The Red Tempest

About This Book

In February 1917 the women of Petrograd walked out of their factories and their bread queues, and within a week the largest empire on earth had lost its tsar. Eight months later a disciplined party of revolutionaries seized the moment that the old world's collapse had opened, and Russia — and the twentieth century — were changed forever.

This is the whole arc, told whole: the famine and autocracy of the late tsarist empire; the “dress rehearsal” of 1905; the catastrophe of the World War that finished what all the revolutionaries together had failed to do; the two revolutions of 1917, February's joyous chaos and October's cold, deliberate stroke; and the long, grim aftermath — the Civil War that killed millions, the Terror the new state built into its foundations, the famine that starved five million, the crushing of the sailors at Kronstadt, and the founding of the Soviet Union on the threshold of the age of Stalin.

Drawing on the standard scholarship and the accounts of those who were there, E.B Cohen tells the story of the Russian Revolution honestly — neither the heroic epic of Soviet legend nor the mere criminal conspiracy of Cold War caricature, but the human tragedy of a people who set out to build a juster world and built, instead, something none of them intended, and that half the world would live in the shadow of for a century.