Much of the drama in your biography of Arthur Ransome, probably best known as the author of the children’s book Swallows and Amazons, takes place in revolutionary Russia. How did you stumble upon his extraordinary story?
In 2002, the British public archives released a set of documents showing that Ransome had been a spy for British intelligence during the Russian revolution. I thought this was fascinating. Although I hadn’t been one of the biggest fans of ransome as a kid, I saw a man who had completely reinvented himself through his children’s books, becoming one of the safest pairs of hands in all of literature: English. by excellence. so it was a surprise to me and many people that ransome was a spy. most people thought he just went boating in the lake district. The idea that he was one of the most controversial British correspondents who wrote from Russia during the revolution was simply not widely known.
can you tell us more about the ransome time in russia?
You are reading: Best books on the russian revolution
In 1913, Ransome ran away from a disastrous first marriage. he wanted to go to russia to write fairy tales, but he got caught up in the first world war and started writing for the daily news, a radical left british newspaper. he began by backing the reformist right in Russian politics, but after the tsar lost power in the first revolution in February 1917, he moved progressively to the left. why? because power was progressively shifting to the left, and ransome was pragmatic. Having demonized Lenin and the Bolsheviks, along with most of his colleagues in the press, he became, somewhat rarely among his peers, an avid apologist for the Bolshevik cause.
He fell in love with Trotsky’s secretary, whom he eventually married, and his best friend was Karl Radek, the Bolshevik propaganda chief. He spent the next seven years until Lenin’s death in 1924 writing pro-Bolshevik propaganda, either in the form of articles published in the Western press or political pamphlets published through the Bolshevik Office of International Propaganda. after lenin died, and ransome’s wife finally gave him a divorce, he returned to england with his mistress, evgenia petrovna shelepina, and joined the royal cruising club, becoming the man most people recognize today : the most English of the English.
While I was writing these pro-Bolshevik articles, I was also working with British intelligence. how did it work?
in 1918, there was an allied invasion of russia to try to get rid of the bolshevik government. ransome found himself in an impossible situation. he was a friend of the british diplomats and journalists who remained in russia, but he was also a friend of the bolsheviks. he wanted to remain friends with both sides, and while it was a sensible thing to try, it was not an easy thing to do. not without cutting some corners.
When the situation worsened in Russia, he decided to leave. he escaped to neutral sweden where he was recruited by the british secret service. they wanted him because he had unrivaled access to the Bolshevik leadership, though many of them were suspicious of his true allegiance. in any case, ransome returned to russia after the end of the war as a british agent, leaving again in the spring of 1919 with much information for the british authorities and a pro-bolshevik political pamphlet, six weeks in russia, which is the first of the books on my list.
A few weeks after its publication, however, Ransome was back in Russia to rescue his lover, evgenia, from the civil war, a very daring business, which depended heavily on his contacts in all neighborhoods. He took her out of Moscow and for the next five years lived with her in a kind of limbo in the Baltic states, working as a Russian correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, providing information to the British intelligence services but also helping the Bolshevik intelligence service, the cheka, from time to time. so in terms of his affiliation to one country or another, he looks like a double agent. but ransome didn’t think of himself that way. he considered himself a peace negotiator or, at worst, a kind of independent private detective. he was good at telling stories to himself.
Let’s listen to the man himself. tell us more about six weeks in russia in 1919.
There are only a couple of known eyewitness accounts of the revolution. the best known is probably john reed’s ten days that shook the world, but i’ve gone with ransome’s book because ransome is my man, and because while reed’s book is a highly imaginative take on the 1917 revolution, ransome’s is a similarly stylized version of revolution a bit later.
ransome’s book is a verbatim account of the six weeks he spent in russia in early 1919. in the 18 months since the bolsheviks took power, the west had become, if anything, even more disenchanted with their government. the bolsheviks had made a separate peace with germany, then launched terror against their own people, and of course were fighting the white armies in the russian civil war, who were being covertly supported by britain and others. Thus, the book is Ransome’s first-hand account of what Petrograd and Moscow would be like during a period when almost all Western observers had abandoned the country. most had left because it was dangerous, but also because the Bolsheviks didn’t talk to anyone who didn’t sympathize with them.
ransome had amazing access to the Bolshevik leadership and yet was officially employed and paid by the British secret services. the book reads in what I would call a typically “ransomian” way. in terms of content, it is a deliberately domestic book, almost trivial. he wants to paint the Bolshevik leaders as peaceful and orderly men and women. the first thing he talks about is coming to petrograd, and that there is no one on the street because everyone is going about their business. He says that there were almost no people carrying weapons anymore, because they didn’t need to be armed. He then goes to Moscow, where the Bolshevik government was now based, and stays in the main hotel where many of the Bolshevik leaders used to live. he talks to various high-level figures within the Bolshevik party as if they were his friends, which in a way they were. but at the same time he says that he is completely objective, writing from the point of view of someone who just wanders.
