Nikolai Sukhanov

"Sukhanov stood at the centre of the Russian revolution as an active participant, keen observer and lively chronicler. He recorded the revolution's most stirring events in a vivid and remarkably honest seven-volume memoir where he took the measure of such leading figures as Lenin, Trotsky, Martov, Chernov, Tsereteli, Miliukov and many others. He played a major role in the early days of the Petrograd Soviet as founding member and ideologist; and, as editor and political columnist of the leading opposition newspaper, he was a pivotal figure in the political-intellectual ferment of the revolution. During the crucial agrarian debates of the 1920s, Sukhanov fearlessly championed the Russian village commune, the obshchina, against those Communist economists who prepared the party for Stalin's brutal collectivization policy. A defendant at the farcical Menshevik show-trial of March 1931, and subsequently the victim of a trumped-up charge of spying for Germany, Sukhanov was shot in June 1940 and only rehabilitated in 1992. His fate epitomizes the tragedy of those members of Russia's radical intelligentsia who sought a place for themselves in the Soviet system and were destroyed by it."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.