how the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917; the other containing a series of eye-witness accounts of the frightening days of the Bolshevik regime 1918-1919."
~~~ By November 1917, Russia had lost more than
20,000 000 people in the war. Lenin's Bolshevik party had overthrown the
Tsar and had called for an end to all capitalist governments. Government
files contain a number of detailed documents describing the nature of the
Bolshevik Revolution and the government of Lenin, which was observed to
be not only abhorrent but also menacing because of the international
implications. This book is compiled from two of these files, one of which
describes the events leading up to the revolution and how the Bolsheviks
came to power in October 1917. The other contains a series of eye-witness
accounts of the frightening days of the Bolshevik regime from the summer
of 1918 to April 1919." ~~ From the Introduction: "...The British
Parliament endeavoured to monitor and analyse its progress by gathering
such information as it could from British citizens who became caught up
in the awful developments. They published these reports without comment,
in order to provide a first-hand description of what was happening. The
opening pages of this book are an extract from a Foreign Office review of
the nature of the Revolution. the second part contains the verbatim
account of theose who could get their reports out of the country...
~~ British import. ~~
~~~ Originally published at $13.00, but now OUT
OF PRINT.
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David-Fox, Michael,
REVOLUTION OF THE MIND: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929.
NEW copy, hardcover with dust jacket. (Cornell University Press, 1997).
Photographs, 256 pages.
~~~ Using archival materials never previously accessible to Western
scholars, Michael David-Fox analyzes Bolshevik Party educational and
research initiatives in higher learning after 1917. His fresh consideration
of the era of the New Economic Policy and cultural politics after the
Revolution explains how new communist institutions rose to parallel and
rival conventional higher learning from the Academy of Sciences to the
universities. ~~~ Beginning with the creation of the first party school
by intellectuals on the island of Capri in 1909, David-Fox argues, the
Bolshevik cultural project was tightly linked to party educational
institutions. He provides the first account of the early history and
politics of three major institutions founded after the Revolution:
Sverdlov Communist University, where the quest to transform everyday
life gripped the student movement; the Institute of Red Professors,
where the Bolsheviks sought to train a new communist intellectual or
red specialist; and the Communist Academy, headquarters for a planned,
collectivist, proletarian science. ~~~ Using a wide range of previously
restricted and recently declassified materials in former Communist Party
and Soviet state repositiories, David-Fox analyzes the internal evolution
of the revolutionary institutions and their relations with the Party. His
book represents a commitment, rare in the field of Soviet Studies, to
combine cultural, political, and institutional history, bringing
institution building after 1917 to the center of historical attention.
~~~ Currently in print at $57.50..
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Figes, Orlando & Boris Kolonitskii,
INTERPRETING THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: The Language and Symbols of 1917.. NEW copy, hardcover with dust jacket.
Yale University Press, 1999. Photographs, numerous page-end notes,
index, 198 pages.
~~~ This is the first book in any language to probe the political
culture of the Russian Revolution. The authors examine how language and
other symbols--flags and emblems, public rituals, songs, codes of dress
-- were used to identify competing sides and to create new meanings in
the struggles of 1917. The party or faction that could control the systems
of symbolic meaning, the authors find, was well on the way to mastering the
revolution itself.
~~~ From Publishers Weekly: In this scholarly reduction of
the Russian Revolution, Figes (A People's Tragedy, etc.), professor
of history at Birbeck College, London, and Kolonitskii, senior researcher
at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg,
examine the minutiae of political culture circa 1917, concluding that the
often-neglected struggles played out in popular culture -- via rumors,
jokes, flag waving and singing -- had significant impacts on political
events in Russia. "The demonization of the old regime was a vital means
of legitimizing and enforcing unity around `the revolution,'"
the authors argue. They then offer extensive examples from letters, movies,
postcards and newspapers that demonstrate the popular conclusion that the
empress was a German spy and a woman of loose sexual morals and that her
husband was a weak cuckold. Most interesting is an analysis of the use of
the same symbols by opposing forces--many political parties opposing the
Romanov monarchy, such as Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and anarchists, waved the
same red flags and sang the same revolutionary anthems. After the Romanovs
were deposed, a struggle began among the parties to appropriate the most
effective symbols for themselves. While the book is certainly not, as the
jacket claims, 'the first book in any language to offer an analysis of the
political culture of the Russian Revolution.
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$40.00
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Figes, Orlando,
PEASANT RUSSIA CIVIL WAR: The Volga Countryside in Revolution 1917-21.
. NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK.
(Phoenix Press, 2001). 428 pages.
~~~ The celebrated author of A People's Tragedy explains, for
the first time, how the Bolshevik victory in the civil war was made
possible by the transformation of the Russian countryside in the years
leading up to and during the revolution. Emphasising that any military
victory in a civil war will be short-lived unless it is backed by political
power, Orlando Figes provides a detailed description of the Russian
peasantry on the eve of the revolution; describes the breakdown of state
power in the countryside; examines the system of peasant rule and the
reluctance of the peasants to rise against the Soviet regime and,
crucially, the relationship between the peasants and the Bolsheviks
during the civil war. An original approach and a fascinating account
of this turbulent period, illustrated with disturbing images.
