ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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The political advantage of an anti-war position
GAVIN O’TOOLE applauds a uniquely nuanced people’s history of the revolutionary period, told from below
BLOODBATH: Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), July 17 1917 - July 4, 1917 (Julian calendar) troops of the Provisional Government fired machine guns at the 500,000 protestors - 700 people were killed, most of them Bolsheviks or Bolshevik sympathisers
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924
Robert Service, Picador, £30
REFERENCES abound to similarities between the current geopolitical context — a combustible mixture of warmongering by corrupt elites, resentful nationalism, and brooding popular discontent — and circumstances on the eve of WWI.
Bellicose politicians today banging the war drums as a distraction would, therefore, do well to revisit the starkest lesson to emerge from a period during which a gasping Europe was drowned in a cauldron of blood.
The defining event of that era was not the Treaty of Versailles, but the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk — the separate peace agreed between the new Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia and the Central Powers.
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