Monday, January 14, 2013

FORMER PEOPLE : THE FINAL DAYS OF THE RUSSIAN ARISTOCRACY
by Douglas Smith

There have been many books written about the Romanovs but not so with other families of the Russian aristocracy. Douglas Smith centers primarily on two: the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns and what happened to them from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 up to the Stalin era.
I, alas, only reached page 93 and it's quite a hefty book. There's way too many details, too many characters that you can't get your head around, too many footnotes and it all becomes quite dizzying. Even the directives for the black-and-white photographs are misleading and incorrect. I have read plenty of excellent histories on the Russian people and this one doesn't even come close.
Not recommended.

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