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$19.95
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Geifman, Anna (ed),
RUSSIA UNDER THE LAST TSAR: Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK (Blackwell, 1999).
310 pages.
~~~ Forms an overview of the issues, events, and personalities of the two turbulent decades before the 1917 revolution in Russia, and analyzes the motivations and activities of the various political parties operating during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II.
~~
This paperback edition currently in print at $41.95.
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Gorky, Maxim,
UNTIMELY THOUGHTS: Essays on Revolution, Culture and the Bolsheviks
1917-1918.. NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK.
(Yale University Press, 1995). 300 pages.
~~~ One of the most renowned Soviet writers of the 20th century,
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.
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$19.00
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Gorsuch, Anne E.,
YOUTH IN REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents..
NEW copy, hardcover with dust jacket. (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2000).
Intertextual drawings and photographs, extensive notes and bibliography,
index, 274 pages.
~~~
 Youth in Revolutionary Russia explores the everyday activities of urban youth in Soviet Russia, including communist ritual and performance, popular pleasures like the foxtrot, and the subcultural activities of homeless and hooligan youth. Gorsuch examines the relationship between the realities of youth and Bolshevik ideals for youth, between popular culture and official ideology, and the meaning of these relationships for the making of a "Soviet" state and society.
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$35.00
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von Hagen, Mark,
SOLDIERS IN THE PROLETARIAN DICTATORSHIP: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917-1930.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK. (Cornell University Press, 1993). 408 pages.
~~~ Historians have long debated the factors most responsible for
the fundamental transformation of Soviet social and political structures
which occurred between the October Revolution and the emergence of the
Stalinist police state. With this social and institutional history of
the Red Army, Mark von Hagen provides a valuable new perspective on this
critical first decade in the history of the Soviet Union.
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Halliday, E.M. ,
WHEN HELL FROZE OVER.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK. (Pocket Books). 319 pages.
~~~ On November 11, 1918, World War I officially ended. But for the men of the
ill-starred American Expeditionary Force to North Russia, the fighting had only
begun. Plagued by meager supplies, poor leadership, and the lack of a clear-cut
objective, this small but valiant American contingent fought impossible odds,
scoring several stunning victories against the Bolsheviks before superior
numbers and the bone-breaking arctic winter that had defeated Napoleon forced
them to withdraw. Now, in this clear, forthright account, E.M. Halliday
re-creates one of the most obscure but important of America's foreign
interventions: an epic of confusion, endurance, failure - and gallantry - that
history almost forgot and the Russians never forgave. Only today, more than
seventy years after the Allied occupation of Archangel, have American-Soviet
relations begun to thaw.
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Hopkirk, Peter and Paul Nazaroff,
HUNTED THROUGH CENTRAL ASIA.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK. (Oxford). 335 pages.
~~~ Paul Nazaroff was the ringleader of a desperate plot to overthrow the Bolsheviks
in Central Asia in 1918. He was betrayed to the Secret Police, who declared him
'the most dangerous counter-revolutionary at large in the Tashkent region'. Thus
began his extraordinary catalogue of adventures. As he fled from Lenin's men, he
was aided by the indigenous peoples of the region, the Kirghiz and the Sarts,
whose language and culture he had been steeped in since boyhood. For months he
was forced to live the life of a hunted animal. Peter Hopkirk has contributed a
fascinating introduction to this tale of hair-breadth 'scapes and survival
against all odds, as well as an epilogue which reveals Nazaroff's later
fortunes.
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Ilyin, Olga
WHITE ROAD: A Russian Odyssey, 1919-1923.
NF/VG. 1st Edition. (NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, "A William Abrahams
Book, 1984). Original '17.95' price still on jacket flap. Some minor,
inconspicuous creasing to bottom edge of front panel of jacket. Book
itself clean, bright and tight. 316 pages.
~~ This is an enthralling
slice of personal history that chronicles the onset of the Russian
Revolution, follows the path of retreat of the White army, and involves
us in the chaos, disarray, and horrifying difficulties that beset the
Whites attempting to escape from their native Russia and establish new
lives as exiles abroad. ~~ Olga Ilyin was a young bride at the time the
Revolution broke out, her husband an officer in the White army. their
background recalls the world of Turgenev's novels moved forward into the
twentieth century. members of the upper class and the intelligentsia,
not unaware or undesirous of social change, they were supporters of the
Provisional Government. ~~ But as Lenin and the Bolshevik forces triumphed,
whether one was a moderate or a monarchist no longer mattered. This was
class war with a vengeance. the Whites had no choice but to flee for their
lives -- literally -- and the story Mrs Ilyin tells is utterly fascinating
and sometimes horrifying. The zigzag journey across Siberia is brought
alive in all its hardships and unexpected brief pleasures.
-- White Road is altogether a mixture of heroism, fear, and nostalgic
recollections. The author is a woman in her eighties of indomitable spirit
and innate intelligence and must be one of the last living witnesses to the
events she describes so vividly.
~~ OUT OF PRINT.
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Kennan, George F.,
RUSSIA LEAVES THE WAR: Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK (Princeton University Press, 1989).
531 pages.
