Greg Polansky
History 560
1.28.08

Writing on the Russian Revolution has been complicated by the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union for most of the twentieth century, leading historians to question how effectively they could both remain objective and provide analysis. Furthermore interpretations of the Russian Revolution have been approached in two discrete ways, with the fall of the Soviet Union demarcating two distinct periods of writing on the subject. However, this tension and division has not prevented the historiography of the Russian Revolution from being a topic that has been interpreted in different ways vis-à-vis the decade in which the work was written that also closely paralleled trends in historical writing. Finally, the importance of the Russian Revolution for subsequent twentieth-century history continues to generate interest in the subject and there could be more options for study and interpretation given the current trends that focus on comparative, transnational, and global histories.
The approach taken by historians to the subject of the Russian Revolution has generated debates on just what the role of the historian is vis-à-vis a state which was, at the time of writing, an antagonistic foe of the state in which the historian currently resided in. Writing after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in The Russian Revolution, 1917, Rex Wade stated that, “the collapse of the Soviet Union has made it easier to put the Russian Revolution into better historical perspective. Writing on it no longer involves an implied judgment on an existing government and system.” [1] For Wade, historians who wrote on the Russian Revolution before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 were making judgments on the enemy of the United States. He does not state this in the selected quote, but the existence of the Cold War cannot be discounted. It is part of the social and cultural milieu in which historians wrote in before 1991. Whether those judgments are negative or positive, they did complicate matters for historians attempting to understand the genesis of the Soviet Union.
Writing while the Soviet Union was in existence, both William G. Rosenberg and Donald Raleigh explored the fraught nature of analyzing the Soviet Union which appeared to complicate their efforts to understand the Russian Revolution in an objective manner. In Liberals in the Russian Revolution, Rosenberg states that, “history as mere fact is little more than chronicle; without judgment, which operates in the ordering of events as well as their analysis, and which invariably stems from bias, it also teaches little.”[2] Rosenberg freely admits that historians have a bias that colors their interpretation and analysis of events. The fact that he must state this and acknowledge that his attempts at objectivity are not possible and not even desirable are a departure from the historical model that seeks objectivity above all else. This is crucial to how a historian will interpret the Russian Revolution. Similar to Rosenberg, Donald Raleigh stated that there was a, “tendency to permit our knowledge of or reaction to subsequent Soviet history to intrude upon and color and understanding of the revolution itself.”[3] He was writing in 1986 when the Soviet Union was still very much in existence and while the Cold War was still raging across the world. For him, as for Rosenberg, being a member of one side of a war and being a historian attempting to analyze a subject were fraught with conflicting impulses. How could he attempt a dispassionate analysis of the Russian Revolution when it gave rise to a state whose twentieth-century history and role was that of the “enemy” of the United States? Raleigh does go on to elaborate this position when he states, “detachment is not easy, particularly when one’s request to consult archival holdings is met with the bland assurance that no such documents exist.”[4] This quote suggests that ultimately, Raleigh is trying to write a history of the Russian Revolution that was detached from judgment of subsequent Soviet history. Raleigh is very much the kind of historian that Rex Wade is referring to when he stated that the collapse of the Soviet Union has allowed historians to write on a subject without making any implied judgments on an existing government. Historians like Raleigh, writing in 1986, did not have the distance of time that Wade, writing in 2000, had.
There is a problem with Rex Wade’s idea that due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, “writing on it no longer involves an implied judgment on an existing government and system.”[5] His language is very careful to use the word “existing”. But this leaves room for the idea that one can still write and make an implied judgment on a defunct government and system. Thus it is possible to state that the collapse of the Soviet Union has made the Russian Revolution less significant for world history since it ultimately led to a state which is no longer in existence, whereas the American Revolution could be considered more significant because the state that it gave rise to is still in its existence. There still remains an “implied judgment” on the Russian Revolution, whether or not there is an implied judgment on an existing government and system. Furthermore Wade’s idea implies that even though a certain government no longer exists there is no continuity between governments. If there is some continuity and crossover past 1991, then any analysis will continue to have elements of implied judgment because the government is still in existence, in some form. For instance, would Wade claim that even though France is in the Fifth Republic there is no “implied judgment” when historians write on the first four republics?
Ultimately there appear to be tensions between the ideas espoused by Rosenberg and Wade that need to be addressed to understand the evolution of the historiography of the Russian Revolution and subsequent writing on the Soviet Union. While Rosenberg states that history without judgment is a chronicle that teaches little, Wade appears to have a problem with the idea of judgment at all. This tension appears to be a possible source of exploration for future works of history that examine revolutions beginnings and endings and how historians write about the revolutions during the course of the state that it gave rise to and after their “ends”.
