The Russian Revolution

ONE HUNDRED WORKS ON THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

The following selection of literature on the Russian Revolution is admittedly subjective: I have chosen books from which I have learned the most. Unfortunately, although the serious literature in Western languages increases each year, the bulk of the material is still in Russian. Additional references will be found in the footnotes and endnotes.

Part I

The best general surveys of the final years of the monarchy are by Bernard Pares, who was both an eyewitness and a historian: Russia and Reform (London, 1907) and The Fall of the Russian Monarchy (London, 1929). There exists a sympathetic history of Nicholas II by S. S. Oldenburg, Tsarstvovanie Imperatora Nikolaia II [The Reign of Emperor Nicholas II], 2 vols. (Belgrade-Munich, 1939–49). It has been translated as Last Tsar: Nicholas II, His Reign and His Russia, 4 vols. (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1975–78). Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu’s three-volume The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians (New York-London, 1898) is a comprehensive survey of Imperial Russia in the 1880s. The reader may also wish to consult my Russia under the Old Regime (London-New York, 1974), which interprets the course of Russia’s political and social history.

There exists a unique source of testimonies by high officials on the last years of the old regime taken by a commission of the Provisional Government and published under the editorship of P. E. Shcheglovitov: Padenie tsarskogo rezhima [The Fall of the Tsarist Regime], 7 vols. (Leningrad, 1924–27). Selections from it have been published in French: La Chute du Régime Tsariste: Interrogatoires (Paris, 1927). A six-volume “chronicle” of the year 1917 edited by N. Avdeev et al., Revoliutsiia 1917: khronika sobytii [The Revolution of 1917: A Chronicle of Events] (Moscow, 1923–30), delivers much more than its title promises, for it contains a wealth of information from rare and unpublished contemporary sources.

Of the memoir literature on late Imperial Russia, the most outstanding are the recollections of Sergei Witte, Vospominaniia [Memoirs], 3 vols. (Moscow, 1960). The one-volume English condensation by Abraham Yarmolinsky, Memoirs of Count Witte (London-Garden City, N.Y., 1921), is a pale shadow of the original. Very informative on the mentality of the high Imperial bureaucracy are the recollections of State Secretary S. E. Kryzhanovskii, Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (Berlin, [1938]). The recollections of the liberal leader Paul Miliukov appeared posthumously: Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (New York, 1955) (in English: Political Memoirs, 1905–1917, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1967). Dmitrii Shipov, a leading liberal-conservative, wrote Vospominaniia i dumy o perezhitom [Recollections and Reflections on the Past] (Moscow, 1918).

The best study of the late Imperial bureaucracy unfortunately remains unpublished: Theodore Taranovsky, The Politics of Counter-Reform: Autocracy and Bureaucracy in the Reign of Alexander III 1881–1894, Ph.D. Dissertation, 1976, Harvard University.

On the peasants, outstanding are the personal observations of A. N. Engelgardt, Iz derevni [From the Village] (Moscow, 1987), and Stepniak [S. M. Kravchinskii], The Russian Peasantry (New York, 1888). Theodore Shanin’s The Awkward Class (Oxford, 1972) is a study of Russian peasants under tsarist and Communist rule.

On the phenomenon of the intelligentsia, there is an informative collection of essays edited by George B. de Huszar, The Intellectuals (London and Glencoe, Ill., 1960). There exists no satisfactory history of the Russian intelligentsia in the twentieth century. On the Socialists-Revolutionaries, there is Manfred Hildermeier’s Die Sozialrevolutionäre Partei Russlands [The Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party] (Köln-Vienna, 1978). On the Social-Democrats, the reader may consult Leonard Schapiro’s The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, 1960) and John L. H. Keep’s The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford, 1963). On the early liberals, Shmuel Galai has written The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900–1905 (Cambridge, 1973). The four-volume Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v nachale XX-go veka [Public Currents in Russia at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century] (St. Petersburg, 1910–14), edited by Martov and other Mensheviks, provides an intelligent if partisan survey. Revolutionary terrorism is recounted in A. Spiridovich’s Histoire du Terrorisme Russe, 1886–1917 (Paris, 1930). My two-volume biography, Struve: Liberal on the Left (1870–1905) (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) and Struve: Liberal on the Right (1905–1944) (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), deals with an outstanding Russian intellectual of the age who evolved from Marxism to liberalism and ended up as a monarchist.

