Russia in Revolution

The centenary of the Russian Revolution has, perhaps rather inevitably, invited a wave of new books on the subject, some of them containing much novel material for those engaged at the cutting edge of historical research, with others aimed at a more general readership. S.A. Smith’s contribution to the debate bridges a divide between specialist academic monographs and studies of the Revolution designed to engage a wide audience, with the book ‘primarily written for the reader coming new to the subject’ (p. 2). Like many works on the Revolution written in the past several decades, the Revolution is treated here as a process, though the events of the year 1917 dominate a large chunk of the book’s narrative. Smith locates the origins of the Revolution in the 1880s and the great social, political and economic challenges that faced the Romanov dynasty in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. With sections focusing on February and October 1917, the Civil War period, War Communism and no fewer than two entire chapters devoted to the period of the New Economic Policy, the narrative continues until the onset of the first Five-Year Plan and Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’ in 1928/9. The broad coverage will provide much of interest for the general reader (the book’s stated audience) but there is a lot of detailed (and recent) literature synthesised within these pages, so specialists too will find much to ponder in Smith’s findings

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