Reader recommendation: Former People
Monitor readers share their favorite book picks.
February 6, 2013
Former People by historian Douglas Smith, recalls the deliberate and often cruel elimination of the nobility and aristocracy of Russia resulting from the revolution in 1917. Upper-class Russians, guilty by virtue of their birth, suffered unspeakably throughout the 1900s from assassination to imprisonment in gulags to exile. Mr. Smith is an award-winning historian and served as Russian affairs analyst for Radio Free Europe in Munich.