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Filmed in1966 and ’67, but kept from release for twenty years, The Commissar is unquestionably one of the most important and compelling films of the Soviet era. Based on a short story by Vasily Grossman, it tells of a female Red Army commissar who is forced to stay with a Jewish family near the frontlines of the battle between the Red and White Armies as she waits to give birth. The film drew the ire of censors for its frank portrayal of the violence faced by Russian Jews in the wake of the revolution.
            This book is the first companion to the film in any language. It recounts the film’s plot and turbulent production history, and it also offers a close analysis of the artistic vision of its director, Aleksandr Askoldov, and the ways that viewers can trace in the film not only his complex aesthetics, but also the personal crises he endured in the years leading up to the film. The result is an indispensable companion to an unforgettable film.

Diplomat DeWitt Clinton Poole arrived for a new job at the United States consulate office in Moscow in September 1917, just two months before the Bolshevik Revolution. In the final year of World War I, as Russians were withdrawing and Americans were joining the war, Poole found himself in the midst of political turmoil in Russia. U.S. relations with the newly declared Soviet Union rapidly deteriorated as civil war erupted and as Allied forces intervened in northern Russia and Siberia. Thirty-five years later, in the climate of the Cold War, Poole recounted his experiences as a witness to that era in a series of interviews.
            Historians Lorraine M. Lees and William S. Rodner introduce and annotate Poole's recollections, which give a fresh, firsthand perspective on monumental events in world history and reveal the important impact DeWitt Clinton Poole (1885–1952) had on U.S.–Soviet relations. He was active in implementing U.S. policy, negotiating with the Bolshevik authorities, and supervising American intelligence operations that gathered information about conditions throughout Russia, especially monitoring anti-Bolshevik elements and areas of German influence. Departing Moscow in late 1918 via Petrograd, he was assigned to the port of Archangel, then occupied by Allied and American forces, and left Russia in June 1919.

The traditional narrative of the Russian Civil War is one of revolution against counterrevolution, Bolshevik Reds against Tsarist Whites. Liudmila Novikova convincingly demonstrates, however, that the struggle was not between a Communist future and a Tsarist past; instead, it was a bloody fight among diverse factions of a modernizing postrevolutionary state. Focusing on the sparsely populated Arkhangelsk region in northern Russia, she shows that the anti-Bolshevik government there, which held out from 1918 to early 1920, was a revolutionary alternative bolstered by broad popular support.

Novikova draws on declassified archives and sources in both Russia and the West to reveal the White movement in the north as a complex social and political phenomenon with a distinct regional context. She documents the politics of the Northern Government and its relations with the British and American forces who had occupied the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk at the end of World War I. As the civil war continued, the increasing involvement of the local population transformed the conflict into a ferocious "people's war" until remaining White forces under General Yevgeny Miller evacuated the region in February 1920.

A special correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, Morgan Philips Price was one of the few Englishmen in Russia during all phases of the Revolution. Although his Bolshevik sympathies accorded him an insider’s perspective on much of the turmoil, his reports were often heavily revised or suppressed. In Dispatches from the Revolution, Tania Rose collects for the first time Price’s correspondence from Russia—official and unofficial, published and unpublished—to reveal a side of Russian life and politics that fell largely unreported in the years before, during, and after the Revolution.
This collection includes Price’s pre-censored observations and comment, written for a range of British publications, as well as letters, postcards, and other writings. A foreword by Eric Hobsbawm and introductory material by Rose place Price’s observations in biographical and historical context. Dispatches from the Revolution offers an account of the Russian Revolution from an eyewitness whose political commitment, fluency in Russian, and extensive travel far beyond the cities permitted him to write, uniquely, not only of metropolitan news and politics, but also of the experiences and issues signficant to ordinary peasants, workers, and soldiers in remote areas of the Russian empire.
An important source to scholars of Russian history, this book will also appeal to general readers with interests in Russia, journalism, and world affairs.

Never before available in English, Judgment is a work of startling power by David Bergelson, the most celebrated Yiddish prose writer of his era.
 
Originally published in 1929 and set in 1920 during the Russian civil war, Judgment traces the death of the shtetl and the birth of the “new, harsher world” created by the 1917 revolution. Jews and non-Jews smuggle people, goods, and anti-Bolshevik literature back and forth across the new political border. Filipov acts as the arbiter of "judgment" to prisoners in a Bolshevik outpost, who include Spivak, a counterrevolutionary; Lemberger, a pious and wealthy Jew; a seductive woman referred to as "the blonde"; and a memorable cast of smugglers and criminals.
 
Ordinary people, depicted in a grotesque and modernist style—comparable to Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry—confront the overwhelming forces of history, whose ultimate outcome remains unknown.
 

The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and the ensuing communist regime have often been portrayed as a man’s revolution, with women as bystanders or even victims. Midwives of the Revolution examines the powerful contribution made by women to the overthrow of tsarism in 1917 and their importance in the formative years of communism in Russia.

Focusing on the masses as well as the high-ranking intelligentsia, Midwives of the Revolution is the first sustained analysis of female involvement in the revolutionary era of Russian history. The authors investigate the role of Bolshevik women and the various forms their participation took. Drawing on the experiences of representative individuals, the authors discuss the important relationship between Bolshevik women and the workers in the turbulent months of 1917.

The authors demonstrate that women were an integral part of the revolutionary process and challenge assumptions that they served merely to ignite an essentially masculine revolt. By placing women center stage, without exaggerating their roles, this study enriches our understanding of a momentous event in twentieth-century history.

