Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Mar-17
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 3/30/1953
WEBSITE: http://willenglund.com/
CITY: Baltimore
STATE: MD
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Author.aspx?id=4294992720 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Englund
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016067265
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016067265
HEADING: Englund, Will
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008 161212n| azannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2016067265
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100 1_ |a Englund, Will
670 __ |a 1917, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Will Englund) data view (journalist; Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post; won Pulitzer Prize; lives in Baltimore, MD)
PERSONAL
Born March 30, 1953; married Kathy Lally (a journalist); children: two daughters.
EDUCATION:Harvard University, B.A.; Columbia University, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Baltimore Sun, former editorial writer and associate editor, beginning 1977; National Journal, former White House correspondent; Washington Post, Moscow correspondent, beginning 2010.
AWARDS:George Polk award, Overseas Press Club prize, and Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, all 1998, all for coverage of the shipbreaking industry.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Will Englund has worked as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun and National Journal, and he has served has Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post since 2010. As a reporter, Englund has been honored with a George Polk award, Overseas Press Club prize, and Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. His first book, March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution, was published in 2017, and it addresses two watershed issues that came to a head in March, 1917. The first issue, according to Englund, was the heated debate in Washington surrounding America’s decision to join or not join World War I. The second issue was the end of czarist autocracy in Russia. Englund moves between these debates and the fall of czarist Russia, explaining that the United States was encouraged to join the war after Russia became democratic. At the time, the United States believed that Russia would serve as an ally in the fight against Germany. As Englund portrays these developments, he profiles the actions of such notable figures as Jeannette Rankin, Woodrow Wilson, and Leon Trotsky. Indeed, a Publishers Weekly critic announced, “Englund uses light and compelling storytelling to enliven multiple narratives of select individuals.”
As David M. Shribman put it in Boston Globe Online, March, 1917, “was the month when Russians took arms against their own government and when Americans girded to take arms against Germany in World War I. It is not too much to say that the month launched the world on a trajectory it would follow for the rest of the 20th century, the very argument Will Englund successfully makes in this new fast-paced history.” Steve Donoghue, writing in the Christian Science Monitor Online, was also impressed, and he asserted that “Englund’s energetic, intensely readable book largely splits its narrative along the fault-lines of these two events; in deliberate and carefully-researched order, March 1917 unfolds the events of not just the month but the whole year on which the future of half the world hinged.”
Lauding the volume in Washington Post Online, Charles King stated that “Englund deftly intertwines the Russian story with the American one, in an eventful month that launched America into the world and signaled Russia’s temporary retreat from it. But the causal connections are opaque. March 1917 is a remarkable portrait of two countries on the cusp of change, but their entry and exit were ultimately minor drivers of the near-term military and political outcomes across Europe and beyond.” King then went on to comment that “not all history-writing needs causes and effects. Evocation is a legitimate, maybe even the most honest, way of making sense of the past.” Indeed, a Kirkus Reviews critic found that “Englund is an accomplished storyteller, and he well captures the spirit of the time. . . . The author also ably portrays the unfortunate misperceptions about emerging Russian democracy.”
In the words of Washington Times Online columnist Martin Rubin, “with so many books taking a sweeping view of a big, hydra-headed topic like World War I, there is great virtue in a book like this which bores deep into a pivotal month out of its four dozen plus other ones.” Rubin additionally explained that America’s bet on Russia was misguided, remarking: “Tragically, anti-Semitism and other forms of tyrannical repression would continue to flourish in Russia for many more decades in the post-Czarist political and social soil that was equally fertile for the growth of such poisons. But a book like March 1917 allows us to view the world from its hopeful—sometimes hopelessly naive—viewpoint, even if we cannot quite shut off the lens of hindsight.” Offering more strident applause in Library Journal, Jacob Sherman announced that March 1917 is “recommended for those eager to learn about watershed moments in history and all readers interested in World War I.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2017, review of March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution.
Library Journal, January 1, 2017, Jacob Sherman, review of March 1917.
Publishers Weekly, January 16, 2017, review of March 1917.
ONLINE
Boston Globe Online, https://www.bostonglobe.com/ (March 17, 2017), David M. Shribman, review of March 1917.
Christian Science Monitor Online, https://www.csmonitor.com/ (March 15, 2017), Steve Donoghue, review of March 1917.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (March 24, 2017), Charles King, review of March 1917.
