Caspar John met Arthur Ransome aboard a liner between Singapore and Hong Kong and soon asked for several of Ransome's books on Russia. The Crisis in Russia and Six Weeks in Russia are singled out as works still worth reading. Ransome was an informed contemporary observer who remained enough of an outsider to offer a comparatively independent view. The moment shows how one service memoir can point readers toward another class of primary source and a very different theatre of history.
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Arthur Ransome as an eyewitness to revolutionary Russia
Casper John's reading list leads to Ransome's contemporary books as unusually informed outsider accounts of revolutionary Russia.