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“... Olga Chekhova was the beautiful and talented niece of Anton Chekhov’s wife, Olga Knipper. Her life spanned Lenin’s Revolution, Stalin’s Terror, and the rise and fall of Hitler’s Reich; her relatives and friends were actors, politicians, millionaires and spies. She liked to dramatise herself, embroidering her anecdotes of childhood and youth with wild jackals, rugged scenery and doting older men ...”

“... Elena’s invitation to the hitchhiker was not encouraging. ‘We’ll give you a lift if you want,’ she said. ‘But honestly I wouldn’t get in this car with us. For a start, the thing’s a wreck. The lights aren’t working. We don’t know what’s happened to them. We’ve already had one crash, and it was all my fault because I can’t really drive ...”

“... Aleksandr Nikitenko’s memoir is unusual: the fact that it exists is odd enough. Nikitenko was a serf, born in 1804 or 1805 in the village of Alekseevka, in the Ukrainian province of Voronezh. Few people from his background would have been able to write their own names, let alone a full-scale history of their lives. The thirty million serfs of the Russian Empire were little more than slaves – they followed their own trade but nothing they earned belonged to them – and their masters for the most part believed that too much education might turn them into rebels ...”

“... In her introduction to Night of Stone Catherine Merridale tells us that she began the book with the intention of writing about ‘the disruption and reinvention of ritual’: I had been intrigued by the idea that a modern revolution could try to create an entirely new kind of person. As I began to collect material about the Bolsheviks’ first efforts, about the League of the Militant Godless and the Society for the Dissemination of Scientific Cremation, the history I thought I was writing was a study of ideology, propaganda and mentalities ...”

“... be liberated from totalitarian rule until the Red Army departed. In her highly readable history Catherine Merridale does not tell us which of those two characterisations better fits the Red Army. It is the individual soldier that interests her. Though the ‘epic story’ of World War Two has been often told, the ‘stories’ of the ‘thirty million ...”

“... Much of this demolition and rebuilding went on within the walls of the Kremlin, which is why Catherine Merridale’s book is important. Merridale established herself with Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (2000) and Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-45 (2007), both of which displayed her ...”