Russia in flames

Laura Engelstein

"A century ago, the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty was toppled, replaced first by an interim government and then by the world's first self-proclaimed socialist society. This was no narrative of ten earth-shaking days but one of months and years of compounding strife, a struggle for power by competing ideologies and regions and classes and political parties and ethnicities, all rushing to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the tsarist regime, brought down by the First World War, that massive exercise in state-driven violence. At the center of it all is the unlikely triumph of Lenin's Bolsheviks, first in their ruthless seizure of power and then, by institutionalizing violence and terror, their eventual victory over equally brutal but less effective opponents. For seven years, through war, revolutionary upheaval, and civil strife, one Russia replaced another; old...

See on librarything