The Russian Revolution

How an Empire Fell and What Came After

von Walter Selby

262 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Petrograd ran out of bread in February 1917. Within five days the garrison had refused to fire, the police had gone from the streets, and three hundred years of Romanov rule were over. Seven years later a single party governed the country, and it censored, conscripted, requisitioned and policed on a scale the tsars had never managed.This book traces the distance between those two facts, from the abolition of serfdom in 1861 to the death of Lenin in 1924, and it traces it from below as much as from above. Witte, Stolypin, Kerensky and Trotsky appear on almost every page. So do the wage that stopped covering the rent, the ration card, the queue that formed before dawn, the village assembly that divided a landlord's fields without waiting for a law, and the sailors of Kronstadt who died for a slogan the government had once printed itself.The two revolutions of 1917 are kept apart here, and the eight months between them are treated as time in which matters could have gone otherwise. Nothing is arranged as a road to October, because no one living through it knew the ending.Violence is counted rather than deplored: the volleys of 1905, the punitive columns, the Red terror and the White, the pogroms, Tambov, and the famine on the Volga. Where the counting was never finished the figures stand as ranges, and contradictions in the record are printed rather than resolved.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798175812122
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 20.09.2026
• Größe: 203 x 127 mm
• Verlag: Independently published