Revolution!
About this book
Commemorating the October 2017 centenary of the Russian Revolution, an anthology of wide-ranging voices and scholarship throwing fresh light on this momentous historical event. This October the world commemorates the centenary of the Russian Revolution, one of the crucial moments of the twentieth century, and an event passionately fought over by those on all sides of the political spectrum. Revolution! will contain writing by Russians and by foreigners who went to Russia and for whom the Russian Revolution was a political litmus test. The themes—hunger and heating, the limits of personal freedom, the infallibility of the party, free love, the role of art in the revolution—dominated twentieth century intellectual life and continue to resonate today. Many books on the Russian Revolution will be published in the centenary year, but Revolution! will be unique in portraying this momentous event through the writings of those who witnessed it (or its immediate after-effects). Following No Man's Land and No Pasaran, it is an anthology that vividly portrays the many sides of an event that changed the course of world history—and is still contested today. "Leninists, Bolsheviks, anarchists and communists, thugs, registered housebreakers – what a muddle! What a Satanic vinaigrette! What immense work – to raise once more and cleanse from all this garbage the great idea of socialism." —Teffi
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Contents
- Pete Ayrton: Introduction
- Leon Trotsky: ‘The Deciding Night’, from My Life
- John Reed & Louise Bryant: ‘The Fall of the Provisional Government’, from Ten Days that Shook the World ‘Odds and Ends of Revolution’, from Six Red Months in Russia
- Arthur Ransome: ‘An Ex-Capitalist’ & ‘A Theorist of Revolution’ from Six Weeks in Russia in 1919
- Robert Bruce Lockhart: ‘Perhaps it is for the best’, from Memoirs of a British Agent
- Edith Sollohub: ‘Alone in Petrograd’, from The Russian Countess
- Konstantin Paustovsky: ‘Blockade’, from Story of a Life: Years of Hope
- Dmitry Furmanov & Mikhail Sholokhov: ‘Chapaev’, from Chapaev ‘Family Man’
- Somerset Maugham: ‘Mr Harrington’s Washing’, from Ashenden: Or the British Agent
- Teffi: ‘Rasputin’, from Rasputin and Other Ironies & ‘They got her to scrub the deck!’, from Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea
- Isaac Babel: Excerpts from Diary: 1920
- H. G. Wells: ‘The Shaving of Karl Marx’ & ‘Institutionalising the Town Children’, from Russia in the Shadows
- Bertrand Russell: ‘Letters from Russia’, from Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China 1919-22
- Lev Lunts, Mikhail Zoshckenko & Marietta Shaginian: ‘The Outgoing Letter N37’ ‘Electrification’, ‘Domestic Bliss’, ‘Crisis’, ‘Nervous People’, ‘An Incident on the Volga’, ‘Pelageya’ & ‘The Hat’ ‘The Secret of the Cheka’, from Mess-Mend: The Yankees in Petrograd
- Alexandra Kollontai & Vera Inber: ‘Three Generations’, from Love of Worker Bees ‘Lalla’s Interests’
- Nina Berberova: ‘The Destruction of the Intelligentsia’ from The Italics are Mine
- Ilya Ehrenburg: ‘Hares of All Lands, Unite!’, from First Years of Revolution 1918-21, Volume II: Of People, Years, Life
- Emma Goldman & Alexander Berkman: ‘John Reed burst into my room . . . ’ & ‘Free Speech is a Bourgeois Prejudice’, from Living My Life ‘Back in Petrograd’ from The Bolshevik Myth
- Victor Serge & Panaït Istrati: ‘Anguish and Enthusiasm: 1919-1920’, ‘Deadlock of the Revolution: 1926-1928’ & ‘The Years of Resistance: 1928-1933’, from Memoirs of a Revolutionary ‘The Roussakov Affair’, from After Sixteen Months in the USSR
- Claude Mckay & Langston Hughes: ‘The Pride and Pomp of Proletarian Power’, from A Long Way from Home ‘Turkmenian Flamenco’, from I Wonder as I Wander
- Viktor Ardov: ‘The Bloodthirsty Profession’ & ‘Striving after Friendship’
- Walter Benjamin: ‘Moscow’, from Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings
- Theodore Dreiser: ‘Propaganda Plus’, from Dreiser Looks at Russia
- Ilf & Petrov: ‘How Robinson was Created’
- Permissions
- Acknowledgements
- Also by Pete Ayrton
- Copyright