~~~ In 1918 the U.S. government decided to involve itself with the Russian Revolution by sending troops to Siberia. This book re-creates that unhappily memorable storythe arrival of British marines at Murmansk, the diplomatic maneuvering, the growing Russian hostility, the uprising of Czechoslovak troops in central Siberia which threatened to overturn the Bolsheviks, the acquisitive ambitions of the Japanese in Manchuria, and finally the decision by President Wilson to intervene with American troops. Of this period Kennan writes, "Never, surely, in the history of American diplomacy, has so much been paid for so little."
~~
This paperback edition currently in print at $39.95.
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[Lenin] Helene Carrere d'Encausse (translated by George Holoch),
LENIN.
NEW copy. Hardcover with dust jacket.
(NY: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc, 2001).
Bibliography, chronology, notes, index, 371 pages.
~~~ This is a one-volume, concise
study of Lenin and his role in the Russian
Revolution. It concentrates on his years in power
between 1917 and 1924. The book draws on recent
historical work in Russia and the West, and makes
use of new documents made available since the
Gorbachev era and the end of the Soviet Union.
~~~ From Booknews:
Lenin exercised power for only
a short time, from late 1917 to early 1923. And yet the system he founded,
beginning with just a few thousand agitators, extended its influence far into
the 20th century and far outside Russia. D'Encausse seeks to help remove Lenin
from the ideological passions that his memory still stirs up in order to situate
him in the larger history of a century that was dominated by his ideas and will.
D'Encausse has written extensively about Russian, Soviet, and Slavic history.
~~~ Currently in in print at $45.
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[Lenin] Louis Fischer,
LIFE OF LENIN.
NEW copy. PAPERBACK. (Phoenix Press, 1984).
~~~ "...a history of the Russian revolutionary movement and of
Soviet Russia from 1917-1924 wrapped up in a detailed biography of Lenin. It is
a brilliant contribution to our understanding of one of the giants of the 20th
century and the revolution which he launched and led..." The author knew
Lenin personally for many years. Winner of the 1965 National Book Award for
Biography/History.
~~
This edition originally in print at $24.95, now OUT OF PRINT.
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[Lenin] Dmitri Vokogonov,
LENIN: A New Biography.
NEW copy. Hardcover with dust jacket. (Free Press). 529 pages.
~~~ General Volkogonov sheds new light on the early years of the Soviet
regime thanks to his unique access to secret Soviet archives. It is
the masterly work of a skillful historian.
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[Armand, Lenin] Michael Pearson,
LENIN'S MISTRESS: The Life of Inessa Armand.
NEW copy. Hardcover with dust jacket. (Random House, 2002). 304 pages.
~~~ From the author of The Sealed Train and Those Damned
Rebels comes the biography of Inessa Armand: revolutionary, tactician,
and confidante and mistress of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Although she is
little known today, after the October Revolution in 1917, Armand became
the most powerful woman in Moscow. Michael Pearson, with access to family
papers (including 150 letters from Lenin to Armand), previously censored
materials from Russian archives, and interviews with Inessa Armand's
descendants, brings her to life with precision and insight - as a wife
and devoted mother, political standard-bearer, and woman in love.
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Lincoln, W. Bruce,
IN WAR'S DARK SHADOW: The Russians Before the Great War.
VG/VG. Minor wear & chipping to jacket. Dial Press, 1983. 76 pages of
notes, 25-page bibliography; index; 557 pp.
~~~ "...brilliantly told story of the Russian people as they entered the twentieth century. It takes the reader into areas of Russian life that have remained virtually unknown in the West to all but those specialists who read and speak Russian. It is a profoundly dramitc exploration of the lives, throughts, hopes, and dreams of the more than one hundred million men and women who lived in the world's largest empire -- one out of three of whom would either be in exile or have perished by the time Lenin announced the Bolshevik final victory."
~~~ OUT OF PRINT.
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$25.00
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Merridale, Catherine,
NIGHT OF STONE: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia.
Trade Paperback. NEW copy, Penguin, 2001. Photographs, Notes & Sources, Bibliography, Index, 402 pages. ~~
"During the twentieth century, Russia, Ukraine, and the other territories of the former Soviet Union experienced more bloodshed and violent death than anywhere else on earth: fifty million dead in an epic of destruction that encompassed war, revolution, famine, epidemic, and political purges. In Night of Stone, Catherine Merridale asks Russians the most difficult questions about how their country's volatile past has affected their everyday lives, aspirations, dreams, and nightmares. Drawing upon evidence from rare Imperial archives, Soviet propaganda, memoirs, letters, newspapers, literature, psychiatric studies, and interviews, Night of Stone provides a highly original and revealing history of modern Russia. " ~~ From Publishers Weekly: "Russia's story of death has been obscured so often," explains Merridale (Perestroika: The Historical Perspective; Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin). The extraordinary scale of the violence and loss in modern Russian history has been shrouded in secrecy; indeed, the government has only recently acknowledged the hundreds of thousands killed under Stalin. 'For 50 years,' Merridale writes, 'until the fall of Communism, families had kept bereavement of this kind to themselves.... It was dangerous, after all, to mourn the passing of an enemy of the people.' Paying particular attention to the ways that Orthodox religion and Soviet atheism have affected Russian bereavement, Merridale explores Russian perceptions of death and afterlife from before the Bolshevik Revolution, through both world wars and the great famines of the 1930s and into the present. Her fascinating study is based on intimate conversations with bereaved Russians, as well as interviews with gravediggers, funeral directors, social workers, doctors and priests, and meticulous readings of imperial archives, Soviet propaganda, letters, memoirs, literature and government documents. (As Merridale points out, much of this research would have been impossible 20 years ago.) Merridale scrupulously avoids imposing her own ideological or cultural prejudices on her subject. By turns solemn and grisly, empathetic and scholarly, this inspired work provides a unique window on Soviet history through the brutality, ceremony and silences of death."
