num_pages: 573
description: The author of The Romanovs ('81) has written a choppy, unilluminating account of perhaps the most vividly &amp; extensively chronicled period in Russian history: from ca 1890 to the Revolution. The panorama that Lincoln presents is broad but static. Chapters are devoted to descriptions of the miseries of the peasantry who endured famine in 1891 &amp; deprivation thereafter--until Stolypin threw them some crumbs to ensure their support in suppressing the '05 revolutionary movement; to the archaic Russian nobility; to the misery &amp; degradation of the urban masses; to the Romanovs; to the ill-fated war with Japan in '05 etc. The thing that seems to tie these topics together, in Lincoln's telling, is syphilis--which, we're told pointedly, infected a broader strata of the population in Russia than elsewhere. Prostitution statistics also get considerable play. Similarly, a chapter on the sexually liberated artistic fringe--which included Diaghilev, Blok &amp; Belyi--makes much of the poet mystic Soloviev as a prophet of sexual pleasure &amp; also ludicrously pronounces him "the 1st--&amp; only--philosopher that 19th-century Russia produced." Little historical explanation is attempted, but he tends toward the view that what was lacking in prerevolutionary Russia was strong leadership: the assassination of Stolypin, the one strong leader produced by the old order, should have advised him otherwise. (Russian institutions collapsed as much from their dead weight as from anything else.) Altogether, he's provided many undigested facts &amp; much garish color--but little else. For the serious general reader, this bears no comparison with Harrison Salisbury's Black Night, White Snow ('78).--Kirkus (edited)
language: English
title: In war's dark shadow: The Russians before the Great War
publisher: Dial Press (NYC)