Category: Russian Revolution

Richard Pipes was a prominent scholar of Russian history at Harvard for nearly half a century. Born in Poland in 1923, he was a virulent anti-communist and served in the Reagan administration National Security Council in the early 1980s. The fact that he dedicates “The Russian Revolution” to “the victims” tells you all you need…

I’ve read several scholarly accounts of the Russian Revolution, but nowhere have the events of 1917 in Petrograd come alive quite like they do in Helen Rappaport’s masterful “Caught in the Revolution: Witnesses to the Fall of Imperial Russia.” Rappaport breaks her quick flowing narrative down into thirds. Part I, The February Revolution, chronicles the…

There are lots of books on the Russian Revolution. Few are as comprehensive and compelling as Orlando Figes’ “A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891 – 1924,” first published to wide critical acclaim in 1997. Figes takes a broad view of his subject; his history stretches over nearly two generations, from the famine of 1891…