Whereas most Soviet and American scholars of the Russian Revolution have emphasized the great leaders and the great events of 1917, Diane Koenker reverses this trend in a study of the Russian working class. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Whereas most Soviet and American scholars of the Russian Revolution have emphasized the great leaders and the great events of 1917, Diane Koenker reverses this trend in a study of the Russian working class. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
he eminent historian Leopold Haimson examines the nature of political power in Russia during the years leading to the Bolshevik revolution. The book explores the issue of power as it was reflected in struggles of Russian workers to control their own lives and in the outlooks and strategies of leading political figures on the objectives of the revolution and the ways to achieve them.
The clash between scholarship and politics—between truth and propaganda—was ruthless for historians in Istpart, the Russian Communist Central Committee's official historical department. Istpart was tasked with preserving the documentary record, compiling memoirs, and upholding ideological conformism within the national narrative of the 1917 revolution. In Revising the Revolution, Larry E. Holmes examines the role of Istpart's historians, in both the Moscow office and a regional branch in Viatka, who initially believed they could adhere to the traditional standards of research and simultaneously provide a history useful to the party. However, they quickly realized that the party rejected any version of history that suggested nonideological or nonpolitical sources of truth. By 1928, Istpart had largely abandoned its mission to promote scholarly work on the 1917 revolution and instead advanced the party's master narrative. Revising the Revolution explores the battle for the Russian national narrative and the ways in which history can be used to centralize power.
At the end of Febraury 1917 the tsarist government of Russia collapsed in a whirlwind of demonstrations by the workers and soldier of Petrograd. Ziva Galili tells how the moderate socialists, or Mensheviks, then attempted to prevent the conflicts between the newly formed liberal Provisional Government (the "bourgeois" camp) and the Petrograd Soviet (the "democractic" camp) from escalating into civil war--and how, in October of that same year, they finally failed. Placing narrative history in a broad social and political context, she creates an absorbing study of idealists who tried in vain to reflect as well as to contain the unfolding revolutionary process. Galili focuses on the Menshevik Revolutionary Defensists who became the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet and of the all-Russian network of soviets. She examines Menshevik political strategy as well as the three-way interaction between Mnesheviks (both in the Soviet and the Provisional Government), workers, and indsutrialists. She emphasizes the perpceptual and interactive aspects of the analysis of revolutions: the relations between social realities, perceptions of realities, and the formulation of political strategies; the roles of rhetorics and societal conflict in shaping social identities; and the impact of political authority and state institutions on the terms of social interaction. Ziva Galili is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is coeditor and annotator of The Making of Three Russian Revolutionsaries: Voice from the Menshevik Past (Cambridge). Studies of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Geroid Tanquary Robinson (founder and first director of the Russian Institute at Columbia University; Chief of the U.S.S.R. Division, Research and Analysis Branch, U. S. Office of Strategic Services, 1941·45; holder of the Medal of Freedom) has produced a book that is, by general consensus, supreme in its field. The work makes a major contribution to the understanding of the struggle of the peasantry with the old landlords and the Imperial Government, and consequently offers an iltuminaling approach to the struggle between the Communist Government and the most stubborn and massive domestic force this Government has faced-the peasant opposition.
The Russian revolution of 1917 was a defining event of the twentieth century, and its achievements and failures remain controversial in the twenty-first. This book focuses on the retreat from the revolution’s aims in 1920–24, after the civil war and at the start of the New Economic Policy – and specifically, on the turbulent relationship between the working class and the Communist Party in those years. It is based on extensive original research of the actions and reactions of the party leadership and ranks, of dissidents and members of other parties, and of trade union activists and ordinary factory workers. It discusses working-class collective action before, during and after the crisis of 1921, when the Bolsheviks were confronted by the revolt at the Kronshtadt naval base and other protest movements. This book argues that the working class was politically expropriated by the Bolshevik party, as democratic bodies such as soviets and factory committees were deprived of decision-making power; it examines how the new Soviet ruling class began to take shape. It shows how some worker activists concluded that the principles of 1917 had been betrayed, while others accepted a social contract, under which workers were assured of improvements in living standards in exchange for increased labour discipline and productivity, and a surrender of political power to the party.
More than seventy years after the birth of the Soviet Union, the events that brought the Bolsheviks to power are still poorly understood. Ever since the first reports of the revolution reached Western audiences, analysts have blamed or credited Lenin and his party for overthrowing the old order singlehandedly. Yet studies of the revolution in recent years have revealed the depth of the crisis through which Tsarist society passed late in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 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.
