These are challenging times.  My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine at this difficult hour.  

That said, I'm going to try to post a little more often in the coming months.  In part this is because I am planning to teach a course in the Russian Revolution, and that course starts next week.  The book I've assigned for this course is Eyewitnesses to the Russian Revolution, edited by Todd Chretien.  The book does a reasonably good job of stringing primary sources together to describe both the bourgeois and Bolshevik phases of the unrest of 1917.  However, the book is clearly intended to describe the October Revolution from a pro-Bolshevik standpoint.  It relies very heavily on Bolshevik sources, or sources friendly to Lenin's general line of thinking.  It fails to provide readers with many alternative perspectives. For me, it was interesting to hear how Leftist historians might interpret each phase of the Revolution, but for students without much historical context the selected sources might prove misleading. Still, I'm hopeful that I can use the pro-Bolshevik sources as a counterpoint to my own views about the meaning of events.

As preparation for online presentations, I looked at some of the Very Short Introduction books related to the general context of the Russian Revolution.  All of these were fairly good.  The most relevant of these books was S.A. Smith's Russian Revolution, but I used Stephen Lowell's book, The Soviet Union, to help me think about how the Revolution fits into the overall trajectory of the USSR, and Michael Newman's book, Socialism, to place the Bolsheviks into a broader socialist tradition.  I also relied on the introductory chapters of Jack Goldstone's Revolutions, if only to remind me of some basic questions students should think about when they come to the study of social unrest for the first time.  (See my earlier post on this book) I do think that book should be tempered by Hannah Arendt's On Revolution is better, however, in that it tries to explain that revolutions aren't really an ahistorical phenomenon, as Goldstone seems to contend.  In other words, the term Revolution, as we understand it today, has very little to do with premodern forms of social unrest, revolt, and armed resistance.

While discussing Russian books in this series, I should conclude by saying that earlier, I also read and liked Catriona Kelly's Russian Literature.  And I hope to read the books on Marx and the Russian Economy soon.