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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Blackwell Companions to World History
- Sprache: Englisch
A compendium of original essays and contemporary viewpoints on the 1917 Revolution
The Russian revolution of 1917 reverberated throughout an empire that covered one-sixth of the world. It altered the geo-political landscape of not only Eurasia, but of the entire globe. The impact of this immense event is still felt in the present day. The historiography of the last two decades has challenged conceptions of the 1917 revolution as a monolithic entity— the causes and meanings of revolution are many, as is reflected in contemporary scholarship on the subject.
A Companion to the Russian Revolution offers more than thirty original essays, written by a team of respected scholars and historians of 20th century Russian history. Presenting a wide range of contemporary perspectives, the Companion discusses topics including the dynamics of violence in war and revolution, Russian political parties, the transformation of the Orthodox church, Bolshevism, Liberalism, and more. Although primarily focused on 1917 itself, and the singular Revolutionary experience in that year, this book also explores time-periods such as the First Russian Revolution, early Soviet government, the Civil War period, and even into the 1920’s.
- Presents a wide range of original essays that discuss
- Brings together in-depth coverage of political history, party history, cultural history, and new social approaches
- Explores the long-range causes, influence on early Soviet culture, and global after-life of the Russian Revolution
- Offers broadly-conceived, contemporary views of the revolution largely based on the author’s original research
- Links Russian revolutions to Russian Civil Wars as concepts
A Companion to the Russian Revolution is an important addition to modern scholarship on the subject, and a valuable resource for those interested in Russian, Late Imperial, or Soviet history as well as anyone interested in Revolution as a global phenomenon.
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Seitenzahl: 2005
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Notes on Contributors
Editor’s Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Russian Revolution at 100
New Scripts, Themes, Narratives
Part I: Signs, Near and Far
Chapter One: Long‐Term Causes of the Russian Revolution
References
Chapter Two: The First Russian Revolution, 1890–1914
The State and the Parties
War and Revolution, 1904–1906
Constitutional Monarchy and the Old Regime before 1914
Chapter Three: Russia at War: War as Revolution, Revolution as War
Russia Goes to War: The War Comes to Russia
From the August Crisis to the February Revolution
War and Revolution after February
From the October Revolution to the Revolutionary War
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter Four: Support for the Regime and Right‐Wing Reform Plans, Late 1916–Early 1917
Part II: The February Revolution
Chapter Five: The Duma Committee, the Provisional Government, and the Birth of ‘Triple Power’ in the February Revolution
Liberals during the War
The February Revolution and the Formation of the Duma Committee
The Soldiers' Question, Rodzianko's Order, and Order No. 1
The Duma Committee and the Monarchy
High Command and the Duma Committee
Nicholas II's Abdication
Grand Duke Mikhail's Refusal to Take the Throne
The Provisional Government vs. the Duma Committee
Chapter Six: The Practice of Power in 1917
References
Chapter Seven: The Duma Revolution
Historiography
The First Revolutionary Activities of the State Duma on February 27, 1917
Duma‐Soviet Cooperation: The Beginning
The State Duma – the Headquarters of the Uprising
The Difficult Questions of the Revolution: Food Supply, Arrests, Investigative Commissions, Militia
The TCSD – the First Provisional Government
Bibliography
Chapter Eight: Dynamics of Violence, 1914–17
Riots of the Mobilized and Agrarian Violence
Under the Cover of Patriotism: Anti‐German Pogroms
From Food Riots to Workers’ Strikes
Rise of Anti‐Semitism and Ethnic Violence
1917: Escalation of Urban Violence
The Climax of Agrarian Revolution
The Scope and Vectors of Ethnic Violence
Chapter Nine: Russian Political Parties in the Russian Revolution of 1917/18
Biographical Note
Introduction: The History of Political Parties Prior to February 1917
The February Revolution
The Period of the Provisional Government(s)
From the October Uprising to the Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly
Summary: The Political Parties in 1917/18: Blessing and Curse
Bibliography
Chapter Ten: Workers’ Control and the ‘Workers’ Constitution,’ the
Fabzavkoms
and Trade Unions in 1917
The
Fabzavkoms
and the Trade Unions
Chapter Eleven: Peasant Dreams and Aspirations in the Russian Revolution
Localism and Nationalist Identity
Patriotism
1917: Citizenship and Participation
Land Politics
Food Supply
Peasant Aspirations and Soviet Realities
Chapter Twelve: Liberalism
Civil Society and Its Role in Liberalism
Economic Growth’s Potential for Fostering Civil Society and the Character of Late Imperial Growth
Civil Society Itself
Liberalism in Government Structure and Operations
Local Government
Private Property
Some Special Antipathies
The ‘Liberal’ Revolution – February 1917
The War
References
Chapter Thirteen: Military Revolution and War Experience
The Road to Revolution: The Path to February
The Army between Revolutions
The Bolsheviks and Soviet Power
The Creation of the Red Army
Conclusions
Chapter Fourteen: Freedom and Culture: The Role of the Russian Artistic and Literary World in 1917
Introduction
The February Revolution
Literature
Theater
Cabarets and Art‐Cafés
Cinema
Music
The Arts
Proletkult
The October Revolution
Bibliography
Chapter Fifteen: Political Tradition, Revolutionary Symbols, and the Language of the 1917 Revolution
Bibliography
Chapter Sixteen: Counter‐Revolution and the Tsarist Elite
Chapter Seventeen: Revolution in the Borderlands: The Case of Central Asia in a Comparative Perspective
The Anti‐colonial Revolt, 1916
Famine, 1915–1920
The Russians’ Revolution
The Revolution Spreads to Central Asia
Bibliography
Chapter Eighteen: The Nationality Question: Finnish Activism and the Russian Revolution, 1899–1919
First‐Generation Finnish Activists
Finland as a Support Area in the Russian Revolution
German Support for Sabotage
The Year of the Russian Revolutions in Finland
Finnish Nationalist Activists and Revolutionary Russia in 1918–1919
Activists’ Terrorist Attack in Petrograd
Navy Sabotage in the Gulf of Finland
Summary
References
