Welcome to a slap shot episode of the Russian rulers podcast.

Well today's is going to be a little off the cuff and the idea came to me a little while ago about

I've been asked what books do you use? How do you research your

topics and your zars and the emperors and the rulers? And I've got a wide variety in a pretty large library.

But I've kind of selected what I think are the best books that I've used to research the history,

Russia. And you know, it's interesting because you when you do this you find a lot of

conflict one of the places I find a lot of conflict is is Wikipedia where they

have somehow made up some numbers you you know, in events and names and things like that,

where sometimes it's a, you know, for the most part accurate, I really wouldn't

rely on it. You know, for some it was nice as a little overview but when you really

want to dig down into it there are a number of books that are just really the ones that

you have to go through and then even within those you have to be careful because there's a lot of conflict there.

History is its interpretation.

So, you know, when I start, the book I have to go to is the one that I used in 1976 when I took my first course in Russian history from Dr Paul average, the late Dr. average, and that's spelled Avarichh, if you want to look him up.

He had written a number of books on history, but with a particular bent on anarchism, we'll get to that subject in Russian history because that's a very important one.

The anarchists were part of the overthrow of the Romanovs.

We all remember the Bolsheviks and the Menshviks, but we do forget about the anarchists's role, and we'll get into that and maybe do a special little slapshot episode. But basically what I do with starting looking at Russian history, I go to one book.

It's the one that we had as a textbook. It's now in its eighth edition, and it's called a aptly named a history of Russia and the two

authors are Nicholas Riazanovsky who was the original writer and did the

first few editions.

And Dr Mark Steinberg was the second author,

and I've had a chance to email him a couple of times

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