The Russian Revolution
A New History

Quotes

“Well written, with new details from archival research used for vivid descriptions of key events.”—New York Times Book Review

“A superb and eye-opening account of this important chapter in 20th century history that will be indispensable reading for those anxious to learn more about this seminal event and the aftershocks that followed .... The Russian Revolution is a carefully researched, well-written assessment of the complex and confusing events that did so much to shape the last century. McMeekin is a reliable guide to a complex story and the book moves seamlessly and clearly across a vast landscape of people and events.”—Christian Science Monitor

“A powerful revisionist history... Sean McMeekin is a gifted writer with historical talents equal to the challenge of helping the reader to follow the events of the revolution and appreciate their terrible significance ... And in a world menaced by new totalitarians, by political actors prepared to use conflict as a path to power, by states ready to use their money to suborn democracy elsewhere and by liberals often paralysed by infighting rather than united by principle, McMeekin’s magisterial study repays careful reading.”—Times (UK)

“McMeekin succeeds in offering a fresh take through inclusivity of contributing events ... A well-written and rewarding read on the Russian Revolution’s lasting historical import.”—Library Journal

“With strong scholarly foundations and a riveting narrative, this book provides a broad survey of this tumultuous and fateful social transformation ... This fluid work offers an overview of the revolution’s wartime context.”—Publishers Weekly

“A fresh history of the revolution ... McMeekin refreshingly doesn’t muddy the waters with too many characters, but he is thorough in his treatment, which is that much more interesting due to the wealth of information released following the downfall of the Soviet Union ... McMeekin effectively shows how easily one man could undermine the foundations of a nation, and he makes the revolution comprehensible as he exposes the deviousness of its leader.”—Kirkus Reviews

“It is a quarter of a century since Richard Pipes published his history of the Bolshevik seizure of power in the Russian empire, and twenty years since Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy. Back then, in the wake of the Soviet collapse, those seemed definitive. But now comes Sean McMeekin with a vivid new account, drawing on fresh evidence and offering an original, geopolitical perspective. The full, shocking extent to which Lenin was a German operative now becomes clear, as does the magnitude of Kerensky’s blunder in not finishing the Bolsheviks off before their ‘revolutionary defeatism’ went viral. McMeekin writes muscular history. His Russian Revolution grips the reader.”—Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money

“Sean McMeekin’s new history of the Russian Revolution is, as always with his work, dynamic, compelling, and revisionist, telling the familiar story with vigour, accessibility, and elan but ornamented with fascinating new archival revelations on, amongst other things, German funding of the Bolsheviks.”—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem

“McMeekin enhances his high reputation in this comprehensively researched, persuasively developed account of the Russian Revolution as a contingent consequence of specific policies and decisions. Russia’s army, economy, and society did not collapse from the structural overstretch of World War I. Instead McMeekin emphasizes the might have beens, the roads not taken, that led to a “hostile takeover” standing as a grim warning against armed prophets promising earthly utopias.”—Dennis Showalter, author of If the Allies Had Fallen

“The Tsar didn’t fall, he wilted, and this briskly written, fresh take on the revolution sketches the process in poignant detail—orgies, vodka, Rasputin, pogroms, plots, and war on the Eastern Front. McMeekin’s Lenin is more seedy than heroic, his Bolshevik victory an act of treason engineered by a German army that had stuffed a billion dollars in Lenin’s pockets before the bourgeois exile mounted his first barricade in Petrograd.”—Geoffrey Wawro, author of The Vietnam War