The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  The first Russian Revolution is the subject of Abraham Ascher’s The Revolution of 1905 (Stanford, Calif., 1988); a sequel, dealing with 1906, is in progress. Andrew M. Verner’s Nicholas II and the Role of the Autocrat during the First Russian Revolution, 1904–1907, Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1986, supplies much archival information on tsarist policies.

  The 1906 Fundamental Laws are translated and analyzed in M. Szeftel’s The Russian Constitution of April 23, 1906 (Brussels, 1976).

  The Duma period is discussed in G. A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment (Cambridge, 1973). The best history of Stolypin’s administration, alas, is available only in Polish: Ludwig Bazylow, Ostatnie lata Rosji Carskiej: Rzady Stolypina [The Final Years of Tsarism: The Rule of Stolypin], (Warsaw, 1972). Stolypin’s peasant policies are the subject of S. M. Dubrovskii’s Stolypinskaia zemel’naia reforma [Stolypin’sAgrarian Reform] (Moscow, 1963). Materials on his assassination have been collected by A. Serebrennikov, Ubiistvo Stolypina: svidetel’stva i dokumenty [The Murder of Stolypin: Testimonies and Documents] (New York, 1986).

  Russia at war is treated by Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (London and New York, 1975). A. Knox’s With the Russian Army, 2 vols. (London, 1921), is an informative account by the British military attaché. V. A. Emets in Ocherki vneshnei politiki Rossii, 1914–17 [Outlines of Russia’s Foreign Policy, 1914–17] (Moscow, 1977) and V. S. Diakin’s Russkaia burzhuaziia i tsarizm v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny (1914–1917) [The Russian Bourgeoisie and Tsarism during the World War (1914–1917) (Leningrad, 1967) provide analyses of the political situation in Russia during World War I, relatively free of customary Soviet distortions. The same holds true of the book by the Polish historian Ludwig Bazylow, Obalenie caratu [The Overthrow of Tsarism] (Warsaw, 1976). There is much to be learned from A. I. Spiridovich’s Velikaia voina ifevral’skaia revoliutsiia, 1914–1918 gg. [The Great War and the February Revolution], 3 vols. (New York, 1962). The economic antecedents of the Revolution are treated by A. L. Sidorov’s Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny [The Economic Situation of Russia during World War I] (Moscow, 1973).

  The letters of Alexandra Fedorovna to Nicholas II during the war have been edited by Bernard Pares: Letters of the Tsaritsa to the Tsar, 1914–1916 (London, 1923). Nicholas’s letters to his wife during this period are available only in a Russian translation in KA, No. 4 (1923). Immensely valuable are the minutes of the cabinet meetings in 1915–16, prepared by A. N. Iakhontov in Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, XVIII (1926); they have been translated by Michael Cherniavsky as Prelude to Revolution (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967).

  The best treatment of Rasputin is by high officials of the security services: S. P. Beletskii, Grigorii Rasputin (Petrograd, 1923), and A. I. Spiridovich, Raspoutine (Paris, 1935).

  The situation in Russia on the eve of the February Revolution is reflected in the remarkably objective and well-informed confidential reports by the Corps of Gendarmes, published by B. B. Grave under the misleading title Burzhuaziia naka-nune fevral’skoi revoliutsii [The Bourgeoisie on the Eve of the February Revolution] (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927). E. D. Chermenskii’s IV Gosudarstvennaia Duma i sverzhenie tsarizma v Rossii (Moscow, 1976) is a conventional Communist account that has its uses because of the author’s access to archival sources.

  The standard history of February 1917 is T. Hasegawa’s The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (Seattle-London, 1981). Very informative is E. I. Martynov’s Tsarskaia armiia v fevral’skom perevorote [The Tsarist Army in the February Revolution] (Leningrad, 1927), which deals with much besides the armed forces and provides solid documentation. S. P. Melgunov’s Martovskie dni [The March Days] (Paris, 1961), as everything by this author, is well informed but contentious and disorganized. Of the memoir literature on 1917, pride of place belongs to the recollections of Nicholas Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii [Notes on the Revolution], 7 vols. (Berlin-Petersburg-Moscow, 1922–23), a Menshevik who was directly involved in the events and who had, in addition, uncommon literary gifts. A good part of this work has been translated and edited by Joel Carmichael: N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution: A Personal Record (Oxford, 1955). Paul Miliukov’s Istoriia Vtoroi Russkoi Revoliutsii [The History of the Second Russian Revolution], 2 pts. (Sofia, 1921), is part history, part memoirs. In English: Paul Miliukov, The Russian Revolution, 3 vols. (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1978). A. Shliapnikov’s Semnadtsatyi god [The Year 1917], 3 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad, various dates in the 1920s), are the memoirs of an important Bolshevik. I. G. Tsereteli’s Vospominaniia 0 Fevral’skoi Revoliutsii, [Memoirs of the February Revolution], 2 vols. (Paris-The Hague, 1963), are an overly long but important account by the Menshevik leader of the Petrograd Soviet. Maxim Gorky’s Untimely Thoughts (New York, 1968), translated by H. Ermolaev, is a collection of his forceful comments in 1917–18 on the pages of the daily Novaia zhizn’.

