History

Combining his own long term study of the revolution with the best of contemporary scholarship. Rex Wade presents a revised and expanded account of one of the pivotal events of modern history in this second edition. Within an overall narrative that provides a clear description of the 1917 revolution, he introduces several new approaches on its political history and complexity. Wade discredits many of the myths and misconceptions that have clouded studies of the period. He also considers the social history of the revolution and incorporates people and places too often left out of the story, including women, national minority peoples, and peasantry front soldiers.

This book is the first English-language edition of Weber's writings on the revolutions in Russia in 1905 and February 1917. Weber discusses the events and examines the issue of Russian 'liberalization' and its prospects in a way that, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has great relevance today.

A major contribution to the historiography of the world in the 20th century, The Bolsheviks in Power focuses on the fateful first year of Soviet rule in Petrograd. It examines events that profoundly shaped the Soviet political system that endured through most of the 20th century. Drawing largely from previously inaccessible Soviet archives, it demolishes standard interpretations of the origins of Soviet authoritarianism by demonstrating that the Soviet system evolved ad hoc as the Bolsheviks struggled to retain political power amid spiraling political, social, economic, and military crises. The book covers issues such as the rapid fall of influential moderate Bolsheviks, the formation of the dreaded Cheka, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the Red Terror, the national government's flight to Moscow, and the subsequent rivalry between Russia's new and old capitals.

Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870 – 1924) led the first successful revolt against market-based liberal democracy and founded the Soviet State in 1917, serving as the new nation’s chief architect and sole ruler for the next five years. This collection of primary sources allows readers to learn about Lenin through his own words and emphasizes Lenin’s actions rather than his ideology. Jeffrey Brooks and Georgiy Chernyavskiy have translated newly available documents that make it possible to provide a more accurate portrait of a ruthless political strategist whose actions created a new political, economic, social, and cultural system that in its heyday challenged the military, technological, and cultural might of the United States. Document headnotes, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography offer additional pedagogical support and encourage students to analyze the actions and beliefs of a man who transformed world history and whose legacy continues to affect social and political movements throughout the world.

This comparative historical sociology of the Bolshevik revolutionaries offers a reinterpretation of political radicalization in the last years of the Russian Empire. Finding that two-thirds of the Bolshevik leadership were ethnic minorities - Ukrainians, Latvians, Georgians, Jews, and others - this book examines the shared experiences of assimilation and socioethnic exclusion that underlay their class universalism. It suggests that imperial policies toward the Empire's diversity radicalized class and ethnicity as intersectional experiences, creating an assimilated but excluded elite: lower-class Russians and middle-class minorities universalized particular exclusions as they disproportionately sustained the economic and political burdens of maintaining the multiethnic Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks' social identities and routes to revolutionary radicalism show especially how a class-universalist politics was appealing to those seeking secularism in response to religious tensions, a universalist politics where ethnic and geopolitical insecurities were exclusionary, and a tolerant "imperial" imaginary where Russification and illiberal repressions were most keenly felt.

Professor Pipes gives us in A Concise History of the Russian Revolution a succinct and compelling interpretation of the "sequence of violent and disruptive acts" whose political, social, and ideological consequences will continue to be felt for generations to come.

Looks at the roots of what has been described as the most important political event in the history of the twentieth century, from the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 to the Bolshevik uprising in 1917.

This is a concise history of the Revolution of 1905, a critical juncture in the history of Russia when several possible paths were opened up for the country. By the end of that year, virtually every social group had become active in the opposition to the autocracy, which was on the verge of collapse. Only the promise of reform, in particular the formation of a parliament (Duma) that would participate in governing the country, enabled to old order to survive. For some eighteen months the opposition and the Tsarist regime continued to struggle for supremacy, and only in June 1907 did the government reassert its authority. It drastically changed the relatively liberal electoral law, depriving many citizens of the vote. Although the revolution was now over, some institutional changes remained intact. Most notably, Russia retained an elected legislature and political parties speaking for various social and economic interests. As a result, the autocratic system of rule was undermined, and the fate of the political and social order remained uncertain.