Chapter Nineteen: Finland in 1917
The Rise and Fall of the Finnish Coalition Cabinet
Striving for Autonomy
Finland After the October Revolution
Finnish Social Democrats in a Quandary
Descent into Civil War
Further Suggestions
References
Chapter Twenty: Part I: War and the ‘Russian’ Revolutions
Introduction
Borderland Politics on the Eve of War
War as Revolution
Ukraine
Western Borderlands and the February Revolution
The Revolutions Diverge: Kyiv Challenges Petrograd
Soldiers’ Politics and the Conflict over National Autonomy
A Soviet Revolution in Minsk
Chapter Twenty: Part II: Revolution as War: The Western Borderlands Post‐October
Soviet Petrograd against the Ukrainian People’s Republic
The First Peace of the War and the Diplomatic Debut of National Self‐Determination
The Brest‐Litovsk Order:
Nebenstaaten
The Ukrainian
Nebenstaat
under German Occupation
Revolution in Germany and Austria‐Hungary, New Wars, and New Geopolitics of Self‐Determination
After Empire? Frontier Wars and New Actors
Chapter Twenty-One: 1917 in the Provinces
Introduction
Regional Power Structures
Popular Participation in Politics
The Place of Party Politics
Soldiers as Brokers of Power
The Problems of Food Supply
Conclusions
Bibliography
Chapter Twenty-Two: Religion and Revolution: The Russian Orthodox Church Transformed
The Church at War
1917: The Church in Revolution, Revolution in the Church
October Revolution: Bolshevik State and Parish Power
Research: Problems and Priorities
Bibliography
Chapter Twenty-Three: Gender and the Russian Revolution
Introduction
Women’s Organizations in Late Imperial Russia
Marxism and Female Emancipation
Women and the First World War
Women and the 1917 Revolution
The Bolsheviks in Power
The Civil War: Gendering ‘the Catastrophe’
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter Twenty-Four: Revolution and Foreign Policy
The Foreign Policies of the Provisional Government
The Foreign Policies of the Bolsheviks
Bibliography
Chapter Twenty-Five: Law, Empire, and Revolution
Russian Law and Empire
The Provisional Government and the Law‐Based State
The Birth of Socialist Law
Conclusion: Across Three Legal Regimes
References
Part III: October and Civil Wars
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Bolsheviks and Their Message in 1917
All Power to the Soviets! versus Agreementism
March–April 1917: The Bolshevik Scenario Applied
April–August 1917: Agreementism and the ‘Crisis of Power’
August 1917–January 1918: A Passionate Lack of Alternatives
Chapter Twenty-Seven: A Soviet Government?
The Vikzhel Talks
The Bolshevik–Left SR Coalition
Regional Government Coalitions
Ending the Breathing Space
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Political Economy of War Communism
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Civil Wars
Chapter Thirty: Early Soviet Culture: Education, Science, and Proletkult
Education
Science
Proletkult
References
Chapter Thirty-One: The Jews in the Revolution
Tsarist Policy and the ‘Jewish Problem’
Social and Economic Conditions to 1914
Jews and Politics to 1914
The Great War and the End of the Pale
Jewish Relief Work and Political Activity
The February Revolution and Jewish Politics
Culture Enlightenment and Jewish Politics in 1917
Local Jewish Politics in 1917
Resurgent Antisemitism and the Threat of Anarchy
Jewish Politics in October–December 1917
The Bolsheviks and the Jews
Jewish Autonomy in Ukraine
Pogroms and Accommodation to Soviet Power
Historiography
Bibliography
Chapter Thirty-Two: Prospects for Transformation in the Early 1920s
Bibliography
Chapter Thirty-Three: Revolution and Memory
The Will to Remember
Revolutionary Iconoclasm
Revolutionary Romanticism
Revolutionary Exile
Revolutionary Nostalgia… and Beyond
Bibliography
Chapter Thirty-Four: Archiving Russia’s Revolutions
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 31
Table 31.1 Jewish political parties and associations generally aligned with l...
Table 31.2 Jewish socialist political parties in 1917
Table 31.3 Jewish non‐Zionist, Zionist‐Palestinophile, and Extraterritorialis...
List of Illustrations
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Railways in northern Russia.
Chapter 21
Figure 21.1 The Provinces of Russia, 1917
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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A Companion to the Russian Revolution
Edited by
Daniel Orlovsky
This edition first published 2020© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Orlovsky, Daniel T., 1947– editor.Title: A companion to the Russian Revolution / edited by Daniel Orlovsky.Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2020. | Series: Blackwell companions to history | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The long term causes of the Russian revolution reach deeply into the history of Tsarist Russia. The powerful Tsarist state was confronted by economic and social change as it sought to maintain its position as a great imperial power. The abolition of serfdom in the 1860s brought fundamental changes to Russian society, while urbanisation accelerated the development of a middle class and brought millions of working people to Russia’s cities.”– Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020016205 (print) | LCCN 2020016206 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118620892 (cloth) | ISBN 9781118620847 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781118620854 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Soviet Union–History–Revolution, 1917–1921.Classification: LCC DK265.17 .C643 2020 (print) | LCC DK265.17 (ebook) | DDC 947.084/1–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016205LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016206
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © Everett Historical/Shutterstock
Notes on Contributors
Sarah Badcock is Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on Russia in the late Imperial and revolutionary periods. She is interested in comparative perspectives on questions of punishment, free and unfree labor, penal cultures, and visual history. She has published a number of books including A Prison without Walls? Eastern Siberian Exile in the Last Years of Tsarism (2016). Her research on ordinary people’s experiences of the Russian revolution was published as Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History (2007). Badcock’s interest in regional perspectives on the Russian revolutions culminated in the co‐edited volume Russian Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22: Book 1. Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective (2015).