  The basic texts on the abdication of Nicholas II are in P. E. Shchegolev, ed., Otrechenie Nikolaia II [The Abdication of Nicholas II] (Leningrad, 1927).

  Part II

  A very good account of Russia in 1917–18 is Volume I of William Henry Chamberlin’s Russian Revolution (London and New York, 1935). Leon Trotsky’s The Russian Revolution, 3 vols. (New York, 1937), is partly political tract, partly literature. Peter Scheibert’s Lenin an der Macht [Lenin in Power] (Weinheim, 1984) is a storehouse of little-known information about Russia under Lenin’s rule.

  On Lenin, several biographies can be recommended. David Shub, a Menshevik with a keen sense for the milieu in which Lenin worked, is the author of Lenin (New York, 1948; London, 1966). Adam Ulam’s The Bolsheviks (New York, 1965; London, 1966) also focuses on the Communist leader. There are insights into his personality in Leon Trotsky’s O Lénine [About Lenin] (Moscow, 1924) and Maxim Gorky’s Vladimir Il’ich Lenin (Leningrad, 1924). N. Valentinov’s The Early Years of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969) is based on personal conversations.

  Lenin’s return to Russia by way of Germany is discussed and documented in W. Hahlweg’s Lenins Rückkehr nach Russland, 1917 [Lenin’s Return to Russia, 1917] (Leiden, 1957). Essential documents on Lenin’s relations with the Germans from the archives of the German Foreign Office have been published by Z. A. B. Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 1915–1918 (London, 1958).

  Kerensky edited in collaboration with Robert Browder a three-volume collection of documents under the title The Russian Provisional Government, 1917 (Stanford, Calif., 1961). His recollections of 1917 are available in several versions, of which the best are The Catastrophe (New York-London, 1927) and Crucifixion of Liberty (London and New York, 1934). There is an admiring biography by Richard Abraham, Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution (New York, 1987).

  The Provisional Government is viewed from the inside in V. D. Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government, 1917 (New Haven-London, 1976), which contains his memoirs as State Secretary. The best account of the rival organization is by Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets (New York, 1974).

  The July Bolshevik putsch has not yet found an authoritative historian. Many key documents have been published under the editorship of D. A. Chugaev, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v iiule 1917 g. [The Revolutionary Movement in Russia in July 1917] (Moscow, 1959). There is a great deal of information on this event as well as on other Bolshevik activities during 1917 in the recollections of the head of Kerensky’s counterintelligence, Colonel B. Nikitin, Rokovye gody (Paris, 1937) (in English: The Fateful Years, London, 1938).

  John L. H. Keep’s The Russian Revolution (London, 1976) analyzes the social changes in Russia in 1917–18.

  D. A. Chugaev edited a collection of documents on the Kornilov Affair under the title Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v avguste 1917 g.: Razgrom Kornilovskogo miatezha [The Revolutionary Movement in Russia in August 1917: The Crushing of Kornilov’s Mutiny] (Moscow, 1959). Of the secondary accounts, the best are by E. I. Martynov, Kornilov (Leningrad, 1927) (hostile to Kornilov), and George
Katkov, The Kornilov Affair (London-New York, 1980) (friendly).

  The October coup is imperfectly reflected in the heavily doctored minutes of the Central Committee: Protokoly Tsentral’nogo Komiteta RSDRP (b): avgust 1917-fevral’ 1918 [Protocols of the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks): August 1917-February 1918] (Moscow, 1958). Of the histories, outstanding are S. P. Melgunov’s, Kak bol’sheviki zakhvatili vlasf [How the Bolsheviks Seized Power] (Paris, 1953) (an English condensation: The Bolshevik Seizure of Power, Santa Barbara, Calif., 1972) and Robert V. Daniels’s Red October (New York, 1967; London, 1968).

  For the Communist dictatorship, an indispensable source is the decrees (not entirely complete) published as Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow, 1957), of which at the time of writing 13 volumes have appeared. Leonard Schapiro’s The Origin of the Communist Autocracy, 2nd ed. (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1977), traces the rise of the one-party dictatorship into the early 1920s. There is a reasonably good Communist account of the same process, seen from a very different perspective, by M. P. Iroshnikov, Sozdanie sovetskogo tsentral’nogogosudarstvennogo apparata [The Creation of the Soviet Central State Apparatus], 2nd ed. (Leningrad, 1967). Trotsky’s Stalinskaia shkola fal’sifikatsii [The Stalin School of Falsification] (Berlin, 1932) has important documentation not available elsewhere.

  On the Constituent Assembly, there are the memoirs of its Secretary, M. V. Vishniak, Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobrante [The All-Russian Constituent Assembly] (Paris, 1932), and an identically titled monograph by the Soviet historian O. N. Znamenskii, published in Leningrad in 1976.