Washington Times Online, http://www.washingtontimes.com/ (June 18, 2017), Martin Rubin, review of March 1917.
Will Englund Website, http://willenglund.com/ (October 12, 2017).*
Biography
I once saw a plaque on the wall of a church in St. Petersburg commemorating parishioners who had died during the First World War, and it struck me that in all my years in Russia I had never before seen a public memorial to that conflict. At least 1.7 million Russian soldiers were killed in the war, yet their memory had been obliterated. World War I, of course, had led to revolution, civil war, Stalin and the gulag, which might explain why Russians didn’t care to dwell on it. Recently, President Vladimir Putin has tried to spur Russian awareness of the war; we’ll see if he succeeds.
That plaque led, eventually, to the writing of my book, March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution.
With my wife, the journalist Kathy Lally, I spent 12 years altogether in Russia. We were there from 1991 to 1995 and from 1997 to 2001 for the Baltimore Sun, and then a third time, from 2010 to 2014, for the Washington Post. It was a time of great upheaval, of poverty and recovery, of war and peace, and yet in so many ways it seemed that nothing could ever change Russia. Maybe this is what got me thinking about the cataclysm of that long ago war.
I worked for a number of years as a reporter, foreign correspondent, editor and editorial writer for the Sun, which was once a paper that gave its roving journalists considerable latitude in deciding what to write about. Between our first two Moscow stints, I took part in a project that investigated shipbreaking – that is, the scrapping of old ships for their steel – and I roamed from Rhode Island to San Francisco to Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas, and eventually all the way to Alang, in the Indian state of Gujarat. That series won a George Polk award, an Overseas Press Club prize, and the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, in 1998.
My siblings have wondered how I, who grew up in a comfortable suburban home in Pleasantville, N.Y., and was never very adventurous, ended up as a foreign correspondent. Besides India and Russia, I covered war in the Balkans and in Afghanistan, and the Arab Spring in Cairo. When our two daughters, now grown, were very young, Kathy and I spent five months in Glasgow, working on an exchange for the Glasgow Herald. Maybe that’s where we got the bug. Sometimes, I guess, you just go where your nose leads you.
It was on a trip to Korea in 2007 that I struck up a friendship that would lead, a few months later, to my joining National Journal as a White House correspondent. This was my first real plunge into Washington journalism, it lasted two-and-a-half years, and it helped give me the courage to tackle the American angle in this book.
I studied English literature as a Harvard undergraduate, because I figured novels would be more interesting than textbooks. Yet it was the master’s program at Columbia University’s journalism school that actually taught me something about writing. Now I’m finally getting around to the book form.
I still live in Baltimore; I still work at the Washington Post, commuting every day to a job on the foreign desk.
Will Englund
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William A. (Will) Englund (born March 30, 1953) is an assistant foreign editor for The Washington Post.[1] He began working for the Post in October 2010 as a Moscow correspondent.[2]
Contents [hide]
1 Awards
2 Life
3 References
4 External links
Awards[edit]
He was the recipient of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for his investigative reporting and work on the shipbreaking industry.[3] His work reports on the shipbreaking industry also won him the Overseas Press Club awards as well as the George Polk award.[2]
Life[edit]
This section of a biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (October 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
A native of Pleasantville, New York, he joined The Sun, of Baltimore, in 1977. Englund obtained his degree from Harvard College and then from Columbia University. He, and his wife Kathy Lally, worked for the Glasgow Herald as part of a Fulbright scholarship in 1988, and were foreign correspondents in Moscow for The Sun from 1991–1995 and from 1997-2001. Englund and his wife finished their third tour as Moscow correspondents for The Washington Post in May 2014. He was an editorial writer and associate editor for The Sun. He was White House correspondent for National Journal.[2][4] He has also written about the perspective of Islam in Russia along with the desperate situations of Chernobyl veterans in Ukraine.[5]
References[edit]
Jump up ^ Englund&, Will (April 12, 2012). "Will Englund". The Washington Post.
^ Jump up to: a b c "Will Englund - THe Washington Post". The Washington Post. 28 June 2012. Retrieved 2 April 2013.
Jump up ^ "The Pulitzer Prize Winners, 1998, Investigative Reporting". Retrieved 2007-05-08.
Jump up ^ http://pulitzercenter.org/people/will-englund
Jump up ^ "Will Englund | Pulitzer Center". Retrieved 3 April 2013.
