The history of the 'Jewish Problem' in Russia (and Russia only?) is above all else exceptionally rich. Talking about it means listening to new voices and passing them on to the reader. (In this book, the Jewish voices will be heard more often than those of the Russians.)

But the whirlwinds of the social climate force us towards the razor's edge. You can feel the weight of both sides, all the grievances and accusations, plausible as well as improbably, which grow as they go.

The purpose that guides me throughout this work on the life common the Russians and the Jews consists of looking for all the points necessary for a mutual understanding, all the possible voices which, once we get rid of the bitterness of the past, can lead us towards the future.

Like all other people, like all of us, the Jewish people is at the same time an active and passive element of History; more than once they have accomplished, be it unconsciously, important works that History has offered them. The 'Jewish Problem' has been observed from diverse angles, but always with passion and often in self-delusion. Yet the events which have affected this or that people in the course of History have not always, far from, been determined by this one people, but by all those who surrounded it.

An attitude that is too passionately for one party or the other is humiliating to them. Nevertheless, there cannot be problems that man can't approach with reason. Speaking openly, amply, is more honest, and, in our case precise, speaking about it is essential. Alas, mutual wounds have piled up in popular memory. But if we look at the past, when will the memory heal? As long as popular opinion does not find a pen to shed light thereupon, it will stay a vague rumour, worse: menacing.

We cannot cut ourselves off from the past centuries permanently. Our world has shrunk, and, whatever are the dividing lines, we find ourselves neighbours again. For many years I have delayed writing this book; I would've been glad not to take this burden upon me, but the delays of my life have neared exhaustion, and here I am.

In 1990, while finishing April 1917 and sorting out the enormous amount of material not included in The Red Wheel, I decided to present some of that material in the form of a historical essay about Jews in the Russian revolution.

Yet it became clear almost immediately that in order to understand those events the essay must step back in time. Thus, it stepped back to the very first incorporation of the Jews into the Russian Empire in 1772. On the other hand, the revolution of 1917 provided a powerful impetus to Russian Jewry, so the essay naturally stretched into the post-revolutionary period. Thus, the title Two Hundred Years Together was born.

However, it took time for me to realize the importance of that distinct historical boundary drawn by mass emigration of the Jews from the Soviet Union that had begun in the 1970s (exactly 200 years after the Jews appeared in Russia) and which had become unrestricted by 1987. This boundary had been abolished, so that for the first time, the non-voluntary status of the Russian Jews no longer a fact: they ought not to live here anymore; Israel waits for them; all countries of the world are open to them. This clear boundary changed my intention to keep the narrative up to the mid-1990s, because the message of the book was already played out: the uniqueness of Russian-Jewish entwinement disappeared at the moment of the new Exodus.

Now, a totally new period in the history of the by-now-free Russian Jewry and its relations with the new Russia began. This period started with swift and essential changes, but it is still too early to predict its long-term outcomes and judge whether its peculiar Russian-Jewish character will persevere or it will be supplanted with the universal laws of the Jewish Diaspora. To follow the evolution of this new development is beyond the lifespan of this author.

The first published novel from the controversial Nobel Prize winning Russian author of The Gulag Archipelago.

In the madness of World War II, a dutiful Russian soldier is wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp. So begins this masterpiece of modern Russian fiction, a harrowing account of a man who has conceded to all things evil with dignity and strength.

First published in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is considered one of the most significant works ever to emerge from Soviet Russia. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, it is at once a graphic picture of work camp life and a moving tribute to man's will to prevail over relentless dehumanization.

Includes an Introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
and an Afterword by Eric Bogosian

The first published novel from the controversial Nobel Prize winning Russian author of The Gulag Archipelago.

In the madness of World War II, a dutiful Russian soldier is wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp. So begins this masterpiece of modern Russian fiction, a harrowing account of a man who has conceded to all things evil with dignity and strength.

First published in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is considered one of the most significant works ever to emerge from Soviet Russia. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, it is at once a graphic picture of work camp life and a moving tribute to man's will to prevail over relentless dehumanization.

