Overview

During the First World War, 30,000 Russian Jews of military age in Britain faced a terrible dilemma: to enlist for the carnage of the Western Front or risk everything by returning to Russia. Introducing conscription in 1916, the government had to decide whether the refugees should remain exempt. When Nicholas II was overthrown the picture changed - Russia was now seen as democratic, why not go back to defend it, and, if not, why not join the British army? That was the choice. Bolshevik agitation against compulsion added to the refugees' confusion. Some joined up in Britain. Nearly 4,000 - the author's father and uncle among them - chose to go back. They arrived in Archangel in the autumn of 1917 together with the Arctic winter and the chaos of the revolution, which soon descended into bloody civil war. How they fared and how they struggled to return to Britain is the story of ""War or Revolution"".

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Harold Shukman retired in 1998 as University Lecturer in Modern Russian History at Oxford and is now an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, where he was for several years Director of the Russian and East European (now Eurasian) Centre. His books include studies of the Russian revolution; biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Rasputin; an account and memoir of the National Service Russian Course titled Secret Classrooms (with Geoffrey Elliott); A History of World Communism (with F.W. Deakin and H.T. Willetts); The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution (ed.); translations of plays by Evgeny Shvarts and Isaac Babel and of novels by Valentin Kataev and Anatoly Rybakov, and edited translations of the works of Dmitri Volkogonov. His recent work includes Agents for Change: Intelligence Services in the 21st Century (ed.); The Winter War, 1939-40 (ed.); and Redefining Stalinism (ed)

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