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.