Catherine Merridale's books include Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia, which won the Heinemann Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, Ivan's War: The Red Army, 1939-45 and Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History, which won the Wolfson Prize for History and the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Twice I missed my stop on the Tube reading this book... this is a
jewel among histories, taking a single episode from the penultimate
year of the Great War, illuminating a continent, a revolution and a
series of psychologies in a moment of cataclysm and doing it with
wit, judgment and an eye for telling detail... Catherine Merridale,
who won the Wolfson history prize for Red Fortress, her 2013 book
about the Kremlin, is one of those historians whose work allows you
to understand something more about the world we inhabit now.
*The Times*
'A detailed look at the famous train journey... fascinatingly
realist... [Merridale] is good at capturing the frankly dodgy
atmosphere of high politics and low motives that swirled around
post-abdication Russia... Merridale can bring humour into the most
gruesome moments.
*Spectator*
Catherine Merridale is one of the foremost foreign historians of
Russia, combining wry insights with deep sympathy for the human
beings suffering the tragedies she writes about... It combines
diplomatic intrigue, spycraft, towering personalities, bureaucratic
bungling, military history and ideology. Ms Merridale neatly unites
background and foreground, and deftly evokes the atmosphere of the
time... excellent
*Economist*
Praise for RED FORTRESS: 'Magnificent ... [a] a superbly written
book' Telegraph 'A zingy, razor-keen history of the Kremlin'
Spectator Books of the Year 'Exhilarating'
*Guardian*
A brisk and often witty overview for the lay reader of the
circumstances leading up to the February and October
revolutions.
*The Sunday Times*
With a novelists' readability and a fertile imagination...
Merridale retraces his week-long journey... At the same time, she
skilfully weaves into the story the unfolding revolution
*Observer Review*
With the 100th anniversary of the two Russian revolutions of 1917
around the corner... surely no author will give a better account
than Merridale of how, in that fateful year, Lenin made his way
with German help from exile in Switzerland to Russia.
*Financial Times BOOKS OF THE YEAR*
Fills a lacuna in the canonical record of Soviet communism.... A
superbly written narrative history that draws together and makes
sense of scattered data, anecdotes, and minor episodes, affording
us a bigger picture of events that we now understand to be
transformative
*Kirkus Reviews*
Merridale corrects factual errors made by predecessors and opens a
fresh interpretive perspective. Personal reenactment of Lenin's
eight-day train-and-ferry journey gives force to materials
uncovered through assiduous research in newly opened archives as
Merridale resolves perplexities long surrounding the political
gambles, devious espionage, and shadowy financing that transport
Lenin through Germany on a sealed train bound for a land
tempestuously shedding its czarist past and desperate for a leader
to guide it into an uncharted future. . . . History recovered as
living drama
*Booklist*
A colorful, suspenseful, and well-documented narrative
*Publishers Weekly*
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