Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

INTRODUCTION

Russia under the Bolshevik Regime^* continues and concludes The Russian Revolution; in a sense, it also completes the trilogy begun twenty years ago with the publication of Russia under the Old Regime. The present work, however, is meant to stand on its own. It deals with the attempts of the Bolsheviks to defend and expand their authority from the Great Russian base which they had conquered in the winter of 1917–18 to the borderlands of the defunct Russian Empire and beyond, to the rest of the world. By the fall of 1920 it had become apparent that these efforts would not succeed, and that the new regime had to concentrate on building a Communist state at home. The closing part of the book deals with the problems and crises this unexpected development caused Russia’s new rulers. In addition, I discuss Communist cultural and religious policies. By treating these and other topics usually ignored in general histories, I seek to fulfill the promise given in the introduction to The Russian Revolution to provide a more comprehensive account of the subject than hitherto available: that is, to look beyond the struggle for power which is commonly seen as the quintessence of the Revolution to its makers’ designs and uses of that power. The book concludes with the death of Lenin in January 1924, by which time all the institutions and nearly all the practices of the future Stalinism were in place.

The present work was virtually finished when the Soviet Union disintegrated and Russia’s new government outlawed the Communist Party. This sudden turn of events provided something of a coda to my work. It must be an uncommon experience for a historian to find that his subject becomes history at the very time that he concludes writing an account of its origins.

The demise of the Communist Party ended its monopoly on archival sources. I was fortunate in the last stages of writing to be given access to what had been the Central Party Archive in Moscow, where are kept the most important documents bearing on the history of the CPSU since 1917. For this opportunity I would like to express gratitude to Mr. R. G. Pikhoia, Director of the Russian Archival Committee, and to Mr. K. M. Anderson, Director of the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Contemporary History (RTsKhIDNI) and his staff. Acquaintance with this material (the personal archive of Lenin and that of his Secretariat, as well as the archives of Stalin, Dzerzhinskii, and others) enabled me to modify and amplify certain parts of my narrative, but in not a single instance did it compel me to revise views which I had formed on the basis of printed sources and archives located in the West. This gives me a certain degree of confidence that no new and startling information from other, still secret, archival repositories—notably the so-called Presidential Archive, which contains minutes of the Politburo, and the files of the Cheka/KGB—is likely to invalidate my account.

I wish to take this opportunity to express thanks to the John M. Olin Foundation for its generous financial support.

Richard Pipes

^* The title of this book was originally announced as “Russia under the New Regime.” However, the changes which have occured in Russia during the past two years have invalidated this title, in that what was the “new regime” in 1917 became in 1991 an old regime.