~~ From Kirkus Reviews: "A wrenchingly poignant examination of how the Russian people have coped with a century of tragedy and loss. Because Merridale (History/Univ. of Bristol) believes that the truth resides more in stories than statistics, she spent two years in Russia interviewing a wide variety of people, reviewing personal and archival documents (many just recently available), and visiting the sites associated with the revolutions, wars, and atrocities that characterized the Soviet period. She does not ignore statistics, but she folds them seamlessly into her mesmerizing narrative. Beginning with a 1997 visit to a mass grave for Stalinist victims at Sandormokh, she segues smoothly into an examination of sanguinary historical events and their psychological impact, which many Russians still deny. One of the questions that drives her narrative is: How do people's memories accommodate the unthinkable? After all the arrests, tortures, mass murders, deportations, bloody battles, famines and starvation, even cannibalism (all reported here), how do the survivors carry on? As the author proceeds through the century in riveting and occasionally nauseating detail, she uncovers some astonishing data. The census of 1937, for example, stunned Soviet officials with its revelation that the famine of 1932-33 had claimed as many as seven million lives. She reveals with devastating clarity the 'success' of Soviet propaganda among its own citizens. During the two-year siege of Leningrad, for example, more than ten times as many people died as at Hiroshima, yet survivors tend to reject the suggestion that its horrors had lingering psychological consequences. Silence and dissociation become the operative strategies. Merridale examines, as well, more recent events, such as the war in Afghanistan, the disaster at Chernobyl, the fall of Communism and the dismantling of the USSR; through it all she sees many Russians embracing what she calls 'the stoicism myth.' Despite what they have suffered through a most savage century, Merridale concludes, they are only now beginning to realize -- and acknowledge -- the effects. Written with consummate skill and enormous compassion."
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[Miliukov] Melissa Kirschke Stockdale,
PAUL MILIUKOV AND THE QUEST FOR A LIBERAL RUSSIA, 1880-1918.
NEW copy, hardcover with dust jacket. (Cornell University Press, 1996). 376 pages.
~~~ Paul N. Miliukov was one of the most formidable intellectual
and political forces of Russia's late imperial period. An historian of
international reputation, Miliukov eventually became the principal
theoretician and leader of Russian liberalism. He helped found the
country's first liberal political party, led the party's faction in the
Duma, and edited an influential liberal daily. In 1917 Miliukov took the
lead in organizing the first Provisional Government. Working tirelessly
for a liberal order committed to social reform as well as political
liberties and the rule of law, Miliukov also strove to reconcile
liberalism and nationalism, championing the rights of national minorities
while trying to promote the cohesion of the increasingly fragile empire.
Melissa Kirschke Stockdale's biography of Miliukov's life in Russia is the
most comprehensive available in any language. Drawing on his enormous
published oeuvre and the five thousand folders of his personal
archives in Moscow, many never before available to Western scholars,
Stockdale examines Miliukov's contributions to Russian historiography,
liberal thought, and nationality relations, teases out the connections
between his historical writing and his political practice, and assesses
his career in both a European and a Russian context. In so doing, she
illuminates the dilemmas involved in constructing a workable liberalism
in an illiberal climate, dilemmas with a startling contemporary
relevance.
~~~ Originally in print at $59.95, now OUT OF PRINT.
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Miller, Martin A.,
FREUD AND THE BOLSHEVIKS.
NEW copy, hardcover with dust jacket. (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998). 256 pages.
~~~ This fascinating book is the first comprehensive history of psychoanalysis in
Russia from the last years of the tsars to the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991. Using rare Russian sources and newly opened Soviet archives, Martin A.
Miller explores Sigmund Freud`s influence in Russia during the twentieth
century, discusses the lives of the Russian Freudians, and explicates for the
first time original Russian psychoanalytic case studies. The book begins with an
investigation of the cultural currents in Russian society during the last
decades of the tsarist regime. Discontented with treatment modes in Russia, a
small group of Russian psychiatrists sought training with Freud, Carl Jung, and
Karl Abraham and by 1917 had established the first psychoanalytic institute
outside Vienna and Berlin and the first Russian psychoanalytic journal. Contrary
to common belief, the psychoanalytic community did not disappear when the
Bolsheviks seized power. Miller details how Soviet Freudianism was established,
how psychoanalysts were trained, what their research focused on, and the impact
of their work. Although psychoanalysis underwent a withering ideological assault
under Stalin and clinical activities were curtailed, discussions of Freud and
his work continued. Later, as the end of the Soviet period approached, Freud`s
writings were republished for the first time in decades, and psychoanalytic
institutes and societies reemerged. Miller finds that the oscillations in
Russian attitudes toward Freud during Soviet rule reflected shifting tensions
within Russian culture at large. Martin A. Miller is professor of history at
Duke University."
