American Writer Ernest Poole Describes Russia During the Revolution of 1905

I was always fascinated by the motto across the façade of the old National Archives building on the Mall in Washington, "History is Prologue."That, I thought, was certainly true of Russia, as many historians have considered the 1905 revolution that Ernest Poole witnessed there as a "rehearsal" for 1917, and many in the West find the era of Joseph Stalin a precursor to that of Vladimir Putin.History repeats itself?But never exactly.The differences help make history interesting--and useful.With the construction of a new archives facility (Archives II) in College Park, Maryland, my Washington research routine changed to every other day riding in a van from the old archives at the new one, the other days spent at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress easily reached by metro.This account of Poole in articles written from Russia in 1905 was quite different than that depicted in his book of 1917.The Russia of 1905 was still an autocracy resembling a police state that George Kennan had so eloquently described a few years earlier as a Russia, known especially for its political prisoners and revolutionary exiles, perhaps even more reliant on the army (Cossacks) and police because of the "shock" of Bloody Sunday in January of that year.This project also has its own prologue.It begins with my collaboration with William Benton (Ben) Whisenhunt, who I had met at scholarly conferences in both the United States and Russia, and who also believed that our mutual interests in the field of Russian-American relations were neglected by mainstream journals.This culminated in a volume of articles published as number 39 in the Routledge Studies in Cultural History, published in 2016.It included 16 articles by both American and Russian scholars as New Perspectives on Russian-American Relations.Its success in serving our objectives led to two more collaborative projects.With the centennial of the Russian Revolution approaching, we thought about a project of republication of books by Americans who observed the revolutionary events and wrote it.We made a list of some 25 of them.Slavica Publishers of Bloomington, Indiana, was amenable to our proposal and liked our format of pairing appropriate scholars, both Russian and American, with a book to introduce, edit, and to annotate where needed, and to do this with little possibility of any recompence.Slavica produced sixteen volumes in the Americans in Revolutionary Russia (ARR) series before finding it too much to manage financially.The last two by James Houghteling and Malcom Grow and edited by David Fogelsong of Rutgers and Laurie Stoff of Arizona State, respectively, were issued by Slavica earlier this year (2022).There is a possibility that more may follow by a different press

Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies · Logistics and Transportation Systems · Soviet and Russian History

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  Neil B Weissman, Edward H Judge•The American Historical Review•1984

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  John Shelton Curtiss, Avrahm Yarmolinsky•American Slavic and East European…•1960

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  Robert F Byrnes, Theodore H Von Laue•The Slavic and East European…•1965

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• The Road to Bloody Sunday

  Gerald Surh, Gerald D Surh et al.•The Russian Review•1978

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• Lenin and His Rivals

  George V Lantzeff, Donald W Treadgold•The American Historical Review•1955

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