Field of Mars
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A bibliography of the books, newspapers, videos, recordings and magazines consulted in the writing of The Field of Mars would itself fill a small volume. Below are some English language titles that provided good background, plus some harder-to-find sources which were especially useful as I was researching the book—a labour of love which did not stop until the last day; cited in no particular order. Any missed attributions are honest mistakes, and my apologies are sincerely offered.
Ruud, Charles A. and Sergei Stepanov—Fontanka 16, McGill Queen’s University Press, 1999. This is the only English-language general history of the Okhrana in print.
Baedeker, Karl—Russia 1914. Arno Press reprinted it in 1971. Rare. The original copy I used was discovered at the Perkins Library at Duke University. Baedeker has everything between its covers. The maps alone were crucial.
Fitzlyon, Kyril and Tatiana Browning—Before the Revolution: A View of Russia under the last Tsar, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1982. Photographs and insightful text; widely available.
Ometev, Boris and John Stuart, compiled by Olga Suslova and Lily Ukhtomskaya—St Petersburg: Portrait of an Imperial City, Vendome Press, New York, 1990. Stunning photographs throughout this absolutely splendid book.
Troyat, Henri—Daily Life in Russia Under the Last Tsar, translated by Malcolm Barnes, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1961. A fictionalized Baedeker of everyday life. Set primarily in Moscow.
Fay, Sidney B.—The Origins of the World War, Second edition, The Free Press, New York, 1966.
Lincoln, W. Bruce—In War’s Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War, The Dial Press, New York, 1983. Also his Sunlight at Midnight. Lincoln is always thorough and readable. One of the basics.
Gilfond, Henry—Black Hand at Sarajevo, Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1975, Hertha Pauli’s The Secret of Sarajevo, Appleton-Century, New York, 1965, and Lavender Cassels’s The Archduke and the Assassin, Dorset, New York, 1984. All were good for details of the assassination.
Morton, Frederic—Thunder at Twilight, Vienna 1913–1914, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1989. Dramatic portrait of Austria in the months before the war.
Taylor, Edmund—The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order, 1905–1922, Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1963. Especially good on the Hartwig–Artamonov–Apis plot.
Vassilyev, A.T. and Rene Fullop-Miller—Ochrana: The Russian Secret Police, J.B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, 1930. Fullop-Miller, the co-writer, points out that Vassilyev must be taken with several grains of salt. Self-justifying memoir of the Okhrana by its last commander in St Petersburg.
Volkov, Solomon—St Petersburg: A Cultural History, The Free Press, New York, 1995. Excellent.
West, Rebecca—Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Viking Press, New York, 1940. For background of Balkan struggles and later perspectives on the assassination.
Bely, Andrei—Petersburg, translated, annotated and introduced by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1978. Bely’s novel came out in serial form during 1913, but was neglected during the Soviet era. Bely’s appeal rests on his intricate wordplay which is lost in most translations, thus Petersburg has been underrated abroad. Maguire’s and Malmstad’s extensive notes were invaluable.
Finally, the first draft of The Field of Mars was completed shortly after the death of my father, Wendell Richard Miller. A fine man, my father was a history buff; his interests spanned mostly American history from the Revolution to World War II, and it is from him that I derive my own love of the past. ‘Spud’ was a larger-than-life character, a man with a multitude of interests and multitudes of friends. I find that I miss him very much as the years go by, and one book is not enough to dedicate to his memory.