March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 3 (The Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series)

Product Description
In March 1917, Book 3 the forces of revolutionary disintegration spread out from Petrograd all the way to the front lines of World War I, presaging Russia’s collapse.
One of the masterpieces of world literature, The Red Wheel is Nobel prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s multivolume epic work about the Russian Revolution told in the form of a historical novel. March 1917―the third node―tells the story, day by day, of the Russian Revolution itself. Until recently, the final two nodes have been unavailable in English. The publication of Book 1 of March 1917 (in 2017) and Book 2 (in 2019) has begun to rectify this situation.
The action of Book 3 (out of four) is set during March 16–22, 1917. In Book 3, the Romanov dynasty ends and the revolution starts to roll out from Petrograd toward Moscow and the Russian provinces. The dethroned Emperor Nikolai II makes his farewell to the Army and is kept under guard with his family. In Petrograd, the Provisional Government and the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies continue to exercise power in parallel. The war hero Lavr Kornilov is appointed military chief of Petrograd. But the Soviet’s “Order No. 1” reaches every soldier, undermining the officer corps and shaking the Army to its foundations. Many officers, including the head of the Baltic Fleet, the progressive Admiral Nepenin, are murdered. Black Sea Fleet Admiral Kolchak holds the revolution at bay; meanwhile, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the emperor’s uncle, makes his way to military headquarters, naïvely thinking he will be allowed to take the Supreme Command.
Review
“In The Red Wheel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn produced a masterpiece and proved himself a worthy companion of Dostoevsky and rival of Tolstoy.” ―Law and Liberty

“Contrary to Tolstoy in War and Peace, Solzhenitsyn means to demonstrate that, at the decisive ‘nodal’ moments of history, the action or inaction of a single individual may have a decisive impact on the course of events.” ―National Review

“If Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago presented a mindset-changing view of the history of the USSR, the historical novels that make up his epopee The Red Wheel are a counterweight to the heroics of the October Revolution.” ―Russian Review

“[A] magisterial depiction of the long, slow collapse of the Tsarist regime in which everybody gets a voice, but nobody feels that he or she can prevent the worst of it. Eerily prescient for the binary confusions of the present.” ―VoegelinView

“This is the principal work of the Nobel laureate’s life, to which Solzhenitsyn dedicated several decades and into which poured all his thoughts about the senseless chaos of the modern and postmodern worlds, all told through the prism of that most contingent of events, the Russian Revolution.” ―The New Criterion

“Solzhenitsyn’s art in this work conveys deep truths, and opportunities lost, in a way that academic history, increasingly torn between ideology, abstruse methodology, and soulless reductionism can rarely if ever do. Art, dramatized history, wisdom about statecraft and the art of politics, and a deep, passionate but measured patriotism find elevated expression in the literary art of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.” ―Law and Liberty

“Moving from staccato reportage to evocative scenes, the book works as a sort of collage of information, replicating in its stylistic choices the different lenses used to understand history. By combining them into one forceful whole, Solzhenitsyn not only gives us an incredibly vivid sense of the different aspects of the Russian Revolution, but a unique model for how to approach history.” ―New York Journal of Books

“For most Western historians, the March (February O.S.) Revolution was a glorious, if short-lived, event in the history of an otherwise backward―that is, undemocratic―Russia. Solzhenitsyn did not view it that way. He judged the revolution to have been a catastrophe that prepared the way, within m