Lewis Siegelbaum, who teaches at Michigan State University, is the author of Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile.
A short time after the Russian prime minister P.A. Stolypin was assassinated in September 1911, Alexander Guchkov made a speech in the State Duma about the impact of revolutionary terrorism in which he recalled an assassination attempt from 45 years earlier:
The generation to which I belong was born on the eve of Karakozov’s shots; in the 1870s and 1880s, a bloody and menacing wave of...
The NKVD came for Angelina and Nelly Bushueva’s father in 1937, when they were one and three years old. Nine months later, the sisters were sent to different orphanages when their mother, Zinaida, was sent to the Akmolinsk Labour Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland, along with their baby brother, Slava. Zinaida’s own mother found Nelly several weeks later but didn’t...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.