~~~ Currently in print at $45.
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Moore, Joel, et al,
THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN EXPEDITION FIGHTING THE BOLSHEVIKI,
Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919.
NEW copy, Battery Press, 2003. Reprint edition. 120 photographs/
drawings, 1 map, 360 pages.
~~~ The story of the 339th Infantry Regiment
and its attached units in North Russia in 1918-1919.
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Moynahan, Brian,
COMRADES: 1917 -- Russia in Revolution.
VG/VG. Little, Brown & Company, 1992. First Edition. Photographs, bibliography, index, 374 pages.
~~~ From Publishers Weekly:
"Moynahan's spellbinding chronicles of Russia in 1917--the year of Kerensky's fumbling provisional government and the Bolsheviks' October coup--ranks among the most vivid books to date on the Russian Revolution. Former London Times foreign correspondent Moynahan (The Claws of the Bear) describes his material in concrete, human detail: Kerensky's brilliant mocking of Lenin ('Karl Marx never proposed such methods of oriental despotism'); women lined up on icy nights from 3:00 a.m. until the shops opened at 9:00, after which they labored all day; Lenin, 'obsessed with violence,' a thug full of hatred who dehumanized his enemies as 'harmful insects . . . bedbugs'; the 1916 murder of Rasputin, 'the Unmentionable' -- his name seldom pronounced aloud for fear it would bring bad luck -- by a young aristocrat who dabbled in transvestism and the occult.
The author conveys the weft and warp of Russia's tattered social fabric as few others have done. He illumines the rottenness of the old regime and the evil brutality that replaced it, showing how the Bolsheviks ruthlessly crushed the centrifugal forces that reasserted themselves in 1991 to shatter the Soviet monolith." ~~~
From Kirkus Reviews: "A tightly focused narrative of the year that Russia overthrew the Romanovs only to fall under the yoke of another despotic government. Moynahan (Claws of the Bear, 1989), former chief foreign correspondent of the London Times, has not uncovered any new material about the birth of the USSR, but he presents familiar information with an eye for the lively anecdote as told by eyewitnesses. In his view, although the overthrow of the well-intentioned but weak Czar Nicholas II and his
dominating wife Alexandra may have been inevitable, the eventual triumph of the Bolsheviks was anything but. The usual pivotal events of the Revolution are chronicled--including the murder of Rasputin, the February Revolution, the March abdication of Nicholas, the Communists' abortive summer coup, the supposed threat from the military that allowed them a comeback, the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, and the fateful formation of the Cheka, the first instrument of Soviet-sponsored state terror. Among the large cast of characters here, two stand out: Alexander Kerensky, the charismatic but vacillating revolutionary and eventual prime minister who let his democratic government be whipsawed by four cabinet changes in six months, economic deprivation, and unsuccessful participation in WW I; and cowardly, fanatical V.I. Lenin, who transformed the Bolsheviks from the most marginal of Russia's splinter groups to the only one by year's end, chiefly through ruthlessness (`How can you make a revolution without executions?' he scolded colleagues after a vote abolishing capital punishment). A cautionary tale to be remembered as the infant Commonwealth of Independent States tries to remain democratic and economically viable without veering between anarchy and a new, yet unknown dictatorship."
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$30.00
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Pipes, Richard,
A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
NEW copy. Hardcover with dust jacket. Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. First
Edition. Intertextual photographs, glossary, chronology, references,
suggestions for further reading, index, 431 pages.
~~~ From BookList: "For the busy but interested reader, Pipes has condensed his classic two-volume analysis of Russia's tragic cataclysm. How that great country became saddled with and ruined by Communism is complex -- despite the Bolshevik victors' claims for historical inevitability. Without World War I, they would have remained an obscure intelligentsia; Lenin doubted he would live to see the revolution scarcely weeks before the czar's abdication. Of course, Russia had muddled through the 19th century quasi-expectant of a revolution, ardently so by socialist terrorists, apprehensively so by liberals ;and conservatives; and the 1905 revolution should have revealed to everyone what a full-blown social overthrow' would be like. But as Pipes cogently and rather wistfully describes, the reformist track under Stolypin was stymied by the monarchist reactionaries. After the bizarre interlude of Alexandra and Rasputin, enter Kerensky, the Reds Lenin and Trotsky, the Whites Kolchak and Denikin, and the dolorous drama unfolds. Despite its sadness, insight abounds in this history, among the most reliably researched and skillfully synthesized works ever written on the revolution."
~~~ Originally published at $30, now OUT OF PRINT.
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Pipes, Richard,
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
NEW copy. TRADE PAPERBACK. Knopf, 1991. 976 pages.
