good overview of the russian revolution?

[David Kipen]

am i missing something? does pynchon come out and say on amazon that the
Russian Revolution will be dealt with in ATD? i'd love to brush up on it,
but oughtn't we better to concentrate on the mexican revolution, which he
actually mentions, and for which i'm open to suggestions other than azuela's
'the underdogs' or reed's 'insurgent mexico'?

all finest,
david kipen

p.s. anybody got suggestion for a better single-volume vade mecum between
now and december 5 than tuchman's 'the proud tower: a portrait of the world
before the war, 1890-1914'?


On 7/31/06, bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>  The best book I know of about the Russian Revolution is "A People's
> Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924" by Orlando Figes.  Figes makes
> the point that the Revolution was a complete tragedy for the Russian people
> and he looks at the role of the workers, peasants and official through
> excellent use of primary  source material.  It's not short - 824 pages - but
> it's not hard to read.  He includes excellent little mini-biographies of
> many of the key  players,  some of whom I had never heard of before (not
> surprising,  I guess).
>
> Anyway, the book rather arbitrarily deals with the time period between
> 1891 (the onset of some serious economic difficulties) and 1924 (Lenin's
> death) and that certainly plays into his basic theme of how  'the people'
> were affected but the focus is far more on the revolution and Marxists than
> the whole history of bloody Tsars. The book also uses biographical sketches
> of people who illustrate Figes' points by being close to the peasants and/or
> workers,  or rejecting them.
>
> Literary references are important to Figes probably because of his prior
> work,  Natasha's Dance, which is the cultural history of Russia.  These
> parts are rather interesting because the intellectuals always had a
> love-hate relationship with the reality of the peasants;  loving the idea
> them only, it would seem,  and hating the reality.
>
> Bekah
> happy reading    :-)
>
>
>
>
> At 6:10 PM -0400 7/30/06, jd wrote:
>
> I'm reading The Russian Revolution 1917-1921 by Beryl Williams, which
> seems to be a decent intro to the subject, but it's only 99 pages long
> and seems to gloss over a lot of details, giving a more eagle-eyed
> view of the situation, and I was wondering if any of you could
> reccomend a book that might be better at both giving that view as well
> as more detail to the events leading up to and surrounding the
> revolution.  This book is decent but sort of flies through events in a
> way that makes them sometimes easy to miss.
>
>
>
>
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