The first Russian Revolution is the subject of Abraham Ascher’s The Revolution of 1905 (Stanford, Calif., 1988); a sequel, dealing with 1906, is in progress. Andrew M. Verner’s Nicholas II and the Role of the Autocrat during the First Russian Revolution, 1904–1907, Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1986, supplies much archival information on tsarist policies.

The 1906 Fundamental Laws are translated and analyzed in M. Szeftel’s The Russian Constitution of April 23, 1906 (Brussels, 1976).

The Duma period is discussed in G. A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment (Cambridge, 1973). The best history of Stolypin’s administration, alas, is available only in Polish: Ludwig Bazylow, Ostatnie lata Rosji Carskiej: Rzady Stolypina [The Final Years of Tsarism: The Rule of Stolypin], (Warsaw, 1972). Stolypin’s peasant policies are the subject of S. M. Dubrovskii’s Stolypinskaia zemel’naia reforma [Stolypin’sAgrarian Reform] (Moscow, 1963). Materials on his assassination have been collected by A. Serebrennikov, Ubiistvo Stolypina: svidetel’stva i dokumenty [The Murder of Stolypin: Testimonies and Documents] (New York, 1986).

Russia at war is treated by Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (London and New York, 1975). A. Knox’s With the Russian Army, 2 vols. (London, 1921), is an informative account by the British military attaché. V. A. Emets in Ocherki vneshnei politiki Rossii, 1914–17 [Outlines of Russia’s Foreign Policy, 1914–17] (Moscow, 1977) and V. S. Diakin’s Russkaia burzhuaziia i tsarizm v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny (1914–1917) [The Russian Bourgeoisie and Tsarism during the World War (1914–1917) (Leningrad, 1967) provide analyses of the political situation in Russia during World War I, relatively free of customary Soviet distortions. The same holds true of the book by the Polish historian Ludwig Bazylow, Obalenie caratu [The Overthrow of Tsarism] (Warsaw, 1976). There is much to be learned from A. I. Spiridovich’s Velikaia voina ifevral’skaia revoliutsiia, 1914–1918 gg. [The Great War and the February Revolution], 3 vols. (New York, 1962). The economic antecedents of the Revolution are treated by A. L. Sidorov’s Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny [The Economic Situation of Russia during World War I] (Moscow, 1973).

The letters of Alexandra Fedorovna to Nicholas II during the war have been edited by Bernard Pares: Letters of the Tsaritsa to the Tsar, 1914–1916 (London, 1923). Nicholas’s letters to his wife during this period are available only in a Russian translation in KA, No. 4 (1923). Immensely valuable are the minutes of the cabinet meetings in 1915–16, prepared by A. N. Iakhontov in Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, XVIII (1926); they have been translated by Michael Cherniavsky as Prelude to Revolution (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967).

The best treatment of Rasputin is by high officials of the security services: S. P. Beletskii, Grigorii Rasputin (Petrograd, 1923), and A. I. Spiridovich, Raspoutine (Paris, 1935).

The situation in Russia on the eve of the February Revolution is reflected in the remarkably objective and well-informed confidential reports by the Corps of Gendarmes, published by B. B. Grave under the misleading title Burzhuaziia naka-nune fevral’skoi revoliutsii [The Bourgeoisie on the Eve of the February Revolution] (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927). E. D. Chermenskii’s IV Gosudarstvennaia Duma i sverzhenie tsarizma v Rossii (Moscow, 1976) is a conventional Communist account that has its uses because of the author’s access to archival sources.

