Excerpt from All the Russias: Travels and Studies in Contemporary European Russia, Finland, Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia This volume is the outcome of fifteen years' interest in Russian affairs, culminating in four journeys - one of nearly 20,000 miles - in European and Asiatic Russia. In the course of these, besides a residence of some time in St. Petersburg and visits to the principal cities, I travelled in Finland, in Siberia as far as Lake Baikal (I had previously been to Vladivostok), in the Caucasus, and in Central Asia as far as the frontier of Kashgar. During all these journeys I was afforded opportunities of seeing and investigating every matter that interested me, and of making the acquaintance of the chief Russian administrators in every part. Indeed, official courtesy went so far as to convey me, by a special train and a special steamer, to places I could not otherwise have seen, and to provide for my safety on another occasion by an escort of Cossacks. In case the reader may wonder how, without a mastery of the Russian language, I held the conversations and made the inquiries here described, I may say that during my chief journeys I took with me as interpreter a young Russian gentleman, a student of law at the University of Moscow, whose knowledge and intelligent sympathy were of the greatest service to me. Without such help, or the ability to speak Russian fluently, a journey for any serious purpose in Russia outside the two capitals would be a waste of time. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Russia had an extraordinary twentieth century, undergoing upheaval and transformation. Updating his acclaimed History of Modern Russia, Robert Service provides a panoramic perspective on a country whose Soviet past encompassed revolution, civil war, mass terror, and two world wars. He shows how seven decades of communist rule, which penetrated every aspect of Soviet life, continue to influence Russia today. This new edition takes the story from 2002 through the entire presidency of Vladimir Putin to the election of his successor, Dmitri Medvedev.