Will Englund
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Pulitzer, Polk, and Overseas Press Club Award–winning journalist Will Englund was a recent Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post and has spent a total of twelve years reporting from Russia. He now lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Print Marked Items
Englund, Will: MARCH 1917
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Englund, Will MARCH 1917 Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 3, 7 ISBN: 978-0-393-29208-4
In his debut, Washington Post assistant foreign editor Englund takes a close look at a month "that wrenched America
toward a new course."This was the month immediately before Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to take America into
World War I. Wilson, the book's central figure, was initially determined to keep America neutral but was also
relentlessly drawn to the conclusion that escalating German attacks on American shipping required the nation to join
the hostilities. Early in the month, the first Russian revolution broke out and the hapless Czar Nicholas II abdicated,
thus eliminating the embarrassing prospect of Americans fighting for democracy alongside an absolute despotism.
Supporting players in the drama include Theodore Roosevelt, fulminating for a war he would not be permitted to join;
Jeannette Rankin, the first American congresswoman, who wanted to focus on obtaining suffrage for women but first
had to decide how to vote on going to war; H.L. Mencken, the Germanophile journalist who spent March in Cuba
covering a farcical failed revolution; and James Reese Europe, a pioneering jazz and military band leader. Englund is
an accomplished storyteller, and he well captures the spirit of the time: in Russia, where the exhilaration and confusion
as the nation stumbled toward a humiliating separate peace with Germany and a second revolution; in America, full of
anxiety and anticipation as the country slid reluctantly into war. The author also ably portrays the unfortunate
misperceptions about emerging Russian democracy. Englund's self-imposed time frame proves constraining, however.
The events of March were, of course, the culmination of earlier developments that require and receive full explanation,
particularly the resumption by Germany of unrestricted submarine warfare and the now-famous Zimmermann telegram.
The coverage of Rankin's congressional debut effectively displays the distressing split that the prospect of war caused
in the ranks of the suffragists, but the adventures of Mencken and James Europe seem of only tangential relevance. An
entertaining narrative of events that have received more thorough treatment elsewhere.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Englund, Will: MARCH 1917." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357409&it=r&asid=9b833e3a39d78b38e8cdb8446ead7a2c.
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Englund, Will. March 1917: On the Brink of War
and Revolution
Jacob Sherman
Library Journal.
142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p108.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Englund, Will. March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution. Norton. Mar. 2017.416p. illus. notes, bibliog.
index. ISBN 9780393292084. $27.95; ebk. ISBN 9780393292091. HIST
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In March 1917, World War I in Europe had sputtered to a stalemate. Few thought that the war would be over soon.
However, that month altered the conflict's trajectory with the ouster of Nicholas II of Russia and the galvanizing of
prowar forces within the United States. Journalist Englund, most recently Moscow correspondent for The Washington
Post, ties these two events together in this debut book. The author maintains that when Russian liberals seized control,
this event led to another ally for the Americans. As Englund narrates, because Russia was now democratic, the United
States could trust her as a force of good in the defeat of autocratic Germany. This book nicely details both the political
arena and the submerged social currents. It also adds to the knowledge base about this time period which has been
described in Adam Tooze's The Deluge, Marc Ferro's The Russian Revolution of February 1917, and Ross Kennedy's
The Will To Believe. VERDICT Recommended for those eager to learn about watershed moments in history and all
readers interested in World War I.--Jacob Sherman, John Peace Lib., Univ. of Texas at San Antonio
Sherman, Jacob
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sherman, Jacob. "Englund, Will. March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2017, p.
108+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562401&it=r&asid=28d24da612968cd9034169ee8cbc76cb.
Accessed 26 Sept. 2017.
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March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution
Publishers Weekly.