This compelling never-before-published
  account takes the reader into Red Guard and Red Army units, Moscow factories,
  workers' homes, and to the unfamiliar world of feudal Dagestan. Worker-revolutionary
  Eduard Dune was seventeen when the Russian revolution began. He joined the Bolshevik
  party and fought with the Moscow Red Guard during the October revolution. Notes
  of a Red Guard is his candid account of what happened through 1921. This
  uncensored account offers a rare glimpse of revolutionary Russia from the perspective
  of an educated, skilled worker who became a rank-and-file participant.
 

In 1920, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, dramatist Nikolai Evreinov directed a cast of 10,000 actors, dancers, and circus performers—as well as a convoy of armored cars and tanks—in The Storming of the Winter Palace. The mass spectacle, presented in and around the real Winter Palace in Petrograd, was intended to recall the storming as the beginning of the October Revolution. But it was a deceptive reenactment because, in producing the events it sought to reenact, it created a new kind of theater, agit-drama, promulgating political propaganda and deliberately breaking down the distinction between performers and spectators.

Nikolaj Evreinov: “The Storming of the Winter Palace” tells the fascinating story of this production. Taking readers through the relevant history, the authors describe the role of The Storming of the Winter Palace in commemorating Soviet power. With a wealth of illustrations, they also show how photographs of Evreinov’s theatrical storming eventually became historical documents of the October Revolution themselves.
 

A Dostoevskian psychological novel of ideas, Novel with Cocaine explores the interaction between psychology, philosophy, and ideology in its frank portrayal of an adolescent's cocaine addiction. The story relates the formative experiences of Vadim at school and with women before he turns to drug abuse and the philosophical reflections to which it gives rise. Although Ageyev makes little explicit reference to the Revolution, the novel's obsession with addictive forms of thinking finds resonance in the historical background, in which "our inborn feelings of humanity and justice" provoke "the cruelties and satanic transgressions committed in its name.

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution irrevocably changed the course of history, with consequences still being felt a century later. This book offers a dramatic depiction of the chaotic events of the revolution, drawn from selected firsthand accounts.

Assembling extracts from letters, journals, diaries, and memoirs from a remarkably diverse cast of both Russians and foreign nationals who were there when the revolution broke, Petrograd, 1917 is a strikingly close-up account of these world-shaking events. Each entry is supplemented with a short introductory note that sets it in context, and the book is rounded out with more than seventy illustrations, including photographs of the Romanovs and the violence in the streets as well as propaganda posters, postcards to loved ones, and more. In these pages, the drama and terror of those days comes to life once more, a century on.
 

“An original and much needed analysis of an important but neglected aspect of the legacy of the Russian Revolution…. Essential reading.”—Mary Davis, Marx Memorial Library
 
From Cuba to Vietnam, China to South Africa, the October Revolution of 1917 inspired millions of people beyond the territory of Russia. It proved that the masses could not only overthrow autocratic governments, but that they could also form an opposing government in their own image.
 
The new idea that the working class and the peasantry could be allied, combined with the clear strength and necessity of a vanguard party, guided multiple revolutions across the globe.  Here is much-needed antidote to all the glum histories written on the demise of the Soviet Union. Vijay Prashad throws a spotlight on the way the Russian Revolution was seen and received in the countries colonized by European empires. With Russia as an inspiration and providing support, suddenly workers and peasants, those left out of capitalist prosperity, organized and attempted to create for themselves real socialist revolution. Prashad’s chapters include:
 
*Eastern Graves
*Red October
*Follow the Path of the Russians
*The Lungs of Russia
*Soviet Asia
*Enemy of Imperialism
*Eastern Marxism
*Colonial Fascism
*Polycentric Communism
*Memories of Communism
 
The author writes in this Preface, “It has been a quarter-century since the demise of the USSR. And yet, the marks of the October Revolution remain—not just in the territories of the USSR but more so in what used to be known as the Third World. From Cuba to Vietnam, from China to South Africa, the October Revolution remains as an inspiration. After all, that Revolution proved that the working class and the peasantry could not only overthrow an autocratic government but it could form its own government.”
 
This book explains the power of the October Revolution in the Global South. From Ho Chí Minh to Fidel Castro, reflections on polycentric communism, and collective memories of communism, it shows how, for a brief moment, another world was possible.   

Details the military aspects of the American Expeditionary Force's (AEF) deployment to Siberia following World War I to protect the Trans-Siberian Railroad

In the final months of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson and many US allies decided to intervene in Siberia in order to protect Allied wartime and business interests, among them the Trans-Siberian Railroad, from the turmoil surrounding the Russian Revolution. American troops would remain until April 1920 with some of our allies keeping troops in Siberia even longer.
 
Few American citizens have any idea that the United States ever deployed soldiers to Siberia and that those soldiers eventually played a role in the Russian revolution while protecting the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Wolfhounds and Polar Bears relies on the detailed reports of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) as well as on personal stories to bring this rarely discussed expedition to life.
 
Initial chapters recount the period in World War I when conditions in Russia pointed to the need for intervention as well as the varied reasons for that decision. A description of the military forces and the geographic difficulties faced by those forces operating in Siberia provide the baseline necessary to understand the AEF’s actions in Siberia. A short discussion of the Russian Railway Service Corps explains their essential and sometimes overlooked role in this story, and subsequent chapters provide a description of actual operations by the AEF.
 
Wolfhounds and Polar Bears: The American Expeditionary Force in Siberia, 1918–1920 may well be the most detailed study of the military aspects of the American intervention in Siberia ever undertaken, offering a multitude of details not available in any other book-length history.