The Russian Revolution (29 page)

Notes

Details of titles included in the Select Bibliography are given only at the first citation.

Introduction (pages z-z4)

i. Even naming the Revolution became complicated. The term `the Russian Revolution' has never been used in Russia. In Soviet usage, which many Russians now try to avoid, it was `the October Revolution', or simply `October'. The favoured post-Soviet term seems to be `the Bolshevik Revolution'.

2. Dates before the calendar change in 1918 are given in the old style, which in 1917 was thirteen days behind the Western calendar which Russia adopted in 1918.

3. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (rev. edn; New York, 1965). In the French Revolution, 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) was the date in the revolutionary calendar on which Robespierre fell. The word `Thermidor' is used as a shorthand both for the end of revolutionary terror and the end of the heroic phase of revolution.

4. See below, p. 166.

5. My thinking about state terror owes a considerable debt to Colin Lucas's article, `Revolutionary Violence, the People and the Terror', in K. Baker (ed.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 4: The Terror (Oxford, 1994).

6. The party's name was changed from Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolshevik) to Russian (later, All-Union) Communist Party (Bolshevik) in 1918. The terms `Bolshevik' and `Communist' were used interchangeably in the 192os, but `Communist' became the normal usage in the 1930s.

7. The term is borrowed from Aristide R. Zolberg, `Moments of Madness,' Politics and Society 2:2 (Winter, 1972), 183-207.

8. Adam B. Ulam, `The Historical Role of Marxism', in his The New Face of Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 35.

9. On this theme, see Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA, 2003).

to. `The Great Purges' is a Western term, not a Soviet one. For many years, there was no acceptable public way to refer to the episode in Russian because it had not officially happened; in private conversation, it was usually referred to obliquely as `1937'. The confusion of nomenclature between `purges' and `the Great Purges' comes from the Soviet use of a euphemism: when the Terror was brought to an end with a quasi-repudiation at the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939, what was nominally repudiated were `mass purges' (massovye chistki), though in fact no party purge in the strict sense had occurred since 1936. The euphemism was used briefly in Russian but soon disappeared, whereas in English it caught on permanently.

ii. The Great Terror is the title of Robert Conquest's classic work on the subject.

Chapter i (pages 15-39)

i. Frank Lorimer, The Population of the Soviet Union (Geneva, 1946), 10, 12.

2. A. G. Rashin, Formirovanie rabochego klassa Rossii (Moscow, 1958), 328.

3. Barbara A. Anderson, Internal Migration during Modernization in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (Princeton, NJ, 1980), 32-8.

4. A. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 1962), 5-30.

5. On peasant rebelliousness and working-class revolution, see Leopold Haimson, `The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 19051917', Slavic Review, 23, no. 4 (1964), 633-7.

6. See Between Tsar and People. Educated Society and the Quest.for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West (Princeton, NJ, 1991).

7. Alfred Rieber has used the term `sedimentary' to describe the coexistence of old and new forms of social identity in Russian society: see his article `The Sedimentary Society' in Between Tsar and People, 343-66.

8. See Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia. The EighteenthCentury Nobility (New York, 1966).

9. This is discussed in Richard S. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, 1976), 286-9 and passim. On the broader issue of the Great Reforms, see Russia's Great Reforms, 1855 1881, ed. Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova (Bloomington, IN, 1994).

10. See the argument in Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York, 1974), Ch. 10.

11. On the Populists' prescience on this question, see Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, 167-73.

12. For a negative view, see Richard Pipes, Social Democracy and the St Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885-1897 (Cambridge, MA, 1963); for a more positive one, see Allan K. Wildman, The Making of a Workers' Revolution. Russian Social Democracy, 1891-1903 (Chicago, 1967).

13. Quoted from Sidney Harcave, First Blood: The Russian Revolution of 1905 (New York, 1964), 23.

14. For an analysis of Bolshevik and Menshevik membership to 1907, see David Lane, The Roots of Russian Communism (Assen, The Netherlands, 1969), 22-3, 26.

15. For a lucid discussion of the split, see Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 21-6.

16. Quoted from Trotsky, `Our Political Tasks' (1904), in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (London, 1970), 91-2.

17. Haimson, `The Problem of Social Stability', 624-33.

18. On the 1905 Revolution, see Abraham Ascher The Revolution of 19o5, 2 vols. (Stanford, CA, 1988 and 1992).

19. See Roberta Thompson Manning, `Zemstvo and Revolution: The Onset of the Gentry Reaction, 1905-1907', in Leopold Haimson, ed., The Politics of Rural Russia, 19o5 1914 (Bloomington, IN, 1979).

20. Mary Schaeffer Conroy, Petr Arkad'evich Stolypin: Practical Politics in Late Tsarist Russia (Boulder, CO, 1976), 98.

21. Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906 1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin's Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford, 1999), S.

22. For a vivid fictional representation of what this isolation meant in psychological terms, see Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lenin in Zurich (New York, 1976).

23. See Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington, IN, 1999).

24. The family tragedy is portrayed with sympathy and understanding in Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra (New York, 1967).

Chapter 2 (pages 40-67)

i. For a critical historiographical survey of this argument, see Stephen F. Cohen, `Bolshevism and Stalinism', in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism (New York, 1977).

