In Blood on the Snow, Robert Service returns to the subject that has formed the backbone of his long
and distinguished career: the Russian Revolution.
For Service, the great unanswered question is how to reconcile the two vital narratives that underpin
the extraordinary but troubled events of 1917. One puts the blame squarely on Tsar Nicholas II and
on Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government that deposed him. The other is the view from the
bottom, that of the workers and peasants who wanted democratic socialism, not the Bolshevik
dictatorship imposed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his successors.
Service's vivid and revisionist account spans the period from the outbreak of the First World War to
Lenin’s death in 1924. In it, he reveals that the seeds of the revolution were sown by the Tsar's
decision to join the western allies in the war against Germany in 1914. He shows with brutal clarity
how those events played out, eventually leading to the establishment of the totalitarian Soviet
regime, which would endure for the next seven decades.
Nicholas II, Kerensky and Lenin are to the fore, but Service enriches his narrative by drawing on
little-known diaries of those such as the Vologda peasant Alexander Zamaraev, the NCO Alexei
Shtukaturov and the Moscow accounts clerk Nikita Okunev. Through the testimony of these
‘ordinary’ people, Service traces the tortuous path that Russia took through war, revolution and civil war. |