264.3 (Jan. 16, 2017): p53.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution
Will Englund. Norton, $26.95 (416p) ISBN 978-0-393-29208-4
Despite the plethora of books on WWI, Englund, an experienced Moscow-based correspondent for the Washington
Post, crafts a novel and persuasive point of entry into the topic, focusing on the pivotal month of March 1917-"the most
critical month in Washington since the Civil War." He structures his narrative history around two primary
developments: the lead-up to U.S. involvement in the war in Europe, amid unceasing German submarine warfare and
after raucous domestic debate, and the overthrow of czarist autocracy in Russia. Englund alternates between these two
primary narratives and deftly interweaves additional stories and anecdotes to provide social, cultural, and political
context for this pivotal time. These elements largely center on the U.S.: race relations, labor disputes, music, sports, and
more. Englund uses light and compelling storytelling to enliven multiple narratives of select individuals, including
then-President Woodrow Wilson, former president Theodore Roosevelt, "professional revolutionary" Leon Trotsky,
women suffrage activists, an American banker in Russia witnessing its revolution, and a privileged couple in the
Ukraine. Despite the lack of any groundbreaking perspectives or material, Englund delivers a satisfying, well written,
and well timed work. Illus. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution." Publishers Weekly, 16 Jan. 2017, p. 53. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478405305&it=r&asid=5e53349f03f335dc525357a7693fa8e4.
Accessed 26 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A478405305
BOOKS BOOK REVIEWS
'March 1917' follows Russia and the US in a year that shaped the future
Journalist Will Englund suggests that World War I set both the United States and Russia on the paths they would follow for the next century.
By Steve Donoghue MARCH 15, 2017
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March 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the two events that form the support-columns for veteran news correspondent Will Englund's new book, March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution. First, Russian Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, ending centuries of Romanov rule. Second, the United States, led by President Woodrow Wilson, abandoned its official stance of neutrality toward the war grinding on in Europe and instead declared war on Germany. Englund's energetic, intensely readable book largely splits its narrative along the fault-lines of these two events; in deliberate and carefully-researched order, "March 1917" unfolds the events of not just the month but the whole year on which the future of half the world hinged.
Englund is hardly the first to characterize 1917 as a watershed year. The so-called February Revolution that rocked St. Petersburg in March of 1917 not only drove the Tsar from power but began the radical re-shaping of Russian rule that would then be galvanized by Lenin in the October Revolution, in which March's provisional government was scrapped in favor Bolshevism and the foundation-laying of what would become the USSR. In sure, economical strokes, Englund describes the hopeless gap that quickly widened between the country's new political realities and its well-intentioned but hapless former monarch; “From time to time someone would describe Nicholas, accurately enough, as a mild-mannered man, modest in his comportment, dedicated to his country,” he writes. “But that didn't make him a democrat.”
These revolutions were successful in large part due to the fact that the bloodletting of World War I had left the Tsar's main instrument of repression – the Russian army – in a state of more or less open mutiny, and this is one of the many ways the war, grimly but accurately summarized here as “millions of refugees, millions of wounded, millions of dead,” overshadows everything else in Englund's book. “The war,” he writes simply, “set both the United States and Russia on the paths they would follow for the next century.”
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At every step of President Wilson's decision to respond to Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare – which treated all oceangoing vessels in the Atlantic, including US shipping, as fair targets – there were waves of fierce opposition throughout America. “Wilson saw himself as a righteous man,” Englund writes with a fair degree of diplomacy. “Though he could deliberate over a policy decision, once his mind was made up there was no changing it and no hope that he might compromise.” And his domestic foes were every bit as adamant; in that fateful March the Emergency Peace Federation, for instance, ran an ad in the New York Tribune: “Mothers. Daughters and Wives of Men – Have you no hearts? Have you no eyes? Have you no voice? We are being rushed to the brink of war – AND YOU DO NOT WANT WAR.”
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Nor was the country ready; on the eve of war, the United States had scarcely a single trained division of soldiers at its disposal. And despite the vociferous war-mongering of former president Theodore Roosevelt, there was widespread national resistance to the idea of getting entangled in what most people saw as an entirely local European fight.
All such opposition was of course overcome, and two million American soldiers went off to fight, and as Englund points out, they came back to a substantially different country than the one they'd left, a looser, less formal country flush with wartime prosperity and a palpable sense of new standing in the world. “The American of the 1910s is a remote figure, living a different life from ours,” Englund writes. “The American of the 1920s is recognizably one of us.”
This tremendous surge of national pride happened despite the fact that, as our author points out, “Nearly all the arguments about the war turned out to be wrong”: it didn't make the world safe for democracy, as Wilson had naively hoped; it didn't break Germany's militaristic spirit; crucially, it didn't further the cause of the Russian Revolution abroad. An impartial observer in 1917 would almost certainly have predicted that the ultimate significance of the Russian Revolution would far overshadow the US's brief and hasty participation in a fight on the Continent.
