18 December 2011
Rereading Orlando Figes’s ‘A People’s Tragedy’ (1996), a long exhausting history of the Russian Revolution. Like wading through blood. Like the people of the time you slowly become desensitised to violence until you read about whole areas being put to the torch, peasants massacred, all the women raped, the village elders systematically tortured, without blinking, since this is the thousandth time it’s happened.
What horror! Not sure what to read next, ‘The Whisperers’ looks like a kind of sequel…
Books & Boots 