2. Quoted from W. G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1974), 209.

3. George Katkov, Russia, 1917: The February Revolution (London, 1967), 444.

4. For a documentary account of Nicholas' last days, see Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalev, The Fall of the Romanovs (New Haven and London, 1995), 277-366.

5. A. Tyrkova-Williams, From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk (London, 1919), 25.

6. Quoted from Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army (Princeton, NJ, 1980), 260.

7. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917, i. 104-5.

8. For a vivid account of the developing situation in the provinces, see Donald J. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga (Ithaca and London, 1986).

9. Quoted from Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy (Cambridge, MA, 1955), 42 (n. 20).

10. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow, 1964), xxiv. 21-6. The critic quoted by Lenin was Goldenberg.

ii. For a careful analysis of membership data for 1917, see T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917-2967 (Princeton, NJ, 1968), Ch. i.

12. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army. In addition to its central theme, the Army in the period Feb.-Apr. 1917, this book offers one of the best analyses available of the February transfer of power.

13. Marc Ferro, The Russian Revolution of February 1917, trans. by J. L. Richards (London, 1972), 112-21.

14. For a variety of popular responses, see the documents in Mark D. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917 (New Haven and London, 2001).

15. On the July Days, see A. Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington, IN, 1968).

16. Quoted from A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power (New York, 1976), 115.

17. Newspaper interview with General Alekseev (Rech', 13 Sept. 1917, p. 3), in Robert Paul Browder and Alexander F. Kerensky, eds, The Russian Provisional Government 1917: Documents (Stanford, 1961), iii. 1622.

18. Quoted from Robert V. Daniels, Red October (New York, 1967), 82.

19. The actions and intentions of major Bolshevik participants in the October Revolution were later subject to a great deal of self-serving revision and political myth-making-not only in official Stalinist histories, but also in Trotsky's classic history-cum-memoir, The History of the Russian Revolution. See the discussion in Daniels, Red October, Ch. 11.

20. Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, trans. by Max Eastman (Ann Arbor, MI, 1960), iii. Chs. 4-6.

21. See, for example, Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (1st edn; New York, 1976), 381-4.

22. The following analysis is based on O. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly 1917 (Ithaca, NY, 1989).

Chapter 3 (pages 68-92)

i. For accounts of the aftermath of revolution in the provinces, see Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1913-1921 (Cambridge and London, 2002) (on the Don region) and Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia's Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922 (Princeton, NJ, 2002).

2. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire (Ithaca, 2001), 8, 10.

3. For a discussion of these issues, see Ronald G. Suny, `Nationalism and Class in the Russian Revolution: A Comparative Discussion', in E. Frankel, J. Frankel, and B. Knei-Paz, eds, Russia in Revolution: Reassessments of 1917 (Cambridge, 1992).

4. On the impact of the Civil War, see D. Koenker, W. Rosenberg, and R. Suny eds, Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War (Bloomington, IN, 1989).

5. T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917-1967 (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 242; Vsesoyuznaya partiinaya perepis' 1927 goda. Osnovnye itogiperepisi (Moscow, 1927), 52.

6. Robert C. Tucker, `Stalinism as Revolution from Above', in Tucker, Stalinism, 91-2.

7. This argument is elaborated in Sheila Fitzpatrick, `The Civil War as a Formative Experience', in A. Gleason, P. Kenez, and R. Stites, eds, Bolshevik Culture (Bloomington, IN, 1985).

8. Quoted from John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk. The Forgotten Peace, March 1918 (New York, 1971), 243-4.

9. Figures cited from Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York, 1974), i-ii, 300. On the Cheka's activity in Petrograd, see Mary McAuley, Bread and Justice. State and Society in Petrograd, 1917-1922 (Oxford, 1991), 375-93.

10. For a sample of Lenin's statements on terror, see W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory. A History of the Russian Civil War (New York, 1989), 134-9; for Trotsky's views, see his Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Comrade Kautsky (1920).

ii. On peasant attitudes, see Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917-1921 (Oxford, 1989).

12. On the economy, see Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918-1921 (Cambridge, 1985).

13. See Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (London, 1969), Ch. 3.

14. On trade policies, see Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade (Princeton, NJ, 2004), Ch. 2.

15. On food procurement, see Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia 1914-1921 (Berkeley, 1990).

16. For an argument that there was no `second revolution', see T. Shanin, The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia 1910-1925 (Oxford, 1972), 145-61.

17. N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, trans. by E. and C. Paul (London, 1969), 355.

18. On continuity between the period of the Stolypin reforms and the 1920s, especially through the presence in the countryside of agricultural specialists working on land consolidation, see George L. Yaney, `Agricultural Administration in Russia from the Stolypin Land Reform to Forced Collectivization: An Interpretive Study', in James R. Millar, ed., The Soviet Rural Community (Urbana, IL, 1971), 3-35.

i9. See Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1989) and William G. Rosenberg, ed., Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (2nd edn, Ann Arbor, MI, 1990).

20. Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, 118.

21. Quoted from Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment (London, 1970), 20.

22. T. H. Rigby, Lenin's Government. Sovnarkom, 1917-1922 (Cambridge, 1979). For a recent archive-based account of Lenin in power, see Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (London, 2000), Chs. 15-25.