In 2017 we know that such an impartial observer would have been quite wrong to think such a thing. The Russian Revolution gave birth to an implemented political ideology that hardly endured for a generation, whereas Englund is right to contend that World War I taught the United States the terrible appeal of interventionism: “The lesson of 1917 seemed to be that America had an obligation to set things right beyond its borders,” he writes, and this was only half of the change. The other half was the real birth of what President Eisenhower dubbed the military-industrial complex, which would go on for the next century to pursue war for profit motives rather than Wilsonian idealism. In this sense the careful history in "March 1917" also doubles as a warning.
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By Martin Rubin - - Sunday, June 18, 2017
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
MARCH 1917: ON THE BRINK OF WAR AND REVOLUTION
By Will England
W.W. Norton, $27.95, 387 pages, illustrated
Much as I deplore the trend within the academy towards ever more micro-courses dealing with a subsection of a subject, when it comes to books honing in on such slices of history, I feel entirely differently. After all, is it too much to ask that if a college course does not quite leave students seeing life steadily and whole (in the words of Matthew Arnold), it should at least give them some context and not result in them not knowing, say, who came first, Jackson or Lincoln?
But with so many books taking a sweeping view of a big, hydra-headed topic like World War I, there is great virtue in a book like this which bores deep into a pivotal month out of its four dozen plus other ones.
Pulitzer, Polk, and Overseas Press Club Award-winning journalist Will Englund, who now lives in Baltimore, has spent a dozen years reporting from Russia and so brings great expertise to his subject. For if his eponymous month was just another slog to get through for most of the combatants, for Russia it was a turning point, with the first of two revolutions which saw a relatively democratic government under Alexander Kerensky replace Czarist rule, only six months later to have another imposing the iron heel of Communism under V.I. Lenin.
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For the United States, poised on the brink of entering the war against Germany, which had just brought back unrestricted submarine warfare, not having an autocratic Russia as an ally made taking the fateful leap easier.
So it is not surprising to see the familiar visages of President Woodrow Wilson and Czar Nicholas II on the cover of a book aptly subtitled “On the Brink of War and Revolution.” But as is so often the case, it would be a mistake to judge a book by its cover. Although Mr. Englund certainly does justice to these two men so often portrayed elsewhere, for most readers the chief strength of his study of that month which proved so fateful in different ways for both men is its highlights of relatively little-known incidents which took place then.
It is fascinating that in late March, mere weeks after Kerensky was installed in Petrograd’s Winter Palace, already “in Zurich, Vladimir Lenin was negotiating with the Germans to arrange passage on the infamous ‘sealed train’ that would take him back across enemy territory to Russia after a decade in exile.”
Lenin’s triumphant arrival at the Russian capital’s Finland Station the next month is famous. How many readers will know that his cohort in establishing Communist rule, Leon Trotsky, began an equally ominous but much less renowned journey at the end of March 1917?
I knew that Trotsky was living in the United States, but I did not know until I read this book that “On March 27, Leon Trotsky and his wife and two sons sailed from New York heading to the country of revolution. But at Halifax, Nova Scotia, British authorities took them and other Russian travelers off the ship They sent him to a prisoner-of-war camp . The camp commandant, a Colonel Morris told Trotsky that he posed a danger to the new Russian government. Trotsky replied that he had received a visa from that government while he was in New York. Morris answered back, ‘You are dangerous to the Allies in general.’”
If only the hapless Kerensky had possessed similar good sense and judgment, but, we learn, “after he had intervened, the British let Trotsky continue on his way to Russia and the revolution.”
So although history has damned Kerensky for allowing one viper into his bosom on that train across enemy German territory and neutral Scandinavia, thanks to Mr. Englund we realize that he brought another equally dangerous threat to his own rule and Russia’s continued place among the Allies. Without the Red Army, ruthlessly but brilliantly led by Trotsky, could Communist rule have been established in Russia?
One of the most intriguing benefits of a book on a micro-topic like this one is its exposure of misjudgments. Not all of them were as catastrophic as Kerensky’s, but it is still sad to read banner headlines like this:
“On March 19, The Evening Ledger in Philadelphia proclaimed: ‘RUSSIA FREES JEWS; ANCIENT PALE SMASHED. Great Rejoicing Reigns as Age-Long Persecution Ends.’”
With hindsight of course, we see the folly of rushing to judgment like this or a missionary just returned from Russia rejoicing at “the tremendous growth of democracy” there.
