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This book explores the 1917 Russian Revolution from its February Revolution beginning to the victory of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October.
Rex Wade presents an account of one of the pivotal events of modern history, combining his own long study of the revolution with the best of contemporary scholarship. Within an overall narrative that provides a clear description of the 1917 revolution, he introduces several new approaches on its political history and the complexity of the October Revolution. Wade clears away many of the myths and misconceptions that have clouded studies of the period. He also gives due space to 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, enabling a more complete history to emerge. The 2005 second edition of this highly readable book has been thoroughly revised and expanded. It will prove invaluable reading to anyone interested in Russian history.
This collection presents the major recent writings on the Russian Revolution and its context. It brings together key texts to illustrate new interpretive approaches and covers the central topics and themes. Together, the chapters in this volume form a coherent representation of both the events and the theories and debates that relate to them.
The truth is that I never did know my mother - my mum - and now I don't even know what happened to her after she had left us, what became of her - even whether she is now alive or dead. She gave life to me and, not long after, she went away. I was probably three when I last saw her. My dad died soon after. And then it was just me and my two brothers Kevin and Brucie left to fend for ourselves in a big bad world. We didn't - and couldn't - possibly know then, as defenceless little kids, just how big, and just how bad it was. But we were about to find out. So begins a life-long journey for Rex, who at the age of 11 left the children's home in Cornwall along with his brother, and travelled to A...
This is the first major study of revolutionary Kronstadt to span the period from February 1917 to the uprising of March 1921. It focuses attention on Kronstadt's forgotten golden age, between March 1917 and July 1918, when Soviet power and democracy flourished there. Professor Getzler argues that the Kronstadters' 'Third Revolution' of March 1921 was a desperate attempt at a restoration of that Soviet democracy which they believed had been taken from them by Bolshevik 'commissarocracy'. Pointing to continuity in personnel, ideology and institutions linking the 1917-18 Kronstadt experiment in Soviet democracy with the March 1921 uprising, the author sees that continuity reflected in the Kronstadt tragedy's central figure, the long-haired, dreamy-eyed student Anatolii Lamanov. Chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet in 1917 and chief editor of its Izvestiia, Lamanov became the ideologist of the 1921 uprising and was soon after executed as a 'counter-revolutionary'.
The essays in this book address the process of worker alienation and the way that the Bolsheviks appealed to, rather than exploited, the working population, especially in the capital cities of Petrograd and Moscow. James Bater surveys the growing demographic and social crisis in the capitals that accompanied rapid industrialization. Steve Smith then traces the revolution in Petrograd, particularly in the factories where worker radicalism often outpaced the leadership of parties of the left that came to power after the tsar was overthrown in February. Diane Koenker finds a similar process at work in Moscow, despite the differences between the two cities. Finally, both Ronald Suny and William Rosenberg demonstrate how significant these findings are for a more accurate understanding of the Russian Revolution and ultimately of the survival of the Bolsheviks' government.
With precision and sensitivity, the human story of what the Russian revolution meant to ordinary people is told through the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the people as expressed in their own words.
This is a stimulating and highly original collection of essays from a team of internationally renowned experts. The contributors reinterpret key issues and debates, including political, social, cultural and international aspects of the Russian revolution stretching from the late imperial period into the early Soviet state.
Introduction -- Prelude to revolution -- Rising crime before the October revolution -- Why did the crime rate shoot up? -- Militias rise and fall -- An epidemic of mob justice -- Crime after the Bolshevik takeover -- The Bolsheviks and the militia -- Conclusion
Access to newly opened archives has allowed Alexander Rabinowitch to substantially rewrite the history of how the Bolsheviks consolidated their power in Russia. Focusing on the first year of Soviet rule in St Petersburg, he shows how state organs evolved in the face of repeated crises.