Full name: In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War

Author: W. Bruce Lincoln Year: 1983 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780875805979 0875805973

The author of The Romanovs ('81) has written a choppy, unilluminating account of perhaps the most vividly & extensively chronicled period in Russian history: from ca 1890 to the Revolution. The panorama that Lincoln presents is broad but static. Chapters are devoted to descriptions of the miseries of the peasantry who endured famine in 1891 & deprivation thereafter--until Stolypin threw them some crumbs to ensure their support in suppressing the '05 revolutionary movement; to the archaic Russian nobility; to the misery & degradation of the urban masses; to the Romanovs; to the ill-fated war with Japan in '05 etc. The thing that seems to tie these topics together, in Lincoln's telling, is syphilis--which, we're told pointedly, infected a broader strata of the population in Russia than elsewhere. Prostitution statistics also get considerable play. Similarly, a chapter on the sexually liberated artistic fringe--which included Diaghilev, Blok & Belyi--makes much of the poet mystic Soloviev as a prophet of sexual pleasure & also ludicrously pronounces him "the 1st--& only--philosopher that 19th-century Russia produced." Little historical explanation is attempted, but he tends toward the view that what was lacking in prerevolutionary Russia was strong leadership: the assassination of Stolypin, the one strong leader produced by the old order, should have advised him otherwise. (Russian institutions collapsed as much from their dead weight as from anything else.) Altogether, he's provided many undigested facts & much garish color--but little else. For the serious general reader, this bears no comparison with Harrison Salisbury's Black Night, White Snow ('78).--Kirkus (edited) Similar books: Passage Through Armageddon by W. Bruce Lincoln Russia and the Russians by Geoffrey Hosking Russia by Martin Sixsmith The Shadow of the Winter Palace by Edward Crankshaw Former People by Douglas Smith Red Fortress by Catherine Merridale A History of Russia by Nicholas V. Riasanovsky The Icon and the Axe by James H. Billington Land of the Firebird by Suzanne Massie Empire of the Czar by Astolphe de Custine Russia and the Golden Horde by Charles J. Halperin The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore The Romanovs by W. Bruce Lincoln Black Night, White Snow by Harrison E. Salisbury Natasha's Dance by Orlando Figes A History of Modern Russia by Robert Service The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof by J. A. Rogers Dreamers and Deceivers by Glenn Beck