The Russian Century: A History of the Last Hundred Years [Paperback]

Brian Moynahan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 4, 1995

Making extensive use of contemporary accounts, Moynahan traces Russia's turbulent 20th century, from the last days of tsarist rule to the Bolshevik Revolution, two world wars (and one cold one), and to the overthrow of the Communist regime. Simultaneously a political, social and oral history, this book will quickly become the preeminent short history of Russia's recent past. Photos.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

From the image of a nun drawing water near the Pontetayevsky Convent in 1904 to a shot of Russians joyfully swilling vodka in the post-Communist era, this photohistory offers an excellent overview of Russia's tragic history in the 20th century. The photographs were culled from numerous Russian archives, most previously sealed, and the result is a fresh and startling view of an embattled nation. The image of women harnessed to a barge in Tsarist Russia contrasts painfully with the group portrait of elegant young ladies at the Smolny Institute in St. Petersburg; other images move from the Communist takeover through the horrors of collectivization, World War II, and the Gulag to the achievements of the postwar years and the collapse of communism. The text is as good as the photos, which isn't often true in photo spreads like this; British journalist Moynahan neatly condenses Russia's history while retaining a flair for the telling anecdote. An excellent addition to history, photography, and subject collections.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

A spectacular, startling, and sometimes downright grisly chronicle, in words and pictures, of a bloody and tumultuous period. Alongside a stunning battery of photographs scoured from archives and collections throughout the former Soviet empire, the vast majority of them unfamiliar, Moynahan (Comrades, 1992) unfolds a history short on depth but told in crisp, imagistic (not to say strongly opinionated) prose. To his great credit, he persistently strives to include not only the obvious historical milestones-- wars, revolutions, terror, famine, and the like (every horseman of the apocalypse gallops across the tortured steppes)--but also some sense of the evolving everyday sensory and emotional realities of Russian life under czar, dictator, and infant democracy. In this, he's not only immeasurably aided but inevitably outshone by the pageant of superbly reproduced photographs to which every reader will be immediately drawn and which, highlighting the human figure at the expense of landscape, run the gamut from imperial family portraits and staged Party propaganda scenes to snatched samizdat documents of ghetto and gulag, to the innovative high art of Rodchenko. Behind the familiar official faces of the masters- -Rasputin's manic stare, Trotsky's compelling gaze, Stalin's sly squint, Yeltsin's pugnacious querulousness--and the distortions of official history, both amply evidenced here, the photos unearth a vast parade of their nameless subjects (and, more often then not, victims)--``ordinary'' workers, peasants, soldiers, priests, shopkeepers. Too often it's a gallery of the unquiet dead: These pages are as corpse-strewn as the history they record--slain in purges, pogroms, insurrections, invasions, by starvation or single bullet, piled high by roadsides, dumped into mass graves, even, most shockingly and indelibly, filleted on the dining table of famine-stricken peasants driven to cannibalism. No mere coffee-table ornament, but a historical document of great drama and unusual intensity. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Random House (December 4, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679764364
• ISBN-13: 978-0679764366
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #827,846 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent on So Many Levels, November 5, 1999

By A Customer

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This review is from: The Russian Century: A History of the Last Hundred Years (Paperback)

I echo the views of the other reviewers ... that this book is an outstanding introduction to / overview of 20th century Russian history. It's worth the price for Brian Moynahan's sweeping, lucid narrative alone, but when I first borrowed this book from a friend it was the photographs that kept me rivited for hours at at time over several days. I'm convinced that this will come to be regarded as of the great collections of historic photography ever. Very highly recommended!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Profile in Brutality, December 1, 1999

By 

Chris Kincade - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Russian Century: A History of the Last Hundred Years (Paperback)

Moynihan's book serves as a solid overview of what is painted as a fairly blighted century. From collectivization, to Stalin's brutal purges, to invasion by Nazis, to the dark restless sleep of the soul inspired by Brezhnev, the Communist years were not kind to the Russians. From the tsar to Yeltsin, Moynihan offers a clear mix of history and analysis that makes this a quick read. Still, the chapter on Russia's war with Germany unfolds like the blitzkrieg, and if you're looking for details, this is not your book. Moynihan paints with very broad strokes and does not attempt to get into the minds of the Russian people. Given that they were treated as nothing more than neccessary cogs in Stalin's megalomaniacal drive to modernize a peasant state, it would be nice to know more about their perspective. Nonetheless, this is a lucid narrative of a century's worth of troubles.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Journalism at its best, September 23, 2001

By 

M. Mcfarland - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Russian Century: A History of the Last Hundred Years (Paperback)

Moynahan's journalistic instincts are to the fore in this fast moving account of one of history's great upheavals. The author has plenty of experience covering Russia as a journalist at The Times. The coverage doesn't just take in the politics or revolution. There's social history, art and lifestyle - as well as all the gruesome stuff involving purges, genocide and the death camps in eastern siberia.

It also has some wonderful pictures - especially one showing an old woman experiencing voting for the first time. Something that is so familiar to most of us was so alien to her. She was ninety and old enough to remember Tsar Nicholas.

The coverage is heavily bent towards the first half of the century since most of the action took place then. Moynahan's big picture style means that you really get a feel for how traumatic and vengeful these times were for ordinary people. The revolutions and the spread of communist power throughout the empire was quite simply government by a gang of murderous thugs. Fiends of the worst possible kind with a liking for violence.

The end of the party and the Russian Empire is dealt with only lightly since the book was first written in the early 1990s. (I read the 1994 version and haven't got around to reading an updated version). That, I don't, think is a big issue since most readers will have been around long enough to have a pretty good handle on the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years anyway.

All too often, these types of histories are academic (often mind numbing) and/or far too long. This one is short, sucinct and highly entertaining. In fact, anyone wishing to get into the excellent accounts of the revolution by Figes or Pipes should read this one first.