Word: bolshevik
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...February and October revolutions. Unfortunately, he often prefers to combine and compromise conflicting accounts instead of selecting his facts and taking a more definitive stand. For example, there is a minor but interesting disagreement among historians about a man named Roman Malinovsky, who was either a police spy, a Bolshevik agent, or a double agent, depending on whom you read. After digesting all the available evidence, Ulam decides that "Malinovsky himself, it is obvious, was not simply a cold-blooded police agent, but a man divided in his loyalties." All well and good; but to ask the author...
...Bolsheviks is not as big as its title would have you believe. Ulam implicitly assumes that the history of the Bolshevik Party cannot be separated from the history of Lenin. The book is essentially an account of Lenin's life, padded with more general history and laced with occasional hints of animation. The decision to identify the Party with Lenin was in many ways an unfortunate one, because the two were not synonymous. A discussion of dissent within the Party would have made the book more exciting, and probably more balanced...
...Bolsheviks is solid biography which frequently benefits from its pretensions to history of a broader scope. Ulam's discussions of Lenin's youth and the Party in exile are exhaustive, and his treatment of the 1917 revolutions is both thorough and fair-minded. In discussing the February revolution, for example, after giving two pages of "the bare facts," Ulam asks, "What did really happen?" He then summarizes the liberal, non-Bolshevik Socialist, monarchist, Trotskyite, and Leninist positions before adding his own interpretation. Equally impressive are his analyses of Lenin as the ruler of a state. Here he gives a very...
...Pasternak's novel, the love story of Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and his Lara (Julie Christie) was part of a vast canvas of war, revolution and social upheaval. Scenarist Robert Bolt has condensed much of this story through a narrator, Yuri's Bolshevik brother (Alec Guinness). The device seems awkward at times, but the flashbacks spring vividly to life on their own. The couple's first wordless encounter takes place aboard a tramcar in Moscow, and the headlong rush of their interwoven destinies is a subtle, unifying symbol of Zhivago. Trains wail along outside the house where...
...should hear about her but Bounine the taxi driver? Well, part-time taxi driver. General Bounine (Michael Kermoyan) is one of those loyal servants of the Czar of All the Russias, without whom the czardom could scarcely have fallen. Bounine does not believe that the girl escaped the Bolshevik firing squad at Ekaterinburg, but he plays Professor Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle and coaches her to bluff big. After all, ?400,000 is waiting in the Bank of England for the rightful Romanov heir. Some blind Russian peasants who happen to be milling around the streets of Berlin oblige...