Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 – A World on the Edge

From the author of the bestseller “The Romanov Princesses’ Diaries” — the fall of Old Russia as told by those who saw everything with their own eyes.

Spring 1917. Petrograd is boiling: on Nevsky Prospekt there are rallies and crowds, flags over the city change, and familiar rules disappear. At the very center of events are foreigners — journalists, diplomats, engineers, governesses, and soldiers. They keep diaries and write letters home, unaware that these lines will turn into a documentary chronicle of the last days of Tsarist Russia.

An English nurse, miraculously survived after the sinking of the “Titanic,” now pulls the wounded from the chaos of the streets. Suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst comes to Russia to meet the fighters of Maria Bochkaryova’s Women’s Battalion of Death. Reporters, diplomats, and specialists watch history being made before their eyes: some with hope and enthusiasm, others with horror and bewilderment. Some believe a new era is beginning, others view what’s happening as senseless collapse, and still others simply try to make it to tomorrow and not lose their human face.

City streets become a stage for looting, panic, vigilante justice, beatings, and executions. “They kicked women’s shoes right off their feet in the street, and took the clothes from men… the crowd surrounded the thieves and beat them to death.” “Those cadets who surrendered were lined up and thrown into the water.” In these fragments of other people’s diaries — there is a sharp sense of an ending, when the familiar world collapses not in books, but right before your eyes.

Drawing on forgotten archives and rare testimonies, Helen Rappaport brings dozens of scattered voices together into a single coherent narrative — tense, piercing, and utterly vivid. This is a report from the past, where each eyewitness sees only a fragment of the disaster, but together their accounts form a panorama of an empire dying.