October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

Further Reading

The literature on the Russian Revolution, even for those of us only confident in English, is vast – there is far more than any one normal person can read. With the interested general reader in mind, what follows is a brief, curated list of selected titles that I have found particularly helpful and/or interesting in the long research for this book, accompanied by short and, of course, subjective glosses.

I have culled from the list very many fine works that I think likely to be of mostly specialist interest; I have excluded those that do not include a particular focus on the months between February and October themselves; and but for one irresistible indulgence, I have ruthlessly avoided the pleasure of falling down the rabbit hole of artistic and fictional works on, or from, the period. With a few exceptions, I have focused on books rather than scholarly essays. I have also refrained from listing those texts not only about but of the moment – for example, any of Lenin’s many writings from these months, some mentioned in these pages. They, and much else relevant, are available at marxists.org.

Inevitably, there will be those who object to my inclusions or exclusions. My reasoning and my hope is simply that this list might provide some invaluable starting points for any reader eager to go deeper into these topics.

E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923 volumes 1–3 (1950–53). This is only the first section of Carr’s monumental work on Russia. Not a narrative but an analysis of the revolution’s systems and structures and their evolution, it is long, dense and idiosyncratically though rigorously organised. It is no easy read: it is, however, a magisterial and brilliant one.

William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921 (1935). Described sniffily as a ‘sturdy workhorse’ by Norman Stone, this remains a fine introduction.

Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy (1996). Exhaustive in scope and research, written with élan and stuffed with anecdotes that make for compelling reading. This is not necessarily the easiest starting point for a new reader, however – its scale and detail can be overwhelming for someone unfamiliar with the material. It is also characterised by unconvincing tragedianism for some lost liberal alternative; jarring elitism (‘when people learn as adults what children are normally taught in schools, they find it difficult to progress beyond the simplest abstract ideas making them resistant to the subsequent absorption of knowledge on a more sophisticated level’); preposterous offhand smears (‘hatred and indifference to human suffering were to varying degrees ingrained in the minds of all the Bolshevik leaders’); and a strange disapproving obsession with the Bolsheviks’ leather jackets – they are mentioned five times.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (2nd edition) (2008). A useful short introduction, though unconvincingly wedded to an ‘inevitabilist’ Lenin-leads-to-Stalin perspective.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution, Petrograd: 1917 (1981). Outstanding. The definitive telling of the early days of 1917.

David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime (1983), and The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power (1984). Marxist, partisan, and impressive.

Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990). Like Figes’s, Pipes’s long book is often fascinating for its details and stories – and also fascinating, though perhaps not in the ways its author intends, for the sheer virulence of its animus against the left. Analytically, Pipes’s Bolshevikophobia leads him to take various totally unconvincing positions, such as that both the April and the July Days were attempted Bolshevik putsches.

Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (1991), and The Bolsheviks Come to Power (2004). Superb, meticulous, detailed, exciting, indispensable.

Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930). Unlike (too) many observers, the anarchist-, libertarian-inclined Bolshevik Serge never allows his commitment to the revolution to dim his critical analysis of its trajectory – hence the melancholy behind this remarkable clear-eyed narrative, written not long after the heady year itself. His perspective can be ascertained from a letter he published in the US journal New International in 1939: ‘It is often said that “the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning”. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that very sensible?’ This wonderful riposte to the canard has deservedly become celebrated – so much so that it is now something of an anti-Stalinist socialist cliché. What too often seems to escape the notice of, especially Trotskyist, admirers is that as well as defending the Bolshevik tradition, the passage allows that it contained authoritarian tendencies – which Serge did not hesitate to criticise.

Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (1930). Justly celebrated as a towering, vivid, historically vital work.

Edward Acton, Vladimir Cherniaev and William G. Rosenberg (eds), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution (1997). An absolutely invaluable collection of essays on the people, organisations, issues and events of the revolution, by an impressive array of writers. Very many of the essays within its pages could deservedly be listed separately within this list. In particular these include Alexander Rabinowitch on Maria Spiridonova; Ziva Balili and Albert Nenarokov on Tsereteli, and on the Mensheviks; Michael Melancon on the SRs and Left SRs; as well as several articles on regions.

Edith Rogovin Frankel, Jonathan Frankel, Baruch Knei-Paz (eds), Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917 (1992). Includes valuable work on various regions, the peasantry and the workers, and the Red Guards.

Mike Haynes, Russia: Class and Power 1917–2000 (2002). A short, provocative general history. Haynes’s sympathetic approach to the revolution is at the heart of his analysis of Russia’s later trajectory.

Steve Smith, Red Petrograd (1983). Not the easiest book for the general reader, but a key examination of Petrograd’s working class, including factory committees, trade unions, and the specifics of early ‘workers’ control’.

