Revolution!

August 14, 2017
British author, editor, and publisher Ayrton (No Pasarán! Writings from the Spanish Civil War) collects an assortment of key writings produced in Russia in the immediate context of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Incorporating fiction, journalism, memoirs, and reflections, the book has three types of sources. First come foreign writers and intellectuals who were present during or directly after the revolution, including Langston Hughes, John Reed, and H.G. Wells. Their common perspective was favorable to the revolution and the tone of their works was well-wishing. The second category incorporates Russian writers who remained in the new U.S.S.R., such as Isaac Babel and proto-feminist revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai. Finally, there are the Russian émigrés who, disillusioned by the revolution's outcome, left before 1925—when it was still possible—and sank into relative obscurity. Ayrton's selections reflect a discerning perspective on the topic. His commentaries are informed by his own sympathy with the revolution and its ideals but never lapse into blind boosterism. The anthology successfully presents the initial hopes and expectations that "a new world and new ways of living were possible" and the eventual disillusion, despair, and denial when dreams were dashed under waves of Stalinist opportunism, horror, and betrayal. Ayrton nevertheless believes that these writings affirm "that fundamental change for the better remains possible."

August 1, 2017
On its 100th anniversary, a collection of brief, pointed writings from eyewitnesses to the Bolshevik Revolution.British publisher and editor Ayrton, who has edited two previous historical collections (No Pasaran!: Writings from the Spanish Civil War, 2016, etc.), assembles another fine, readable anthology of primary sources. This one gives a solid sense of the enormous hope and ultimate disappointment that the Russian Revolution instilled in eyewitnesses, from Leon Trotsky to Theodore Dreiser. Ayrton presents these selections more or less chronologically, with a mix of foreign witnesses (e.g., H.G. Wells, John Reed, and Louise Bryant), Russian writers who stayed in the Soviet Union under increasingly dire, censorious conditions (among others, Isaac Babel and Ilya Ehrenburg), and Russian emigre writers who left before 1925, such as Teffi and Nina Berberova. Many of the selections are extracts from memoirs published later. One example is Trotsky's My Life, in which he recounts the extraordinary moment when he announced to the Petrograd Soviet the dissolution of the provisional government; later the same evening, he and Lenin, returned from four months of exile, are resting on a makeshift pallet on the floor of an empty meeting hall, "body and soul...relaxing like over-taut strings." Arthur Ransome's diary entries from Six Weeks in Russia in 1919 give a good sense of the shifting precarious political winds, while, in The Russian Countess, Edith Sollohub describes the (rather lucky) help she received at the hands of her father's former coachman, who was elevated to Communist House Commandant. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman became bitterly disillusioned with Soviet Communism after the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921, and many writers wrestle with the new social order, such as "social realist" author Dmitry Furmanov, in his epic Chapaev. Times were rapidly changing, indeed, as delineated in popular Soviet writer Mikhail Zoshchenko's "Electrification," in which the fashionable illumination of Soviet Russia only seems to reveal how shabby their lives really were. Compelling, timely extracts to spur deeper exploration.

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