Did any Russian person who was alive for the whole lifespan of the Soviet Union, from the Revolution to the Fall, ever publish any retrospective or opinions on the matter?

by should-stop-posting

I can’t imagine any are still alive, considering all the WW1 vets are now dead. But in the 1990s, surely there were a handful of elderly Russians who had been born around the turn of the century and were old enough to have understood what was going on when the Revolution happened. Did any of them ever write anything?

Kochevnik81

There is plenty, plenty more to say on the subject, but one particular person of interest would be Alexander Briansky, who I mention here, who was interviewed in the 1990s, and was a participant in the storming of the Winter Palace in the October 1917 Revolution.

It's worth pointing out that plenty of people would have been alive from around the time of the 1917 Revolutions to the 1990s - that's generally the World War II veteran age. But people that age didn't necessarily have extremely strong memories or understandings of events in their early childhood. One interesting autobiography I can mention of someone who lived this span is Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, who was born in 1922, and wrote a two-volume autobiography The Silent Steppe and A Kazakh Teacher's Story about his life through the end of the Soviet period (he was writing in the 2010s). Most of the first book focuses on the 1930s famines and World War II, however, with childhood memories of the 1920s.

But if the question is - how many people vividly remembered or played an active role in the 1917 era and were still alive in the post-Soviet period with a sharp mind to analyze current events, that number is much smaller (you're basically looking for centenarians born in the 1890s). Lazar Kaganovich was a major functionary in the Stalin era, and comes close (he was born in 1893 and died July 25, 1991), but seems to have had a serious cognitive decline in his later years and lived in relative obscurity and seclusion, despite the attempts of journalists like David Remnick to interview him. Vyacheslav Molotov (1890 - November 8, 1986) maybe comes closest to what you might be looking for, and was interviewed off and on by Felix Chuev until his death - these collected interviews can be found in English in Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics. Molotov notably changed his opinion very little, if at all, and even referred to himself as "a man of the nineteenth century".

Briansky otherwise is your best bet. Unfortunately, I've looked through the transcript of that particular interview he gave, and found almost nothing asked about his thoughts on the 1990s.

Emergency_Advantage

Side question: as an American who can only speak English but has had a fascination with Soviet history and experience, ive always found it difficult to find reputable sources not skewed by propaganda.

Could someone point me in the direction of resources, books, volumes etc. That could provide non-bias information about Soviet life, culture and experience in English?

deadzelwashington

I'm interested in reading about Lenin setting up a government and the actual transition to power. Does anyone have a recommendation for that narrow section of Russian Soviet history?