The October Storm and After

An anthology of twenty pieces of fiction and reminiscence about the revolution and the years that followed, by writers who lived through them.

A word on the byline before anything else, because catalogues get it wrong. This is not a book by Anatoly Lunacharsky. He heads the roll of contributors and supplies one reminiscence of about eight hundred words - roughly one per cent of the volume - and the rest is other hands. Among them are John Reed, Mikhail Sholokhov, Vera Panova and Yuri German, in translations by George H. Hanna, Robert Daglish, Margaret Wettlin and Helen Altschuler.

Lunacharsky's own contribution, "Smolny on the Night of the Storm", is vivid and brief, and his presence at the head of the bill is worth understanding. He had been a genuine intellectual - a critic who read four languages, a playwright, the man who ran Soviet education and the arts from 1917 to 1929 - and he died in 1933 on his way to take up an ambassadorship, never arrested and never tried. In the terms of the export catalogue, he was a first-rank Bolshevik whose name could still be printed in gold.

The pieces themselves are the reason to have the book: eyewitness writing about Petrograd in October, the civil war, the Don, and the making of the new state, by people who were there.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on what an undated anthology costs its reader, and on the Lunacharsky that is not in it.