good overview of the russian revolution?

[richard baillie]

I thought ATR was about the Mexican revolution...

"You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you"

Lev Bronstein




On Mon, 31 Jul 2006 08:35:10 -0700, "David Casseres"
<david.casseres at gmail.com> said:
> One that's not exactly "about the revolution" but that I think is
> indispensable is Bertram D. Wolfe's "Three Who Made a Revolution," a
> triple biography of Lenin, Trotsky,, and Stalin.
> 
> 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.
> >
> >
> >
-- 
  richard baillie
  richbaillie at fastmail.fm

-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - Access your email from home and the web