~~~ From Publisher's
Weekly: "With erudition lightly worn, Harvard historian Pipes, in this massive,
wonderfully vivid, gripping chronicle, stresses the role of liberals both in the
Russian revolution of 1905, for which the Communists later claimed credit, and in
the upheavals of 1917. He attributes the failure of the February 1917 revolution to
Alexander Kerensky's rash actions, his doctrinaire vision of democracy and his
dissolution of the police and the provincial bureaucracy, which plunged the nation
into anarchy. He argues persuasively that the Bolsheviks' October 1917 putsch was
not a true revolution, but a classic coup d'etat. His portrayal of the backward
Russian peasantry, scarcely touched by westernization, and of the intelligentsia,
`self-appointed spokesman' for over nine-tenths of the populace, lays the groundwork
for his discerning analysis of how Lenin built a one-party dictatorship. No other
book so brilliantly clarifies the inner dynamics of the Russian Revolution."
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Pitcher, Harvey,
WITNESS OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
NEW copy. TRADE PAPERBACK. Pimlico. 313 pages.
~~~
This is a book on the Russian Revolution with a difference. It unites
formal history and individual memoir by telling the story of 1917 in the
words of eye-witnesses who saw the overthrow of the Czar in March and the
Bolshevik seizure of power in November. These witnesses are British and
American and include American radical, John Reed, and newspaper
correspondent, Arthur Ransome, who married Trotsky's secretary.
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Price, Morgan Philips (Tania Rose, ed),
DISPATCHES FROM THE REVOLUTION: Russia, 1916-1918.
. NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK.
(Duke University Press, 1998). 181 pages.
~~~ A special correspondent for the Manchester Guardian,
Morgan Philips Price was one of the few Englishmen in Russia during all
phases of the Revolution. Although his Bolshevik sympathies accorded him
an insider's perspective on much of the turmoil, his reports were often
heavily revised or suppressed. In Dispatches from the Revolution,
Tania Rose collects for the first time Price's correspondence from Russia
- official and unofficial, published and unpublished - to reveal a side
of Russian life and politics that fell largely unreported in the years
before, during, and after the Revolution. This collection includes Price's
pre-censored observations and comment, written for a range of British
publications, as well as letters, postcards, and other writings. A
foreword by Eric Hobsbawm and introductory material by Rose place Price's
observations in biographical and historical context.
Dispatches from the Revolution offers an account of the Russian
Revolution from an eyewitness whose political commitment, fluency in
Russian, and extensive travel far beyond the cities permitted him to
write, uniquely, not only of metropolitan news and politics, but also
of the experiences and issues significant to ordinary peasants, workers,
and soldiers in remote areas of the Russian empire.
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$19.95
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Read, Christopher.,
FROM TSAR TO SOVIETS: Russian People and their Revolution, 1917-21.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 336 pages.
~~~ The author shows how the social, economic, political and
cultural pressures of tsarism created almost universal discontent, which
fueled a massive, large self-organized revolution from below. By examining
the revolution in the light of these experiences rather than the activities
of central parties and politicians, the book challenges many commonly held
assumptions and sheds new light on the realities of living through and
participating in those tumultuous events.
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Read, Piers Paul,
ALICE IN EXILE. [FICTION] NEW copy. Hardcover with dust jacket.
~~~ "Because of her liberal upbringing in late 19th-century London, Alice Fry
believes in women's suffrage, the labor movement, and free love. When she falls
for a young English army officer, she is completely happy despite his family's
disapproval. But a scandal involving her father's publishing business causes her
lover to break off their engagement to protect his rising political star. After
discovering that she is pregnant, Alice flees to Russia with a visiting
aristocrat and becomes his lover and the governess to his children. Soon, she is
caught up in the horrific turmoil of the Bolshevik Revolution and World War I."
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Reed, John,
TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD.
(Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics).
Paperback. Rear cover corner slightly bent, otherwise in new condition.
With an introduction by A.J.P. Taylor.
~~~ In Ten Days
That Shook the World John Reed conveys, with the immediacy of cinema, the impression of a whole nation in
ferment and disintegration. A contemporary journalist writing
in the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm, he gives a gripping
record of the events in Petrograd in November 1917,
when Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. Containing
verbatim reports both of speeches by leaders and the chance
comments of bystanders, set against an idealized backcloth of the
proletariat, soldiers, sailors, and peasants uniting to throw off
oppression, Reed's account is the product of passionate
involvement and remains an unsurpassed classic of
reporting.
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Reed, John,
TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD.
NEW copy, Trade PAPERBACK.
(Tantallon Press). 399 pages.
~~~ Reed captures the drama of the power struggle
in Petrograd following the Tsar's abdication in
1917. Traveling throughout the city in those
fateful days, he recounts with forceful
description the packed meetings, the Provisional
government's downfall, the resistance to the
Bolsheviks, and their eventful hold on the
country. A bestseller when first published in
1919, Ten Days That Shook the World still
teaches compelling lessons about democracy.
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[Romanovs] Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrusgalev,
THE FALL OF THE ROMANOVS: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution. Trade Paperback. NEW copy. Yale University Press, 1995. Photographs, chronology, glossary, genealogy, notes, bibliography, document & illustration credits, index, 444 pages.
~~ From Publishers Weekly: Based
largely on previously classified materials from
Moscow and Russian regional archives released
only since the late 1980s, this valuable
documentary record recreates the arrest,
captivity and execution of the imperial Romanov
family. It draws on letters, diary excerpts,
telegraphs, minutes of government meetings and
official orders, woven together by the authors'
interpretive commentary.
