Peter Holquist

While this is not the first book you want to read if you're just starting to study the Russian revolution, I found Holquist's efforts to place the whole Russian (not just Bolshevik) tendency to create a politics of mobilization in the context of World War I, and to do so in a comparative fashion, to be quite interesting. You'll also learn a great deal about what it meant to be a cossack in this period.