By Alex, founder of Highstreett
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Best books about the Russian Revolution: the voices and places the usual lists leave out
Most lists of the best books about the Russian Revolution are lists of Petrograd in 1917, the Romanovs and the men who took power: Lenin, Trotsky, the Winter Palace. Those books are named in one line below the search result. The sixteen picks go where those lists rarely go: the letters of workers, peasants and soldiers, the women of 1917, memoirs of the civil war years, the émigrés, novels in translation, and the empire’s other nations in Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia. For a first pick, try Teffi’s Memories for a writer’s journey into exile, The White Guard for a Kyiv family in the winter of 1918, or Mark D. Steinberg’s The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921 for a history told through what people lived. Last verified 13 October 2026.
Edition and source checks: 13 October 2026.
What Highstreett returned for “Books about the Russian Revolution for a reader who already knows the usual classics such as Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, Sheila Fitzpatrick's The Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes and Doctor Zhivago. Focus on the voices and places the standard lists skip: peasants, workers, women, the non-Russian nationalities in Ukraine, Central Asia and the Caucasus, the civil war, and the emigres; diaries and memoirs from 1917 to 1921; and novels and poetry in translation.”
- The Russian Revolution: A New History, Sean McMeekin (2017)
- October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, China Mieville (2017)
- A People's History of the Russian Revolution, Neil Faulkner (2017)
- The Russian Civil War, Evan Mawdsley (1987)
- The Russian Revolution, 1917, Rex A. Wade (2000)
- The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, S. A. Smith (2002)
See this result · Run 13 October 2026. One request, without re-prompting.
Editor’s verdict: Six general histories, three of them published for the 2017 centenary. Two lean from below, Faulkner’s people’s history and Wade’s account of the revolutionary year; Mawdsley covers the civil war, and S. A. Smith’s short introduction is a sound map. But there is no diary, memoir, novel or poem, nothing centred on women, and no book on Ukraine, the Caucasus or Central Asia, although the query asked for all of them. The one-line description of McMeekin’s book as putting workers and the shop floor at the centre overstates it: it is mainly a narrative of politics, war and money. The search also proposed Peasant Russia, Civil War, under the wrong author (Donald J. Raleigh rather than Orlando Figes), and a Sarah Badcock title that matched no ISBN it found, and dropped both. None of the six is among the sixteen below: they were held back because the search already finds them, and are named in the handed line. The run was logged at 22:57 UK time on 13 October.
How this list was made: it starts from the Highstreett book search results above, run 13 October 2026 and shown as they came back. Alex, founder of Highstreett, chose the final list.
You probably know these already, so they are named here rather than counted: Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy, John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes’s The Russian Revolution, Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Russian Revolution, Victor Sebestyen’s Lenin the Dictator, Catherine Merridale’s Lenin on the Train, Helen Rappaport’s Caught in the Revolution and Four Sisters, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs, Robert Service’s The Last of the Tsars, Douglas Smith’s Rasputin, Antony Beevor’s Russia: Revolution and Civil War, Doctor Zhivago, Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don, Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin in Zurich and November 1916, and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. For a start-here overview, read Fitzpatrick’s short history before any of the picks.
Also left in the handed line because the lists we checked, or our own search, already find them: Sean McMeekin’s The Russian Revolution: A New History and China Miéville’s October (both on Country & Town House’s list and returned by our search), S. A. Smith’s Russia in Revolution (Country & Town House), Neil Faulkner’s A People’s History of the Russian Revolution, Evan Mawdsley’s The Russian Civil War, Rex A. Wade’s The Russian Revolution, 1917 and S. A. Smith’s Very Short Introduction (all returned by our search), Arthur Ransome’s Six Weeks in Russia in 1919 and John Keep’s The Debate on Soviet Power (Five Books, Roland Chambers), Maxim Gorky’s My Childhood and Orlando Figes’s Natasha’s Dance (Five Books, Thomas Keneally), James Meek’s The People’s Act of Love (Historia), and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time (Culture Trip).
The sixteen picks are grouped by what you want next: 1917 in ordinary people’s words, women in the revolution, memoirs of the civil war years, the émigrés, novels in translation, the empire’s other nations, and the civil wars as a whole. Each carries a readability marker. This page gives no death tolls for the civil war, the famine or the pogroms: estimates vary by source, and a list of books is the wrong place to settle them.
If you want 1917 in ordinary people’s words
Both are on none of the five lists we checked. Faulkner’s and Wade’s histories, returned by our search, tell 1917 from below as narrative; Steinberg starts earlier, ends later, and lets people speak for themselves.