Includes an Introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
and an Afterword by Eric Bogosian

In March 1917, Book 4 the willing and unwilling participants of the Russian Revolution try to make sense of their next steps amidst unraveling chaos.

One of the masterpieces of world literature, The Red Wheel is Nobel prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's multivolume epic work about the Russian Revolution told in the form of a historical novel. March 1917--the third node--chronicles the mayhem, day by day, of the Russian Revolution. Book 4 presents, for the first time in English, the conclusion of this four-volume revolutionary saga.

The action of Book 4 is set during March 23-31, 1917. Book 4 portrays a cast of thousands in motion and agitation as every stratum of Russian society--the army on the front lines, the countryside, the Volga merchants, the Don Cossacks, the Orthodox Church--is racked by the confusing new reality. Soldiers start to fraternize across trenches with the enemy. The Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the emperor's uncle, arrives at military headquarters to assume the supreme command but is promptly dismissed by the new Provisional Government. Even this government holds no power, for at every step it is cowed and hemmed in by a self-proclaimed and unaccountable Executive Committee acting in the name of the Soviets--councils of workers and soldiers. Yet the Soviets themselves are divided--on whether to call for an end to the war or for its continuation, on whether to topple the Provisional Government or to let it try to govern. Meanwhile, in Switzerland, Lenin quietly dictates his own terms to the German General Staff, setting the stage for his return to Russia.

For the centenary of the Russian Revolution, a new edition of the Russian Nobel Prize-winning author's most accessible novel

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an undisputed classic of contemporary literature. First published (in censored form) in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, it is the story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov as he struggles to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. On every page of this graphic depiction of Ivan Denisovich's struggles, the pain of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's own decade-long experience in the gulag is apparent--which makes its ultimate tribute to one man's will to triumph over relentless dehumanization all the more moving.

An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced-work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary works to have emerged from the Soviet Union. The first of Solzhenitsyn's novels to be published, it forced both the Soviet Union and the West to confront the Soviet's human rights record, and the novel was specifically mentioned in the presentation speech when Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Above all, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich establishes Solzhenitsyn's stature as a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy (Harrison Salisbury, The New York Times).

This unexpurgated, widely acclaimed translation by H. T. Willetts is the only translation authorized by Solzhenitsyn himself.

The Russian Nobelist's semiautobiographical novel set in a Soviet cancer ward shortly after Stalin's death

One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the cancerous Soviet police state.

Cancer Ward, which has been compared to the masterpiece of another Nobel Prize winner, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, examines the relationship of a group of people in the cancer ward of a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955, two years after Stalin's death. While the experiences of the central character, Oleg Kostoglotov, closely reflect the author's own--Solzhenitsyn became a patient in a cancer ward in the mid-1950s, on his release from a labor camp, and later recovered--the patients, as a group, represent a remarkable cross section of contemporary Russian characters and attitudes, both under normal circumstances and then reexamined at the eleventh hour of illness. A seminal work from one of the most powerful voices in twentieth century literature, Cancer Ward offers an extraordinary portrait of life in the Soviet Union.

Stark . . . the story of how one falsely accused convict and his fellow prisoners survived or perished in an arctic slave labor camp after the war.--Time

From the icy blast of reveille through the sweet release of sleep, Ivan Denisovich endures. A common carpenter, he is one of millions viciously imprisoned for countless years on baseless charges, sentenced to the waking nightmare of the Soviet work camps in Siberia. Even in the face of degrading hatred, where life is reduced to a bowl of gruel and a rare cigarette, hope and dignity prevail. This powerful novel of fact is a scathing indictment of Communist tyranny, and an eloquent affirmation of the human spirit.

The prodigious works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, including his acclaimed The Gulag Archipelago, have secured his place in the great tradition of Russian literary giants. Ironically, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is the only one of his works permitted publication in his native land.

