Blood on the Snow

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What to expect

'A terrific book about a terrifying subject by the best historian of Russia working today' - Michael Burleigh, author of The Third Reich

'This work of a lifetime presents high-octane, high-politcal drama' - Guardian

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 key seeds of the revolution were sown by the Tsar's decision to join 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.

'This authoritative, detailed account shows how Lenin won control of Russia and caused untold misery . . . ' - The Times

Critics Review

  • Robert Service’s Blood on the Snow is his masterwork, the product of decades of thought about Russia’s past. A terrific book about a terrifying subject by the best historian of Russia working today.

    Michael Burleigh, author of author of Day of the Assassins and The Third Reich: A New History

  • This work of a lifetime presents high-octane, high-politcal drama

    Guardian

  • Blood on the Snow crowns Robert Service’s four decades of work on the Russian Revolution and its perpetrators.

    Literary Review

  • This authoritative, detailed account shows how Lenin won control of Russia and caused untold misery . . . Service takes a methodical approach, carefully outlining the sequence of events and always emphasising the importance of simple luck. In contrast to other authors, he lets ordinary people have their voice, through an assortment of otherwise neglected diaries.

    The Times

  • Robert Service’s Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914–1924 brings a new vibrancy to the history of the Revolution . . . With its short chapters and choppy sentences, and a title and jacket design that are more airport novel than academic tome, Service’s history reads like a thriller and is all the better for it.

    TLS

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