Revolutionary Russia

IN today's Russia the best historians have abandoned the once obligatory view of the October Revolution as a triumph of the class-conscious proletariat. Chronological perspectives have lengthened, and the events of 1917 are now perceived as the initial stages in a disastrous cataclysm, a five-year-long upsurge of violence and barbarism that all but destroyed Russia's fragile civil society. If the victims of famine and disease are included, the struggle may have claimed some thirteen million lives. The investigative focus has shifted away from party-political strife in the capital to the social psychology of the worker and peasant masses. V.P. Buldakov and others have shown how utopian visions of social equality led many embittered activists to wreak vengeance on those whom they deemed to be ‘outsiders’ and enemies of their righteous cause. T.V. Osipova sees communally-minded peasants, with an essentially archaic world-view, fiercely resisting attempts by urban zealots, Red or White, to seize their crops and impose military conscription. By 1920–1 local acts of banditry had developed into a broad-based insurgency that forced the Bolshevik rulers into the compromise of NEP—a setback Stalin would never forgive

Barbarism · Communism · Criminology · Economic history · Famine · Peasant · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Proletariat · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · History · Law · Soviet and Russian History