Russia's Iron Age

by William Henry Chamberlin

Hardback edition of Russia's Iron Age (Russia Observed) by William Henry Chamberlin William Henry Chamerlin's "Russia's Iron Age" was one of the few, if not the only, comprehensive contemporary treatments of the results of Russia's five year plan which ended on December 30, 1932, and the resulting famine which devastated parts of the Soviet Union, particularly Ukrainia, during the winter of 1932-1933 and spring of 1933. The Soviet authorities were largely successful in hiding the famine from the Western world by restricting the access of foriegn correspondents to the famine areas and through the acquiescense of the pro-Russian Revolution intellegensia, along with other means. Published in 1934, Chamberlin's book chronicles how the famine not only coincided with the rise of Hitler in Germany but also contributed to the triumph of Nazism in Germany.

Genres: History

400 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

William Henry Chamberlin (February 17, 1897 – September 12, 1969) was an American historian and journalist. He was the author of several books about the Cold War, communism and US foreign policy, including The Russian Revolution 1917-1921 (1935), which was written in Russia between 1922 and 1934 while he was the Moscow correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor.

He had communist sympathies until he lived in the Soviet Union. Then, he gradually turned anticommunist. He predicted that intervention in World War II would help communism in Europe in Asia and so was a non-interventionist.

Reviews

[Daniel Roy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chamberlain was a colleague of Eugene Lyons, both foreign correspondents in the USSR during the (first) five-year plan, or "piatiletka". This text, released four years before Lyons' book Assignment In Utopia, is a less personal, more diplomatic account of that period, also described by Lyons as an "iron age".

AIU is a political bildungsroman; RIA is like a long magazine article, divided into subjects rather than unfolded as narrative. But Chamberlain's writing is so clean that it exerts comparable force of indignation through steadiness of hand. He always makes clear what he's thinking while describing his subject objectively. Early passages, in fact, gave me the impression that this book would be positive. But Chamberlain is simply careful to round off his sharpest criticisms with polite qualifiers that communicate he is doing a job. The book still made him an enemy of the Soviet state.

Russia's Iron Age has many crossovers with Assignment In Utopia — the name of the author of a bad poem, for instance, as well as a more detailed account of an exchange between the author's wife and Bernard Shaw — so fans of that book are encouraged to pick this up as well.