1. The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921, Mark D. Steinberg (2016)
Nonfiction · the revolutionary era as people lived it · Readability: moderate, academic but clear
A history of Russia’s revolutionary era from Bloody Sunday in 1905 to the last shots of the civil war in 1921, told as a story of experience. Steinberg keeps two viewpoints at once: the historian’s, looking back, and that of ordinary people at the time, making sense of events as they happened. Differs: an overview that starts from below rather than from the Bolshevik leadership, and runs from 1905, not 1917.
Edition source: Oxford University Press paperback, 1 December 2016, 400 pages; £34.99, in stock and usually dispatched within one to two days at Foyles on 13 October 2026. ISBN 9780199227631.
2. Voices of Revolution, 1917, Mark D. Steinberg; documents translated by Marian Schwartz (2002)
Primary source · workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ own words in 1917 · Readability: moderate, document by document
Letters and other documents written in 1917 by workers, peasants and soldiers, translated and set in context. They show what the revolution meant to the people living it, in their own words, which political histories rarely let them say. Differs: a primary source, not a narrative; read Steinberg’s introductions and dip into the documents.
Edition source: Yale University Press paperback (Annals of Communism), 10 September 2003, 420 pages; £30.00, ordered from the publisher and usually dispatched within two weeks at Foyles on 13 October 2026. The 2002 hardback (9780300090161) was shown as unavailable. ISBN 9780300101690.
If you want women in the revolution
Both are on none of the five lists. Teffi, in the émigré section, is the third woman’s voice on this page.
3. Midwives of the Revolution: Female Bolsheviks and Women Workers in 1917, Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar (1999)
Nonfiction · women workers and women Bolsheviks in 1917 · Readability: demanding, academic but short
The February Revolution began on International Women’s Day 1917, with women textile workers striking in Petrograd. McDermid and Hillyar look at the women workers of that year and at the women of the Bolshevik party, and argue against the usual picture of 1917 as a men’s revolution with women as bystanders or victims. Differs: a short academic study that puts women at the centre of the revolution rather than in a chapter of it.
Edition source: Taylor & Francis paperback, 20 May 1999, 248 pages; £21.99, ordered from the publisher and usually dispatched within three weeks at Foyles on 13 October 2026. ISBN 9781857286243.
4. Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922, Marina Tsvetaeva; translated and edited by Jamey Gambrell (1917–1922; this edition 2017)
Diary and memoir · a poet in Moscow, 1917–1922 · Readability: moderate, fragmentary
Tsvetaeva, one of the great Russian poets of the century, spent the revolution and the civil war in Moscow while her husband was away fighting with the Whites. After she left in 1922 she made the diaries she had kept from 1917 into prose pieces for the émigré press: life in revolutionary Moscow as she saw it. Differs: a poet’s prose from the losing side of the street, not a political memoir, and the most personal book here.
Edition source: New York Review Books paperback, 5 December 2017; £16.99, in stock and usually dispatched within one to two days at Foyles on 13 October 2026. The Yale University Press paperback of the same translation (9780300179590) was shown as unavailable. ISBN 9781681371627.
If you want memoirs of the civil war years
Both are on none of the five lists we checked. One is by a revolutionary who joined the Bolsheviks in 1919 and was later expelled from the Soviet Union; the other by a writer who grew up in Kyiv and worked as a journalist through the revolution.
5. Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge; translated by Peter Sedgwick with George Paizis; foreword by Adam Hochschild (1951; Sedgwick’s translation first published 1963)
Memoir · a Bolshevik in Petrograd and after · Readability: accessible, long
Serge reached Petrograd in January 1919, joined the Bolsheviks that spring and worked for the Communist International through the civil war, helping to defend the city. He stayed a revolutionary and became a critic of the regime’s authoritarianism, was expelled from the Soviet Union, and finished this book in exile in Mexico. Differs: the revolution from inside the party by someone who saw what it became; the civil war years are the heart of it, though it runs from 1901 to 1941.
Edition source: NYRB Classics paperback, 1 May 2012, 576 pages, with notes and a glossary by Richard Greeman; £13.99, in stock and usually dispatched within one to two days at Foyles on 13 October 2026. ISBN 9781590174517.
6. The Story of a Life, Konstantin Paustovsky; translated and introduced by Douglas Smith (1946–1956; this translation 2022)
Memoir · Kyiv, the front and the revolution · Readability: accessible, very long
The first three volumes of Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography in one book: a youth in Kyiv, where Bulgakov was a schoolmate, work as a paramedic at the front in the First World War, and journalism as the country fell into revolution. Differs: written in the Soviet Union decades later, so read it as a writer’s remembered life rather than a record; it is also the longest book here.
