| In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War Asked shortly after the revolution about how she viewed the new government, Tatiana Varsher replied, "With the wide-open eyes of a historian." Her countrywoman, Zinaida Zhemchuzhnaia, expressed a similar need to take note: "I want to write about the way those events were perceived and reflected in the humble and distant corner of Russia that was the Cossack town of Korenovskaia." What these women witnessed and experienced, and what they were moved to describe, is part of the extraordinary portrait of life in revolutionary Russia presented in this book. A collection of life stories of Russian women in the first half of the twentieth century, In the Shadow of Revolution brings together the testimony of Soviet citizens and émigrés, intellectuals of aristocratic birth and Soviet milkmaids, housewives and engineers, Bolshevik activists and dedicated opponents of the Soviet regime. In literary memoirs, oral interviews, personal dossiers, public speeches, and letters to the editor, these women document their diverse experience of the upheavals that reshaped Russia in the first half of this century. Sheila Fitzpatrick is the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor in History at the University of Chicago and coeditor of The Journal of Modern History. She is the author of, most recently, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s and Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789-1989 . Yuri Slezkine is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the coeditor of Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture and the author of Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North . |