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Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890-1928 by S A Smith

£17, Amazon, Buy it now

Lenin the Dictator: An Intimate Portrait by Victor Sebestyen

£17, Amazon, Buy it now

The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution by Robert Service

£17, Amazon, Buy it now

Lost Splendour and the Death of Rasputin by Prince Felix Yusopov

£12.99, Amazon, Buy it now

Just over a century ago, on February 22, 1917 (using the Russian Julian calendar which was 13 days behind the West), began the civil protests and strikes in Petrograd that would topple Tsar Nicholas II and mark the start of the Russian Revolution. It would culminate, eight months later, with the Bolshevik coup and Lenin’s assumption of power. Ever since, apart from a brief devil’s pact to defeat Hitler during the Second World War, the West’s relationship with Russia has been marked by hostility and mutual suspicion.

Might things have been different? Yes, says S A Smith in his fluently written and convincingly argued Russia in Revolution. There was, he writes, “nothing preordained” about the collapse of tsarist autocracy or even of the democratic government that briefly succeeded him. Contrary to popular belief, the tsarist regime was not “blind” to change and had, from the 1860s onwards, introduced a series of social and political reforms, culminating in the October Manifesto of 1905, which could have provided a framework for further modernisation. That it did not was thanks to the myopia of Nicholas II, the last tsar, “who would not countenance any diminution of his authority as an autocrat”.

Even then, argues Smith, revolution was not inevitable. Despite political stasis, Russia was stabilising as industrial output picked up and the armed forces were strengthened. What doomed the regime was the outbreak of the First World War.

The conflict “placed huge demands on a backward economy that could only be met at the expense of the living standards of the civilian population”. Eventually even high-ranking generals and politicians agreed that Nicholas had to go.

The provisional government that replaced him was faced with a number of acute problems, not least the popular classes’ expectation of real economic power and a heavily “socialised” conception of democracy. The gap might have been bridged if the government had withdrawn from the war. It did not do so, and the door was thus opened to the Bolsheviks and their leader Lenin, who displayed “brilliant political instincts” by insisting on “implacable opposition” to the imperialist war and to the new government of “capitalists and landowners”.

The Bolsheviks had high hopes for a “socialist society rooted in soviet power, workers’ control, abolition of the standing army and far-reaching democratic rights”. They were never realised, partly because the legacy of the First World War — the desperate struggles to win the civil war, to feed the towns, to deal with the ravages of famine and disease — constrained their scope for action; and partly because of the personalities of Lenin and his successor Stalin, men united in the belief that the Communist Party should enjoy a monopoly of power, socialist opponents should be crushed and civil and political freedoms curtailed. “Lenin,” writes Smith, “must bear considerable responsibility for the institutions and culture that allowed Stalin to come to power.”

Smith describes Lenin as “a man of broad intellect and tremendous industry, of iron will and self-discipline, self-confident and intolerant of opponents”. In his excellent new biography, Lenin the Dictator, Victor Sebestyen does not disagree. Lenin, particularly after the revolution, was ruthless, brutal and dictatorial, executing enemies and stifling opposition.

What Sebestyen adds, however, is the human side of Lenin: his liking for chess, bicycles and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery book Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the fact that he was born a member of Russia’s minor nobility and only turned to revolutionary politics after the execution of his terrorist brother in 1887; and, most revealingly, Lenin’s love of women, particularly his mother, wife Nadya Krupskaya and mistress Inessa Armand (living in a happy ménage-à-trois with the latter pair for a number of years).

Sebestyen explodes the myth that Lenin was a talented orator. Instead, the secret to his success was his brilliance at presenting “simple solutions to complex problems” in “direct, straightforward language that anyone could understand”. It’s a useful talent in a politician, and one manifestly lacking in the subject of Robert Service’s brilliant, original and compelling study, The Last of the Tsars. Nicholas II is often portrayed as a weak, misguided but essentially well-meaning ruler. Service, a distinguished historian of 20th-century Russia, paints a much darker portrait of a “nationalist extremist, a deluded nostalgist and a virulent anti-Semite”. The Tsar was, moreover, a duplicitous and stubborn man whose longevity in power “had given him an unwarranted confidence in his own judgment”. When advisers “refused to toe the line”, he simply got rid of them.

Service has examined the Tsar’s diaries, recorded conversations and reading habits from his abdication in March 1917 to his murder (and that of his family) 16 months later. He expected to find evidence of remorse and self-awareness, that the Tsar’s attitude to politics, rulership, war, international relations and his own personal responsibility for Russia’s predicament had altered. There was no sign of this.

“In captivity,” writes Service, “he had the time to recognise any of his mistakes and rectify his basic analysis. In fact he did nothing of the kind. Although he belatedly allowed that if his son, Alexei, had been able to succeed him, a constitutional monarchy of some sort could have been attempted, he never expressed regret that he himself had set his face against any such outcome while he held power.”

The Russian Revolution may not have been inevitable but it was certainly popular with ordinary Russians, who resented the wealth and influence of a privileged few. No man better exemplifies the excess and moral bankruptcy of pre-war high society than Prince Felix Yusopov, husband of the Tsar’s niece and co-murderer of the Tsarina’s favourite, Gregor Rasputin.

In Lost Splendour and the Death of Rasputin (first published in 1953), Yusopov tells the story of his originally Muslim family from its rise to prominence in the 14th century to its demise at the revolution.

It is a vain, frivolous and boastful book, lacking in judgment and self-knowledge but useful, nonetheless, as a vivid record of a doomed elite.