While the subject of the Russian Revolution’s ability to be analyzed has been complicated by historian’s views on objectivity and whether they wrote pre- or post- 1991, the actors and agents of the revolution that historians have chosen to focus upon has closely paralleled overall historical shifts in the field. Beginning in the late nineteen-sixties and extending into the nineteen-eighties, historians shifted to the use of social history to analyze the Russian Revolution. By 1967, the influence of social history could be felt on the work of Robert V. Daniels who in Red October could wonder whether the October Revolution was an “extraordinary series of accidents and missteps that accompanied the Bolshevik revolution and allowed it to succeed”[6] or if there were “deep historical forces of a long-laid master scheme.”[7] This line of inquiry would appear to indicate that there a shift away from a political emphasis on history that placed success of the Revolution on V. I. Lenin to an open suggestion that could be construed that social forces – deep historical forces – were more responsible for both the occurrence and outcome of the October Revolution. This line of inquiry is further developed in Rabinowitch’s work when he states that the reason the Revolution succeeded was because the people supported the Bolsheviks. And they supported the Bolsheviks because they wanted to ensure that they did not die at the front, that they were not returned to the old regime, and because they wanted an end to Russia’s involvement in the First World War.[ Rabinowitch analyses the people to determine why they gave their support to the Bolsheviks. For him there are deep social forces at work and while Lenin was important, the people grievances and concerns were more important to the success of the Bolsheviks.
A focus upon the people also characterizes the works of S. A. Smith and Diane Koenker. In Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, S. A. Smith still focuses upon the city of Petrograd but his focus has shifted to the “sphere of production [that] was itself an important area of political as well as economic conflict.”[9] While Smith does note that the history of revolution is a political history, he also integrates social history into his approach to understand the relationships between class power in the factories of Petrograd, with a special emphasis on the ways in which the old tsarist factory was autocratic and the workers were attempting to establish control of production.[10] Smith’s analysis very much echoes Marx’s and Lenin’s own words on the nature of production and power with its emphasis on class, management, power, and economic conflict. Smith finds that “it was the struggles of workers in the world of work, and the activities of work-based organizations, such as the factory committees and trade unions, which were of central importance in promoting revolutionary consciousness in 1917.”[11] Consciousness and the worker were of the utmost importance in explaining how and why the Russian Revolution both occurred and succeeded.
Workers are also of prime importance in Diane Koenker’s Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution. Very much a part of the climate that saw social history’s value and feasibility, the author gives a month by month analysis of worker’s concerns, with particular attention to which groups of workers were voting for which resolutions, how many resolutions were voted upon and what percentage this represented between February and October 1917. This focus expresses a deeper concern within the historiography of the Russian Revolution. Not only is there a dismissal of the idea that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and their cohort were the primary agents responsible for the revolution, but the study shows that there is a concern with power – who is in charge and who is the legitimate locus of power?[12] And based upon the results of the quantitative analysis and statistical study, it would appear that, at first, the people were the ones in power. For instance, though the resolutions were proposed by the Bolsheviks, Koenker shows that the Bolsheviks felt the need to propose those resolutions to gauge how much public support they had.[13] This innovative use of statistics allows Koenker to use social history to elucidate the complexities of the Revolution from below. By carefully analyzing voting patterns on a month by month basis, Koenker finds that “not till October did the resolution favoring Soviet Power emerge as one of the paramount concern for Moscow workers and it emerged simultaneously with the emergence of the Bolshevik party as the leading working class party.”[14]
While Koenker’s work is representative of the shift towards social history in the seventies and eighties, it also represents a shift in what locations are studied that parallels the rise of metropole/colony and postcolonial studies during this time period. Moscow, while not a colony, did represent a new area of study for the Russian Revolution that before had focused on Petrograd. Even S. A. Smith’s work focused on red Petrograd, not red Moscow. For Koenker, Moscow is not backward to Petrograd. Moscow was a more complex site of inquiry. It was less impulsive than Petrograd and Koenker’s study, written in 1981, ended up with the idea that more work on the significance of Petrograd was needed with an examination of other parts of Russia.[15]
Donald Raleigh’s Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov, takes up this idea that there needs to be more exploration of the Russian Revolution outside of Petrograd by examining the stereotype of a provincial town. His is the “first book of non-Soviet consideration of the revolution in a provincial town in European Russia.”[16] His work uses Saratov because Saratov was Russia for him and his history is a social and political history that demonstrates that the “conflicts and conditions that brought about the revolution were by no means confined to the urban capitals.”[17] For Raleigh, an exploration that uses social history is a means to an end to show that the Revolution was very much a revolution of the people in all of Russia, not just Petrograd and Moscow. His work represents a bridge that ties together social history with postcolonial studies.
