History

In 1917—that is, in the midst of the First World War—Madeleine Z. Doty, a feminist, lawyer, prison reformer, peace activist, and journalist, was commissioned by the magazine Good Housekeeping to travel “around the world” to get a view “behind the battle line” of how people on the home front, especially women, were responding to the war. Traveling on the Trans-Siberian...

Arthur Bullard’s The Russian Pendulum (1919) is a personal and political analysis of the Russian Revolution, from the Revolution of 1905 through the beginning of the Civil War in 1918. It reflects Bullard’s own perspective, as an advocate for change in Russia with American help. Bullard’s experience as an advisor to Colonel House and Woodrow Wilson as a key staffer for...

Pioneer war photographer Donald Thompson arrived in Petrograd on the eve of the February Revolution of 1917. Since the outbreak of World War I, Thompson had worked on every front in Europe, shooting motion-picture footage and stills for US and British newspapers and magazines, carefully fashioning his reputation as a free spirit who defied danger, death, the elements, and the...

At the turn of the 20th century, the Russian Empire's 5.2 million Jews were in crisis. Having quintupled in number since 1800, they were substantially impoverished and crammed into Russia's 25 westernmost provinces. Some pinned their hopes on emigration, others on being granted permission to live in the Russian interior. Some labored with hand tools in dingy workshops, but most...

Of all of the books by American witnesses of the Russian Revolution, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World was and still is the best known. Even though Reed arrived in Russia in September 1917 and left in the spring of 1918, his enthusiastic account focuses on the ten key days of the revolution itself, bringing to life the...

Dmitry Prigov (1940–2007), the most prominent figure in Moscow Conceptualism, is not well known in the West because of a lack of English translations of his work and scholarship in English. This collection of articles by some of the most devoted experts on his work aims to change that by providing detailed discussions in English of Prigov’s broad-based...

Seeing Muscovy Anew: Politics—Institutions—Culture: Essays in Honor of Nancy Shields Kollmann brings together nineteen thought-provoking essays from an international group of specialists in medieval and early modern Russian and Ukrainian studies to honor the inspiring scholarship of Nancy Shields Kollmann. The contributions are grouped into thematic categories that reflect Kollmann’s wide-ranging interests: 1) the politics of rule, 2) conflicted belief,...

Louise Bryant and her husband John Reed were among a relatively small group of Americans who participated in one of the most important events of the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution of 1917. As first-hand observers, they attended meetings of the revolutionaries, were present at the Winter Palace as it was under attack, and witnessed the surrender of the palace guards. Over...

Chicago native, political activist, and journalist Ernest Poole (1880-1950) provides a distinctive view of the Bolshevik Revolution in his work, The Village: Russian Impressions. This work is unusual in the library of American accounts of Revolutionary Russia because he addresses the world of the Russian peasants, far away from the revolutionary centers of Petrograd and Moscow. He associated with a...