Author Description

Originally published to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution, this collection of writings brings together contemporary responses to the new Soviet Union. The authors include foreign visitors sympathetic to the Revolution, Russian writers who stayed in the Soviet Union, and Russian émigrés who left while it was still possible. These writings, from figures as disparate as Leon Trotsky, Arthur Ransome, Isaac Babel and Walter Benjamin, convey the hope, disillusionment and sometimes despair of the decade after 1917.