Praise for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Cannot fail to arouse bitterness and pain in the heart of the reader. A literary and political event of the first magnitude.--New Statesman

Both as a political tract and as a literary work, it is in the Doctor Zhivago category.--Washington Post

Dramatic . . . outspoken . . . graphically detailed . . . a moving human record.--Library Journal

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West includes the texts of the Nobel Prize-winning author's three speeches in the United States in the summer of 1975, his first major public addresses since his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974: on June 30 and July 9 to trade-union leaders of the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., and in New York City, and on July 15 to the United States Congress; and also the texts of his BBC interview and radio speech, which sparked widespread public controversy when they were aired in London in March 1976.

Solzhenitsyn's outspoken criticism of the West's growing weakness and complacency and his belief that Russia's growing strength will enable her to establish supremacy over the West without risk of a nucelar holocaust are expressed with the moral authority of a great novelist and historian.

Solzhenitsyn mounts a public indictment of the supine inattention of the West that rings like the blows of the hammer with which Luther nailed his manifesto to the doors at Wittenberg.--Times Literary Supplement

This collection brings together ten of Nobel Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's most memorable and consequential speeches, delivered in the West and in Russia between 1972 and 1997.

Following his exile from the USSR in 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived and traveled in the West for twenty years before the fall of Communism allowed him to return home to Russia. The majority of the speeches collected in this volume straddle this period of exile, contemplating the materialism prevalent worldwide--forcibly imposed in the socialist East, freely chosen in the capitalist West--and searching for humanity's possible paths forward. In beautiful yet haunting and prophetic prose, Solzhenitsyn explores the mysterious purpose of art, the two-edged nature of limitless freedom, the decline of faith in favor of legalistic secularism, and--perhaps most centrally--the power of literature, art, and culture to elevate the human spirit.

These annotated speeches, including his timeless Nobel Lecture and Harvard Address, have been rendered in English by skilled translators, including Solzhenitsyn's sons. The volume includes an introduction to the speeches, brief background information about each speech, and a timeline of the key dates in Solzhenitsyn's life.

One of the most chilling novels about the oppression of totalitarian regimes and the first to open Western eyes to the terrors of Stalin's prison camps; if Solzhenitsyn later became Russia's conscience in exile, this is the book with which he first challenged the brutal might of the Soviet Union.

The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, Arkhipelag GULAG) Note 1 is a three-volume non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, and translated into English and French the following year. It covers life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet forced labour camp system, through a narrative constructed from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a Gulag prisoner.

Following its publication, the book initially circulated in samizdat underground publication in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the literary journal Novy Mir in 1989, in which a third of the work was published in three issues. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago has been officially published in Russia.

Historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft described the book as a fine literary masterpiece, a sharp political indictment against the Soviet regime, and has had tremendous importance in raising the issue of Soviet repression in the Russian consciousness. Wheatcroft wrote that the book was essentially a literary and political work, and never claimed to place the camps in a historical or social-scientific quantitative perspective but that in the case of qualitative estimates, Solzhenitsyn gave his high estimate as he wanted to challenge the Soviet authorities to show that the scale of the camps was less than this.Note 3 UCLA historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn's methodology that such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history. Gabor Rittersporn shared Getty's criticism, saying that he is inclined to give priority to vague reminiscences and hearsay ... [and] inevitably [leads] towards selective bias.

In an interview with the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, British historian Orlando Figes stated that many Gulag inmates he interviewed for his research identified so strongly with the book's contents that they became unable to distinguish between their own experiences and what they read: The Gulag Archipelago spoke for a whole nation and was the voice of all those who suffered. Soviet dissident and historian Roy Medvedev referred to the book as extremely contradictory; in a review for the book, Medvedev described it as without parallel for its impact, saying: I believe there are few who will get up from their desks after reading this book the same as when they opened its first page. In this regard I have nothing with which to compare Solzhenitsyn's book either in Russian or world literature. (wikipedia.org)

The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, Arkhipelag GULAG) Note 1 is a three-volume non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, and translated into English and French the following year. It covers life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet forced labour camp system, through a narrative constructed from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a Gulag prisoner.