The standard history of February 1917 is T. Hasegawa’s The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (Seattle-London, 1981). Very informative is E. I. Martynov’s Tsarskaia armiia v fevral’skom perevorote [The Tsarist Army in the February Revolution] (Leningrad, 1927), which deals with much besides the armed forces and provides solid documentation. S. P. Melgunov’s Martovskie dni [The March Days] (Paris, 1961), as everything by this author, is well informed but contentious and disorganized. Of the memoir literature on 1917, pride of place belongs to the recollections of Nicholas Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii [Notes on the Revolution], 7 vols. (Berlin-Petersburg-Moscow, 1922–23), a Menshevik who was directly involved in the events and who had, in addition, uncommon literary gifts. A good part of this work has been translated and edited by Joel Carmichael: N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution: A Personal Record (Oxford, 1955). Paul Miliukov’s Istoriia Vtoroi Russkoi Revoliutsii [The History of the Second Russian Revolution], 2 pts. (Sofia, 1921), is part history, part memoirs. In English: Paul Miliukov, The Russian Revolution, 3 vols. (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1978). A. Shliapnikov’s Semnadtsatyi god [The Year 1917], 3 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad, various dates in the 1920s), are the memoirs of an important Bolshevik. I. G. Tsereteli’s Vospominaniia 0 Fevral’skoi Revoliutsii, [Memoirs of the February Revolution], 2 vols. (Paris-The Hague, 1963), are an overly long but important account by the Menshevik leader of the Petrograd Soviet. Maxim Gorky’s Untimely Thoughts (New York, 1968), translated by H. Ermolaev, is a collection of his forceful comments in 1917–18 on the pages of the daily Novaia zhizn’.

The basic texts on the abdication of Nicholas II are in P. E. Shchegolev, ed., Otrechenie Nikolaia II [The Abdication of Nicholas II] (Leningrad, 1927).

Part II

A very good account of Russia in 1917–18 is Volume I of William Henry Chamberlin’s Russian Revolution (London and New York, 1935). Leon Trotsky’s The Russian Revolution, 3 vols. (New York, 1937), is partly political tract, partly literature. Peter Scheibert’s Lenin an der Macht [Lenin in Power] (Weinheim, 1984) is a storehouse of little-known information about Russia under Lenin’s rule.

On Lenin, several biographies can be recommended. David Shub, a Menshevik with a keen sense for the milieu in which Lenin worked, is the author of Lenin (New York, 1948; London, 1966). Adam Ulam’s The Bolsheviks (New York, 1965; London, 1966) also focuses on the Communist leader. There are insights into his personality in Leon Trotsky’s O Lénine [About Lenin] (Moscow, 1924) and Maxim Gorky’s Vladimir Il’ich Lenin (Leningrad, 1924). N. Valentinov’s The Early Years of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969) is based on personal conversations.

Lenin’s return to Russia by way of Germany is discussed and documented in W. Hahlweg’s Lenins Rückkehr nach Russland, 1917 [Lenin’s Return to Russia, 1917] (Leiden, 1957). Essential documents on Lenin’s relations with the Germans from the archives of the German Foreign Office have been published by Z. A. B. Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 1915–1918 (London, 1958).

Kerensky edited in collaboration with Robert Browder a three-volume collection of documents under the title The Russian Provisional Government, 1917 (Stanford, Calif., 1961). His recollections of 1917 are available in several versions, of which the best are The Catastrophe (New York-London, 1927) and Crucifixion of Liberty (London and New York, 1934). There is an admiring biography by Richard Abraham, Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution (New York, 1987).

The Provisional Government is viewed from the inside in V. D. Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government, 1917 (New Haven-London, 1976), which contains his memoirs as State Secretary. The best account of the rival organization is by Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets (New York, 1974).

The July Bolshevik putsch has not yet found an authoritative historian. Many key documents have been published under the editorship of D. A. Chugaev, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v iiule 1917 g. [The Revolutionary Movement in Russia in July 1917] (Moscow, 1959). There is a great deal of information on this event as well as on other Bolshevik activities during 1917 in the recollections of the head of Kerensky’s counterintelligence, Colonel B. Nikitin, Rokovye gody (Paris, 1937) (in English: The Fateful Years, London, 1938).

John L. H. Keep’s The Russian Revolution (London, 1976) analyzes the social changes in Russia in 1917–18.

