History

This volume brings together the work of researchers in North America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Turkey, who are generating important, archivally based scholarship in their respective fields, languages, and nations of study. The larger goal of this volume is to sit in conversation with the others in this series that directly deal with Russia and its Great War and...

A special correspondent of The New York Times, Carl W. Ackerman traveled from Vladivostok to Irkutsk to Omsk to Ekaterinburg in the fall of 1918 in the midst of the Russian Civil War. He met with officers of the American and Japanese expeditionary forces, with members of the Czecho-Slovak corps fighting the Red Army, with ministers of the democratic Russian...

John R. Mott’s Recent Experiences and Impressions in Russia presents a collection of public addresses and letters created during his participation in a United States diplomatic mission to Russia—sent by President Woodrow Wilson and led by Elihu Root—from May to August 1917. These historical documents (printed in 1917 but never published) describe this Root Mission and offer perspectives on several...

In the last generation a large body of new empirical information has challenged the inherited views of early modern Russia. Much of this new information has been about the state, its administration, practices, and relations with society. Old ideas and terminology need to be rethought, concepts such as westernization, autocracy, or centralization. The amount and pace of change in the...

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...

In April 1917, Walter Crosley assumed the position of naval attaché to Petrograd and brought his wife, Pauline, with him. Over the next eleven months, the Crosleys witnessed the last gasps of the Russian Empire and the emergence of the new Bolshevik-led communist regime. Throughout this period, Pauline wrote letters describing the changing political landscape and the challenges of daily...

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...