Roud To Revolution

This book traces the history of revolutionary movements in nineteenth-century Russia, ending with the great famine of 1891-92, by which time the movement had become a political force to be reckoned with the publication, in May 1796, of a book by Alexander Radishchev expressing the corruption and cruelty of the court of the Empress Catherine the Great, and suggesting that the nation could well dispense with the regime. Coming as it did immediately after the French Revolution, Radishchev’s work caused much anxiety in court circles and among the nobility; even secret societies that were to emerge in the 1820s and beyond owed their inspiration to ideas he had popularized. The first to take up arms against the autocracy in the 1860s. Other chapters describe the “Nihilists” crusade “and the manhunt that culminated in the assassination of Alexander II.

“This is an excellent piece of high-level popularization that will bring pleasure and enlightenment to the nonspecialist reader and will be of interest as well as to the reading in courses on modern Russian history. It is, in short, a tour de force.”

“Taking for its theme a vast and disorderly subject, [the author] has managed to unravel it with all of pre-Marxist Russian revolutionary movement in a simple, clear, if dramatic form…. The result is an unusually readable introduction—based on the best available sources and written in a lively and expressive style—of the read that led the Russian revolution.”