Edition source: Vintage Classics paperback, 2 March 2023, 816 pages; £14.99, usually dispatched within three to five days at Foyles on 13 October 2026. ISBN 9781784873097.
If you want the émigrés
Both are on none of the five lists. Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is the émigré memoir most readers know; these are the writers he lived among.
7. Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea, Teffi; translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson and Irina Steinberg; introduced by Edythe Haber (1928–1930; this translation 2016)
Memoir · a writer’s journey into exile · Readability: accessible, funny
Teffi was a hugely popular humorist, read by both Nicholas II and Lenin. In 1918 she left on what was billed as a theatrical tour and travelled south through Ukraine to Odesa and on towards the Black Sea, by cart, freight train and steamer, never to return. She wrote this account in Paris a decade later. Differs: funny as well as frightening, and the most readable book on the page; it ends where exile begins.
Edition source: Pushkin Press paperback, 4 May 2017, 352 pages; £12.99, usually dispatched within three to five days at Foyles on 13 October 2026. ISBN 9781782272991.
8. Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky, Edited by Bryan Karetnyk, who translated most of the stories (2017)
Fiction anthology · Russian writers in exile after 1917 · Readability: accessible, dip in
Stories written in exile in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere by writers who fled the revolution and civil war, from Ivan Bunin, Nabokov and Teffi to writers hardly known in English, such as Yuri Felzen and Vasily Yanovsky. Many worked as taxi drivers, labourers and film extras while they wrote. Differs: the revolution’s aftermath in fiction, from the side that lost, and the widest range of voices on the page.
Edition source: Penguin Classics paperback, 30 May 2019, 464 pages; £12.99, usually dispatched within three to five days at Foyles on 13 October 2026. ISBN 9780241299739.
If you want novels of the civil war in translation
The White Guard is on Historia’s list and Red Cavalry on Thomas Keneally’s for Five Books; Chevengur is on none of the five. Doctor Zhivago and Quiet Flows the Don, in the handed line, are the familiar civil war novels.
9. The White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov; translated by Roger Cockrell (1925 (in full 1927))
Fiction · a family in Kyiv, winter 1918–19 · Readability: accessible
The Turbins, a Russian-speaking family loyal to the old order, sit out the winter of 1918–19 in their Kyiv flat while the German-backed Hetman’s regime collapses and rival armies fight for the city. Bulgakov lived through it there as a young doctor. Differs: the civil war from the losing side’s kitchen table, and the revolution as a Ukrainian story rather than a Petrograd one.
Edition source: Alma Classics paperback, 25 August 2016, 320 pages; £7.99, usually dispatched within six days at Foyles on 13 October 2026. Cockrell’s earlier Alma edition (9781847492456, 2012) and Marian Schwartz’s Yale translation (9780300151459) were shown as unavailable; the Vintage Classics paperback (9780099490661) was in stock, but neither Foyles’ nor Penguin’s page names its translator. ISBN 9781847496201.
10. Red Cavalry and Other Stories, Isaac Babel; translated by David McDuff; edited by Efraim Sicher (1926; this translation 1994)
Fiction · the Red cavalry in the Polish–Soviet war · Readability: accessible, short stories
Short, violent stories of the Polish–Soviet war of 1920, drawn from the diary Babel kept as a reporter with Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army: a Jewish intellectual among Cossacks, riding through Jewish towns the war was wrecking. This edition adds his earlier stories of a Jewish childhood. Differs: the Red side of the civil war, by a writer later executed in Stalin’s purges, and the shortest way into it.
Edition source: Penguin Classics paperback, 7 July 2005, 400 pages; £12.99, in stock and usually dispatched within one to two days at Foyles on 13 October 2026. ISBN 9780140449976.
11. Chevengur, Andrey Platonov; translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler (1928; this translation 2023)
Fiction · a utopian commune on the steppe · Readability: demanding, long and strange
A visionary, comic and terrible novel of the southern Russian steppe from the late 1910s into the 1920s, through war communism and the New Economic Policy, whose dreamers set out to build communism at once. Banned in the Soviet Union, it was published there in full only in 1988. Differs: the revolution as the countryside dreamed it; the hardest of the novels here, and long, so take it slowly.
Edition source: Vintage Classics paperback, 9 January 2025, 592 pages (hardback 2023); £12.99, usually dispatched within three to five days at Foyles on 13 October 2026. ISBN 9781784879150.
