The Shadow of the Winter Palace: Russia's Drift to Revolution 1825-1917

An elegantly expostulatory narrative about the Russian century between the failed 1825 Decembrist conspiracy against Tsardom & the WWI collapse. Crankshaw, author of Khrushchev ('66) & Tolstoy ('74), focuses on the monarchy itself, the "sad fatuity" of its earlier attempts to ablish serfdom & the ministers who perpetuated "the sheer frivolity of the system," a waste of talent "more damaging than its brutalities." The book concludes, 1st, that the Tsars were a pretty foolish lot, & 2nd, that Russian reformers tended either to rely on the central autocracy to implement their hopes or to form a bloc with the revolutionary left. He considers the latter course, as embodied by the turn-of-the-century constitutionalist Milyukov, to have been disastrous, while the former approach had possibilities--if only Stolypin's combination of repression & agricultural restructuring had had time to bear fruit, for example. The key to 19th-century Russia was the interplay between autocracy & intelligentsia, he writes. Yet he gives the merest of glosses on key intellectuals from Belinsky to Chernyshevsky. A more serious resource in this area is Tibor Szamuely's The Russian Tradition ('75), while Richard Pipes' Russia Under the Old Regime ('75) offers fuller treatment of socio-economic developments. This volume makes not a scholarly contribution, but a pleasantly readable overview based on the premise that "the drift to revolution" was a surpassing misfortune.--Kirkus (edited)