Russia, 1917.
No one can stop the century’s blind momentum.
A great reportage through the streets, alleys and opulent palaces that saw the dusk of Tsarist Russia and Lenin’s revolution flare up.
“At night, one hundred years later, everything looks like this, a composition suffused with history and light, marble and fate, memory and ice. I walk from one bridge to the other to the Pryazhka Canal, looking for a window. Dekabristov St. 57, where the poet Aleksandr Blok spent hours in the dark on those nights watching the ‘cool purple’ of St. Petersburg, and beyond the window, ‘Russia flying who knows where in the azure-blue abyss of the times.”
A hundred years after the Russian Revolution, Ezio Mauro returns to the locations of the popular uprising that changed the course of history. In St. Petersburg he explores the royal palaces and the darkest corners, following the footsteps of events, the forbidden stories and mysteries that marked the course of a grandiose and terrible year. The discovery of the city gradually turns into the story of events for which the city was a theater. In the palace of Tsarskoe Selo, Rasputin, the black monk, put a spell on Tsar Nicholas II and his whole court. The aristocracy that for centuries ruled the endless territories of Holy Mother Russia now rushes headlong toward its ruinous decline. The streets become restive and tumultuous. Lenin and Trotsky come back from exile, the Bolsheviks are organizing. Soon the train of history will upend everyone.
Ezio Mauro traverses the anger, fear and tragedy of a population exhausted by war and famine. He revisits the fury that gripped the soul of a city and the history of a country, a fury that forever changed their destiny. With the keen eye of a great corrispondent, he creates a short-circuit between past and present that evokes in the places of the Revolution the same atmosphere of suffering, struggle and hope for change that inspired and ignited it, leading to Terror. “Everything that happened afterward began here. Even though it seemed like a beginning, and was the end of the world.”
Ezio Mauro
Ezio Mauro started his career in journalism in 1972 at the newspaper Gazzetta del Popolo in Turin. Then, he became a political reporter in Rome for La Stampa, for which he was also a foreign correspondent, writing stories and conducting investigative reports in the United States. In 1988, he started contributing to the newspaper la Repubblica, writing from Moscow. On June 26, 1990 he re-joined La Stampa, becoming its editor-in-chief two years later. On May 6, 1996 he became the editor-in-chief of la Repubblica. In 2011, he published La felicità della democrazia. Un dialogo, with Gustavo Zagrebelsky, and in 2015 Babel, his dialogue on democracy with Zygmunt Bauman. He has written L’anno del ferro e del fuoco. Cronache di una rivoluzione (2017), L’uomo bianco (2018), Anime prigioniere. Cronache dal muro di Berlino (2019), Liberi dal male (2020), La dannazione (2020), Lo scrittore senza nome (2021). His most recent book is L’anno del fascismo (2022). In 2016 he left his place as editor-in-chief of la Repubblica, but he still contributes to it.
- L’anno del fascismo (The year of fascism)
- Lo scrittore senza nome (The Writer Without a Name)
- La dannazione (The Damnation)
- Liberi dal male (Free from Evil)
- Anime prigioniere. Cronache dal muro di Berlino (Captive Souls. Chronicles from the Berlin Wall)
- L’uomo bianco (The White Man)
- L’anno del ferro e del fuoco (The Year of Fire and Fury)
Download
A selected press review (PDF)
Video
Cronache di una rivoluzione on Rai Storia
Ezio Mauro on Radio Deejay
