Arthur Mitchell Ransome was a British author and journalist, the son of a Professor of History at Leeds College. He was best known for writing the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books, which tell of school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads areas of England. The books remain popular to the point that they provide a basis of a tourist industry around Windermere and Coniston Water -- the two lakes that Ransome used as the basis for his fictional North Country lake. He studied chemistry, but quit college to take low-paying jobs as an office assistant in a publishing company and as editor of a failing magazine while writing and becoming a member of the literary scene of London. In 1914, he covered the Eastern Front in World War I for the radical newspaper, the Daily News. He also covered the Bolshevik Revolution, and became close to Vladamir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Old Peter's Russian Tales is a collection of twenty-one Russian folktales drawn from his time in Russia. The tales include "Baba Yaga," the story of the famous witch who lived in a house that walked on chicken feet. Ransome says in a Note at the beginning that The stories in this book are those that Russian peasants tell their children and each other. It was written for English children who play in deep lanes with wild roses above them in the high hedges, or by the small singing becks that dance down the grey fells at home.