Tragically, anti-Semitism and other forms of tyrannical repression would continue to flourish in Russia for many more decades in the post-Czarist political and social soil that was equally fertile for the growth of such poisons. But a book like “March 1917” allows us to view the world from its hopeful — sometimes hopelessly naive — viewpoint, even if we cannot quite shut off the lens of hindsight.
• Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, California.
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Month that set the world’s course for 20th century
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PRINTAnitwar protestors on the steps of the US Capitol.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Anitwar protestors on the steps of the US Capitol.
By David M. Shribman GLOBE CORRESPONDENT MARCH 17, 2017
Of all the momentousmonths in history — April 1775 (Lexington and Concord), April 1865 (Appomattox and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln), November 1963 (the assassinations of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon and John F. Kennedy in Dallas) — March 1917 still stands out.
It was the month when Russians took arms against their own government and when Americans girded to take arms against Germany in World War I. It is not too much to say that the month launched the world on a trajectory it would follow for the rest of the 20th century, the very argument Will Englund successfully makes in this new fast-paced history.
A mere glance at the principals of “March 1917’’ suggests big things loom: Woodrow Wilson, outraged and idealistic; V.I. Lenin, steely and determined; Theodore Roosevelt, militant and militaristic; even Jeanette Rankin, Montana pacifist, first female member of Congress, and the only lawmaker who would vote against American involvement in both world wars.
The two nations that Alexis de Toqueville predicted in 1835 would dominate world affairs were on the precipice of change. Russia was in despair; food in short supply; political unrest spreading. America had felt safe behind its ocean moat, but its professor-president was confounded by Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare and forced to abandon the isolationism that had not kept America isolated from peril.
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This is a book full of haunting, unforgettable wartime images: shivering residents of dark Berlin picking through rail yards for pieces of coal. Zoo elephants enlisted to pull sledges through the snow. Russians getting lice in the subway after standing too close in crowded train cars to soldiers back from the front. The price of potatoes skyrocketing 10 times the peacetime rate in the land of czars, a loaf of rye bread rising by a factor of eight. “The war changes all things,’’ testified H.L. Mencken. “It is a new Europe, and a much duller and sadder one.’’
Meanwhile, in Washington, there was growing consternation over submarine attacks against ships on the high seas and reports, credible and creepy, that Germans dangled territorial gains before Mexico in exchange for their military alliance if America entered the war. Wilson shaped those concerns into a question not so much of traditional power politics nor of safety on the seas but instead into an issue of human rights — laying out, as Englund characterizes it, “one of the cardinal totems of American foreign policy for the century to come.’’
It was in March of 1917 that the revolution began in Russia, forcing the tsar to abdicate, and it was then that the United States moved toward war itself. Blacks saw an opening here: Russians were winning freedom amid the shadow of war, so maybe African Americans might, too. (This would not be the case, and it would take another world war, and the Double-V movement of black newspapers, especially the legendary Pittsburgh Courier, to light the fires of the civil rights movement.) Women, too, saw opportunity, despite a strong strain of pacifism in the movement for the female vote. Listen to Alice Paul, who headed the National Woman’s Party:
“We women, when war breaks upon us, will be called on for duty in the machine shops and for dangerous duty in the munition factories. We have shown this in the way we women have responded to the call for woman navy recruits. We will do more, and we won’t be behind the men in any sacrifice for the country we are loyal to.’’
While Wilson bathed his views in the rhetoric of high-minded values, he did not have much freedom of choice politically. “The president thought he was acting on a nobler impulse,’’ Englund writes. “He was carried along, whether he willed it or not, on a mounting wave of national passion.’’
The month, and the war that followed, changed the world, wiping venerable empires from the map, propelling Russia into Soviet communism (and a contempt for the people in whose interest the revolution was prosecuted) and transforming the United States into an international force with a population suddenly exposed to the world and to diverse views on life, politics, and culture.
It is true that Wilson was succeeded by a president, Warren G. Harding of Ohio, who brayed about “normalcy,’’ but in fact Wilson and the war created a new normal for the United States, one of global engagement. And it sealed in the American consciousness an important principle that guides us still.
“World War I gave rise to the idea that it was better to fight the enemy abroad than wait for him to attack at home,’’ Englund writes in his last paragraph, a passage that alone justifies the 322 pages that precede it. “The lesson of 1917 seemed to be that America had an obligation . . . to defend democratic values wherever they were threatened.’’ Silentlyunderlying that, of course, is recognition that isolationism would not longer be, if it ever really was, an option for America — an idea we still struggle with, especially of late.
