The Russian Century: A History of the Last Hundred Years - Softcover

Moynahan, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679764364 ISBN 13: 9780679764366

Publisher: Random House, 1995

Synopsis

Making extensive use of contemporary accounts, Moynahan traces Russia's turbulent 20th century, from the last days of tsarist rule to the Bolshevik Revolution, two world wars (and one cold one), and to the overthrow of the Communist regime. Simultaneously a political, social and oral history, this book will quickly become the preeminent short history of Russia's recent past. Photos.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"The Russian Century manages to convey both the staggering cruelties of Russian history and the telling gestures of individual suffering.... Moynahan knows how to focus on revealing details in the bigger picture."--Newsweek

From Kirkus Reviews:

A spectacular, startling, and sometimes downright grisly chronicle, in words and pictures, of a bloody and tumultuous period. Alongside a stunning battery of photographs scoured from archives and collections throughout the former Soviet empire, the vast majority of them unfamiliar, Moynahan (Comrades, 1992) unfolds a history short on depth but told in crisp, imagistic (not to say strongly opinionated) prose. To his great credit, he persistently strives to include not only the obvious historical milestones-- wars, revolutions, terror, famine, and the like (every horseman of the apocalypse gallops across the tortured steppes)--but also some sense of the evolving everyday sensory and emotional realities of Russian life under czar, dictator, and infant democracy. In this, he's not only immeasurably aided but inevitably outshone by the pageant of superbly reproduced photographs to which every reader will be immediately drawn and which, highlighting the human figure at the expense of landscape, run the gamut from imperial family portraits and staged Party propaganda scenes to snatched samizdat documents of ghetto and gulag, to the innovative high art of Rodchenko. Behind the familiar official faces of the masters- -Rasputin's manic stare, Trotsky's compelling gaze, Stalin's sly squint, Yeltsin's pugnacious querulousness--and the distortions of official history, both amply evidenced here, the photos unearth a vast parade of their nameless subjects (and, more often then not, victims)--``ordinary'' workers, peasants, soldiers, priests, shopkeepers. Too often it's a gallery of the unquiet dead: These pages are as corpse-strewn as the history they record--slain in purges, pogroms, insurrections, invasions, by starvation or single bullet, piled high by roadsides, dumped into mass graves, even, most shockingly and indelibly, filleted on the dining table of famine-stricken peasants driven to cannibalism. No mere coffee-table ornament, but a historical document of great drama and unusual intensity. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0679764364
• ISBN 13: 9780679764366
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288