Word: chamberlin
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Brief, brisk, emphatically pro-Bolshevik, Reed's account won Lenin's approval, earned its author burial space in Moscow's place of honor in the Red Square, has served as a valuable source book for historians ever since. Last week another U. S. newspaperman, William Henry Chamberlin, for ten years Russian correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, offered the first definitive history of the turbulent period, including the Ten Days, from the fall of the Romanov Dynasty in March 1917, to the introduction of the New Economic Policy in March 1921. Neither brief nor pro-Bolshevik, Author...
...Russia's geographic position Author Chamberlin finds the first reasons for the inflexibility of the Tsarist government and the desperation of the revolutionary upheaval. Poised between Europe and Asia, serving for centuries as a barrier between European civilization and Asiatic barbarism, Russia drew her ideas of Western progress and enlightenment from Europe, her form of government from the East. The dilemma of Peter the Great, who tried to evoke initiative by force, who "desired that the slave, remaining a slave, should act consciously and freely," remained to haunt the later Tsars, who dared not concede an inch of freedom...
...back as the Crimean and Japanese Wars the government had lost prestige at home and abroad, but demands for reform were met with more systematic repression, until by 1917 the Tsar could scarcely find support outside the ranks of the nobility. The livest sections of Author Chamberlin's history are to be found in his descriptions of the collapse of the Romanov autocracy, "one of the most leaderless, spontaneous, anonymous revolutions of all time," and of the hourly dissolution of the monarchy that suddenly fell apart like a gigantic One-Hoss Shay. Again & again Author Chamberlin introduces incidents...
...work that deals principally with the changing moods and movements of nine million soldiers, unknown millions of peasants, hundreds of thousands of industrial workers, individuals can be given little space. Yet Author Chamberlin turns again & again to the enigmatic figure of Lenin, writes of him with an historian's objectivity rather than with a newshawk's interest in a spectacular figure. He insists on Lenin's cold colorlessness, even while relating how Lenin plotted to disguise himself as a deaf-&-dumb Swede in order to return to Russia; how he escaped arrest by hiding successively...
...Russian Revolution 1917-1921 is likely to have a sobering effect on those who speak glibly of revolution, since Author Chamberlin is at pains to show how much explosive resentment had been stored up in the masses before it took place, how much agony followed it. His last chapters become a cumulative catalog of miseries as he writes of the civil war, when Reds fought Whites on a great fluctuating battle-line that stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific, from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea, while famine and typhus were triumphing behind the lines. Unpopular though...