Tsar Nicholas II's personal writings reveal an autocrat of fatalistic spirituality who believed that the common people would '...come to their senses...' and rescue him. His reactionary wife, former German princess Alexandra, reinforced his perception of the Russian people as simple, devoted and childlike. Yale history professor Steinberg and Khrustalv, historian at Russia's State Archive in Moscow, dispute the widely held view that orders to execute the Romanov family came personally from Lenin and the top party leadership. They argue that the inconclusive, circumstantial evidence favors a different scenario: party leaders in Moscow and Bolsheviks in the Urals agreed to put the Romanovs on trial, with execution as an alternative if the military situation dictated. Illustrated with photos, maps and facsimiles, this documentary sets the Romanovs' ordeal in the context of the Bolshevik crushing of liberal attempts to ensure the royal family's safety and aborted rightist conspiracies to free the Romanovs." History Book Club selection. (Oct.)
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Salisbury, Harrison E.,
BLACK NIGHT, WHITE SNOW: Russia's Revolutions, 1905-1917.
VG-/VG-. Jacket chipped & torn, protected by mylar.
On book itself, page edges and end pages slightly soiled.
Book otherwise clean and tight. (NY: Doubleday, 1978).
First Edition. Source notes, bibliography,
81 pages of notes, index, 746 pages.
~~~ Harrison Salisbury, a leading authority on Russia, has told a sweeping story and shown the dazzling fabric of Russian life, often in the words of the participants. His account draws heavily on Russian archival sources, some still unpublished, as well as on personal memoirs . . . not only of political and diplomatic figures, but of artists, poets, and journalists of the period. There are new insights and revelations of the role of Lenin and his Bolsheviks -- their confusion and internal conflicts. The result is an exciting record of Russia's great revolutions -- a book that captures in detail and anecdote the electrifying atmosphere of an extraordinary epoch that changed the world.
~~~ OUT OF PRINT.
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Siegelbaum, Lewis H. and Ronald G. Suny (ed),
MAKING WORKERS SOVIET: Power, Class and Identity.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK (Cornell University Press, 1994).
299 pages.
~~~ Drawing on such diverse sources as propaganda art, the trade
union press, workers' memoirs, and materials in recently opened Soviet
archives, this is the first book to examine the shifting identity of the
"working class" in late tsarist and early Soviet societies. New essays by
fifteen leading historians show how Russian workers responded to attempts
to make them Soviet.
~~~ Currently in print at $27.95..
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Steinberg, Mark D. (translated by Marian Schwartz),
VOICES OF REVOLUTION, 1917.
NEW copy. textbook hardcover. (Yale University Press, 2001).
432 pages.
~~~ Although much has been written about
the political history of the Russian revolution,
the human story of what the revolution meant to
ordinary people has rarely been told. This book
gives voice to the experiences, thoughts, and
feelings of the Russian people - workers,
peasants, soldiers - as expressed in their own
words during the vast political, social, and
economic upheavals of 1917. The documents in the
volume include letters from individuals to
newspapers, institutions, or leaders;
collective resolutions and appeals; and even
poetry. Selected from the State Archive of the
Russian Federation in Moscow, nearly all the
texts are published here for the first time.
~~~
Currently in print at $45..
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Trotsky, Leon [Max Eastman, translator],
HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK. (Pathfinder Press, 1980). 465 pages.
~~~ The social, economic, and political dynamics of the first socialist revolution
as told by one of its central leaders. "The history of a revolution is for us
first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of
rulership over their own destiny," Trotsky writes. Unabridged edition, 3 vols.
in one.
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Trotsky, Leon [George Breitman and Naomi Allen, eds],
WRITINGS OF LEON TROTSKY, 1939-1940.
NEW copy. Hardcover (library binding). (Pathfinder Press, 1973). 465 pages.
~~~ This volume contains pamphlets, intervies, articles, letters and statements to the press written by Leon Trotsky during his Mexican excile from July 1939 to August 1940 when he was assassinated by a Stalinist agent.
~~
Originally in print at $70, now OUT OF PRINT.
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[Trotsky] Dmitri Vokogonov,
TROTSKY: The Eternal Revolutionary.
NEW copy. Hardcover with dust jacket. (Free Press). 524 pages.
~~~ "A revealing biography of perhaps the most tragic figure
of the Russian Revolution. Leon Trotsky was once portrayed as the
pivotal figure of the revolution, as idealistic as Lenin but far
less ruthless than Stalin. If he had gained power, rather than
Stalin, the theory goes, the revolution might have turned out
differently. Volkogonov's biography Lenin: Life and Legacy
destroyed any illusions about the man and Stalin: Triumph and
Tragedy reinforced the dictator's negative image. Now we have
the last volume in a collective biography of the leadership of the
Russian Revolution. And perhaps no one was better prepared to write
it than Volkogonov, who rose to the post of deputy chief of political
indoctrination in the Soviet army despite the fact that his father had
been a victim of one of Stalin's purges."
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[Trotsky] Meaghan Delahunt,
IN THE CASA AZUL: A Novel of Revolution and Betrayal.