Following its publication, the book initially circulated in samizdat underground publication in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the literary journal Novy Mir in 1989, in which a third of the work was published in three issues. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago has been officially published in Russia.

Historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft described the book as a fine literary masterpiece, a sharp political indictment against the Soviet regime, and has had tremendous importance in raising the issue of Soviet repression in the Russian consciousness. Wheatcroft wrote that the book was essentially a literary and political work, and never claimed to place the camps in a historical or social-scientific quantitative perspective but that in the case of qualitative estimates, Solzhenitsyn gave his high estimate as he wanted to challenge the Soviet authorities to show that the scale of the camps was less than this.Note 3 UCLA historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn's methodology that such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history. Gabor Rittersporn shared Getty's criticism, saying that he is inclined to give priority to vague reminiscences and hearsay ... [and] inevitably [leads] towards selective bias.

In an interview with the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, British historian Orlando Figes stated that many Gulag inmates he interviewed for his research identified so strongly with the book's contents that they became unable to distinguish between their own experiences and what they read: The Gulag Archipelago spoke for a whole nation and was the voice of all those who suffered. Soviet dissident and historian Roy Medvedev referred to the book as extremely contradictory; in a review for the book, Medvedev described it as without parallel for its impact, saying: I believe there are few who will get up from their desks after reading this book the same as when they opened its first page. In this regard I have nothing with which to compare Solzhenitsyn's book either in Russian or world literature. (wikipedia.org)

La historia del problema judío en Rusia ( y sólo en Rusia?) es ante todo excepcionalmente rica. Hablar de ello significa escuchar nuevas voces y transmitirlas al lector. (En este libro, las voces judías se oirán más a menudo que las de los rusos).

Pero los torbellinos del clima social nos empujan hacia el filo de la navaja. Se puede sentir el peso de ambos bandos, todos los agravios y acusaciones, tanto verosímiles como inverosímiles, que crecen a medida que avanzan.

El propósito que me guía a lo largo de este trabajo sobre la vida en común de los rusos y los judíos consiste en buscar todos los puntos necesarios para un entendimiento mutuo, todas las voces posibles que, una vez que nos despojemos de la amargura del pasado, puedan conducirnos hacia el futuro.

Como todos los demás pueblos, como todos nosotros, el pueblo judío es al mismo tiempo un elemento activo y pasivo de la Historia; más de una vez ha realizado, aunque sea inconscientemente, importantes obras que la Historia le ha ofrecido. El problema judío ha sido observado desde diversos ángulos, pero siempre con pasión y a menudo con autoengaño. Sin embargo, los acontecimientos que han afectado a tal o cual pueblo en el curso de la Historia no siempre, ni mucho menos, han estado determinados por este único pueblo, sino por todos los que lo rodeaban.

Una actitud demasiado apasionada por una u otra parte es humillante para ellas. Sin embargo, no puede haber problemas que el hombre no pueda abordar con la razón. Hablar abiertamente, con amplitud, es más honesto, y, en nuestro caso preciso, hablar de ello es esencial. Por desgracia, las heridas mutuas se han acumulado en la memoria popular. Pero si miramos al pasado, cuándo sanará la memoria? Mientras la opinión popular no encuentre una pluma que arroje luz sobre ello, seguirá siendo un vago rumor, peor aún: amenazador.

No podemos aislarnos definitivamente de los siglos pasados. Nuestro mundo se ha encogido y, sean cuales sean las líneas divisorias, volvemos a ser vecinos. Durante muchos años he retrasado la escritura de este libro; me habría encantado no llevar esta carga sobre mí, pero los retrasos de mi vida se han acercado al agotamiento, y aquí estoy.

