The empire must die : Russia's revolutionary collapse, 1900-1917

The empire must die Russia's revolutionary collapse, 1900-1917

Mikhail Zygarʹ, 1981-

Book - 2017

From Tolstoy to Lenin, from Diaghilev to Stalin, The Empire Must Die is a tragedy of operatic proportions with a cast of characters that ranges from the exotic to utterly villainous, the glamorous to the depraved. In 1912, Russia experienced a flowering of liberalism and tolerance that placed it at the forefront of the modern world: women were fighting for the right to vote in the elections for the newly empowered parliament, Russian art and culture was the envy of Europe and America, there was a vibrant free press and intellectual life. But a fatal flaw was left uncorrected: Russia's exuberant experimental moment took place atop a rotten foundation. The old imperial order, in place for three hundred years, still held the nation in thr...all. Its princes, archdukes, and generals bled the country dry during the First World War and by 1917 the only consensus was that the Empire must die. Mikhail Zygar's dazzling, in-the-moment retelling of the two decades that prefigured the death of the Tsar, his family, and the entire imperial edifice is a captivating drama of what might have been versus what was subsequently seen as inevitable. A monumental piece of political theater that only Russia was capable of enacting, the fall of the Russian Empire changed the course of the twentieth century and eerily anticipated the mood of the twenty-first.

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Subjects
Romanov, House of.
Russia > History > 1801-1917.
Russia > Kings and rulers.
Biographies.
Genres
Biographies
Published
New York : Public Affairs 2017.
Language
English
Russian
Main Author
Mikhail Zygarʹ, 1981- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xi, 558 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 521-530) and index.
ISBN
9781610398312
  • Chapter 1, in which Leo Tolstoy becomes a symbol of the fight against the regime and the main ideologist of the opposition
  • Chapter 2, in which Sergei Witte fails to stop Russia from invading China and seizing Beijing
  • Chapter 3, in which Jews go on the war path: Mikhail Gotz and Gregory Gershuni create the most powerful opposition party in Russia
  • Chapter 4, in which liberals come into fashion: Peter Struve and Pavel Milyukov become the most popular politicians in the country
  • Chapter 5, in which Empress Alexandra and Dowager Empress Maria argue over who will be mistress of the palace and of Russia
  • Chapter 6, in which Russian gets a new leader of popular protest: his name is Georgy Gapon
  • Chapter 7, in which Black-Hundreder Alexander Dubrovin creates the first Russian party of the state, and oppositioner Maxim Gorky asks the West to stop funding Russia
  • Chapter 8, in which Pyotr Stolypin and Dmitriy Trepov suggest two different ways of reforming Russia
  • Chapter 9, in which art fan Sergei Diaghilev and religious fanatic Sergei Trufanov (Iliodor) try to stay independent from the state and even use it to their advantage
  • Chapter 10, in which millionaires Alexander Guchkov and Pavel Ryabushinsky try to engage big business in managing the country
  • Chapter 11, in which Grigory Rasputin becomes the most powerful kleptocrat and the most hated pacifist in Russia
  • Chapter 12, in which there is a second leader of popular protest in Russia: his name is Alexander Kerensky
  • Chapter 13, in which Irakli Tsereteli tries to turn Russian into a parliamentary democracy and Vladimir Lenin stands in his way
  • Chapter 14, in which Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev don't wish for a Bolshevik revolt anymore, since they believe it to be completely unnecessary.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A vivid, character-driven reconstruction of the period leading up to the overthrow of the Romanovs and the birth of modern Russia.One-time TV host Zygar (All the Kremlin's Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin, 2016) opens with a mild protest: he is a journalist and not a historian and so writes by the journalist's playbook, "as if the characters were alive and I had been able to interview them." Nonetheless, the author commands a powerful depth of historical knowledge and a novelist's knack for sorting through the details to determine what is important and what's ancillary. His book is long on meaningful storytelling in the service of finding out what went wrong in Russia's brief moment of liberalism, an era that snapped shut a century ago. He adds that his characters, who range from rebels to royals, intellectuals to clerics, had no idea how their deeds would play out in history or how small events would turn into big ones. In some senses, the October Revolution began more than two years earlier, with anti-German riots that embraced the Empress Alexandra, "an ethnic German by birth." The riots did not please Alexandra, still less the demands of the crowd that her confessor, Rasputin, be hanged, and still less the popularity of the general who restored order. In a narrative reminiscent of the best of Eduardo Galeano, Zygar raises all sorts of what-if questions in the reader's mind: what if Alexander Kerensky had prevailed over Lenin? What if the old intelligentsia, civil service, and minor nobility had been able to integrate into Soviet society instead of being massacred by Stalin? What if the czarist state had been able to read the tea leaves better and accommodated the demands of the people for better food, better jobs, better government? The possibilities are endlessand endlessly fascinating.An excellent complement to recent work by other Russian journalists who have turned to history, and to brilliant purpose. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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