Coming of Age in the Russian Revolution

Coming of Age, the fourth and final volume in the series The Soviet Union at War, is the unadorned story of Russian life told by an observant person who lived it. Elena Skrjabina tells how the tremendous military casualties suffered in World War I hit home, how almost all their family and friends were losing sons or relatives at the front. She describes the pillaging of estates and how the supposed class enemies were arrested. Her impressions of the famine on the Volga in the post-Civil War period, the tremendous housing shortage, the American Relief Administration, the Leningrad famine in the early twenties that turned people into beasts-all flash through the pages of these remarkable memoirs.