Vladimir Prokhorovich Buldakov is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Russian History and for many years was head of the sector on the study of the October Revolution, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. He is the author of many works on the Russian Revolution including Krasnaia smuta: Priroda i posledstviia revoliutsionnogo nasiliia (Moscow 1997), Voina, porodivshaia revoliutsiiu. Rossiia, 1914–1917 (with Leonteva T.G., Moscow 2015), and Khaos i etnos. Etnicheskie konflikty v Rossii. 1917–1918 gody. Usloviia vozniknoveniia. Khronika. Kommentarii (Moscow 2010).
Marco Buttino is member of the Global History Laboratory of the University of Turin and until 2017 was Professor of Modern History at the same university. He has written on various aspects of the social history of the USSR and Central Asia. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Quaderni Storici and of the international board of different historical journals. Among his publications are: Revolyutsiya naoborot. Moscow, 2008 (Italian edition Naples 2003); Samarcanda, storie in una città dal 1945 ad oggi, Roma, Viella, 2015 (soon to appear in English).
Frederick C. Corney is Professor of European and Russian History at the College of William & Mary, Virginia, USA, where he is also Chair of the Department of History. He specializes in the history of Russia, particularly the revolutionary period through the 1920s, and in the sub‐disciplines of cultural and collective memory. He has published a monograph, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution, and has edited, introduced, and translated a volume of writings from the 1920s entitled Trotsky’s Challenge: The ‘Literary Discussion’ and the Fight for the Bolshevik Revolution.
Murray Frame is a Reader in History at the University of Dundee, Scotland. His publications include Russian Culture in War and Revolution 1914–22 (co‐editor), 2 vols (2014), School for Citizens: Theatre and Civil Society in Imperial Russia (2006), and The St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres: Stage and State in Revolutionary Russia, 1900–1920 (2000). He is currently working on a history of the militia during the Russian Civil War.
Gregory L. Freeze is the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of History at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA. His primary interests are religious and social history in modern Russia. He has written numerous articles and books and is currently working on a volume entitled Bolsheviks and Believers, 1917–1941, as well as two multi‐year projects funded by the Russian Science Foundation.
Lutz Häfner received a PhD in modern East European history from Hamburg University in 1992. He has taught East European history at the Universities of Bielefeld, Leipzig, and Gießen and is currently working as Senior Researcher in Göttingen. His publications include Society as Local Event: The Volga Cities Kazan and Saratov, 1870–1914 (Böhlau, 2004). A book on food consumption and adulteration of food products in Tsarist Russia is also in progress.
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is Research Professor of Modern Russian and Soviet History Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He has had multiple books published such as The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917 (1981), revised edition The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917: The End of the Tsarist Regime and the Birth of Dual Power (2017), and Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (2005) for which he won the Robert Ferrell Award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His most recent book is Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution (2017).
Ben Hellman, PhD, Docent, is Associate Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature at the University of Helsinki. Main publications: Meetings and Clashes: Articles on Russian Literature (Helsinki 2009); Fairy Tales and True Stories: The History of Russian Literature for Children and Young People (Brill 2013); Hemma hos Tolstoj. Nordiska möten i liv och dikt (Stockholm 2017); Poets of Hope and Despair: The Russian Symbolists in War and Revolution (second ed., Brill 2018).
Michael C. Hickey is Professor of Russian History at the Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, USA. His main areas of interest are the Revolution in Smolensk and Jews in the Revolutionary era, and he has written several essays on this topic. His book, Competing Voices from the Russian Revolution, won the 2012 American Library Association's RUSA Award as one of the year's Outstanding Reference Sources.
Michael Hughes is Professor of Modern History at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of numerous monographs on Russian history and Anglo‐Russian relations including Inside the Enigma: British Officials in Russia 1900–1939 (1997); Diplomacy before the Russian Revolution: Britain, Russia and the Old Diplomacy, 1894–1917 (2000); and Beyond Holy Russia: The Life and Times of Stephen Graham (2014).
Tomi Huttunen is Professor of Russian Literature and Culture at the University of Helsinki. He specializes and has published widely on the Finnish translation history of Russian literature, on historical avant‐garde, semiotics of culture, Russian rock poetry, and contemporary literature.
Hannu Immonen is Research Fellow Emeritus at the Academy of Finland. His current research interests focus on the issues of Russian and Finnish military history during 1870–1905. His publications include: The Agrarian Program of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1900–1914 (Helsinki 1988); Mechty o novoi Rossii. Viktor Chernov (1873–1952) (St. Petersburg: izd‐vo Evropeiskogo universiteta v St. Petersburg, 2015); and articles on the history of post‐1800 Finland.
