The New York Times Book Review - Owen Matthews
…splendid…Like foreigners in Russia before and since, Rappaport's narrators are a separate caste, above and apart from the troubles engulfing ordinary Russians…"I sit high and see far" is the appropriate Russian aphorism. That outsider's long view is the book's strength. After all, these foreigners often have more privileged access to great men and events than the vast majority of Russian witnesses…By confining herself to foreigners in Russia's capital, Rappaport takes a necessarily narrow slice of revolutionary history. But the story these witnesses tell is endlessly fascinating.
Publishers Weekly
12/19/2016
Rappaport (The Romanov Sisters) adopts an eyewitness approach to the Russian Revolution of 1917 in this fun, fast-paced, yet frivolous work. She bases her story on the firsthand accounts of Westerners in Petrograd at the time—a mixed bag of bankers, diplomats, journalists, socialists, and socialites, including Julia Dent Grant (granddaughter of Ulysses S. Grant); journalists Florence Harper, Arthur Ransome, and John Reed; and American war photographer Donald Thompson. Some witnesses braved the mob scene with camera and notebook in hand. Others barricaded themselves in their offices and watched through their windows, fearing for their lives as the violence escalated. Rappaport fails to really develop these personalities, and the perspective changes as rapidly as the street names. Compared to Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World or Richard Pipes’s classic The Russian Revolution 1899–1919, this is revolution-lite, very colorful but without much analysis or context. Rappaport treats readers to glimpses of the general strikes, bread protests, looting, and red banner–waving through the smoky-rose glasses of these wistful and unprepared foreigners. Sadly, the Russians are reduced to a ragged, hungry monochrome mass. Map & illus. Agent: Caroline Michel, Peters Fraser & Dunlop. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Splendid . . . By confining herself to foreigners in Russia's capital, Rappaport takes a necessarily narrow slice of revolutionary history. But the stories these witnesses tell is endlessly fascinating.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Lively . . . Ms. Rappaport’s account works well as an introduction to a complicated year, but is most valuable for its record of the impressions of those who lived through it.” —Wall Street Journal
“One of the great strengths of this book is the way in which the unheralded and the celebrated mingle in its pages . . . A mosaic of truth which no fictional one could outdo.” —The Washington Times
“A multifaceted account of the 1917 Russian Revolution . . . gripping and thoroughly researched. . . [Rappaport brings] the streets and spirit of the early-20th-centuryPetrograd to life on the page.” —Harper’s Bazaar
One of Bustle's 16 Best Nonfiction Books coming in February 2017
One of Harper Bazaar's 14 Books You Need To Read In February
“Helen Rappaport combines thorough scholarship with the stylistic grace of a novelist, and the result is a riveting tale of the Russian Revolution that’s difficult to put down” —PopMatters
“Rappaport’s elegantly detailed writing shapes and pulls together excerpts from letters, diaries, articles, and more, quoted throughout, creating the immediacy and energy of history in the making: terrifying, brutal, and unforgettable.” —Booklist
“The most comprehensive compendium to date of non-Russian perspectives across social classes. . . . An engaging if challenging look at a country's collapse with worldwide repercussions. Informed general readers will enjoy this glimpse into history; scholars will declare it a definitive study.” —Library Journal (starred)
“Rappaport creates a portrait of the Russian Revolution from the points of view of outsiders who happened to be in Petrograd at the time . . . An undeniably valuable history of the Russian Revolution.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Rappaport adopts an eye witness approach to the Russian revolution of 1917 . . . fun, fast-paced.” —Publishers Weekly
"Illuminating . . . Rappaport has collected a wonderful array of observations . . . delightful and enlightening." — The London Times on Caught in the Revolution
"A gripping, vivid, deeply researched chronicle of the Russian Revolution told through the eyes of a surprising, flamboyant cast of foreigners in Petrograd, superbly narrated by Helen Rappaport." —Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs
“Helen Rappaport paints a compelling portrait of the doomed grand duchesses.” —People magazine on The Romanov Sisters
"Rappaport, with a light hand and admiring eyes, allows the four Grand Duchesses to grow on us as they grow up.” —Christian Science Monitor on The Romanov Sisters (10 best books of June 2014)
Library Journal
01/01/2017
Rappaport contributes a unique take on the revolution using vivid primary source accounts from American, British, and French citizens who lived and worked in St. Petersburg in February 1917. The city comes alive as people witnessed the beginnings of a new nation and ideology. (LJ11/15/16)
MARCH 2017 - AudioFile
This centenary year of the Russian Revolution promises a string of new audio histories, but not many will surpass this one for impact. Xe Sands is a subtle and empathetic narrator—not the voice you’d immediately think of for a story of violent upheaval. Helen Rappaport’s narrative, too, told from the perspective of Westerners in the Russian capital in 1917, might initially seem narrow and parochial. But together they bring the listener down to street level to witness firsthand a chain of events that seems astonishing even today. Hunger, confusion, high hopes, terror, and ruthless determination fueled those uncertain months, and, as the chapters unfold, you see and feel with vivid immediacy how everything could have been so different—and yet could have ended no other way. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2016-11-23
Rappaport (The Romanov Sisters, 2014, etc.) gathers together the impressions of foreign witnesses to the historic events of the Russian Revolution.In the heady, uncertain weeks of the revolution, mobs in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) looted and burned any and all artifacts of the Romanov family, only recently deposed. They tore down street signs and museum placards that bore the imperial insignia, and there was frequent shooting in the streets. An American journalist, seeking shelter in a gutter, found himself lying alongside a Russian officer. "I asked what was happening," he wrote later. The officer replied: "The Russians, my countrymen, are idiots. This is a white night of madness." Rappaport records these and other recollections, creating a portrait of the Russian Revolution from the points of view of outsiders who happened to be in Petrograd at the time. Foreign diplomats, journalists, and businessmen recorded their thoughts in letters, journals, and newspaper accounts both in the midst of the action and in the years following. The author uses these accounts, many of them unpublished, to follow the action from the czar's abdication in February 1917 to the ascendancy of the Bolsheviks in October. Rappaport assumes prior knowledge of these complicated events, so leading figures and key moments receive only brief introductions, and she features so many different speakers it can be hard to distinguish among them. Still, their accounts are useful because of the remarkable events they record. Sometimes those events are intriguing for their very prosody. The morning after Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks took control of the Winter Palace, a Dutch diplomat, walking around the city with his wife, found that, while they'd been asleep, "the second Revolution had been accomplished." As he wrote later, "we did not realize what a great historical day we were living in as we trod our way home through the perfectly tranquil streets filled with apathetic, indifferent looking people." An occasionally scattershot but undeniably valuable history of the Russian Revolution.
