The alcoholic empire: vodka and politics in late Imperial Russia. By Patricia Herlihy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. vi+244. ISBN 0-19-513431-1. £25.00.

Nikolai Sukhanov: chronicler of the Russian Revolution. By Israel Getzler. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xix+226. ISBN 0-333-97035-7. £45.00.

Making war, forging revolution: Russia's continuum of crisis, 1914–1921. By Peter Holquist. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+359. ISBN 0-674-00907-X. £29.95.

The Russian Civil War: primary sources. Edited by A. B. Murphy. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000. Pp. xviii+274. ISBN 0-333-77013-7. £45.00.

Homosexual desire in revolutionary Russia: the regulation of sexual and gender dissent. By Dan Healey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+392. ISBN 0-226-32233-5. £25.00.

These five volumes under review each address different aspects of Russia's experience of modernization and revolution from the 1880s to the 1930s. Our understanding of the scale and complex nature of the changes wrought during these years has been immeasurably enriched by two important factors: first, the recent opening of the former Soviet archives and the detailed case studies that their contents have facilitated; secondly, a mounting reluctance to see 1917 as a radical break with the past and hence an increasing tendency to reinsert the Revolution into a broader series of dynamic and momentous changes that rocked Russia during the period. The rapid expansion of cultural history in the discipline has prompted many scholars to rethink central features of the revolutionary period and to open up new fields of study. Over the last decade, attention has turned to the dynamism and diversity of late tsarist and early Soviet culture embracing topics as wide-ranging as crime, popular religion, the natural and social sciences, and representations of sex.1 Another recent focus has been the experience of conflict across the years of the Revolution and Civil War and its impact on prospects for democracy in Russia.2 The rise to prominence in the historiography of the term ‘modernity’ is an obvious feature of a more comparative analytical framework that has sought to re-insert Russia's revolutionary experience into a pan-European perspective.