Caught in the Revolution

A gripping, vivid, deeply researched chronicle of the Russian Revolution told through the eyes of a surprising, flamboyant cast of foreigners in Petrograd, superbly narrated by Helen Rappaport.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs

Chronicles the events of 1917 through the eyes of foreigners resident in Petrograd — diplomats, journalists, merchants, factory owners, charity workers and simple Russophiles... a wonderful array of observations, most of them misguided, some downright bizarre. What makes this book so delightful and enlightening is the depth of incredulity it reveals... [A] wonderful book.

Gerard DeGroot, The Times

Thoroughly-researched and absorbing... this book offers a compelling picture of life in Petrograd in this momentous and often terrible year... One gets a wonderful picture of the extraordinary and beautiful city... and a keen sense of the really grotesque inequality that has always existed there.

Allan Massie, Scotsman

Fascinating… A colourful account of expatriate life in the Russian capital in 1917.

Peter Conradi, Sunday Times

A past more dramatic than Chekhov, more tragic than Tolstoy and more romantic than Pasternak... Helen Rappaport collates a vast menagerie of eyewitnesses [from Petrograd 1917] into a cast of fascinating characters... bring[ing] an absorbing period of history closer to home.

Guy Pewsey, Evening Standard

Next year's centenary will prompt a raft of books on the Russian Revolution. They will be hard pushed to better this highly original, exhaustively researched and superbly constructed account.

Saul David, Daily Telegraph

A vivid account of the city ‘taut as a wire’… highly readable and fluent… Rappaport has unearthed striking new material

Spectator, Charlotte Hobson

This is narrative history at its very best, communicating the confusion, exhilaration, horror and despair of that momentous year

BBC History Magazine

The strength of Rappaport’s work is the immediacy it provides, the sense of what it was like to experience the Revolution

Douglas Smith, Literary Review

This book will, no doubt, be followed by many others as the centenary of the revolution approaches. It will be surprising if any match this one for originality, vividness and a visceral sense of excitement... Meticulous, detailed, wonderfully comprehensive.

shinynewbooks.co.uk

A dramatic and absorbing narrative

Catholic Herald

A vivid account... Give[s] an authentic sense of months of chaos, marked by surging crowds, looted bakeries and outbreaks of gunfire, some seemingly random and some viciously aimed... Rappaport chooses their graphic accounts brilliantly.

Jonathan Steele, Guardian

Ms Rappaport's book [is] a mosaic of truth which no fictional one could outdo.

Martin Rubin, Washington Times

Splendid ... Rappaport has unearthed plenty of wonderful new material ... The story [her] witnesses tell is endlessly fascinating.

Owen Matthews, The New York Times

[A] lively narrative

David Reynolds, The New Statesman

Rappaport has dug deeper. She has unearthed from private sources, the Library of Congress and the Leeds Russian archive numerous accounts previously untold, and gives an unfailingly gripping picture of chaos as seen through the eyes of the orderly.

Times Literary Supplement

This research is impressive and the narrative she has constructed makes for an excellent read

Chartist

Immediate, fast-moving … fascinating

The Times on the Audiobook