A Concise History of Russia by Paul Bushkovitch

Pg 9 The Rus people were not just Christians, they were Orthodox Christians. Orthodox Christianity would determine the character of Russian culture until the 18th century and in some ways beyond it

Pg 96 Peter the great was not out to eliminate religion. The consequence of his policies was to end the universal domination of religion in Russian culture, and to reduce it to the place it held in the mental life of early modern Europe after the Renaissance: a foundational belief system in a society whose high culture was already secular

Pg 131 Catherines time marked the beginning of Russian classicist architecture, which transformed St. Petersburg into the city familiar today. She was firmly against the Baroque exuberance of her predecessor Elizabeths chief architect Rastrelli. Catherine and her contemporaries built with unmistakable Roman allusions, a proper architecture for a great imperial capital and its elites. Strict symmetry, Roman columns and triumphal arches were the order of the day

Pg 280 Russian Marxists wanted to overthrow the government. The Marxist group had a split and Vladimir Lenin lead the “Bolsheviks” and Iulii Martov lead the “Mensheviks”

Pg 290 Rasputin, rumors aside, had no political effect that can be traced, but his presence and the real and exaggerated stories further undermind the monarchy

Pg 295 the Bolsheviks were the particular object of the governments wrath because of their position on the war, a position that transformed an obscure Marxist group into a world movement that fundamentally reordered the 20th century. For it was out of Lenin’s reaction to the war, not as a response to the later Russian Revolution, that Communism was born

Pg 322 Trotsky believed that the revolution could not survive, and socialism could not be built in the Soviet Union unless there were revolutions in the advanced countries of the West

Pg 331 The revolutionary side of Soviet relations with the world in the 1920’s was the province of the Communist International (the Comintern). Founded in 1919 as the Communist answer to the Socialist International of moderate (and mostly formerly pro-war) socialists, it aimed to organize and promote revolution throughout the world……..In Paris a young Vietnamese working at painting pseudo-asian pottery in a French factory read that the Comintern wanted to support the colonized peoples, and he decided to join the Communists. His name was Ho Chi Minh

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