Douglas Smith, “Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian nobility numbered about 1.9 million people, or 1.5 percent of the population. The 1917 Revolution and the Russian Civil War would all but obliterate this class, as many nobles were dispossessed, killed or driven into exile. By 1921, Felix Dzerzhinsky, the...

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