This book presents for the first time in English a collection of previously unpublished Menshevik documents from the Hoover Institution Archives. It draws a dramatic picture of the Russian Civil War and the establishment of the communist dictatorship as witnessed by the Russian Social Democrats, or Mensheviks. When the opposing Bolsheviks consolidated their power to emerge as the ruling party of the 1917 revolution, the Mensheviks' political influence was swept away and most were driven to exile. This collection is a mosaic of small pictures, specific situations, and tragedies that combine to form a large picture of conflict, struggle, and repression. It depicts the everyday reality of the Bolshevik dictatorship and shows the formation of the new mentality of communist rulers and their new relationship with the workers--how unquestioning obedience, military discipline, and intolerance replaced the free-wheeling multiparty competition of 1917.

2005 marks the centenary of Russia's 'first revolution' - an unplanned, spontaneous rejection of Tsarist rule that was a response to the 'Bloody Sunday' massacre of 9th January 1905. A wave of strikes, urban uprisings, peasant revolts, national revolutions and mutinies swept across the Russian Empire, and it proved a crucial turning point in the demise of the autocracy and the rise of a revolutionary socialism that would shape Russia, Europe and the international system for the rest of the twentieth century. The centenary of the Revolution has prompted scholars to review and reassess our understanding of what happened in 1905. Recent opportunities to access archives throughout the former Soviet Union are yielding new provincial perspectives, as well as fresh insights into the roles of national and religious minorities, and the parts played by individuals, social groups, political parties and institutions. This text brings together some of the best of this new research and reassessment, and includes thirteen chapters written by leading historians from around the world, together with an introduction from Abraham Ascher.

After the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in February 1917, Russia was subject to an eight month experiment in democracy. Sarah Badcock studies its failure through an exploration of the experiences and motivations of ordinary men and women, urban and rural, military and civilian. Using previously neglected documents from regional archives, this text offers a history of the revolution as experienced in the two Volga provinces of Nizhegorod and Kazan. Badcock exposes the confusions and contradictions between political elites and ordinary people and emphasises the role of the latter as political actors. By looking beyond Petersburg and Moscow, she shows how local concerns, conditions and interests were foremost in shaping how the revolution was received and understood. She also reveals the ways in which the small group of intellectuals who dominated the high political scene of 1917 had their political alternatives circumscribed by the desires and demands of ordinary people.

An exciting acount and analysis of Lenin's role in the Russian Revolution and the creation of the Soviet system. How did a revolutionary leader who was frequently surprised by events and was often compelled to observe them from abroadfinally seize power in a bloodless coup? This study, besides charting his rise to power, examines Lenins propagandist skill in crafting resonant slogans to fit every changing situation. He made failure look like success, and won the debate while seeming to lose it. Lenins legacy of government by propaganda still survives in Putins sovereign democracyitself a propaganda triumph. This is the Bolshevik Revolution seen from the 21st century, when President Putin attends Christmas eucharist in Moscow Cathedral and commends religion for promoting traditional Russian values. If historians of the Kruschev era did not foresee so improbable a transformation of Lenins Russia, Lenin himself was also unexpected.

Robert Service completes his masterful trilogy on the founding figures of the Soviet Union in an eagerly anticipated, authoritative biography of Leon Trotsky. Trotsky is perhaps the most intriguing and, given his prominence, the most understudied of the Soviet revolutionaries. Using new archival sources including family letters, party and military correspondence, confidential speeches, and medical records, Service offers new insights into Trotsky. He discusses Trotskyâe(tm)s fractious relations with the leaders he was trying to bring into a unified party before 1914; his attempt to disguise his political closeness to Stalin; and his role in the early 1920s as the progenitor of political and cultural Stalinism. Trotsky evinced a surprisingly glacial and schematic approach to making revolution. Service recounts Trotskyâe(tm)s role in the botched German revolution of 1923; his willingness to subject Europe to a Red Army invasion in the 1920s; and his assumption that peasants could easily be pushed onto collective farms. Service also sheds light on Trotskyâe(tm)s character and personality: his difficulties with his Jewish background, the development of his oratorical skills and his preference for writing over politicking, his inept handling of political factions and coldness toward associates, and his aversion to assuming personal power. Although Trotskyâe(tm)s followers clung to the stubborn view of him as a pure revolutionary and a powerful intellect unjustly hounded into exile by Stalin, the reality is very different. This illuminating portrait of the man and his legacy sets the record straight.