Various (eds), Russia’s Great War and Revolution Series, five volumes so far (2014–). Slavica publishers is involved in this ongoing multi-volume project. Each book comprises a collection of essays around a shared theme by experts in the field: at the time of writing there are five volumes, all outstandingly useful. They are listed separately in the relevant sections that follow.

Rex A. Wade (ed.), Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches (2004). This book contains some very useful pieces of, particularly, social and cultural history, including on the particular nuance of the term ‘democracy’, by Boris Kolonitskii, a fascinating look at crime and policing in Petrograd by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, and more by Michael Melancon on the SRs.

Barbara Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885–1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik (2015). This biography of a Bolshevik worker–intellectual provides a vivid alternative to the common focus on the party’s best-known leaders, and insight into Bolshevik political culture, internal debates and all.

Abraham Ascher (ed.), The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution (1976). Collected Menshevik documents, illustrating the range of and changes in Menshevik analyses before, during and after the revolution.

Paul Avrich, The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution (1973), and The Russian Anarchists (2005). Pioneering, sympathetic and involving.

Tony Cliff, Lenin, four volumes (1975–79). Volume 2 of this quartet is the most pertinent for this book. A valuable political biography, and an articulation of a particular ‘Leninism’. Though not hagiographical, Cliff’s enthusiasm sometimes leads him to retrospectively ‘en-wisen’ Lenin and/or ‘Leninify’ wisdom, as for example when he describes the Bolsheviks during the Kornilov Affair as ‘following the line put so clearly by Lenin’, when it was in fact reached before any – latterly approving – word from Lenin arrived.

Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky (2015). This is the collected edition of Deutscher’s magisterial three-volume biography written in the 1950s and 1960s.

Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (1967). A seminal, sympathetic, not uncritical portrait of the man consigned by Trotsky to ‘the dustbin of history’, by a writer melancholically committed to the ‘losers’ of the revolution – his term. His later book, Kronstadt 1917–21: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (1983) is also of great interest.

Lars T. Lih, Lenin (2011). This very short book is chosen here as an introduction to Lih’s pioneering work. Over many years, in books and articles, Lih has been assiduously revolutionising and demythologising our understandings of the political positions of the Russian revolutionaries, most famously in Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context (2006). The discussion above of the Bolshevik responses to Lenin’s ‘Letters from Afar’ is indebted to Lih’s archival work, in ‘Letters from Afar, Corrections from Up Close’ (2015), in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, volume 16, number 4.

Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar, Midwives of the Revolution: Female Bolsheviks and Women Workers in 1917 (1999). A key text bringing to the fore the central role of women in the revolution, focusing on Bolshevik activists and masses, as well as the better-known cadre.

Oliver Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries February–October 1917 (1958). A wonderful and vivid overview of this strange, fractured party.

Liliana Riga, The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire (2012). Fascinating on the sheer cosmopolitanism of the revolutionary movement.

Sarah Badcock, Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia (2007). The revolution as experienced from a variety of perspectives in two Volga provinces, with an enlightening focus on the dynamics between political leaders and the grassroots.

Sarah Badcock, Liudmila G. Novikova and Aaron B. Retish (eds), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 1. Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective (2015). One of the excellent volumes in Slavica’s ongoing series, containing essays by a large number of scholars on various issues and regions.

Andrew Ezergailis, The 1917 Revolution in Latvia (1974). A detailed examination of one of the most intriguing and exciting revolutionary regions of the empire in 1917.

Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (1989). More specialist and focused than the book for which he is most famous, and a clear and useful exposition of the trajectories of rural insurgency.

Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (1981). A classic work, focusing on the second city, and on the politics and agency of its working class.

Eric Lohr, Vera Tolz, Alexander Semyonov and Mark von Hagen (eds), The Empire and Nationalism at War (2014). One of Slavica’s multi-volume series, on the war, the empire and the revolution around Russia and its territories.

Kevin Murphy, Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory (2005). An excellent close examination of the revolution from below, this deservedly won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.

Ronald Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (1972). An indispensable examination of the complexities of class and intersecting national politics.

W. Astrov, A. Slepkov and J. Thomas, An Illustrated History of the Russian Revolution, two volumes (1928). Dated and rather obscure, but full of wonderful photographs and reportage – including the full captivating tale of Lieutenant Sinegub’s wanderings in the Winter Palace, of which only a snatch could be retold above.

Bessie Beatty, The Red Heart of Russia (1918). Sometimes florid to the point of comedy (within the book’s first two short paragraphs Petrograd is a forest in the silver twilight and is also strange, mysterious, inscrutable, compelling, and a candle – drawing moths, of course) but, or as a result, oddly engaging.

Louise Bryant, Six Red Months in Russia (1918). A vivid and exciting telling by a radical journalist.

