August 1914 (Hardcover)

The word pictures he has created of the rolling plains of battle, the lumbering armies, life in the military, are some of the greatest ever painted. One is transported back to that date when backward, religiously zealous, serf-like Russia meets the modern age. The story of the first vision of the industrial West by the illiterate Russian soldier - and the impact it makes on them - was breathtaking.

The story switches from one vista to another, battlefield to palace, and finally from the Romanovs to Lenin as the march of history continues steadily and inexorably onward. Even knowing the awful outcome does not decrease the pleasure of the story. At the end, you have come only so far and are ready for the next in the series, NOVEMBER 1916. I like the method in which he has chosen to write history - the selection of specific periods of time which he considered to have had the greatest impact on the modern Soviet state.

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I remember when my son was little. He would bring me August 1914 and ask me to read it to him. There were no pictures in this book, but he knew that it was a book that I loved. So we would lie on his bed and as I opened the book and read to him about a world he could only discover in a book. Solzhenitsyn is one of my hero?s, a moral voice speaking against the tyranny of Soviet repression. This book about the battle of Tennenberg in August 1914 is not only a brilliant historical novel, but also a critique of the forces that lead to the October Revolution in Russia. Let?s talk about the story, before we continue the review.

The story is about the entrance of Imperial Russia into World War I. War is declared and Russia in its hurry to honor its commitments to France, invades Prussia. Its army under the leadership of General Samsonov is unprepared for war and Russia suffers a humiliating defeat as the army is surrounded and destroyed. The story is told through the eyes of a Colonel Vorotyntsey who alone sees the coming disaster and vainly tries to avert it.

It is a story of an Army that did not understand modern warfare. Samsonov, a cavalry officer, is used to sitting on his horse and viewing the battlefield; this battlefield, however, stretches for hundreds of miles. Communication is non-existent; supplies are scarce. The Germans, however, understood the new technology and were able to listen in on all the Russian communications. Samsonov makes one blunder after another; he is out classed and doesnt know what to do. With his army collapsing around him, he is lost. Lost in a forest, he ends his life with a bullet as he and his staff are attempting to escape the encirclement.

It is a wonderfully written book. One can hear the hoof beats of the charging cavalry, see the sabers glistening in the sun, sense the terror of the soldiers huddle in their trenches as thousands of shells fall around them and smell the cordite as it drifts across the fields. But Solzhenitsyn?s purpose is more than giving us a history of a battle fought long ago, we wants to expose the corruption of a Czarist Russia that lead to an even greater corruption of the Soviet System. This is a novel about truth and the attempt to conceal it. The old Czarist regime and the Soviet one that followed could only survive by the suppression and the corruption of the truth. No wonder that this book was banned in the Soviet Union.

It is a great book; I have read it at least a half dozen times over the years.

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