If you want the empire’s other nations: Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia
All four are on none of the five lists. The Russian Empire was not only Russia, and much of the fighting after 1917 was in its borderlands; Smele’s book, in the last section, ties them together.
12. In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The 1918–1921 Pogroms in Ukraine and the Onset of the Holocaust, Jeffrey Veidlinger (2021)
Nonfiction · the pogroms in Ukraine, 1918–1921 · Readability: accessible, harrowing
Between 1918 and 1921, in hundreds of separate attacks across Ukraine and Poland, soldiers, peasants and townspeople robbed and murdered their Jewish neighbours, blaming them for the turmoil of the revolution. Veidlinger argues that the pogroms were a defining moment of the century and, as his subtitle says, part of the onset of the Holocaust. Differs: the civil war in Ukraine as its Jewish towns suffered it, which most histories pass over in a paragraph.
Edition source: Pan Macmillan paperback, 3 November 2022 (hardback 2021), 480 pages; £12.99, usually dispatched within three to five days at Foyles on 13 October 2026. ISBN 9781509867479.
13. Ali and Nino, Kurban Said; translated by Jenia Graman (1937)
Fiction · Baku, 1914–1920 · Readability: accessible
A Muslim boy from Baku and a Georgian Christian girl grow up together in the oil city and marry as the old empire falls apart around them, through the First World War, the revolution and the short-lived Azerbaijani republic. Differs: the revolution seen from the Caucasus, as a love story between East and West. Who wrote it is still disputed: Lev Nussimbaum, Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli and Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels have all been proposed.
Edition source: Vintage paperback, 5 October 2000, 240 pages; £9.99, usually dispatched within three to five days at Foyles on 13 October 2026. A new Vintage edition (9781807849863) is listed for 3 June 2027. ISBN 9780099283225.
14. Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires 1908–1918, Michael A. Reynolds (2011)
Nonfiction · the Caucasus between two empires · Readability: demanding, academic
Reynolds tells the collapse of the Russian and Ottoman empires as one story, driven by their rivalry over eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus, the ground on which Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis tried to found states of their own in 1918. Differs: 1917 and its aftermath seen from Istanbul as much as from Petrograd; academic, and it stops in 1918, where Ali and Nino carries on.
Edition source: Cambridge University Press paperback, 27 January 2011, 324 pages; £27.00, in stock and usually dispatched within one to two days at Foyles on 13 October 2026. ISBN 9780521149167.
15. Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present, Adeeb Khalid (2021)
Nonfiction · Central Asia under Russian, Soviet and Chinese rule · Readability: moderate, long
The first full history of Central Asia from the Russian and Qing conquests to the present, in which colonial rule, social revolution and nationalism remake the region. Khalid sets the Soviet republics beside China’s Xinjiang, so what the revolution brought to Tashkent can be compared with Communist rule next door. Differs: a long survey of which the revolution is one part, not a book about 1917; go to the early Soviet chapters first.
Edition source: Princeton University Press paperback, 29 November 2022 (hardback 2021), 576 pages; £25.00, in stock and usually dispatched within one to two days at Foyles on 13 October 2026. ISBN 9780691235196.
If you want the civil wars as a whole
On none of the five lists. Mawdsley’s The Russian Civil War, returned by our search, is the classic narrative of Reds against Whites; Smele’s plural title is the argument.
16. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World, Jonathan D. Smele (2016)
Nonfiction · the wars that followed the empire’s collapse · Readability: demanding, dense
Smele argues that there was no single Russian Civil War but a decade of overlapping struggles that wracked the collapsing empire and the new Soviet state from 1916 to 1926, from the Baltic to the Caucasus, and that their wounds reopened when the Soviet Union fell. Its subtitle borrows from Reed. Differs: the whole decade and the whole empire in one analytical book, rather than a story of Reds and Whites.
Edition source: Hurst paperback, 28 July 2016, 480 pages; £22.00, usually dispatched within three to five days at Foyles on 13 October 2026. The hardback (9781849044240) was shown as unavailable. ISBN 9781849047210.
The editions behind these choices
The ISBNs belong to particular editions, mostly the current UK paperback; four are American editions sold in the UK (Earthly Signs and Memoirs of a Revolutionary from NYRB, Voices of Revolution from Yale, Central Asia from Princeton). Prices and availability are what Foyles’ product pages showed on 13 October 2026; they change. None of the sixteen was shown as unavailable new, but two are ordered from the publisher and take two to three weeks: Voices of Revolution, 1917 and Midwives of the Revolution. For The White Guard we give Roger Cockrell’s translation because it is the in-print edition whose translator Foyles names. Bookshop.org, Blackwell’s, Hive and Wordery were not checked.
