Caught in the Revolution
by Helen Rappaport, Hutchinson, £25
Helen Rappaport, author of many studies on Russian history, has subtitled her book Petrograd 1917. By confining herself to one city and a single year, she turns the start of the chaos and violence of the Russian Revolution into a dramatic and absorbing narrative.
Deliberately avoiding the classic account, Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed, she uses the reports of other journalists, as well as the dispatches of diplomats, and the memoirs of British nurses and other Westerners, who looked on in curiosity, fascination and then horror at what was taking place before their eyes.