MARCH 1917:
On the Brink of War and Revolution
By Will Englund
Norton, 387 pp., illustrated, $27.95
David M. Shribman, a former Globe Washington bureau chief, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Opinions
A revolution a century ago that still reverberates — right into the White House
By Charles King March 24
Charles King is the author of “Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul” and other books. He is professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University.
What do you do when your country is taken over by madmen? Elena Nabokova told the valet and cook to pack the trunks and the dachshund, place the jewels in a talcum case, and prepare a knapsack of caviar sandwiches. She soon fled the capital city, Petrograd, along with her husband and children. They headed south, first for the last redoubt of resistance in Crimea and then into permanent exile across the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Years later her son, Vladimir Nabokov, could still remember the machine guns rattling on shore and the cargo of dried fruit on the rickety Greek ship that ferried them to safety, one of many that carried Russian refugees toward rebuilt lives in Europe and the United States.
The Russian revolution of 1917 — as Voltaire once quipped of the Holy Roman Empire — was none of the above. It took place within a multiethnic and multi-confessional empire, among people who called themselves Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Georgians, Tatars, Muslims and Buddhists, in addition to Russians. It unfolded not according to a preset revolutionary plan but rather through a series of missteps, accidents and twists of fortune, starting before that fateful year and extending long after it. It was not one event but several, from the wintertime collapse of the monarchy, through a summer’s flirtation with representative government and military rule, toward an autumn coup by a minority party that had the good sense to name itself “the majoritarians,” or in literal Russian, Bolsheviks.
[What Russia looked like before 1917 … in color]
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"Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 - A World on the Edge," by Helen Rappaport ( St. Martin’s)
This spring marks the 100th anniversary of the revolution’s opening salvos. In Russia, the reaction has been muted. The Putin government has had difficulty figuring out whether it is an occasion to lament, celebrate or just ignore. But historians have found it an opportunity to take stock of the long arc of change that brought about the eventual Bolshevik victory. As three new books show, the revolution was local in its origins but global in its effects — a tocsin that heralded not just the birth of a new country, the Soviet Union, but also a new way of thinking about the relationships between politics, the state and ordinary people.
In its wake came a long civil war and the wholesale refashioning of society by an overbearing state. Whatever coherence it later had was a product of Soviet historians, who recast the Bolshevik takeover as the necessary outcome of imperial decline, visionary leadership, and the revolt of workers and peasants against the exploiting classes. Our mental images are still a product of foreign sympathizers such as the American journalist John Reed or Soviet filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein. When you see black-and-white film footage of surging crowds and saber-wielding Cossacks, those are fictional set pieces later crafted by Eisenstein, not on-the-spot documentaries.
The fact of the revolution’s success — the fall of the Romanov dynasty, the trampling of political opponents on the right and the left, the birth of an entirely new country built on a radical philosophy of creative destruction — provided a template for more than a century of political change, from China to Cuba, Angola to Vietnam. Today the idea of a committed revolutionary vanguard willing to lob a grenade to bring down a decrepit establishment continues to inspire disrupters and change agents of all stripes. Even Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist, has reportedly described himself not as a nationalist or a populist but as a Leninist.
For much of the 1920s and early 1930s, the Bolshevik government was considered by the great powers to be a kind of anti-state — a philosophy-with-bayonets that threatened global order. Teenagers, intellectuals, labor unionists and immigrants were thought to be particularly susceptible to its animating ideology, which is why Western governments invested heavily in institutions of domestic surveillance, such as the FBI and Britain’s MI5. Immigration restrictions fell into place as governments worked to halt the supposed influx of terrorists, agitators and the self-radicalized. Countering violent extremism meant rooting out hidden Bolsheviks.
[3 books on Soviet communism]
“March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution," by Will Englund (Norton)
Eventually, though, the fears subsided. One by one, Western powers normalized relations with the regime they previously denounced as the antithesis of civilization. Even the old firebrand Leon Trotsky contemplated resettling in the United States. His visa application, from 1933, listed his reason for travel as a desire to tour Civil War battlefields. He planned to write a play on the subject, he told a friend, which he reckoned would be a smash at the box office. “I would arrange my life in the United States in a manner calculated to cause as little rumor and sensation as possible,” he promised the State Department. The visa was never granted.