Boris Ivanovich Kolonitskii is Professor at the European University of St. Petersburg and Senior Research Fellow at the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a well‐known scholar of the Russian Revolution and the author of Comrade Kerensky, Erotica, Symbols in the Russian Revolution; his article ‘Antibourgeois Propaganda and Antibourgeois Consciousness in 1917’ in The Russian Review is often cited in publications on Russian history. Kolonitsky is a member of the editorial board of Kritika as well as a member of the editorial board of the international project ‘Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914–1922: The Centennial Reappraisal.’
Erik C. Landis is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He is the author of Bandits and Partisans: The Antonov Movement in the Russian Civil War (Pittsburgh 2008), as well as essays and articles on various aspects of the Russian Revolution and Civil War.
Lars T. Lih lives and works in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His recent book publications include Lenin Rediscovered (2006) and Lenin (2011). Lately he has been researching for a study of the Bolshevik outlook in 1917. At present, he is preparing a collection of his articles under the title Deferred Dreams.
Mikhail N. Loukianov is Professor in the Faculty of History and Political Science at Perm State University, Russia. He is the author of Rossiiskii konservatizm i reforma, 1907–1914 (Stuttgart 2006) and a number of articles, including ‘Conservatives and “Renewed Russia” 1907–1914,’ Slavic Review 61, no 4 (Winter 2002): 762–86, ‘The First World War and the Polarization of the Russian Right, July 1914–February 1917,’ Slavic Review 75, no 4 (Winter 2016): 872–95, and ‘Russian Conservatives and the Great War’ in Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 4: The Struggle for the State, ed. by P. Waldron, C. Read, A. Lindenmeyr (Bloomington 2018), pp. 23–60.
Aleksi Mainio is a historian at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has specialized in the early twentieth‐century history of Finland and Russia.
Tracy McDonald is an associate professor of history at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside under Soviet Rule, 1921–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011) and winner of the 2012 Reginald Zelnik Prize for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of history. She is co‐editor with Daniel Vandersommers of the article collection Zoo Studies: A New Humanities (Toronto and Montreal: McGill‐Queens University Press, 2019) which includes her chapter ‘Sculpting Dinah with the Blunt Tools of the Historian.’
Nikolay Vasilyevich Mikhailov, born in 1956 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), graduated from the historical faculty of Leningrad State University (1978). In 1980–87 he worked as a guide and researcher at the State Museum of History of Leningrad. He was Candidate of Historical Sciences (1995), and has been senior researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) from 1999 to the present. Research interests include history of the social, labor, and revolutionary movement in Russia in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, local history, and St. Petersburg studies.
Andrei Borisovich Nikolaev is Professor and Head of the Department of Russian History, Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, St. Petersburg. He is a specialist in the history of the Russian Revolution of 1917. His main scientific works include: Revoliutsiia i vlast’: IV Gosudarsevennaia duma 27 fevralia–3 marta 1917 goda (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo RGPU im. A.I. Herzen, 2005); K.F. Luchivka‐Nesluhovskij – pervyj polkovnik Fevral'skoj revoljucii. Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography. 7 (2014): 64–98.
Daniel Orlovsky was born in Chicago and educated at Harvard (AB, AM, PhD). He studied Russian at the Defense Language Institute, Monterey, CA while in the US Marine Corps. At Southern Methodist University since 1976, he served as Department Chair (1986–97) and Director of the SMU in Oxford summer school at University College, Oxford (1994–present). He has been Visiting Professor of History at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Texas at Austin and continues to make frequent research trips to Russia and Helsinki, Finland. His research interests include the Russian Provisional Government, bureaucracy, the role of white‐collar workers/lower middle strata in Russian and Soviet history, and the intersection of institutions, society, and politics across the divide of the Russian Revolution.
William E. Pomeranz is Deputy Director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, Washington DC, USA. He previously practiced international law in the United States as well as in Moscow, Russia. His research interests focus on Russian legal history and present‐day Russian commercial and constitutional law. He is the author of Law and the Russian State: Russia’s Legal Evolution from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin (2019). He also has appeared and provided commentary on numerous media outlets.
Christopher J. Read is Professor of Twentieth‐Century European History at the University of Warwick. His research has focused on both the history of the Russian intelligentsia and the social history of the Russian Revolution. He has published several books including Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia (1979); Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia 1914–1926 (1990); From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution (1996); War and Revolution in Russia: 1914–22 – The Collapse of Tsarism and the Establishment of Soviet Power (2013); and Stalin: From the Caucasus to the Kremlin (2017). He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Matthew Rendle is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter. He has published numerous articles on various aspects of revolutionary Russia and is the author of Defenders of the Motherland: The Tsarist Elite in Revolutionary Russia (Oxford University Press, 2010) and The State versus the People: Revolutionary Justice in Russia's Civil War (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2020). He is also the co‐editor of the journal Revolutionary Russia, and a series editor for the BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies.
Aaron Retish is Associate Professor of Russian History at Wayne State University, USA. He authored Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922 as well as articles on law and the courts in the revolutionary era. He co‐edits Revolutionary Russia and serves on the Board of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.
William G. Rosenberg is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Michigan, USA and Associated Scholar of the St. Petersburg Institute of History, RAN. He also serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of the European University at St. Petersburg. In addition to his work in modern Russian and Soviet history, he is the author (with Francis X. Blouin) of Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives which received the W.G. Leland Award from the Society of American Archivists.
Jonathan D. Smele is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Queen Mary University of London, UK. His areas of interest are the Russian revolutions and civil wars. He is a member of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution and edited its journal, Revolutionary Russia, from 2002 to 2012. His most recent books are The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (2015) and Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916–1926.