NEW copy. Hardcover with dust jacket. (St Martin's Press, 2002). 320 pages.
~~~ From Kirkus Reviews:
In a carefully researched first outing, Delahunt tells the story of
Trotsky's wait in a fortified Mexico City house for the arrival of
Stalin's assassins. One of the brightest firebrands of the Russian
Revolution, Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich) was drummed out of the
country by his jealous enemy, Stalin, and now, amid a swirl of memories
—of love, betrayal, and revolution—the last days of the revolutionst are
related in a series of impressionistic pieces, some narrated by Trotsky
himself, others by people who knew him. The timespan goes from Trotsky's
Ukrainian childhood in the late-19th century all the way up to the 1950s,
years after his death, when the man who ordered his assassination, Joseph
Stalin, lies dying in Moscow. The story begins with a recollection of his
arrival in Mexico City, where he and his wife stayed with the flamboyantly
emotional and political couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Along the way
we hear from Trotsky's farmer father; his wife; one of his bodyguards; the
Soviet operative infiltrating Trotsky's compound; a Mexican artist;
Trotsky himself; and others. Delahunt's command of her vast subject is
most impressive indeed as she darts about from lazy days in Mexico City
to the frozen steppes of Russia during the Civil War to the conspiracy --
cloaked corridors of power in Moscow -— all without batting an eye or even
once muddying the narrative. The depth of research is astounding in a
mapping-out of the volcanic passions and dark evils of the Revolution's
heroes and villains -— especially Stalin's near-Satanic henchman Beria. A
complex story laid out with consummate skill and aimed directly at the
powerful vortex where emotion and politics converge.
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Ulam, Adam B.,
THE BOLSHEVIKS: The Intellectual, Personal and Political History of the Origins of Russian Communism.
VG+/VG+. Jacket in mylar. (NY: MacMillan, 1965).
First Printing. Photographs, page-end notes, index, 598 pages.
~~~ In The Bolsheviks, the brilliant
political scientist and historian Adam B. Ulam
vividly re-creates one of the great success stories of modern times: the rise of Communism to world power. His account of the making of the modern Russian state is a massive political and intellectual history honeycombed with intimate biographies of the great men of the Bolshevik movement.
~~~ Professor Ulam seeks out the progenitors
of the Communists as far back as the Decembrists
of the 1820s, and from that point traces from
decade to decade the bloodlines of the great
revolution. He concentrates heavily on the
years between 1900 and 1924, from the time a
small group of revolutionaries organized and
called themselves Bolsheviks, to the year of
Lenin's death. In that time Bolshevism became the force that seized the Russian government and established for all time the character of the modern Soviet state. Throughout the book Mr. Ulam relates the significance of that fatal quarter century to the succeeding years
of the Soviet regime which have revealed so dramatically the Communist determination to master the world.
~~~ The Bolsheviks focuses necessarily upon the commanding figure of Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin, the heir of the long revolutionary tradition, and the great ideologist, master tactician, and electric personality of Bolshevism and Communism. Around him revolve the other important personages who were part of the success story which, as Professor Ulam points out, was not one of unqualified triumph; for the lives of the creators of Communism were marked with personal tragedy, and the movement itself was torn with ideological controversies which were to lead to totalitarianism and to the present quarrel which has divided the Communist world into two camps.
~~~ Much of the material in The Bolsheviks is published here for the first time -- particularly new biographical material on Lenin -- either released at last by the Soviet Government or recently established by Western scholarship. Professor Ulam has masterfully absorbed this new material into the most comprehensive work on the Bolsheviks to date. His is a book of great scope and impeccable erudition, rich with a kind of anecdote and insightful observation that injects moment-to-moment excitement into the extraordinary history of the Bolsheviks, their times, their effect upon Russia, and their influence upon the world.
~~~ Paperback currently in print at $24.95; hardcover OUT OF PRINT.
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White, James D.,
RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, 1917-1921: A Short History.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK. (Edward Arnold, 1994). 320 pages.
~~~ This study provides a factual, chronological account of the
main political events of the period, explains the tensions within society
that led to the popular upheavals of 1917 and shows what had become of
these social movements by the end of the Civil War period; offers an
intellectual history of the Revolution, and looks critically at the nature
of the sources we depend on for an understanding of the Revolution.
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[Wright] William Thomas Allison,
WITNESS TO REVOLUTION: The Russian Revolution Diary and Letters of J. Butler Wright.
NEW copy, hardcover issued without dust jacket. (Praeger Publishers, 2002).
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index, 261 pages.
~~~ J. Butler Wright brought his young bride and son to Russia in the fall of 1916 to take up duties as counselor to the American
Embassy in Petrograd. He had no idea that he would soon witness one of the most amazing events in history--the collapse of
Imperial Russia and the advent of the Soviet Union. Recording daily events and observations in his diary, Wright left a
vivid description of the day-to-day uncertainty in revolutionary Russia and American activities during this chaotic time.
This account demonstrates how confused and dangerous diplomatic representation can be during times of crisis. While often
missing the mark in what was happening in Russia, Wright and his fellow diplomats fulfilled their duty diligently.
~~~ Currently in print at $87.95.
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$75.00
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