Russian Portraits

What would make a British sculptor travel to Soviet Russia in 1921 to carve the faces of the men who orchestrated the revolution? Clare Sheridan did exactly that, and her memoir captures something no political treatise can: the uncanny humanity of those who made history. Sheridan arrived in Petrograd with her chisel and her assumptions, expecting to find monsters. Instead, she found complex men who debated art with her, who complained about their headaches, who wanted to be seen not as symbols but as individuals. Through intimate sittings with Kameneff, Trotsky, and others, Sheridan documents both the machinery of the new Soviet state and the irreducible strangeness of sitting across from the architects of upheaval while their world consolidates around them. The book works because Sheridan refuses the easy narrative. She's not a sympathizer or a spy; she's an artist trying to capture a face, and what she discovers is that even in the most ideological moments, human beings remain irreducibly themselves. For anyone fascinated by revolutionary Russia, by the intersection of art and power, or by the stubborn gap between ideology and lived experience.