'The Revolution of Marina M.' grounds readers in the sweep of Russian history
2017 marks the centenary of the Russian Revolutions of 1917 – first the toppling of the Tsar and the establishment of a provisional government, and then the toppling of the provisional government by the Soviets – and the occasion has prompted a tsunami of new books on all things Russian. Dozens of fat histories, fat biographies of Lenin and Stalin, fat chronicles of war, famine, and ideology – all have flowed from the presses in the last 11 months. Late in this season, in which a young woman named Marina Makarova, born with the century, is 16 when her native city, her beloved St. Petersburg, is poised to undergo the series of historical convulsions we're now commemorating a century later.
