Nikolai Charushin's memoirs of his experience as a member of the revolutionary populist movement in Russia are familiar to historians, but A Generation of Revolutionaries provides a broader and more engaging look at the lives and relationships beyond these memoirs. It shows how, after years of incarceration, Charushin and friends thrived in Siberian exile, raising children and contributing to science and culture there. While Charushin's memoirs end with his return to European Russia, this sweeping biography follows this group as they engaged in Russia's fin de siecle society, took part in the 1917 revolution, and struggled in its aftermath. A Generation of Revolutionaries provides vibrant and deeply personal insights into the turbulent history of Russia from the Great Reforms to the era of Stalinism and beyond. In doing so, it tells the story of a remarkable circle of friends whose lives balanced love, family and career with exile, imprisonment, and revolution.

About the Author

Ben Eklof is Professor of History at Indiana University. He is author of Russian Peasant Schools and a coeditor along with John Bushnell and Larissa Zakharova of Russia's Great Reforms, 1855-1881 (Indiana University Press 1994).

Tatiana Saburova is Visiting Professor of History at Indiana University, Professor of History at Omsk Pedagogical University, and a Research Fellow at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Her books and articles focus on the Russian intelligentsia, collective biography, memory, and on the history of photography.

Reviews

By tracing the complex lives of Charushin and his generation Eklof and Saburova have made an important contribution to the history of Russian society in the volatile years before and after 1917.

* The Russian Review *

A Generation of Revolutionaries will be of value to all historians interested in the longue duree of the Russian Revolution. It deserves to be read widely.

* Slavonic and East European Review *

The book is engagingly written and well sourced, the product of extensive archival research, including in provincial Russian archives. . . . Highly recommended.

* Choice *

This excellent work deserves a broad audience.

* The Russian Review *

Anyone interested in digging deeper into some of the less-examined facets of late imperial and early Soviet Russia will be well rewarded by this wide-ranging generational study.

* American Historical Review *

This richly researched and compelling study situates the Populists not only in the revolutionary movement of the 1870s and 1880s but also reintegrates them into the wider history of Russia.

* Slavic Review *

This is certainly a book in Russian studies in which new archives matter. The encounter of new material and old archetypes of the radical populist intelligentsia offers readers insight at every turn.

* American Historical Review *

This is a powerful piece of scholarship that will stand for a long time. It transcends previous conceptions of what a history of Populism should be and demonstrates how biography can open doors to so much more than the life of a single individual.

* Ab Imperio *

Eklof and Saburova lay bare the underlying challenges for biographers in reconstructing and knowing their subjects and, in so doing, provide an elegant and thoroughly modern take on the memoirs they survey, wringing from them questions of meaning, emotion, universality, and significance.

* Journal of Modern History *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253031211
Author Ben Eklof
Format Paperback
Page Count 412
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press