Of course, as Russians celebrated the new year in mid-January 1917, no one knew that all of this was yet to come. The empire’s old-style calendar placed it chronologically behind the rest of Europe, but there was no reason to think it was any less stable than the other great powers. Everybody was pursuing terrorists, putting down food riots, and bombing, shooting and gassing one another’s armies, just as they had been doing since the summer of 1914.
By March (still February in Russia), disaffected crowds had grown larger in Petrograd. Soldiers had stopped trying to disperse them. In the chaos, elected parliamentarians and unelected socialists stepped in to form alternative governments, which emerged as rival power centers when Czar Nicholas II gave up the throne on the night of March 15-16. It was an abdication, however, not yet a revolution. The document was signed nonchalantly in pencil, as Will Englund of The Washington Post points out in his detailed, fast-paced account of that fateful spring, “March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution.” What followed was confusion and a certain sense of relief, both in Russia and abroad. Among other things, the next month President Woodrow Wilson announced the U.S. entry into the war against Germany.
Englund deftly intertwines the Russian story with the American one, in an eventful month that launched America into the world and signaled Russia’s temporary retreat from it. But the causal connections are opaque. “March 1917” is a remarkable portrait of two countries on the cusp of change, but their entry and exit were ultimately minor drivers of the near-term military and political outcomes across Europe and beyond.
Not all history-writing needs causes and effects. Evocation is a legitimate, maybe even the most honest, way of making sense of the past. Helen Rappaport’s “Caught in the Revolution” is an enlightening cavalcade of people on the move — running across the frosty paving stones in Petrograd, arriving on a steam train, waving goodbye from a military transport, all caught up in the uncertain transformation of the world’s largest country. It is a reminder of the fact that outsiders of all sorts rushed to cover the events in the faltering empire, from the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst to the unsung American journalist Bessie Beatty. It is a catalogue of witnesses pulled from an exhaustive reading of European and American memoirs and on-the-spot reporting, and a testament to the supremely bad forecasting of foreigners eager to make sense of the moments they were experiencing.
If you were a Russian, though, the period from March to November 1917 could be like having your head in a vise. The French would later coin the phrase “drôle de guerre” — the funny, or phony, war — for a similar period after 1939: an ongoing conflict but not much news of it, political uncertainty, a dysfunctional government, and the sense that something — but what? — was in the offing.
"Lenin on the Train," by Catherine Merridale (Metropolitan)
Catherine Merridale picks up one absorbing episode from that spring in “Lenin on the Train”: the eight-day journey by Vladimir Lenin and other revolutionaries in a second-class train carriage from Zurich to Petrograd. A product of cooperation among German intelligence operatives and Russian socialist exiles, the trip marked the return homeward of the person who would lead the Bolshevik coup that autumn. The transformation of Russian society began nearly as soon as the carriage creaked away from the platform. Lenin insisted on no smoking in the corridors and devised a system of tickets to manage orderly access to the only toilet.
Vast amounts of money flowed east to support propaganda against the war. However, the extent of German direct financing of the Bolsheviks is still a matter of speculation, Merridale concludes. Some of Lenin’s support, she points out, probably came from a complicated scheme for war profiteering, including the illicit sale of condoms and lead pencils.
As Lenin knew, revolutionary parties must change the terms of public debate, not just present themselves as one more alternative in an overcrowded field. Mass politics requires mass propaganda, which is why modern revolutions begin by seizing the means of communication, not by building barricades or occupying an arsenal. Ignore politics as usual, make alliances of convenience where you must, cast away old allies when they are no longer of use. And if you want to alter a country’s foreign policy, find a way of transforming its domestic politics — a sealed train, full of zealous agents of change, that can be sent hurtling down the track to become someone else’s problem. Russia’s year of revolution created a recipe for upending a government. But it also made a playbook for building one: a style of state behavior, even a kind of anti-politics, that remains with us today.
MARCH 1917
On the Brink of War and Revolution
By Will Englund
Norton. 387 pp. $27.95
CAUGHT IN THE REVOLUTION
Petrograd, Russia, 1917 — A World on the Edge
By Helen Rappaport
St. Martin’s. 430 pp. $27.99
LENIN ON THE TRAIN
By Catherine Merridale
Metropolitan. 354 pp. $30