Recent Books on the Russian Revolution

Pamela Paul, New York Times - via email

Gray318

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution, which fundamentally shaped  and continues to wield influence over Russia and the rest of the world. Not surprisingly, publishers have put forth a number of related books, with major biographies of Lenin and Stalin, and many new works of Soviet history, including a new book by Anne Applebaum, “Red Famine.”

Other books examine the present-day ripple effects of those tumultuous events. Masha Gessen’s “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” looks at the nation under Putin, and Maria Alyokhina’s “Riot Days” recounts the Pussy Riot musician’s time in prison, where she fought for prisoners’ rights.

But many readers turn to older books for insight into the Russia of 1917 and the following decades. That's why we asked three writers and thinkers – the novelist Martin Amis, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott to write essays on the books that to their mind best illuminate the events of October 1917. *** See also, "Martin Amis on Lenin's Revolution," New York Times, which makes what some would consider a rather controversial statement:

For decades Trotsky’s jealous dismissal — “the gray blur,” the faceless bureaucrat —
was the utterly misleading orthodoxy. Stalin was never a gray blur. Let us for a
moment consider the Stalin versus Hitler question simply as a contest between two
human beings. Until 1917 Stalin was a czarist dissident, a brawler, a boozer, a
singer, a charmer, a womanizer and a brilliant mimic; he was not only a published
but an anthologized poet; and he was wholly dedicated to the fight for universal
equality and justice. Compare him with Hitler, the dank, sexless, humorless,
milk-drinking vegetarian invert, nursing dreams, in his Viennese flophouse, of
Judaeocide and world domination. Once established as the autocrat, Hitler went
back to reading nothing but trash ethnology and the westerns of Karl May, whereas
Stalin went back to reading Dickens, Chekhov, Gogol, Hemingway, Zola, Balzac,
Maupassant and Oscar Wilde. Stalin was an Earthling; Hitler climbed up from the
infernal regions.

My inclination, rather, would be to ask in which circle of hell these two tyrants belonged. It would not be surprising if some of their victims would reply "in the same one." [see]