A comprehensive, ideologically detached, and enormously enlightening work of Russian history.
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 conferences—she notes that a third of the population, about 50 million people, voted for the Constituent Assembly—could, 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.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-979421-8
Page Count: 840
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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