This volume was first written in the 1960's Soviet Union under Krushchev's less onerous regime. By the time Children of the Arbat was ready for print Brezhnev had taken power and any dissent was supressed. Arbat was in fact, not printed until 1987.

The novel takes place in 30's Russia on the eve of the Great Purges under Stalin. The Arbat itself is street in Moscow which was once a bazaar and then (and now) the location of several cafe's and ourdoor music.

Children of the Arbat is great work combining literature and political commentary. Rybakov shows the impact of the terror on a small group of friends and relations. His portrayal of Stalin is on the mark, cold and ruthless.

An excellent novel of an era in Russia that should never be forgotten.

This book documents the horrors of the Stalinist reign of terror in the old Soviet Union from a uniquely Russian perspective .It is in fact written in a very similar style to Tolstoys 'War and Peace' The epic develops at just the right pace with well developed characters who are very real.The hero of the story Sasha Pankratov,a loyal Communinst Party member who falls victim to the rotten machinations of the party,the rebellious and strong yet vulnerable Varya Ivaova,the scheming and ruthless Yuri Sharok,the opportunistic Vika Marasevitch,the colourless Nina Ivanova,the vilainous Kostya and a host of other characters who all get caught up one way or another in the evil of the Communist regime

Rybakov refused to have his "Children of the Arbat" published abroad until it was first published in the Soviet Union. After reading how idealistic young Soviets sacrifice themselves to Stalin's lofty plans, in the end betrayed by the very system that they so strongly believed in, one can understand why it took so long before the book went to press. The reader certainly gets a feel for the hope, revolutionary fervor, and idealism of Soviet youth in the 1930's - even while the "Terror" was in full swing. The paths and decisions of the characters take each in widely different (and sometimes opposing) directions - much like life in the real world. Children of the Arbat is a fabulous read - its a pity that it is out of print.

I wanted to get a brief introduction to the life of
Rasputin and this book delivered very well. It's well
writen, at times I thought I was reading the novelisation
of a film rather then history as it sort of plays out like
a movie.

Rasputin is an interesting character and this book made me want to read something more detailed and in depth on his life and
relationship with the Ramonavs. But I would suggest this book
for those who just want to get a glimps of who this man was. You
can read it in a couple hours.

It is a profound investigation about the demoniac monk. This book can teach us a great deal about the dark side of the human soul. The contents tend to lean us to two extremes: painful feeling of great fear and strange enchant.

Gen. Volkogonov is not a professional historian, and certainly not a great writer. His work his well researched and meticolous, but is fails to either capture the general reader or to impress the reader looking for a clear analysis of causes and consequences. The book is very long, the style of prose quite boring and at times repetitive. The author very often has a moralistic tone ("How could Stalin posssibly be so cruel? Look how corrupt his cronies were...") that bothers those who would like a more detached approach. I guess one has to remember that once he believed in Communism and cannot have helped being shocked by what he found in the state's archives (where he ventured with the original purpose of writing an orthodox biography of the Great Leader); this might explain his being upset at Stalin, but does not make the book more appealing. In the end, Gen. Volgokonov's main merit is exactly this: to have been able to access, thanks to his position in the Red Army, the USSR's impenetrable archives, and to have revealed to the world a deluge of details and documents. Some of them are immensely controversial in their potential consequences (eg the statements made by Stalin before the German attack that war was inevitable; or Zukov's plan for a preventive strike against Germany). Indeed, this book deservedly appears in most bibliographies on the USSR and the Russo-German war, and has provided the academic community with valuable insights for further analysis on Stalin and Stalinism. But it is probably more suited for an historian than for a general reader.

This is the best biography of Stalin there is, in my opinion. Volkogonov simply had the access to the kind of materials no one else had. This book takes full advantage of them. It correctly depicts Stalin as a great actor who sold his image to the masses, the image of benevolent and infallible ruler. In contrast to his fascist counterparts, Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin did not have a good speaking ability, and often read his boring speeches monotonously. But his self-assured and reassuring monotony came to have a hypnotic effect. His smile and almost goofy mustache and eyebrows covered the soul of a despot.

Stalin was a single-minded individual: for him, power came before everything else. A Georgian nationalist who called himself Koba in his youth and resented Russian rule over his people, he rose to become Stalin (man of steel) who ruled over the new Russian Empire called the Soviet Union. Volkogonov gives us the most factual biography yet of the man who slaughtered millions in the name of the workers' paradise and future generations; the man who feared and obsessed over Adolph Hitler and who ultimately defeated him; the man whose cruelty and destruction are a warning to all future generations not to lend a sympathetic ear to promises of future earthly utopias in exchange for absolute power and elimination of civil rights.