In time for the centenary of the beginning of the Russian Revolution, a new edition of the Russian Nobelist's major work

The month of November 1916 in Russia was outwardly quiet--the proverbial calm before the storm--but beneath the placid surface, society seethed fiercely.
In Petrograd, as St. Petersburg was then known, luxury-store windows are still brightly lit; the Duma debates the monarchy, the course of war, and clashing paths to reform; the workers in the miserable munitions factories veer toward sedition.
At the front, all is stalemate, while in the countryside sullen anxiety among hard-pressed farmers is rapidly replacing patriotism.
In Zurich, Lenin, with the smallest of all revolutionary groups, plots his sinister logistical miracle.
With masterly and moving empathy, through the eyes of both historical and fictional protagonists, Solzhenitsyn unforgettably transports us to that time and place--the last of pre-Soviet Russia.
November 1916 is the second volume in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's multipart work, The Red Wheel. This volume concentrates on a historical turning point, or knot, as the wheel rolls inexorably toward revolution.

In March 1917, Book 3 the forces of revolutionary disintegration spread out from Petrograd all the way to the front lines of World War I, presaging Russia's collapse.

One of the masterpieces of world literature, The Red Wheel is Nobel prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's multivolume epic work about the Russian Revolution told in the form of a historical novel. March 1917--the third node--tells the story, day by day, of the Russian Revolution itself. Until recently, the final two nodes have been unavailable in English. The publication of Book 1 of March 1917 (in 2017) and Book 2 (in 2019) has begun to rectify this situation.

The action of Book 3 (out of four) is set during March 16-22, 1917. In Book 3, the Romanov dynasty ends and the revolution starts to roll out from Petrograd toward Moscow and the Russian provinces. The dethroned Emperor Nikolai II makes his farewell to the Army and is kept under guard with his family. In Petrograd, the Provisional Government and the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies continue to exercise power in parallel. The war hero Lavr Kornilov is appointed military chief of Petrograd. But the Soviet's Order No. 1 reaches every soldier, undermining the officer corps and shaking the Army to its foundations. Many officers, including the head of the Baltic Fleet, the progressive Admiral Nepenin, are murdered. Black Sea Fleet Admiral Kolchak holds the revolution at bay; meanwhile, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the emperor's uncle, makes his way to military headquarters, naïvely thinking he will be allowed to take the Supreme Command.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the University of Notre Dame Press is proud to publish Nobel Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic work March 1917, Node III, Book 1, of The Red Wheel.

The Red Wheel is Solzhenitsyn's magnum opus about the Russian Revolution. Solzhenitsyn tells this story in the form of a meticulously researched historical novel, supplemented by newspaper headlines of the day, fragments of street action, cinematic screenplay, and historical overview. The first two nodes--August 1914 and November 1916--focus on Russia's crises and recovery, on revolutionary terrorism and its suppression, on the missed opportunity of Pyotr Stolypin's reforms, and how the surge of patriotism in August 1914 soured as Russia bled in World War I.

March 1917--the third node--tells the story of the Russian Revolution itself, during which not only does the Imperial government melt in the face of the mob, but the leaders of the opposition prove utterly incapable of controlling the course of events. The action of Book 1 (of four) of March 1917 is set during March 8-12. The absorbing narrative tells the stories of more than fifty characters during the days when the Russian Empire begins to crumble. Bread riots in the capital, Petrograd, go unchecked at first, and the police are beaten and killed by mobs. Efforts to put down the violence using the army trigger a mutiny in the numerous reserve regiments housed in the city, who kill their officers and rampage. The anti-Tsarist bourgeois opposition, horrified by the violence, scrambles to declare that it is provisionally taking power, while socialists immediately create a Soviet alternative to undermine it. Meanwhile, Emperor Nikolai II is away at military headquarters and his wife Aleksandra is isolated outside Petrograd, caring for their sick children. Suddenly, the viability of the Russian state itself is called into question.

The Red Wheel has been compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace, for each work aims to narrate the story of an era in a way that elevates its universal significance. In much the same way as Homer's Iliad became the representative account of the Greek world and therefore the basis for Greek civilization, these historical epics perform a parallel role for our modern world.

