This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.
Paul Miliukov’s
Russia and Its Crisis was one of the most extraordinary and prescient books ever to have emerged from pre-revolutionary Russia. Based upon a series of lectures presented at the University of Chicago and Boston’s Lowell Institute in 1903 and 1904, Russia and Its Crisis laid out the case for the development of a politically
liberal Russia at precisely the moment that the old autocratic order was beginning to crumble.
O autorze
Paul Miliukov (1859-1943) graduated from both Moscow and St. Petersburg universities and began his professional life as a scholar. His political development, not dissimilar to that of many other Russian intellectuals of the time, led him to fight against all the terrors of Tsarist repression, then cherish the potential in Russia for European-style liberal democracy, and then fight, during the height of the October Revolution, to preserve the Tsar’s power in the face of Lenin and the Bolshevik marauders. Indeed, one lasting picture in
To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson’s masterful study of the history of Soviet communism, has Miliukov, as the Provisional Government’s nattily dressed, bespectacled Minister of Foreign Affairs, frantically cabling his consuls in 1917 to prevent Lenin’s train from entering into Russia.