Reading "Triumph and Tragedy" is, quite simply, a life-altering
experience. Volkogonov was a loyal member of the Red Army and
Communist Party when he gained access to the whole of the KGB's
archives. As he researched the past, his level of disenchantment grew
until the very core of his world-view was torn asunder. This book is
written unevenly, as Volkogonov was still struggling to absorb the
historical record as he wrote. Nevertheless, the occasional
awkwardness serves to drive home the horror of this period. The
experience is as if the reader can feel the author there with them,
reeling from it all. While the book certainly contains much
interesting historical information, particularly with respect to
Stalin's purges of the Red Army and its affects on WWII, it is also
much, much more. When I read it, the phrase "the horror, the horror"
from Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" kept coming into my mind.

A good general look at events, personalities and chronology of the Russian Revolutions. An excellent reference work for general students of this era.

"Ten Days That Shook The World" is the account by John Reed of what he saw during the Russian Revolution. Reed was an American Communist and journalist who is the only American known to be buried in the Kremlin. Throughout this book we read a series of observations and dialogues reported by Reed, virtually without comment, although his bias is apparent. We read his reports of political meetings, encounters with minor officials and his observations of events occurring during those turbulent revolutionary days in Petrograd.

This book is a classic case of missing the forest for the trees. The view is too up close to permit the reader to see the big picture. One does not look here for the history of the Revolution. We look here for its spirit. Here we see the swirling chaos, hear the repeated buzz words and get a feeling for the competing factions which fashioned the Communist tyranny which emerged from the Revolution.

In writing this book, Reed gives the reader a view of himself and other American Communists who saw in the Revolution the future that worked. His view can best be summarized in his comment that, while watching a funeral, he realized that the Russian people no longer needed priests to pray them into heaven because they were building a world brighter than any which heaven promised. This hope is in stark contrast to the now known Communist record.

Overall I enjoyed this book as it taught me some more about the Russian Revolution than I had learned from other books which I had read. (See my Amazon review of "The Russian Revolution" by Alan Moorehead.) For that it was worth reading.

Having just finished John Reed's great work of historical journalism I would call it compelling, articulate, a page-turner, etc. It is unfortunate that Reed died so young and was unable to see what his idealistic heroes set loose upon Russia and later the world. Reed was undoubtedly a good man and I don't mean to discredit his character, just his logic.

That aside, this work is fascinating in that it presents so many of the pivotal events in the formation of the Soviet Socialist system from the point of view of someone who was right there while it happened. Add to this the fact that he was an American and thus understood the American sensibility and you have a work of near genius. For the average American reader, this work must have been illuminating for reasons of its style as well as its content.

Reed does have obvious bias in favor of the Bolsheviki, indeed Trotsky is portrayed as a demigod, but he is able to sympathetically depict the plight of the nation of Russia near the close of WWI and enlighten the reader to the numerous causes of the Revolution, and why it must have seemed so inevitable and right to those who experienced it.

Overall a stunning work of journalism and history, highly worth your time.

This is a most powerfully written American radical journalist's eyewitness account of the Bolshevik seizure of power--recording the excitement of the October days and the beginnings of John Reed's own revolutionary disillusionment.

Ten Days That Shook the World is the classic account of the Russian Revolution of November 1917 by a western journalist and has been admired worldwide since its first publication in 1919. Lenin endorsed it as "a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is the Proletarian Revolution."

Already based in Europe and sympathetic to the cause of the Russian Revolution, Reed was able to observe dispassionately exactly what was going on and to find out not only what the Bolshevik leaders were doing, but to move among those on the streets and note experiences of the masses of ordinary people. Witnessing first-hand the day-to-day events of the Revolution, he captures in vivid and graphic detail the atmosphere of that time.

An extraordinary document of history in the making, this newer edition is the first with contemporary photographs, while a new introduction by Harold Shukman, University Lecturer in Modern Russian History at Oxford University, sets the work in context. Published to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, this illustrated edition will appeal to anyone interested in modern history. And quite possibly re-ignite a political polemic.

Warren Beatty dared to make the film Reds, which gives us a poignantly epic visual view of John Reed, his life, his loves and his fierce beliefs as read in Ten Days That Shook The World.

This book was very informative in terms of a comprehensive description of the turn of events between 1917 and 1921 as well as acts of revolution before and after these years. The basic moral is that if enough people don't like what goes on in a certain place, they will find some sort of way to change it, in this case, by revolting. This book teaches that if only the government had worked with the people in deciding what went on, events occurring between the years 1917 and 1920 would have different much more greatly. Overall, this was an informative book.