Laurie Stoff is Principal Lecturer and Honors Faculty Fellow at Arizona State University’s Barrett Honors College, USA. She specializes in Russian, East European, and women’s and gender history. Her main research interest is on how gender and war intersect for Russian women during World War 1. She has written They Fought for the Motherland: Russia’s Women Soldiers in World War 1 and the Revolution (2006) and Russia’s Sisters of Mercy and the Great War: More Than Binding Men’s Wounds (2015). For the latter, she was awarded the Best Book in Slavic Studies by the Southern Conference of Slavic Studies and the Smith Award for Best Book in European History by the Southern Historical Association. She is also lead editor for a volume entitled Military Experience which explores the experiences of different participants in the war.
Geoffrey Swain is Emeritus Professor of Central and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow. He focused his research on the history of Russia and Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. He has written numerous works on the history of Eastern Europe including Eastern Europe since 1945 (2018) and A Short History of the Russian Revolution (2017).
Ian D. Thatcher is Professor and Research Director of History at Ulster University, Northern Ireland. His research focuses on the history of Russian social democracy, the 1917 Revolution, and the history of the Soviet Union. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a member of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution and of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.
The late Mark von Hagen was Professor of History and Global Studies at Arizona State University, USA. Earlier, he served as Director of the Harriman Institute and Professor of History at Columbia University. A leading scholar in the rebirth and redefinition of the study of the Russian Empire and its borderlands, especially Ukraine, he wrote Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 and War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918. In 2008, he was elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and served on the editorial board of Slavic Review, Ab Imperio, and Kritika.
Peter Waldron is Professor of History at the University of East Anglia, UK. His books include Radical Russia: Art, Culture and Revolution (Sainsbury Centre, 2017); Russia of the Tsars (Thames & Hudson, 2011); Governing Tsarist Russia (Palgrave, 2007); Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (N. Illinois University Press, 1998); and The End of Imperial Russia, 1855–1917 (Palgrave, 1997).
Frank Wcislo is Associate Professor of History and Russian Studies at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA. He is the author of Reforming Rural Russia: State, Local Society, and National Politics, 1855–1914 (1990 and 2014) and Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergie Witte, 1849–1915 (2011). He was a member of the editorial board for the publication project of the Witte Memoirs (2003) by the St. Petersburg Institute of History.
Elizabeth White is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of the West of England, UK. Her research focuses on modern Russian and European social and cultural history. She is the author of The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1921–39 (2010) and A Modern History of Russian Childhood (2020) as well as numerous articles on the history of Russian childhood, refugees, and humanitarianism.
Stephen F. Williams is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Before that he taught at the University of Colorado Law School from 1969 to 1986. In addition to his career in law, Williams has studied Russian history. Among his works on the subject are The Reformer: How One Liberal Fought to Preempt the Russian Revolution (2017) and Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime: The Creation of Private Property in Russia, 1906–1915 (2006).
Editor’s Acknowledgments
My greatest debt is to the successive generations of scholars who have done so much to clarify and reinterpret this most difficult historical phenomenon, the Russian Revolution. A subject never offering easy answers, the Revolution more often than not inspires a despairing humility, perhaps reflected in the essays here presented. I give deep thanks also to the contributors whose patience and support throughout the unimaginably long process of publication are more than I deserved. I am deeply sorry to note the recent death of one of our dear friends and contributors, Mark von Hagen.
Special thanks to several close friends among Revolution scholars, Bill Rosenberg, Boris Kolonitskii, Chris Read and Toshi Hasegawa, who shared so many global venues and projects, and who so generously asked questions and offered wisdom over the Centennial years. Finally, my gratitude to Jennifer Manias, of John Wiley, the Publisher, whose crucial intervention brought this project to completion.
Introduction: The Russian Revolution at 100
Daniel Orlovsky
The Centennial of the Russian Revolution has resulted in the publication of books, conferences, events, and projects around the globe. The essays collected here provide original views of both the historiography and the state of current research on key components of the Revolutionary experience. Though the focus is on 1917 itself, for reasons discussed below, the volume offers substantial coverage of the Revolution as a longer‐term process embracing not only the years of the Great War and Civil War, but also the longer‐term origins as well as the extension of the Revolution proper into the era of New Economic Policy (NEP). We cover in detail such themes as the borderlands and provinces, gender, popular and high culture, religion, law, ideologies and parties, social movements, the military, foreign policy, symbols, and discourse. In addition questions of memory and commemoration of the Revolution are taken up as well as what we might term the ‘afterlife’ of the Revolution or its capacity to continue to influence events, to serve as a model, to provide a script for the overthrow of authoritarian regimes and/or the creation of new ones.
There was much interest in how the Centennial would be celebrated in Russia and what would be the attitude of ‘official’ Russia or the Putin regime. The government chose to downplay the anniversary, preferring to set up a commission in late 2016 with the idea of building a monument of reconciliation of Reds and Whites in the Civil War in The Crimea. Official discourse pointed instead to the dangers of Revolution, the idea of reconciliation of the opposing forces in the Revolution and Civil War, and criticism of violence. Preservation of a strong Russian state was another primary goal. This went along with a reopening of memory on World War I, Russian sacrifices there and a pointed attack on Lenin for stoking the violence of the Civil War.
In 1996 November 7 became the Day of Reconciliation and Concord and in 2004 ceased to be a public holiday and was replaced by the Day of People’s Unity celebrating the end of the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century. Even more recently in 2018, the anniversary celebrated the defense of Moscow in 1941.
