Sidney Harcave, Count Sergei Witte and the Twilight of Imperial Russia : a Biography (2004); Terrence Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia (1983); Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2 vols. (1998–1992); and the same author’s P A Stolypin, The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (2001) cover the politics of the last generation before 1917. Sergei U. Witte’s Memoirs of Count Witte, trans. Sidney Harcave (1990) provide a vivid if scarcely objective picture of the government.
Russia’s First World War is a neglected subject. For the background see D. C. B. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (1983) and for war itself Norman Stone, The Eastern Front 1914–1917 (1975) is still the only overview. See also Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: a Social and Economic History (2005). Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols. (1980–1987) provides a transition to the revolution. The revolution itself was fully portrayed in William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 2 vols. (1987, originally 1935). The best brief account is Steven Anthony Smith, The Russian Revolution: a Very Short Introduction (2002). John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World (originally 1919) is the classic picture of October by a sympathetic American. For the February Revolution Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917 (1981) is unsurpassed, and on October there is Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: Petrograd 1917 (1976). For the Civil War see Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (1987) and Jonathan D. Smele, The Civil War in Siberia: the Anti-Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak 1918–1920 (1996). ECONOMIC, SOCIAL, AND RELIGIOUS HISTORY
Work on the economic history of Russia is mostly old and not numerous. An exception is Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy 1850–1917 (1986). The largest group in Russian society, the peasantry has not found many students in the English speaking world, but to be recommended are David Moon, The Russian Peasantry 1600–1930: the World the Peasants Made (1999); Steven L. Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov (1986); and Christine Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (1991). The merchants becoming modern businessmen have found their historians in Alfred Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (1982) and T. C. Owen, Capitalism and Politics in Russia: a Social History of the Moscow Merchants 1855–1905 (1981). The working class and its early strike and political activity was once a subject of great interest. Reginal Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: the Factory Workers of St. Petersburg 1855–1870 (1971) and Walter Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday: Father Gapon and the St. Petersburg Massacre of 1905 (1976) were pioneers. Women, the family and sexuality are the subject of Barbara Engel, Between the Fields and City: Women, Work and the Family in Russia 1861–1914 (1994), the same author’s Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth Century Russia (1983); Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism 1860–1930 (1978); and Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-siècle Russia (1992). There is no overview of the history of religion in modern Russia for any period, but useful monographs include Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of the Revolution (2004); Nadieszda Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (2000); and for the theologically inclined Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov – Orthodox Theology in a New Key (2000). FOREIGN POLICY AND EMPIRE
The study of Russia as an empire has flourished in recent years. Older studies looked at Russia as a conglomerate of national minorities: Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: a Multiethnic History, trans. Alfred Clayton (2001); Ronald Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (2d ed. 1994); Mikhailo Hrushevskyi, History of Ukraine (1941); M. B. Olcott, The Kazakhs (2d ed., 1995); and Edward C. Thaden, ed., Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland (1981). On the Jews in Russia Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (1986) and Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: the Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (2002) offer some new perspectives. More recent work takes the perspective of empire: Robert Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (2006); Daniel R. Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (2003); Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East 1840–1865 (1999); and David Wolff, To the Harbin Station: the Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria 1898–1914 (1999). Some historians combine foreign policy with the imperial perspective, such as David Schimmelpenninck, Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (2001). The crux of Russian foreign policy in the nineteenth century was its involvement in the Balkans with the Ottoman Empire and the Slavs. See Barbara Jelavich, Russia’s Balkan Entanglements 1806–1914 (1991); and David Goldfrank, The Origins of the Crimean War (1994). THE SOVIET ERA
For the Soviet era, the most accessible are probably the recent biographies of Soviet leaders. Robert Service’s trilogy Lenin (2000), Stalin (2004), and Trotsky (2009) make a good beginning. William Taubman’s Khrushchev: the Man and his Era (2003) covers his subject’s early years in the Stalin era as well as his years of power. Ronald Suny’s The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (2d ed., 2011) is more comprehensive and provides extensive bibliography.
The 1920’s and 1930’s are the subject of many recent monographs. Some of the more useful are Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question 1917–1923 (1999); Lewis Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society between Revolutions 1918–1929 (1992); Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: a Study of Collectivization (1968); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times – Soviet Russia in the 1930’s (1999) and her Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (1996); and Wendy Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Socialt Life 1917–1936 (1993); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923–1939 (2001); Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle, trans. Nora Seligman Fvorov (2009). DOCUMENTARY COLLECTIONS