D. Russia

The total output of books on Russia since 1917 is enormous, and little of it measures up to the more rigorous standards academic historians like to impose. It is suggested that an intelligent reader of the following would not, however, be hopelessly misinformed about the movement, and could attempt to integrate his knowledge of what has been going on in Russia with what has gone on in other modern revolutions.

W. R. Batsell, Soviet Rule in Russia. New York, 1929. A clear, factual analysis of the machinery of government. The recent constitutional changes do not seriously alter Batsell’s picture.

W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution. 2 vols., New York, 1935. A careful piece of work, written by an American with a command of Russian sources. Chamberlin is not a Communist, but save to more rigid Marxists, his work will appear reasonably detached. Good bibliography.

Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia. New York, 1937. Lyons is an American radical whose long residence as a newspaper correspondent in Russia turned him against Stalin’s rule. When allowance is made for this bias, the book remains the best account in English of “Thermidor in Russia”—though see under Trotsky below.

James Mavor, The Russian Revolution. New York, 1928. A brief account.

L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution. English translation, 3 vols., New York, 1936 (also a single-volume edition). This will probably be Trotsky’s masterpiece. A vivid narrative, heightened by excursions into Marxist interpretation, mostly very keen and even sensible. Chamberlin and Trotsky, read together, make the best introduction possible to the study of the Russian revolution. Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, New York, 1937, is a bitter and interesting attack on the present regime in Russia, which he himself has christened “Thermidorean.”

S. and B. Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, 2 vols., New York, 1936. For American readers, this is probably the best and most persuasive defense of the present regime in Russia, and may be recommended as an antidote to the writings of disenchanted liberals and angry Trotskyites. But it is a very soft and academic book, and the Webbs are surely at least as much doctrinaires as others who have written on Russia.