Francis W. Wcislo - Tales of Imperial Russia. The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915 [2011][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: April 8, 2011
History and biography meet in Tales of Imperial Russia, a study of the late-Romanov Russian Empire, told through the figure of Sergei Witte. Like Bismarck or Gorbachev, Witte was a European statesman serving an empire. He was the most important statesman of pre-revolutionary Russia. In the Georgia, Odessa, Kyiv, and St. Petersburg of the nineteenth century, he inhabited the worlds of the Victorian Age, as young boy, student, railway executive, lover of divorcees and Jews, monarchist, and technocrat.
His political career saw him construct the Tran-Siberian Railway, propel Russia towards Far Eastern war with Japan, visit America in 1905 to negotiate the Treaty of Portsmouth concluding that war, and return home to confront revolutionary disorder with the State Duma, the first Russian parliament. The book is based on two memoir manuscripts that Witte wrote between 1906 and 1912, and includes his account of Nicholas II, the Empress Alexandra, and the machinations of a Russian imperial court that he believed were leading the country to revolution. Telling the story both of a life and of the last days of the Tsarist empire, Tales of Imperial Russia will delight and inform all those interested in biography, literature, and history, as well as readers interested in the history of modern

Reviews
"An innovative and informative study. . . . a textured and elegant view of a man who was so central to Russia as it balanced on the brink between either revolution or economic and political modernization."--The Wall Street Journal

"A very fine book...Wcislo's excellent book offers us fresh way of thinking about Witte as a creature of his time, a man full of far-fetched plans and contradictory impulses." --The Russian Review

"A stellar combination of historiography and a history of the last years of czarist Russia...Recommended." --CHOICE

About the Author
Frank W. Wcislo is a historian of modern Russia, Eurasia, and Europe. He is Dean of The Commons and Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.