The Shadow of the winter palace: Russia's drift to revolution, 1825-1917. --

An elegantly expostulatory narrative about the Russian century between the failed 1825 Decembrist conspiracy against Tsardom & the WWI collapse. Crankshaw, author of Khrushchev ('66) & Tolstoy ('74), focuses on the monarchy itself, the "sad fatuity" of its earlier attempts to ablish serfdom & the ministers who perpetuated "the sheer frivolity of the system," a waste of talent "more damaging than its brutalities." The book concludes, 1st, that the Tsars were a pretty foolish lot, & 2nd, that Russian reformers tended either to rely on the central autocracy to implement their hopes or to form a bloc with the revolutionary left. He considers the latter course, as embodied by the turn-of-the-century constitutionalist Milyukov, to have been disastrous, while the former approach had possibilities--if only Stolypin's combination of repression & agricultural restructuring had had time to bear fruit, for example. The key to 19th-century Russia was the interplay between autocracy & intelligentsia, he writes. Yet he gives the merest of glosses on key intellectuals from Belinsky to Chernyshevsky. A more serious resource in this area is Tibor Szamuely's The Russian Tradition ('75), while Richard Pipes' Russia Under the Old Regime ('75) offers fuller treatment of socio-economic developments. This volume makes not a scholarly contribution, but a pleasantly readable overview based on the premise that "the drift to revolution" was a surpassing misfortune.--Kirkus (edited) The Shadow of the Winter Palace Contents List of Illustrations A Note on Dates and Spelling A Moment of History The Doomed Conspiracy 3 4 5 36 The Autocratic Inheritance 4 5 The State of the Empire 56 58 3 5 6 74 76 The Growth of the Mind 3 4 5 The Imperial Mission 4 5 6 The Slow Drift to Disaster 4 5 6 The Crimean Fiasco 3 4 5 6 The New Tsar 3 4 Revolution from Above 3 4 Limits of Tolerance and Vision 3 4 197 Peace Abroad; Prosperity at Home 3 4 5 6 Aspects of Self Love 3 4 5 ‘How Great is Russia!’ 3 4 5 The Impact of Terror 3 3 4 The Peace of the Graveyard 3 4 New Wine in Very Old Bottles 3 4 5 6 Nicholas and Alexandra 310 3 4 3M Defeat in Asia 3 33* 'Impossible to Live Thus Any Longer’ 336 3 Stolypin and the Thirteenth Hour 35« 3 4 5 The End 3 4 5 388 6 392 Note on Sources Bibliography Chonological Table Index This history of Russia under the last four Tsars describes how the seeds of revolution culminated in the November revolution