Volume 50, Number 16 · October 23, 2003
In Search of Russia
By Orlando Figes
Russia: Experiment with a People
by Robert Service
Harvard University Press,406 pp., $29.95
Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall
by Andrew Meier
Norton, 511 pp., $28.95
In 1909, the Russian prime minister Pëtr Stolypin told a foreign journalist: 'Give the State twenty years of internal and external peace and you will not recognize Russia.' At that time there were real hopes in Russia's huge potential. With its natural wealth and vigorous new industries, Russia promised to become the dominant economic power on the European continent. Western capital was heavily invested in Russian industries. The creative forces of a burgeoning democracy were breaking free from the old authoritarian social order, giving life to an exciting new society. But twenty years of peace were a lot to ask. Two years later, in 1911, Stolypin was assassinated—and with him went the chances of political reform before the catastrophe of 1917.
Review, 4185 words
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