Review by Choice Review
With the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian scholars unleashed a plethora of new works examining the upheavals in prewar Russia and the ensuing collapse of czarism. One study stands out among the others. Laura Engelstein (emer., Russian history, Yale) embarked upon a mammoth undertaking with her exploration of the revolutionary cataclysm that engulfed Russia and still haunts the post-Soviet Russian Federation. The outstanding strength of her narrative is her account of prewar Russia and the failure of the autocracy to address the mounting political and social crises that plagued Nicholas II. As Engelstein relates, this cauldron of unaddressed grievances and political corruption, as well the battlefield horrors of a failed war, ignited the fuse of revolution. Her detailed account of Lenin's mobilization of Bolshevik cadres and how Lenin weaponized the revolutionary situation to topple the first and only Russian democratic experiment highlights her book. The author's detailed depiction of not only what happened in revolutionary Russia but also the ensuing legacy of a failed experiment based on terror and bloodshed that has enduring meaning today will captivate readers. Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries. --Christopher C. Lovett, Emporia State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Engelstein (Slavophile Empire), professor emerita of Russian history at Yale, chronicles the violence that preempted the "unprecedented and monumental" Russian Revolution and did not cease at the conclusion of the ensuing civil war, which ushered in a state that "substituted the forced mobilization of popular participation for the formal institutions of political democracy." Social unrest in the Russian Empire predated the country's entry into WWI. An unsuccessful war with Japan, pogroms against Jews, domestic terrorism, and the widening gulf between monarchists and the social, cultural, and economic groups "trying to lead Russia into the future" all contributed to an atmosphere of increasing instability, Engelstein writes. By the time "the old regime effectively crumbled" in February of 1917, mutinous soldiers, sailors, and workers had taken to the streets of Petrograd. The efforts of new legislative bodies, including the Duma Committee and the Soviet Executive Committee, to regain control, proved insufficient and were undermined by the Bolsheviks, who "were busy calculating the best strategy for knocking out the political center." Engelstein delivers a clear-eyed, if dry, account of the difficulties confronting the population, now citizens of a country where "the dream of democracy had been abandoned," and everyone was subject to the "arbitrary swing of the sword." (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
At some point in their careers, almost all scholars of Russian and Soviet history write about the complex period between the first Russian Revolution in 1905 and the final submission of the Basmachi insurrection two decades later. Engelstein (history, Yale Univ; The Keys to Happiness) waited until her retirement to tackle this task; as such, she succeeds in presenting a thorough history of these wars and revolutions in an understandable and engaging manner. In this full, richly detailed study, the author effectively argues the Bolsheviks were ultimately triumphant because they focused on power and were more willing to employ violence against their adversaries, and one another, with horrific results. This volume will compete with Jonathan Smele's The Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926, and Richard Pipe's A Concise History of the Russian Revolution for space on the shelf, but Engelstein's expertise in Russian cultural history offers new and unique insights. VERDICT This comprehensive examination of the tragic, tumultuous, and violent period marking the end of the Imperial Russian Empire and the beginning of the Soviet Union is recommended for students and scholars of Russian and Soviet history, as well as anyone interested in social change.-Michael McCarthy, Independent Scholar, Tampa © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A simultaneously sweeping and focused history of the Bolshevik Revolution as a brutal co-opting of the legitimate democratic groundswell.On the 100th anniversary of Lenin's 1917 coup, Engelstein (Emerita, Russian History/Yale Univ.; Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia's Illiberal Path, 2009, etc.) concentrates on the ferocious state-building of the Bolsheviks, which allowed them to assume power through civil war, social control, and economic collapse, defeating the counterrevolution and establishing a top-down socialist state. The author revisits the Revolution of 1905 that shook the Russian Empire "from stem to stern" and first provided the model for the 1917 February Revolution. The Bolshevik coup of the duly elected provisional government brought on a savage four-year civil war that Engelstein asserts was "implicit in the revolution from the beginning." Taking Russia out of World War I and gambling instead on the sparking of worldwide revolution fractured the opposition: "men versus officers, peasants versus landowners, workers versus factor owners, poor versus rich, drunk versus sober." The Bolsheviks exploited the divisions rather than contain them, and what Engelstein sees as the legitimate "procedures of democratic life," which were reflected in the many committees and conferencesshe notes that a third of the population, about 50 million people, voted for the Constituent Assemblycould, by the dominant Bolshevik party, "be dispensed with, or refashioned as instruments of rule." Moreover, the Cheka, the police-state ancestor to the KGB, was put in place within weeks after the October Revolution, instigating the Red Terror, which was, as one official noted, "the rational direction of the punishing arm of the revolutionary proletariat." Engelstein astutely and methodically examines the unquiet regions in turn, from Finland to the Baltics to Ukraine to central Asia to Poland. Crushing the rebellion of the Kronstadt sailors in 1921 was just the beginning of the revolution's turning against itself. A comprehensive, ideologically detached, and enormously enlightening work of Russian history. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