The Russian Nobelist's major work, back in print for the centenary of World War I and the Russian Revolution

In his monumental narrative of the outbreak of the First World War and the ill-fated Russian offensive into East Prussia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has written a dramatically new interpretation of Russian history (Nina Krushcheva, The Nation).
The assassination of the tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, a crucial event in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917, is reconstructed from the alienating viewpoints of historical witnesses. The sole voice of reason among the advisers to Tsar Nikolai II, Stolypin died at the hands of the anarchist Mordko Bogrov, and with him Russia's last hope for reform perished.
August 1914 is the first volume of Solzhenitsyn's epic, The Red Wheel; the second is November 1916. Each volume concentrates on a critical moment or knot in the history of the Russian Revolution.

In March 1917, Book 3 the forces of revolutionary disintegration spread out from Petrograd all the way to the front lines of World War I, presaging Russia's collapse.

One of the masterpieces of world literature, The Red Wheel is Nobel prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's multivolume epic work about the Russian Revolution told in the form of a historical novel. March 1917--the third node--tells the story, day by day, of the Russian Revolution itself. Until recently, the final two nodes have been unavailable in English. The publication of Book 1 of March 1917 (in 2017) and Book 2 (in 2019) has begun to rectify this situation.

The action of Book 3 (out of four) is set during March 16-22, 1917. In Book 3, the Romanov dynasty ends and the revolution starts to roll out from Petrograd toward Moscow and the Russian provinces. The dethroned Emperor Nikolai II makes his farewell to the Army and is kept under guard with his family. In Petrograd, the Provisional Government and the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies continue to exercise power in parallel. The war hero Lavr Kornilov is appointed military chief of Petrograd. But the Soviet's Order No. 1 reaches every soldier, undermining the officer corps and shaking the Army to its foundations. Many officers, including the head of the Baltic Fleet, the progressive Admiral Nepenin, are murdered. Black Sea Fleet Admiral Kolchak holds the revolution at bay; meanwhile, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the emperor's uncle, makes his way to military headquarters, naïvely thinking he will be allowed to take the Supreme Command.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the University of Notre Dame Press is proud to publish Nobel Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic work March 1917, Node III, Book 1, of The Red Wheel.

The Red Wheel is Solzhenitsyn's magnum opus about the Russian Revolution. Solzhenitsyn tells this story in the form of a meticulously researched historical novel, supplemented by newspaper headlines of the day, fragments of street action, cinematic screenplay, and historical overview. The first two nodes--August 1914 and November 1916--focus on Russia's crises and recovery, on revolutionary terrorism and its suppression, on the missed opportunity of Pyotr Stolypin's reforms, and how the surge of patriotism in August 1914 soured as Russia bled in World War I.

March 1917--the third node--tells the story of the Russian Revolution itself, during which not only does the Imperial government melt in the face of the mob, but the leaders of the opposition prove utterly incapable of controlling the course of events. The action of Book 1 (of four) of March 1917 is set during March 8-12. The absorbing narrative tells the stories of more than fifty characters during the days when the Russian Empire begins to crumble. Bread riots in the capital, Petrograd, go unchecked at first, and the police are beaten and killed by mobs. Efforts to put down the violence using the army trigger a mutiny in the numerous reserve regiments housed in the city, who kill their officers and rampage. The anti-Tsarist bourgeois opposition, horrified by the violence, scrambles to declare that it is provisionally taking power, while socialists immediately create a Soviet alternative to undermine it. Meanwhile, Emperor Nikolai II is away at military headquarters and his wife Aleksandra is isolated outside Petrograd, caring for their sick children. Suddenly, the viability of the Russian state itself is called into question.

The Red Wheel has been compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace, for each work aims to narrate the story of an era in a way that elevates its universal significance. In much the same way as Homer's Iliad became the representative account of the Greek world and therefore the basis for Greek civilization, these historical epics perform a parallel role for our modern world.