Russia's Road from Peace to War: Soviet Foreign Relations 1917-41

by Louis Fischer

books, used book, history book

516 pages, Hardcover

First published September 12, 1979

About the author

Foreign correspondent and analyst of world affairs.

Fischer worked as an European correspondent first in Berlin later in the Soviet Union. The works he wrote during his stay in the Soviet Union are criticised for its apologism and the denial of the Ukraine famine.

Louis Fischer first visited Gandhi in 1942 and again in 1946.

Reviews

[Dawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I usually love reading history books, but this one was a very tough one to get through. Louis Fischer had a lot of inside access that most authors and historians could only dream about before he decided to write this book (and from my understanding, has written several other books), so there are some interesting, little known facts scattered throughout the pages. Except that's the problem: the historical account is very scattered. The book itself jumps from 1912/13-1939/40 and all over Russia, Europe, China, Japan, parts of Africa, and other parts of Asia without warning--even within the same paragraph. There's very little linear accounts. It reads more like he dropped his notes and known historical accounts on a desktop, picked up a note at a time, and wrote it in whatever order he picked those pieces up from. The history of Russia is a complex, bloody, prideful, sometimes shrewd, and greedy at times, but it does happen in a notable sequence of events. Those events do coincide with other world events and on several occasions, many things are happening in several countries at once in regards to Russia--that was just the way the country was; during the Stalin years alone, he was building the Soviet Union while playing multiple countries against each other all while looking out for his own (and Russia's) best interest. It's a repeated theme. Instead, I had to go back through and re-read passages just to make sure I knew who I was reading about and what year/decade I was in because far too many times a statement might start in 1917 and end up in 1929, or start in 1934 and revert back to 1917, or begin talking about Lenin and end by talking about Stalin, or start by talking about Stalin and end by talking about Trotsky or Lenin with no or very poor transition.