  The story of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty by J. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace (London-New York, 1956), although first published over half a century ago, has still not been superseded. There are important documents on German-Soviet relations in Vol. I of Sovetsko-Germanskie Otnosheniia [Soviet-German Relations] (Moscow, 1968). The tangled story of German-Russian relations in 1918 is told authoritatively by Winfried Baumgart in Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918 [Germany’s Ostpolitik in 1918] (Vienna-Munich, 1966).

  The Czech uprising is recounted by M. Klante, Von der Wolga zum Amur [From the Volga to the Amur] (Berlin-Königsberg, 1931).

  There are no satisfactory treatments of either the Left SR uprising or Savinkov’s rising in Iaroslavl.

  In many ways the best book on War Communism is by a participant, L. N. Kritsman, Geroicheskii period Velikoi Russkoi Revoliutsii [The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution] (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926). Much data can be found in S. Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921 (Cambridge, 1985). Communist treatment of labor is the subject of M. Dewar’s Labour Policy in the USSR, 1917–1928 (New York, 1979). Simon Liberman’s Building Lenin’s Russia (Chicago, 1945), illuminates the human side of Soviet economic experimentation.

  No comprehensive study has been written on the peasantry in the first years of Communist rule. Among the most informative are D. Atkinson’s The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905–1930 (Stanford, Calif., 1983) and V. V. Kabanov’s KrestHanskoe khoziaistvo v usloviiakh “Voennogo Kommunizma” [The Peasant Economy under Conditions of “War Communism”] (Moscow, 1988). Mikhail Frenkin’s Tragediia kresVianskikh vosstanii v Rossii, 1918–1921 gg. [The Tragedy of Peasant Uprisings in Russia, 1918–1921] (Jerusalem, 1988) describes peasant resistance to Communist agrarian policies.

  On the Imperial family in 1917–18 there is S. P. Melgunov’s Sud’ba Imperatora Nikolaia II posle otrecheniia [The Fate of Emperor Nicholas II after Abdication] (Paris, 1951). N. A. Sokolov’s Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i [The Murder of the Imperial Family] (Paris, 1925) summarizes the findings of the investigatory commission which the author chaired (in French: Enquête Judiciaire sur l’Assassinat de la Famille Impériale Russe, Paris, 1924). The fate of the other Romanovs in Soviet hands is the subject of Serge Smirnoffs Autour de l’Assassinat des Grands-Ducs [About the Assassination of the Grand Dukes] (Paris, 1928).

  The most important work on the Red Terror in all its dimensions is G. Leggett’s The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford, 1986). On early Soviet concentration camps, there is James Bunyan’s The Origin of Forced Labor in the Soviet State, 1917–1921 (Baltimore, Md., 1967).

  TEXTUAL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Gerald Duckworth & Company Ltd.

  : Excerpt from

  Letters of Tsarita to the Tsar 1914–1916

  edited by Sir Bernard Pares, Duckworth & Co., 1923. Reprinted by permission of Gerald Duckworth & Company Ltd.

  Europe Printing Establishment

  and

  Mouton de Gruyter:

  Translation by Richard Pipes of excerpts from Kantorovich in

  Byloe

  , No. 22 (1923); Maliantovich in

  Byloe

  , No. 12 (1918); Gorovich in

  ARR

  , VI (1922); and

  NChS

  , No. 9 (1925). Reprinted by permission of Europe Printing Establishment and Mouton de Gruyter, a division of Walter de Gruyter & Co.

  Karin Kramer Verlag:

  Translation by Richard Pipes of excerpts from

  Gewalt und Terror in der Revolution

  by Isaak Steinberg (1974). Reprinted by permission of Karin Kramer Verlag, Berlin.

  Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd.

  : Excerpt from

  The Kornilov Affair: Kerensky and the Break-up of the Russian Army

  by George Katkov, Longman Group Ltd., London. Copyright © 1980 by George Katkov. Reprinted by permission of the Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd.

  Royal Institute of International Affairs:

  Excerpt from

  Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy

  , Vol. I, 1917–1924, selected and edited by Jane Degras. Published by Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 1951. Reprinted by permission.

  Times Newspapers Limited:

  “Ex-Tsar Shot: Official Approval of Crime” from

  The Times

  , July 22, 1918. Copyright by Times Newspapers Limited. Reprinted by permission.

  The University of Chicago Press:

  Excerpt from

  Building Lenin’s Russia

  by Simon Liberman. Copyright 1945 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.

  Excerpt from

  The Catastrophe: Kerensky’s Own Story of the Russian Revolution

  by Alexander F. Kerensky, 1927, published by Penguin USA for D. Appleton and Company.

  Excerpt from

  The Murder of the Romanovs

  by Captain Paul Bulygin, 1935, published by Random Century Group, London, for Hutchinson & Co. Ltd.

  About the Author

  Richard Pipes has been a professor of History at Harvard University since 1958. He was the Director of East European and Soviet Affairs for the National Security Council in 1981–82 and he is a two-time recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He is the author of numerous books and essays on Russia, past and present. His previous works include Survival Is Not Enough, U.S-Soviet Relations in the Era of Detente, Russia under the Old Regime, Europe Since 1815, and The Formation of the Soviet Union. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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