Like Raleigh’s work in Saratov and Koenker’s work in Moscow, Jeff Sahadeo pushes the frontier of knowledge outward to Tashkent by using class and identity to explore the intricacies of the Russian Revolution. In Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1923, the author examines the way in which “class was used to exclude the entire colonized population from political equality in soviet Turkestan.[1” and how “Russian workers’ and soldiers’ desire to guard colonial identities and privileges surmounted class solidarity and revolutionary emancipation in Tashkent.”[19] This work shows how outside of places like Petrograd, Moscow, and even Saratov, there were other factors at play, such as religion and race, in how the Revolution played out and why it did or did not get support from certain groups in the periphery. Here we have an example of how colonial legacies were more important than class to the society of the “colony” and how this led to social tensions and questions of how to reconcile post-Tsarist emancipating with continued positions of privilege.[20] But ultimately this work is more important because it shows that in 2007 the postcolonial metropole/colony way of analyzing a topic has shifted the focus from the center to the periphery and has also shown that new insights can be made into the Revolution.
While social history and postcolonial theory represent two successive narratives that reflect the means by which historians analyze a subject, new narratives have been created that use linguistics and art to flesh out new ways of thinking about the Revolution. For instance, in Karen Petrone’s work, she notes that for the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution, the women and men involved reincorporated pre-Revolutionary elements such as the author Pushkin and the leader Peter I to create a “shining celebratory moment.”[21] This led to a split between Soviet discourse and Soviet reality that Petrone explores through an examination of how perceptions of the revolution altered in the minds of the people of the 1930s. The essay is an examination in which the “truth” of the October Revolution could be changed twenty years later to both strengthen the current reality and to twist it into a new direction for the future. Hence, the October Revolution loses some sense of absoluteness and becomes more malleable and porous an event. It was not a total break with the past. It was a twist. Certain figures from the past would be allowed access through that twist to the current reality of 1937, the year of the twentieth anniversary celebrations. In addition, other figures that featured so prominently in 1917 were excluded and made into enemies of the state, agents of reactionary past or capitalism. Thus Trotsky is sidelined by 1937 while Peter the Great is allowed past 1917 to form a bridge to the greatness of Stalin.
The idea that the Russian Revolution of 1917 could be a twist rather than a break complicates matters for the understanding of the historiography and subject of the Russian Revolution. When Wade said that “the collapse of the Soviet Union has made it easier to put the Russian Revolution into better historical perspective”[22], he was right at least in terms of access to documents and archives, but if the new interpretations of the Revolution that reinterpret 1917 to be as a twist or to be a porous event for the time before and after it hold true and create new narratives, then the Revolution becomes that much harder to put into historical perspective since one has to ask oneself just when did the Revolution actually begin? When did it end? Did it even have an end? Perhaps the Revolution can be placed into a different historical perspective where a conception of time can be used to examine the nature of the Revolution.
The past four decades have seen interpretations of the Russian Revolution make use of popular narratives. Social history, influenced by psychological study and social anthropology gave way to postcolonial theories that saw the emphasis shift to metropole and periphery. That narrative is now competing for attention with linguistic/artistic narratives of the Revolution that are showing how there appears to be room for more interpretation of the Russian Revolution. Within the past decade comparative histories, global histories, and world histories have all been gaining influence. Because revolutions occur in many different nation-states and in many different cultures, the Russian Revolution is an excellent example of a topic that could be analyzed comparatively, as was suggested earlier in this essay. Historians could gain new insights by comparing how the Russian Revolution took place and has been interpreted with other Revolutions from the past. By integrating the Russian Revolution into a global narrative of revolutions it could allow for new insights into the Russian Revolution, the revolutions that are used to compare it with. Philosophically, the nature of revolution itself could better be understood through more analysis of revolutions. Whether this does end up as a fruitful area of inquiry or whether something new is used to analyze the Russian Revolution, or even whether something older like an economic analysis is used to interpret the Russian Revolution cannot be determined. But the Russian Revolution’s significance for twentieth-century history, and Russia’s significance for twenty-first century society and civilizations, means that it will be a subject that will continue to attract interest and will continue to be a subject that will yield new insights and new disagreements about its nature.

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[1] Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ix.
[2] William G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917 – 1921. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 7.
[3] Donald Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga, 1917 in Saratov. (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1986), 11.
[4] Ibid, 11.
[5] Wade, ix.
[6] Robert V Daniels, Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. (New York: Scribner, 1967), 214.
[7] Ibid, 214.
[ Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 314.
[9] S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917 – 1918. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2.
[10] Ibid, 1.
[11] Ibid, 3.
[12] Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 238.
[13] Ibid, 250.
[14] Ibid, 260.
[15] Ibid, 366.
[16] Raleigh, 11.
[17] Ibid, 11.
[1 Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865 – 1923. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 200.
[19] Ibid, 207.
[20] Ibid, 187.
[21] Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000) , 158.
[22] Wade, ix.


Not the best of my work, but it did get me an A-.