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I think this domesticity makes the book particularly fascinating. describes the interior of people’s apartments. write about having a cup of tea with a high official or interviewing lenin. what he seeks to communicate is how utterly determined the Bolsheviks were as a military power, and that there was no point in trying to get rid of them. but he also wants to communicate that they are real people and, in many ways, nice people, because the Bolsheviks had been so demonized in the West that they were no longer considered real people at all. ransome is trying to bring the bolsheviks into british and allied living rooms as the kind of government that should be allowed to take its place at the paris peace conference, which was called by the allied powers to set the terms of peace for germany after the 1918 armistice. but of course the Allies had no intention of extending such an invitation. the Bolsheviks remained international outcasts. anyway, when she published it in england it sold like hotcakes, because lenin didn’t have horns or cloven hooves.
Let’s move on to the next pick for Orlando Figes, who caused a stir after confessing to posting anonymous reviews on Amazon criticizing his rivals.
if one speaks of him as a man rather than an author, he is possibly the least popular historian walking the earth today, due to the disgrace he so publicly brought upon himself by the amazon debacle. at one point he got his wife to say that she had done it. Having said that, I think he is a brilliant historian and it is a great pity that these personal disputes, which have become so poisonous, have tarnished his reputation so much. I believe that the Tragedy of a People is the most readable and illuminating history of the Russian Revolution ever written, using material that only became available to historians after the collapse of the Soviet Union. its reach is immense.
He says that the revolution actually started in 1891 and ended in 1924.
That’s right, although it wasn’t the first. According to Figes, it begins with the great famine of 1891, which caused much popular discontent and reforms, and ends in 1924 with the death of Lenin and the beginning of Stalin’s reign.
figes is basically a social historian. he is interested in how historical events of the magnitude of the Russian revolution developed out of a number of different social trends. one of the best things about this book is that he combines a series of general theses about the revolution with personal narratives. he chooses five very different characters: prince lvov, who was prime minister in the provisional government that was formed after the revolution of February 1917; General Brusilov, the Tsar’s most gifted general who later joined the Red Army; Dmitri Oskin, a peasant soldier; the author maxim gorky; and Sergei Semenov, a reforming peasant leader. these personal narratives allow you to see this period from all points of view: the grand political perspective, the grassroots perspective, a literary perspective, a military perspective.
figes is fantastically good at synthesizing vast amounts of information without getting bogged down, and because his understanding of revolution is sociological, he doesn’t really blame anyone, or rather ally himself with any particular political cause. He obviously dislikes Lenin and the Bolsheviks intensely, but he is equally skeptical of the monarchists. he is excellent at the almost unbelievable deceptions of the tsar and his family, chiefly Rasputin. when it comes to evaluating a character like [alexander] kerensky, who championed the middle path between the lvov and lenin governments, he is very good at using it as a way to focus on the overall disaster that befell the country. Kerensky, the revolution’s second prime minister, was crushed by the inability to appease a starving and terrified population while a war continued to go on. only lenin, who came to power in november, had the courage or ruthlessness to seize the opportunity presented to him. he won over the people with three simple ideas: land, peace and bread.
It is a substantial book. Do you have an attractive writing style?
I think one of the reasons Figes has made so many enemies is that he has the selfishness and sensitivity of a Trotsky. he is a very good dramatic writer and has an excellent ear for stories, although some of his later work makes the story a bit thick, in my opinion.
Tell us about your next election.
The discussion of Soviet power is important because the sheer scale of the revolution made it difficult to get at the main players and what they were doing. Of course, the revolution grew out of the first world war, but in some ways its political and cultural significance outweighed the war. it was the most important political event of the 20th century: the beginning of the modern era.
The problem with that kind of massive seismic event is that it becomes impossible to get out of it. instead you get a lot of ethical generalizations that say more about their authors than about the events they seek to describe. but this book is very special. is a selection from the minutes of the meetings of the Soviet Central Committees, the country’s ruling executive and legislative bodies, immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power. so this book puts an ear to the door at a time when the Bolsheviks were trying to figure out what to do in their first weeks and months in power.
what it shows you, and I think this is vitally important, is that lenin always advocated violence and political dictatorship as vehicles of revolution. he could have chosen a pamphlet that lenin wrote in 1903 called what to do?, in which lenin sets out his views on political violence. he is absolutely in favour: political violence is essential in his opinion. he also believed that the revolution should be led by a political vanguard, and of course he intended to lead that vanguard. and as a leader, he would embrace political violence as a response to the violence used to oppress the masses. this was always his philosophy, and it is clearly manifested in the conversations recorded in this book.
