Russia: from the Varangians to the Bolsheviks is a fascinating overview of 1,000 years of Russian history.

Excerpt from Russia: From the Varangians to the Bolsheviks War is a time of rapid vicissitudes. Among all the vicissitudes in the destinies of nations which this great war has caused or occasioned, none have been more rapid or more striking than those which we have seen in Russia. Failure has alternated with success: one figure after another has appeared, stood for a moment in the ascendant, and then passed away: parties, causes, political creeds have come and gone with an amazing velocity. From our thoughts and pictures of Holy Russia we have been swung to the spectacle of Russia secularized and socialist: we have seen the apparent unity of Russia dissolved, and Poland, Finland, and the Ukraine disengaged from the body of the Russian Empire; and while we recognize the depth and profundity of these changes, we dimly guess that the future may bring us changes still deeper and still more profound. Bewildered by all these revolutions of the wheel, we cannot but ask ourselves how and why they came - whence they sprang, and whither they tend. If we are to answer such questions, we must turn to the story of Russian history. History cannot solve the riddle of humanity, but it can at any rate record the gradual accumulation of factors which have gone to produce the result by which we are confronted, and by breaking up the problem into its constituent elements and successive stages it may enable the student to find some reason and provide some answer for the whole. The stages of Russian history, as they appear in this volume, are sufficiently various. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Between the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the new millennium, Russia went through a unique moment – genuine democracy. In this fascinating and absorbing book, Kenneth MacInnes explores not just the 1990s – when he lived and worked in Russia – but the entire history of Russian democracy, from the earliest days right up to President Putin.

A work delving into the end of the Romanov dynasty and the rise of the Bolsheviks by a foremost figure in the field of geopolitics in the early 20th century

Russia in Britain offers the first comprehensive account of the breadth and depth of the British fascination with Russian and Soviet culture, tracing its transformative effect on British intellectual life from the 1880s, the decade which saw the first sustained interest in Russian literature, to 1940, the eve of the Soviet Union's entry into the Second World War. By focusing on the role played by institutions, disciplines and groups, libraries, periodicals, government agencies, concert halls, publishing houses, theatres, and film societies, this collection marks an important departure from standard literary critical narratives, which have tended to highlight the role of a small number of individuals, notably Sergei Diaghilev, Constance Garnett, Theodore Komisarjevsky, Katherine Mansfield, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf. Drawing on recent research and newly available archives, Russia in Britain shifts attention from individual figures to the networks within which they operated, and uncovers the variety of forces that enabled and structured the British engagement with Russian culture. The resulting narrative maps an intricate pattern of interdisciplinary relations and provides the foundational research for a new understanding of Anglo-Russian/Soviet interaction. In this, it makes a major contribution to the current debates about transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and 'global modernisms' that are reshaping our knowledge of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British culture.