In the early years of the twentieth century, Imperial Russia was an ethnically diverse empire, stretching from Ukraine and Belarus in the west to the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk in the Far East.

At the head of this profoundly dysfunctional polity was Tsar Nicholas II, whose Romanov successors had ruled Russia since the start of the seventeenth century with a lethal mixture of domestic cruelty, expansionist energy and reactionary incompetence. By early 1917, Russia was unreformable, and the tsar's authority irreparably damaged. In March of that year, Nicholas II abdicated and the tsarist system was overthrown. The provisional government installed in its stead to organise democratic elections lasted just eight chaotic months before being ousted by Lenin's Bolsheviks in the October Revolution.

Writing with crisp immediacy, Victor Sebestyen narrates an unprecedented era of political and social convulsion. The Russian Revolution changed the course of history, and, more than a century later, the backwash continues to be deeply felt across the world.

When: Tuesday 14 November, 6.30pm to 7.30pm

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About the speaker:

Victor Sebestyen was born in Budapest and was a child when his family left Hungary as refugees. As a journalist, he has worked for numerous publications, including The Times, New York Times, London Evening Standard, and Daily Mail.

Victor reported widely from Eastern Europe when Communism collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, as well as covering the wars in former Yugoslavia and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Victor's books include Twelve Days, an acclaimed history of t‍he 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and Revolution 1989, a highly praised account of t‍he fall of t‍he Soviet empire. In 2017 he published Lenin the Dictator, a full-scale biography of the founder of the first Communist state, which was shortlisted for the Longford Prize in the UK, the Plutarch Award and the PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography in the US.

He has been a speaker at universities, literary festivals and conferences throughout Europe and t‍he United States. He is based in London.

Tags (office use) : LHF