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one of the first things lenin did when he came to power was allow [communist revolutionary] felix dzerzhinsky to form the cheka, the forerunner of the kgb. closes the opposition press. outlaws rival political parties. prepares for the liquidation of the constituent assembly, originally intended as the parliament of Russian democracy. Many people deludedly argue that the Bolshevik revolution was a democratic revolution, and that the decisions passed through the Soviet Congress where the Bolsheviks had a majority. But the way they got to that majority was overbearing, to say the least, and this book shows you how they consolidated their power.
Let’s continue with Lenin and see what Solzhenitsyn has to say about him in Lenin in Zurich.
I chose this book because it is a work of fiction, and fiction is sometimes better at giving you an idea of the man than facts. Lenin, although a historical figure, is also a mythical figure. to many, he was not really a human being. his statue was in all the villages of the soviet union. he became a cult. Whether you love him or hate him, he is some sort of god, and as such it is very difficult to bring him back through purely historical materials. what solzhenitsyn has done is rescue lenin from that strangely erased fame. of course it’s not the real lenin he gives you, but it’s the sense of a real human being, written by a man who had thought a lot about lenin.
The book is set in Zurich, where Lenin lived in exile for most of the First World War. solzhenitsyn concentrates on lenin in the same way that a miniature portraitist concentrates on a subject. He describes him eating an egg on a train with his mother, who adores him, and his wife, who is a little afraid of him, and how the seeds of the yolk get in the corners of his mouth, but no one dares to tell him he describes how all the pencils in his pocket are always very sharp and how every morning he methodically cleans his desk before starting work. solzhenitsyn does the very deft job, which any fiction writer should do, of building a personality out of details and small actions that show you that inside his mind is a real person with a running imagination, feeling his way through the world. world, plotting what will happen next.
This book has also been described as a “no book”, more a collection of random chapters than a complete story.
solzhenitsyn had a way of writing in what he called “narrative knots”: significant dramatic moments that he sometimes made into a complete story and sometimes not. This book is a series of small moments during the course of the war, each showing Lenin in a different situation. Sometimes he dreams of her lover, Inessa Armand, and regrets not talking to her much. in one episode, he terrorizes her mother for not packing the right things in her suitcase. On another occasion he sits with visiting revolutionaries in his Zurich apartment above a butcher shop, with the window open to let in the smell of sausages.
what these collective moments show is a man who is deeply rooted in his own habits of mind. it also shows a rather boring man, someone who badly needs routine, so much so that outside of that routine he barely exists. And yet, the miracle is that when the revolution occurs, a revolution that Lenin did not expect in his own lifetime, this quarrelsome, routine-oriented man assumes a highly significant historical role without flinching. it just came completely natural to him. The same thing happened with Leon Trotsky, who at the time of the Bolshevik coup still owed money on his couch in New York.
that’s the perfect stepping stone to your final choice of book, trotsky’s history of the russian revolution. tell us more.
i chose this book because almost everything people read about the russian revolution is written by westerners, in part because the official histories written under stalin were incredibly boring and predictable. all that changed when the archives were opened after the collapse of the soviet union, but there is still a void that trotsky tried to fill.
Trotsky’s history of the revolution is obviously a work of propaganda. not a reliable story at all. but it is a story written by one of the great promoters of the revolution itself. Trotsky was the man who basically led the november coup and spearheaded the negotiations with germany that got russia out of world war one. he then became minister of war and turned out to be a brilliant general. so overall, he’s an amazing character, and also, handily, an excellent writer. within the party his nickname was “the ballpoint pen”. his story of the revolution is essentially a justification of his role in it and of his political views, which came into direct conflict with stalin’s. Trotsky believed, as everyone had believed at first, that social revolution meant international revolution, a global class war. Stalin betrayed that view by introducing socialism [of political theory] in one country, effectively turning Russia into a huge prison camp.
when did trotsky write this book?
Just after being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929, Stalin was busy shaping the historical record in Russia, and Trotsky understood that he needed to write a separate history of the revolution himself. he did it to champion what he considered the original object of the revolution, and also to confer on himself an authenticity that stalin wanted to take away from him. but i think it is a mistake to think of trotsky as a martyr or a saint. Like Lenin, he advocated violence and dictatorship, though he got to that later in the game. And like Lenin, he was vain and dishonest, not least because while he thought of revolution in the conventionally Marxist way as the inevitable consequence of economic conditions, he went out of his way to manipulate those conditions. why else hijack a revolution or write a book when they throw you off the train? why not let things take their course?
when trotsky mentions himself in his story, he does so in the third person, as caesar. It is a book that pretends to an analytical detachment, but it is, in fact, a colossal vanity mirror in which Trotsky examines his life’s work as he wishes others to examine it. But it is, I think, a much better read than the Russian lady in the London library who first lent it to me was willing to admit. The proof is that Trotsky, in a way, had the last laugh. because even though stalin defeated and finally assassinated him, trotsky is still the christ of the russian revolution. stalin is lucifer, lenin is god and trotsky is his son exiled from him. In terms of propagating this point of view, this story-turned-autobiography was a very successful piece of work.
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