The official consensus viewed 1917 as a misguided attempt to alter the course of Russian history and ‘Gosudarstvennost’ (sanctity of the state). This was preceded by an earlier commission to combat falsification of history and promotion of a vague unity of historical development and reference to the tragedy of social schism represented by 1917 and the Civil War. Much of this was articulated in a series of interventions by the Minister of Culture V. Medinskii. Legacies were both positive and negative; grand Soviet achievements as well as the violence and repression of the Soviet era. Official Russia drew a line under it and proposed to move on, building a wall of sorrow but proposing no further prosecution in the court of history (Ryan, 2018).
Still, there remained the question of popular responses to the Centennial, responses that were difficult for the state to control, and the actual position of the academic community in Russia and beyond.
New Scripts, Themes, Narratives
The question of periodization: Recent scholarship has shifted focus away from 1917 itself (both February and October) to a more elongated time period that emphasizes Revolution as process. The time period varies, 1914–22, 1905–21, 1890–1928, and in the conception of one of our contributors, J. Smele, 1916–26. In Smele’s creative vision there was no Revolution at all, rather a protracted series of overlapping civil wars. Here the emphasis is on 1917, though the volume takes the longer‐term process seriously and devotes many chapters to both short‐ and longer‐term causes and outcomes of the 1917 Revolutions. 1917 was unique in the history of the Revolution as process, the explosion which produced the discourses of Revolution and Counter‐Revolution and the Revolution itself as historical actor. The undertheorized Civil War and immediate aftermath of 1917 are also crucial as a Revolution phase II, where Revolution continues in the role of actor and the themes of 1917 are played out, power and social and cultural transformation, not to mention the fate of Empire and the multiple revolutions of the borderlands. Here we try to reverse that tendency to bury or lose 1917, the uniqueness of the Revolution in the longer time period embracing the First World War and the Civil War or even more distant dates, or to erase from the docket not just 1917 but Revolution completely, preferring instead to call the whole long era one of multiple revolutions (see here von Hagen and Buttino especially) or Civil Wars.
This introduction focuses on several of the main takeaways (new scripts, themes, narratives) from the Centennial reset or reexamination in place of a complete summary of the volume contents. I review some of these in no particular order. The new work transcends older categories such as party, class, dual power, and the triumphalist narratives both Soviet and Bolshevik. There is an exciting new research area I call Microhistory (different from the first wave of studies of Revolution in the provinces – Hickey, Retish, Penter, Badcock, Raleigh, for example). Here we see the actual daily workings of the infrastructure, Peter Holquist’s parastatal complex both as background to 1917, the state of power relations in given localities on the eve of Revolution, and precisely how these power relationships developed during 1917 and after. This work is based on new, deep local archival materials. But more importantly, it focuses squarely on primary institutions, cooperatives, town dumas, Soviets, other associations in their contested space, and discourses of power, for example, that previously remained less thoroughly examined in the literature. These very new microhistories (Dickins 2017; Schrader, 2018, 2019, for example) integrate the social and occupational with political and institutional infrastructure. And there are the vastly important areas of culture and religion (see here especially the essays by Hellman and Huttunen, Frame, and on religion by Freeze), central to any realistic or theoretical discussion of revolutionary transformation.
The Revival or revaluation of February as centerpiece of the Revolution are reflected in such diverse authors as Solzhenitsyn, Lyandres, Hasegawa, Dukes, and Nikolaev. This includes questions of political antecedents and power struggles that shaped the first Provisional Government and the major role of the Duma both in February Days and in ongoing events. We have witnessed the recovery and highlighting of February as the ‘real revolution’ – or as a Revolution in its own right not just as a ‘second’ Russian Revolution (the first being 1905) and a mere prelude to October. There is a need here especially to counter the Soviet dominant October narrative which feminized and minimized February (with the brilliant exceptions of Burdzhalov, Startsev, and a few others).
Here, Waldron and Wcislo provide the deep and more immediate background to the 1917 events. T. Hasegawa reviews the February Days, bringing into focus the conflicts over power based on the most recent scholarship. A.B. Nikolaev makes the case for ongoing Duma influence and direct participation in the February Revolution. We cover the creation of Dual power and critique of that model (Hasegawa and Thatcher) to include many powers, absence of power, an ongoing struggle for authority and legitimacy.
Solzhenitsyn presents an interesting case. Writing on the 90th anniversary of the Revolution in 2007 he too elevates February over October with the publication of his ‘reflections’ which provide his own summary of his views distilled from his recently translated and published novel March, 1917 (part of the long historical fictional project, The Red Wheel).
Among Solzhenitsyn’s worthy interventions are his notion of the Revolution as a force field that seized minds. Although much has been made of the author’s blame of liberals, westernizers, intellectuals for February, a careful reading reveals plenty of criticism of Nicholas II, the military, members of the royal family (including Mikhail, directly accused of illegally and morally ending the monarchy), and especially of state authority, which failed abjectly. Solzhenitzyn’s portrait supports our notion of the Revolution itself as an active force in history. He also argues that the Provisional Government paved the way for the Bolsheviks by appearing at once as a dictatorship more powerful than the Tsar and as a destroyer of legitimate and necessary authority by undermining the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the police, and local administration. He of course judges as immoral the arrest of the Tsar, who he argues did not similarly treat his political opponents. In the end, he follows the argument of Boris Kolonitskii that loss of love and the Tsar’s nerve (read weakness) carried great responsibility for the February Revolution.
