Molotov's magic lantern : a journey in Russian history / Rachel Polonsky.

Περιλαμβάνει βιβλιογραφικές παραπομπές και ευρετήριο.

Prologue -- Romanov -- Apartment 61 -- The banya -- Lutsino -- Mozzhinka -- Novgorod -- Staraya Russa -- Rostov-on-Don -- Taganrog -- Vologda -- Archangel -- Murmansk and Barentsburg -- Arshan and Irkutsk -- Ulan Ude and Kyakhta -- Epilogue.

In the 1990s Rachel Polonsky moved to Moscow with her family. She lived in an apartment block on Romanov Street that had, in Tsarist and Soviet imes, been a residence of the elite; and one of those ghostly neighbours was Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin's henchman and arch survivor of that ferocious regime. In Molotov's former apartment, and what remained of his library Rachel Polonsky discovered that this ruthless apparatchik and joint author of the collectivisations and the Great Purge was an ardent bibliophile, an eager reader with a particular devotion to Chekhov. He had all the classics and owned signed first editions of books by writers he later sent to the Gulag. It became the starting points of Rachel Polonsky's journey into Russia's secret history. She visited cities and landscapes associated with the books in the library - Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Akhmatova and many less well-known figures, covering from the far south to the Arctic, from St Petersburg in the west to the border with Mongolia in the east.