Timespan of the revolution
Since revolutions arc complex social and political upheavals, his-toriuns who write about them are bound to dillcr on the most basic questions causes, revolutionary aims, impact on the society, political outcome, and even the timespan of the revolution itself. In the case of the Russian Revolution, the starting point presents no problem: almost everyone takes it to be the February Revolution of 1917, which led to the abdication of Emperor Nicholas II and the formation of the Provisional Government. But when did the Russian Revolution end? Was it all over by October 1917, when the Bolsheviks took power? Or did the end of the Revolution come with the Bolsheviks’ victory in the Civil War in 1920? Was Stalin’s ‘revolution from above* part of the Russian Revolution? Or should we take the view that the Revolution continued throughout the lifetime of the Soviet state?
In his Anatomy of Revolution, Crane Brinton suggested that revolutions have a life cycle passing through phases of increasing fervour and zeal for radical transformation until they reach a climax of intensity, which is followed by the ‘Thcrmidorian’ phase of disillusionment, declining revolutionary energy, and gradual moves towards the restoration of order and stability. The Russian Bolsheviks, bearing in mind the same French Revolution model that lies ax the basis of Brimon’s analysis, feared a Thermidorian degeneration of their own Revolution, and half suspected that one had occurred at the end of the Civil War, when economic collapse forced them into the ’strategic retreat’ marked by the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921.
Yet at the end of the 1920s, Russia plunged into another upheaval—Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’, associated with the industrialization drive of the First Five-Year Plan, the collectivization of agriculture, and a ‘Cultural Revolution’ directed primarily against the old intelligentsia—whose impact on society was greater even than that of the February and October Revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War of 1918 20. It was only after this upheaval ended in the early 1930s that signs of a classic Thcrmidor can be discerned: the waning of revolutionary fervour and belligerence, new policies aimed at restoring order and stability, revival of traditional values and culture, solidification of a new political and social structure. Yet even this Thcrmidor was not quite the end of the revolutionary upheaval. In a final internal convulsion, even more devastating than earlier surges of revolutionary terror, the Great Purges of 1937-8 swept away many of the surviving Old Bolshevik revolutionaries…
Introduction
The second edition of The Russian Revolution (1994) appeared in [he wake of dramatic events the fall of the Communist regime and the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. Those events had all sorts of consequences for historians of the Russian Revolution. They opened archives that were previously closed, brought forth memoirs that were hidden in drawers, and released a flood of new material of every kind, especially on the Stalin period and the history of Soviet repression. As a result, the 1990s and early 2000s were particularly producrivc for historians, including post-Soviet Russians, newly reconnected to the international scholarly community. In this third edition, readers will find the most important post-1991 works available in English cited in the notes and listed in the bibliography.
For Russians and other former Soviet citizens, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant a fundamental reappraisal of the meaning of the Revolution,1 previously hailed as the foundational event of the world’s ‘first socialist state’ and now seen by many as a wrong turning that took Russia о1Г course for seventy-four years. While Western historians had less of an adjustment to make, their perspective was subtly changed by the end of the cold war as well as that of the Soviet Union. There are no simple answers in history, but there arc interesting questions. The meaning of the great ambiguous turning point of the Russian Revolution is one of them.
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