Edward Crankshaw – författare

Exactly 175 years ago, on the Senate Square in St. Petersburg, a failed uprising ignited a process that would, one red October, finally sweep the autocracy away. The Shadow of the Winter Palace recounts an extraordinary century of Russian history, a politically tempestuous time that was also a Golden Age of intellectual and artistic achievement,the century of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, of Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky. A master stylist and a distinguished historian, Edward Crankshaw limns dazzling portraits of the czars, the revolutionaries, and a host of other unforgettable characters,and provides a riveting, sweeping history "jam-packed with information about the past and implications for the present" (Atlantic Monthly) .

This is the story of the rise and fall of one man against the background of his country's history - bloody, tumultuous, yet immensely significant - since the revolution in 1917.Nikita Sergei Khrushchev was born in 1894 at Kalinovka where Great Russia borders the Ukraine.He was the child of peasants driven from the land by poverty.His grandfather had been born a serf; his father was a landless worker travelling to the coal fields of the Donetz Valley in the winter, in spring returning to the land.Thus the infant Khrushchev was one of a vast family of nearly one hundred million peasants, mainly illiterate, latterly liberated from serfdom.He was a child without history, and as an infant lucky to survive.Sixty years later, nevertheless, he was to become the dominant leader of the Soviet Empire, now the home of two hundred and twenty million souls, disposing of a massive and complex economy, a vast and modern army, navy and air force and presiding over the launching of the first man into space.In this biography Edward Crankshaw describes how this was achieved, provides a vivid and convincing appreciation of Khrushchev's extraordinary and contradictory character and at the same time places him firmly within the context of Russian history and society.He goes on to answer the most difficult question of all.How was it that this peasant from Kalinovka, who rose to become Stalin's lieutenant and close collaborator in his achievements and his crimes, was transformed into a major statesman who may be remembered chiefly as a man of peace?There is no one better qualified that Edward Crankshaw to write this book.Over the years he has come to be recognised as the wisest, most sane and perspicacious of experts on Soviet affairs.This book is a brilliant and enthralling study of an astonishing man who brought his country to the threshold of a new age which he himself could not enter.

When Edward Crankshaw's Maria Theresa was published in 1969, it was the first full length study of Maria Theresa to be written in English for sixty years.Called to the throne in 1740, at the age of twenty-three, Maria Theresa was wholly unprepared for the events that were to confront her, and trusting in the honour of her fellow monarchs, the young queen found herself with a virtually nonexistent army at the head of a bankrupt and disaffected empire - an empire shortly to be set upon by half Europe intent on shattering the Habsburg power for ever. Married to an amiable but ineffectual husband whom she adored, surrounded by shortsighted advisers senile to the point of decrepitude, her only weapons were her charm, her unbreakable will, and her almost reckless courage. With these, and by her own immense exertions, she first held her powerful enemies at bay; then, choosing new advisers with astonishing skill, and discovering in herself a fund of commonsense amounting almost to genius, she instituted wide-reaching reforms which were to unify the Empire's bewildering mixture of lands and peoples, and bring it to the threshold of the revolutionary age. With all this she remained a wife and a mother - most touchingly so in her vast correspondence with her many children.

Tolstoy was not always an old man-not always a bearded patriarch fixing the world with the eye of an angry ancient mariner. He started War and Peace when he was thirty five, and Anna Karenina was finished before he was fifty. By then he had fulfilled his genius and deployed all those elements of his titanic temperament which made him world famous. In a richly detailed and sympathetic book on the most creative years of Russia's greatest writer, Edward Crankshaw explores the world of Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, the elements in it that contributed to his great art, and the nature of the creative processes involved. Accompanied by evocative illustrations of Tolstoy's life, Mr. Crankshaw's text presents a development of this extraordinary man-his idyllic country childhood and his painful schooling, the wild years of conscience-stricken dissipation, the sojourn among the Cossacks in the Caucasus, the army service in the Crimean War, his entry into Moscow and St. Petersburg literary circles, his fateful marriage. It is an absorbing account which helps us to a fuller understanding of Tolstoy's towering genius-and the limitations that went with it.

The awesome figure of Otto von Bismarck, the 'Iron Chancellor', dominated Europe in the late 19th century. His legendary political genius and ruthless will engineered Prussia's stunning defeat of the Austrian Empire and, in 1871, led to his most dazzling achievement - the defeat of France and the unification of Germany.In this highly acclaimed biography, first published in 1981, Edward Crankshaw provides a perceptive look at the career of the First Reich's mighty founder - at his brilliant abilities and severe limitations and at the people who granted him the power to transform the shape and destiny of Europe.