Review of "Five Days Which Transformed Russia," by Sergei Mstislavskii

 Review of

Five Days Which Transformed Russia, by Sergei Mstislavskii ISBN 0253211174

Five out of five stars

 A lot of history packed into a week.

 Strong arguments can be made for the position that the single greatest short-term event of the twentieth century was the revolution in the Russian Empire that led to the downfall of Tsar Nicholas II and the establishment of the first communist state. The massive country that was once an empire splintered off four new countries and eventually led to a superpower standoff that lasted for almost fifty years. The fear of what was then called Bolshevism terrified conservative elements in Europe, helping fuel the rise of fascism and the Second World War. Which was fundamentally a battle between fascism and communism.

Mstislavskii was an anthropologist and writer and a member of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries  party and played a significant role in the steps of the Russian revolution that took place in February. In this book he recounts his being sent to arrest the already captive former Czar Nicholas II. As his recollection of the five main days demonstrates, there was fundamentally little planning to the revolution. It rose spontaneously, in reality it started as an old-fashioned bread riot. Once the revolution started, there was little to no organization at the top.

 The parties of the left tried to unite as did the parties on the right. The only group that was organized with the courage to act forcefully were the Bolsheviks, who later took advantage of the disorganization of their opposition to seize power. From what appears in this book, the other parties never ever seemed to understand that their old society had essentially disappeared.

 This is a book that explains much about the inner workings of the governmental organization in the immediate aftermath of the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. As Mstislavskii puts it very well, it was just a muddle mess. As a final note, Mstislavskii lived until 1943 and apparently died of natural causes. This demonstrates that he was a political survivor, for very few of the revolutionaries survived Stalin’s purges of the 1930’s.