Jonathan Daly and Leonid Trofimov (eds), Russia in War and Revolution, 1914–22: A Documentary History (2009). A wonderful compendium of primary texts, ranging from various official and semi-official declarations to anonymous letters and recollections.

Eduard Dune, Notes of a Red Guard (1993). The reminiscences of Dune’s days as a teenager, a politically developing activist with the Bolsheviks, and an armed militia member. The book includes vivid memories of the urban fighting in Moscow in October.

Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (2000). Life stories from a wide range of women bringing powerfully up close the lived realities of these days.

Michael Hickey (ed.), Competing Voices from the Russian Revolution: Fighting Words (2010). A large and extraordinarily useful collection of primary texts, arranged by theme.

A. F. Ilyin-Genevsky, From the February Revolution to the October Revolution 1917 (1931). A charming and moving memoir from a man later as well- or better-known as a chess master as he was as a Bolshevik revolutionary.

Mark Jones (ed.), Storming the Heavens: Voices of October (1987). More focused and shorter than the Hickey, Pitcher or Steinberg, but no less invaluable in the pieces it contains.

Dimitri Von Mohrenschildt (ed.), The Russian Revolution of 1917: Contemporary Accounts (1971). Valuable memoirs and firsthand accounts edited by the remarkable later spy and anti-Soviet Cold War warrior, who died aged 100 in 2002.

Harvey Pitcher (ed.), Witnesses of the Russian Revolution (2nd edition, 2001). The testimonials collected here, unlike those in most collections, are not by Russians, but by visitors to the country during the revolutionary year: Americans and Britons. They include among others Arthur Ransome and Morgan Philips Price, both of whose invaluable writing on the subject is collected in dedicated volumes.

F. F. Raskolnikov, Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917 (1925). The vivid recollections of one of the key figures among the Kronstadt revolutionaries.

John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). A justly celebrated committed journalist’s account.

Mark D. Steinberg (ed.), Voices of Revolution, 1917 (2001). A compendium of powerful primary texts separated into three chronological sections, each introduced with a useful essay. It is from this book that soldier Kuchlavok’s letter is excerpted. It is an extraordinary piece of writing that deserves to be read in full – as do many of the achingly powerful soldiers’ letters.

Nikolai Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution of 1917: A Personal Record (1984). It is impossible not to be caught up with the vivid, thoughtful, honest and meticulously observed reminiscences of one of history’s very great observers, Sukhanov.

Boris Dralyuk (ed.), 1917 (2016). A captivating collection of poetry and prose from the revolutionary year.

Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii (eds), Interpreting the Russian Revolution (1999). This collection includes many excellent essays on the revolution’s political culture.

Murray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven G. Marks and Melissa K. Stockdale (eds), Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 1: Popular Culture, the Arts, and Insitutions (2014), and Book 2: Political Culture, Identities, Mentalities, and Memory (2014). Two from Slavica’s multi-volume series, containing essays by a large number of scholars on political representation, memory and heritage, among an enormous range of cultural issues.

Mary Hamilton-Dann, Vladimir and Nadya: The Lenin Story (1998). A curious but intriguing telling of the lives of the revolutionary couple, which fills out various details most others mention only in passing. As does the same author’s obscure but engrossing Lenin in the Recollection of Finns (1979).

Marianne Kamp, ‘Debating Sharia: The 1917 Muslim Women’s Congress in Russia’ (2015), in Journal of Women’s History, volume 27, number 4. A rare resource on this fascinating and important event.

David C. King, Red Star over Russia: A Visual History (2009). The aged monochrome of most contemporary photographs notwithstanding, the visuals of the revolution are absolutely compelling, both in deliberate iconography and in chance conjunctions – as the images here illustrate.

Adele Lindenmeyr, Christopher Read and Peter Waldron (eds), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 2: The Experience of War and Revolution (2016). This book in Slavica’s series contains essays on an extraordinary variety of topics from the Russian revolution, including philanthropy, drunkenness, drugs, gardening, monasticism, and the representation of Jews.

Anatoly Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes (1923). A captivating series of reminiscences by Lunacharsky, of various revolutionaries of his acquaintance.

Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (1989). For the most part Stites’s classic text focuses on the early years of the revolutionary regime itself, but it is included here via the excuse of the precursor utopianism it outlines because it is such a thoroughly transfixing, moving, sometimes hilarious exposition of the avant-garde in everyday life.

Ian D. Thatcher, ‘The St Petersburg/Petrograd Mezhraionka, 1913–1917: The Rise and Fall of a Russian Social Democratic

Workers’ Party Unity Faction’ (2009), in Slavonic and East European Review, volume 87, number 2. One of the very few sources on the small, intellectually and politically scintillating group, associated in particular with Trotsky. Of all the various not-yet-written books on the Russian Revolution, a volume on and selected translations from this ‘Interdistrict group’ clamour most loudly for existence.