Semion Lyandres’s publication of the only recently recovered oral testimonies of revolutionary actors provides further new insight into the revolutionary process. Here we learn definitively that plots to overthrow the monarchy existed and were actually put into play just prior to February. We learn of the role of Captain D.V. Kossikovskii who moved a cavalry unit to Petrograd prior to the February 27 soldiers’ uprising, then moved it out on March 1 to the strategic position along the path the Imperial train was to pass. And on February 27, Nekrasov, Guchkov, and Tereshchenko attempted to establish a temporary dictatorship under General Manikovskii.
Rodzianko and Miliukov knew of and supported plots to remove Nicholas and this sheds light on the Duma Committee’s decision to seek abdication. Finally, Rodzianko’s opposition to Mikhail taking the throne on March 3 was not a reversal of his previous position to preserve the monarchy, but consistent with his position to seek political power by elevating the prestige of the Duma. Lyandres in a series of works has outlined in detail the role as plotter of Prince L’vov and the three‐way struggle for power between Miliukov, Rodzianko, and L’vov (going back into 1916), having profound results during the February Days.
Now it is common among even Russian scholars to compare February to more recent and even present‐day examples – Iran, Portugal, the color Revolutions in the Middle East, Ukraine, Central Asia, as well as Yeltsin against the parliament in 1991 and 1993. We move away from the idea of October’s inevitability and more toward February as either a violent, explosive, unpredictable process or an unfinished or open‐ended democratic Revolution, one that may have needed illiberal measures (as in 1993) to introduce liberalism. This also requires rethinking the Constituent Assembly experience.
Prominent in the new view of the revolution is what might be termed the Buldakov syndrome, or the rejection of explanations based upon linear development, progress, parties, and leaders. Buldakov in his many works, including his contribution to this volume, substitutes the archaic, emotions, ochlocracy (a favorite term), the crowd, atavistic cultural factors, and the like for the traditional analytic categories. Buldakov wants to study the Revolution (and not just February, but October and the Civil War) not from the top or bottom but from inside, hence his rejection of rational elements and the politics we have studied for one hundred years, but the archaic passions around ‘incomprehensible power.’ He rejects the idea of alternatives as an object of study.
Along these lines and opening new fresh approaches are the study of rumors (Kolonitskii), especially the idea that rumors created new active facts or ‘truths’ and realities, some of what we label today as fake news. Rumor, often fueled by emotion and violence, played a large role in the collapse of the Old Regime, the post February process, and the Bolshevik seizure of power. The establishment of a leader cult with far‐reaching implications in the Soviet period was also a product of February, most notably in the example of A.F. Kerenskii. This is revealed in the magisterial work of B.I. Kolonitskii. Add to this the work of W.G. Rosenberg on the build‐up of mass emotions among soldiers in particular who felt acutely the terror of war and deficits of economic and political justice in the Revolutionary process. T. Hasegawa in a more recent work in the microhistory vein chronicles the growth of crime (anarchy, violence) after February and links the Provisional Government’s failures to cope with it as a key factor in its power deficit and eventual demise. This criminal activity, as in other policy areas, would require Bolshevik responses and institutional solutions.
There is new emphasis on what I call the Endgame of 1917, or renewed study of September and October, the alternative particularly of an all socialist government as articulated by the Mensheviks Martov and Dan, but supported by a broad element of professionals, white collar workers, and others on the left and left center in 1917. This was viewed as a non‐Soviet solution to the power question. Soviets were class institutions and hence unsuitable for a state building project. Plus, they had demonstrated administrative incompetence (the notion that they were taking over the country administratively already in 1917 is portrayed as a myth). A broad‐based democratic state building project based upon the proletariat plus white collar plus professionals was required. Another aspect of the new Endgame vision is deeper study of the so‐called ‘failed’ institutions of September and October 1917, the Democratic Conference and the Council of the Republic (or Pre‐Parliament). Here we find more myth breaking on such subjects as the meaning and viability of coalition and serious policy discussions and proposals for the all socialist/democratic project. Also in play is renewed interest in the Military Revolutionary Committee, the primary mechanism of the power seizure. This helps balance our vastly augmented knowledge of the February Days with some equivalent for October that is not a complete buy‐in to the triumphal Bolshevik October narrative.
Then there is the question of global causality and impact and longer‐term views, including the era of violence (both from the right and the left) immediately after 1917 and fascism, all borrowing heavily from the Bolsheviks. US capitalism and globalism evolved in opposition to Communism and vice versa, each system defining itself as the polar opposite of the ‘other,’ while absorbing or mimicking key traits of its opponent. This pattern provided a script for modern politics and later for Revolutions modeled on both February and October as may be seen in both Cold War competition in Europe and the Third World, including 1968, Ostpolitik, Czechoslovakia (Velvet), detente and Helsinki, Poland, 1991 and 1993, and in post‐Soviet/Cold War color Revolutions in such far‐flung places as post‐Soviet space and the Middle East.
The Russian Revolution was a model for taking and maintaining power in its October and, less frequently cited or understood, February scripts. This went beyond ideology to include visceral feelings of extreme injustice (sometimes calling forth pre‐modern analogs) or programs of national liberation.
Another approach is to internationalize the Revolution both in terms of broad influences leading up to 1917 (pamphlets for example) and raising institutional and historical comparisons and attempts to build public opinion, or create one in favor of republican models and the like.
Further, the state intervention/modernity school sees the Revolution and outcomes as a variant of global patterns, and holds to this even while adding in extreme ideologically motivated violence. The global nexus remains key to 1917, 1991, and to Putin’s regime today.
These explanations are structural and not deterministic, multi‐causal, based on global crises and forces. These more than events on the ground dictated 1917 just as they do today (Rendle, 2017).
