For someone like me, who knew next to nothing about the context of the several Russian revolutions, Three Who Made a Revolution is an exciting biographical history that traces the contours of the decades leading up to 1917. Despite the title, the book treats mostly Lenin and his revolutionary milieu, a group of mostly bourgeois intellectuals who ostensibly committed their lives to Marxist revolutionary praxis. The many competing -- and strangely cut and dried -- Russian takes on Marxist thought provide much of the political drama. Bertram Wolfe, who founded the Communist Party of America, takes detours for Trotsky and Stalin, but the chapters on Trotsky lack depth while those on Stalin are almost entirely possessed by Wolfe's whining about Stalinist historical censorship. This is not to say that Stalin's crimes against humanity and history were not immense, but I suspect Wolfe's meandering jabs proceed more from his defenestration from the Party by Comrade Stalin than anything else. The final chapters of the book are disappointing: there are many jarring chronological jumps and repetitions of material, and the narrative weirdly culminates in Lenin's seven theses against the war without even treating 1917 itself. That said, for an easily readable and often gripping view of the Marxist movement in Russia that is untainted by later Cold War propaganda, this is your book.
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Nick.embrey
For someone like me, who knew next to nothing about the context of the several Russian revolutions, Three Who Made a Revolution is an exciting biographical history that traces the contours of the decades leading up to 1917. Despite the title, the book treats mostly Lenin and his revolutionary milieu, a group of mostly bourgeois intellectuals who ostensibly committed their lives to Marxist revolutionary praxis. The many competing -- and strangely cut and dried -- Russian takes on Marxist thought provide much of the political drama. Bertram Wolfe, who founded the Communist Party of America, takes detours for Trotsky and Stalin, but the chapters on Trotsky lack depth while those on Stalin are almost entirely possessed by Wolfe's whining about Stalinist historical censorship. This is not to say that Stalin's crimes against humanity and history were not immense, but I suspect Wolfe's meandering jabs proceed more from his defenestration from the Party by Comrade Stalin than anything else. The final chapters of the book are disappointing: there are many jarring chronological jumps and repetitions of material, and the narrative weirdly culminates in Lenin's seven theses against the war without even treating 1917 itself. That said, for an easily readable and often gripping view of the Marxist movement in Russia that is untainted by later Cold War propaganda, this is your book.
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