The civil strife and chaos that tore Russia limb from limb in the early 20th Century, although brutally devastating, did not hail the end of the stability and power that had characterized the massive country for so much of history. The continuing strength of what was now the Soviet Union lay in the...

1. Catherine II (the Great). The successor of the sickly Peter III, Catherine II was his wife until his suspected murder and she took the throne in 1762. Although she made no great reforms in Russian society, she gathered many friends by her death in 1796. Catherine had to keep the nobility ple...

George Orwell was chiefly interested in justice and equality. He was a deeply pessimistic man who had powers of imagination which few of his contemporaries dreamed one man could have. Orwell's character and writing style was so deep that qualities that were and still are manifest in his work, ...

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pseudonym George Orwell, is an English author for writing about political issues. Orwell has been highly acclaimed and criticized for his novels, including one of his most famous, Animal Farm. In a satirical form, George Orwell uses personified farm animals to ...

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was born on April 22, 1870, in the city of Simbirsk. From an early age, his mother and father instilled in him the desire to better the lives of people around him. Although many people today question his methods, he did work toward achieving this goal his whole life. In 1887...

Essay Question 5: How useful is the eyewitness account of the Bolshevik revolution by John Reed for an historical understanding of the Bolshevik revolution? John Reeds, Ten Days that Shook the World immediately stands out as a crucial primary historical source on the Bolshevik revolution. His e...

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin "No one nowadays has any reason to doubt the enormous significance of the events connected with the name Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, though for some people these amounted to a catastrophe, or the beginnings of one, whereas for others they created the hope that a new and just socie...