The honest bit
This page is deliberately weighted away from Petrograd and the Bolshevik leadership, so it is not a balanced first shelf. If you have read nothing on the revolution, start with Fitzpatrick’s short history or S. A. Smith’s Very Short Introduction from the handed line, then come back.
Four picks are demanding: Midwives of the Revolution, Shattering Empires, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars and Chevengur. The Story of a Life and Memoirs of a Revolutionary are long. Teffi’s Memories, The White Guard, Red Cavalry, Ali and Nino and the émigré stories are the easiest ways in.
Not every voice here is first-hand. Steinberg, McDermid and Hillyar, Veidlinger, Khalid, Reynolds and Smele are historians; Serge and Paustovsky wrote their memoirs decades later, Serge in exile and Paustovsky in the Soviet Union; Teffi and Tsvetaeva shaped their memories and diaries into prose in emigration; Ali and Nino was published in Vienna under a pseudonym whose owner is still disputed.
There is no poetry pick: the one English edition of Blok’s The Twelve we found at Foyles (Cold Hub Press, 2021) was shown as unavailable, and Boris Dralyuk’s anthology of stories and poems from 1917, on Historia’s list, was not listed there at all. Left out because they were unavailable new at Foyles: N. N. Sukhanov’s The Russian Revolution 1917 (Princeton, the abridged eyewitness record), S. A. Smith’s Red Petrograd on the factory workers, the peasant histories by Orlando Figes, Aaron Retish and Sarah Badcock, Barbara Evans Clements’s Bolshevik Women and Alexandra Kollontai’s fiction in Love of Worker Bees. Ivan Bunin’s diary Cursed Days and Zinaida Gippius’s diaries had no English edition listed there. The search result above is unedited.
Questions
What is the best single book on the Russian Revolution?
For a short overview, Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Russian Revolution or S. A. Smith’s Very Short Introduction; for a long one, Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy. For the revolution as people lived it from 1905 to 1921, Mark D. Steinberg’s The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921, the first pick on this page.
Are there memoirs and diaries of the Russian Revolution and civil war in English?
Yes. Teffi’s Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson and Irina Steinberg), Marina Tsvetaeva’s Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922 (translated by Jamey Gambrell), Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary (translated by Peter Sedgwick with George Paizis) and Konstantin Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life (translated by Douglas Smith). N. N. Sukhanov’s eyewitness record of 1917 is in English too, but was unavailable new when we checked.
What novels are set in the Russian Civil War besides Doctor Zhivago?
Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard (Kyiv, winter 1918–19, translated by Roger Cockrell), Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (the Polish–Soviet war of 1920, translated by David McDuff), Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur (the southern steppe from the late 1910s into the 1920s, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler) and Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino (Baku, 1914–1920). Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don is the familiar Cossack epic.
For a more useful book search, say which people, place or year of the revolution you want, and whether you want a memoir, a novel or a history.
Find a book for your Russian Revolution question
Best books about the First World War: for the war that brought the empire down, told from the other armies and fronts.
Best books about the Second World War: for the next war, including the Soviet war in women’s voices.
Best books about the Cold War: for the divided world the revolution’s state went on to shape.
How the comparison was bounded
On 13 October 2026 we read five general lists: the two Five Books interviews on the revolution (Roland Chambers, 2012, and Thomas Keneally, 2009, counted together as one source), Pan Macmillan’s The best books on the Russian Revolution (6 titles, May 2017), Historia’s Top ten books about the Russian Revolution (10, Carol McGrath, March 2017), Culture Trip’s reading list on the Russian Revolution (8, Simon Leser, March 2017) and Country & Town House’s best books on the Russian Revolution (4, Richard Hopton, undated). Fourteen of the sixteen picks appear on none of the five lists and two on one: The White Guard on Historia’s and Red Cavalry on Keneally’s. None is on two. Most of these lists were written for the centenary in 2017. These are bounded comparisons, not proof that the books are unknown to specialists.
- Five Books: The best books on the Russian Revolution (Roland Chambers)
- Five Books: The best books on Revolutionary Russia (Thomas Keneally)
- Pan Macmillan: The best books on the Russian Revolution
- Historia: Top ten books about the Russian Revolution, by Carol McGrath
- Culture Trip: The best books to read on the Russian Revolution
- Country & Town House: Best books on the Russian Revolution, by Richard Hopton