There is the issue of influence. Can we say that the Russian Revolution has left a permanent mark on global history as we might say of the French or American Revolution? To deny this despite the failure of the Soviet experiment seems triumphalist and overdetermined. Despite the absence of direct analogies in the recent or contemporary ‘revolutions’ there is the renewed hope of liberation promised by the memories and models of both February and October, especially the former in relation to the toppling of authoritarian regimes.
Part ISigns, Near and Far
Chapter OneLong‐Term Causes of the Russian Revolution
Peter Waldron
At the beginning of March 1917 Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and the Romanov dynasty's 300‐year rule over Russia came to an abrupt end. Less than eight months later, the Bolshevik party brusquely swept away the Provisional Government that had replaced the autocracy and began the process of establishing the world's first socialist state. The political cataclysms that transformed Russia in 1917 illuminate significant issues about the ways in which revolutions occur, although the interpretation that the Soviet state placed on 1917 over the following decades complicated understanding of the revolutions. The victors of 1917 – Lenin and his successors – argued that their triumph was inevitable and that the history of Russia was a single process leading to the Bolshevik seizure of power in the October revolution. The Soviet interpretation of Russian history concentrated on identifying every component cause of revolution and subjecting it to intense and detailed analysis. This approach to history did not allow that Russia had different possibilities for its development, but instead forced a single, linear explanation of the past onto circumstances that were complex and often uncertain. Soviet historians read history backward, seeing the October revolution as the inevitable consequence of centuries of historical development. For most of the twentieth century, this conceptual framework also helped to shape the understanding of Russian history outside the Soviet Union. The political antagonisms between the USSR and the western world polarized discussion of the Russian revolution, with history often becoming a function of politics. The Marxist–Leninist prism through which the USSR understood its own history produced a reaction in the west, and it was only in the last decades of the century – as the Soviet Union declined and fractured – that more nuanced views of the Russian revolution came to the fore (Suny 2006, 43–54).
Soviet historians minutely dissected every hint of revolt in the Russian past, alert to the slightest expressions of discontent that could demonstrate the deep roots of the October revolution. Russia's social structures were analyzed in great detail to provide evidence of the long‐held commitment of peasants and working people to the overthrow of the Tsarist state. The Soviet state had to reconcile Marxist political ideas, with their focus on the primacy of an industrial working class in making revolution, with Russia's overwhelmingly agrarian society. Lenin himself had performed complex ideological maneuvers to explain how a socialist revolution could take place in the least industrialized of the European great powers, and the Soviet Union recognized that it was continually striving toward the achievement of the utopia of full communism (Harding 1981, 110–34). Marx's explanation of human history argued that economic change lay at the base of the historical process and that politics was a function of economic change and part of the superstructure of society. For a regime that was so intensely political as the Soviet Union, politics played a surprisingly subordinate role in explaining the causes of revolution. The Bolshevik party stood as the vanguard of the working class and of the revolutionary process, but the political regime that Lenin and his party overthrew in 1917 was, for them, doomed to certain failure by the inevitability of economic upheaval and could do nothing to rescue itself. Tsarism – and its pale replacement in the Provisional Government – was fated to collapse. The Soviet explanation of revolutionary change was thus peculiarly one‐dimensional: the inevitability of the collapse of Tsarism was mirrored by the certainty of proletarian victory. The problems in this explanation of revolution were manifold, not least in its unsophisticated assessment of the nature of the Tsarist state.
A central question in explaining the success of revolution in 1917 is to understand why the mighty autocratic Romanov regime collapsed with such speed, leaving the way open for authority to disintegrate during the spring and summer of 1917. The nineteenth‐century Russian state was recognized as being the most powerful in Europe, and the grip that successive monarchs maintained on their empire was acknowledged as being ruthless and brutal. Russia's borders had witnessed sustained expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the growing power of the Romanov regime enabled its armies to expand in northern Europe, to take control of great swathes of Central Asia, and to consolidate its position in the Far East. The Russian army was the largest in Europe and its military might was feared by the other Great Powers, even though Russia had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Crimean war in the 1850s. In February 1917, however, military commanders lost their grip on the garrison of Petrograd and with troops mutinying, the regime was unable to maintain control of its capital city. Within 72 hours of mutiny breaking out, Nicholas II signed his abdication decree (Hasegawa 1981, 487–507). The experience of war since summer 1914 offers some explanation for the rapid downfall of the Tsarist regime, but the roots of revolution run much deeper and the eventual fragility of the imperial Russian state had more profound structural origins. Pressure from sections of Russian society provides some explanation for the revolutionary upheavals of 1917, but the state itself was vulnerable to assault by that point. The nature of revolutionary change – wherever it occurs – is confused and uncertain. No actor in the revolutionary process has any knowledge of how the historical events in which they are participating will turn out and, indeed, people may not see themselves as being part of a revolution. In 1917, when mass media were in their infancy and when communication in Russia was slow and rudimentary, actors in the drama were themselves often unaware of the wider context of their actions. The Soviet state imposed a single and simplistic narrative of change upon all of Russian history before 1917, minimizing the part played in the historical process by contingency, and reduced the significance of individual actions in bringing about social and political change. The passage of time allows us to identify patterns in the past and to see perspectives that were not open to those people who participated in the events of 1917 themselves. But the random event – the stray bullet or the misunderstood conversation – still plays a part in the shaping of the present and, thus, the past. Applying a corrective to the dominant historical narratives of the Russian revolution should not blind us to the ways in which individual actions have steered events in unthought‐of directions.
