Blood on the Snow

Blood on the Snow, by Robert Service, tackles a terrifying subject with insight and authority, as noted by Michael Burleigh, who describes it as 'A terrific book about a terrifying subject by the best historian of Russia working today'.

In Blood on the Snow, Service returns to the subject that has formed the backbone of his long and distinguished career: the Russian Revolution.

For Service, the great unanswered question is how to reconcile the two vital narratives that underpin the extraordinary but troubled events of 1917. One narrative places the blame squarely on Tsar Nicholas II and Alexander Kerensky's provisional government that deposed him. The other offers the perspective of the workers and peasants who demanded democratic socialism, not the Bolshevik dictatorship imposed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his successors.

Service's vivid and revisionist account spans the period from the outbreak of the First World War to Lenin's death in 1924. In this work, he reveals that key seeds of the revolution were sown by the Tsar's decision to join the war against Germany in 1914. He demonstrates with brutal clarity how those events unfolded, eventually leading to the establishment of the totalitarian Soviet regime, which would endure for the next seven decades.

Nicholas II, Kerensky, and Lenin are central figures, but Service enriches his narrative by drawing on the little-known diaries of individuals like the Vologda peasant Alexander Zamaraev, the NCO Alexei Shtukaturov, and the Moscow accounts clerk Nikita Okunev. Through the testimonies of these 'ordinary' people, Service traces the tortuous path that Russia navigated through war, revolution, and civil war.