Review of 'Year One of the Russian Revolution' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
I always tell people looking for a place to start with the Russian Revolution to read Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, not just because it's a great source, but also because it's an incredible literary achievement; Trotsky was one of the greatest prose stylists of the twentieth century, in addition to being one of those vanishingly few human beings whose capacity to act upon history are empirically apparent (right up until it very much acted on him).
Going forward I'll be telling people to read Trotsky's 'History' and Serge's 'Year One'. I was expecting something a lot more dilettanish and perhaps essayistic given my experience of 'Memoirs of a Revolutionary', which is also fantastic and very detailed, but a memoir nonetheless. However, once Serge gets October behind him there is a properly extensive (if politically skewed) map of the unfolding of the battles as well as the broader dynamics …
I always tell people looking for a place to start with the Russian Revolution to read Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, not just because it's a great source, but also because it's an incredible literary achievement; Trotsky was one of the greatest prose stylists of the twentieth century, in addition to being one of those vanishingly few human beings whose capacity to act upon history are empirically apparent (right up until it very much acted on him).
Going forward I'll be telling people to read Trotsky's 'History' and Serge's 'Year One'. I was expecting something a lot more dilettanish and perhaps essayistic given my experience of 'Memoirs of a Revolutionary', which is also fantastic and very detailed, but a memoir nonetheless. However, once Serge gets October behind him there is a properly extensive (if politically skewed) map of the unfolding of the battles as well as the broader dynamics of the Russian Civil War across most of the Empire, very impressive that he manages to accomplish this in such a (relatively) small number of pages.