D. A. Chugaev edited a collection of documents on the Kornilov Affair under the title Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v avguste 1917 g.: Razgrom Kornilovskogo miatezha [The Revolutionary Movement in Russia in August 1917: The Crushing of Kornilov’s Mutiny] (Moscow, 1959). Of the secondary accounts, the best are by E. I. Martynov, Kornilov (Leningrad, 1927) (hostile to Kornilov), and George Katkov, The Kornilov Affair (London-New York, 1980) (friendly).

The October coup is imperfectly reflected in the heavily doctored minutes of the Central Committee: Protokoly Tsentral’nogo Komiteta RSDRP (b): avgust 1917-fevral’ 1918 [Protocols of the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks): August 1917-February 1918] (Moscow, 1958). Of the histories, outstanding are S. P. Melgunov’s, Kak bol’sheviki zakhvatili vlasf [How the Bolsheviks Seized Power] (Paris, 1953) (an English condensation: The Bolshevik Seizure of Power, Santa Barbara, Calif., 1972) and Robert V. Daniels’s Red October (New York, 1967; London, 1968).

For the Communist dictatorship, an indispensable source is the decrees (not entirely complete) published as Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow, 1957), of which at the time of writing 13 volumes have appeared. Leonard Schapiro’s The Origin of the Communist Autocracy, 2nd ed. (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1977), traces the rise of the one-party dictatorship into the early 1920s. There is a reasonably good Communist account of the same process, seen from a very different perspective, by M. P. Iroshnikov, Sozdanie sovetskogo tsentral’nogogosudarstvennogo apparata [The Creation of the Soviet Central State Apparatus], 2nd ed. (Leningrad, 1967). Trotsky’s Stalinskaia shkola fal’sifikatsii [The Stalin School of Falsification] (Berlin, 1932) has important documentation not available elsewhere.

On the Constituent Assembly, there are the memoirs of its Secretary, M. V. Vishniak, Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobrante [The All-Russian Constituent Assembly] (Paris, 1932), and an identically titled monograph by the Soviet historian O. N. Znamenskii, published in Leningrad in 1976.

The story of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty by J. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace (London-New York, 1956), although first published over half a century ago, has still not been superseded. There are important documents on German-Soviet relations in Vol. I of Sovetsko-Germanskie Otnosheniia [Soviet-German Relations] (Moscow, 1968). The tangled story of German-Russian relations in 1918 is told authoritatively by Winfried Baumgart in Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918 [Germany’s Ostpolitik in 1918] (Vienna-Munich, 1966).

The Czech uprising is recounted by M. Klante, Von der Wolga zum Amur [From the Volga to the Amur] (Berlin-Königsberg, 1931).

There are no satisfactory treatments of either the Left SR uprising or Savinkov’s rising in Iaroslavl.

In many ways the best book on War Communism is by a participant, L. N. Kritsman, Geroicheskii period Velikoi Russkoi Revoliutsii [The Heroic Period of the Great Russian Revolution] (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926). Much data can be found in S. Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921 (Cambridge, 1985). Communist treatment of labor is the subject of M. Dewar’s Labour Policy in the USSR, 1917–1928 (New York, 1979). Simon Liberman’s Building Lenin’s Russia (Chicago, 1945), illuminates the human side of Soviet economic experimentation.

No comprehensive study has been written on the peasantry in the first years of Communist rule. Among the most informative are D. Atkinson’s The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905–1930 (Stanford, Calif., 1983) and V. V. Kabanov’s KrestHanskoe khoziaistvo v usloviiakh “Voennogo Kommunizma” [The Peasant Economy under Conditions of “War Communism”] (Moscow, 1988). Mikhail Frenkin’s Tragediia kresVianskikh vosstanii v Rossii, 1918–1921 gg. [The Tragedy of Peasant Uprisings in Russia, 1918–1921] (Jerusalem, 1988) describes peasant resistance to Communist agrarian policies.

On the Imperial family in 1917–18 there is S. P. Melgunov’s Sud’ba Imperatora Nikolaia II posle otrecheniia [The Fate of Emperor Nicholas II after Abdication] (Paris, 1951). N. A. Sokolov’s Ubiistvo tsarskoi sem’i [The Murder of the Imperial Family] (Paris, 1925) summarizes the findings of the investigatory commission which the author chaired (in French: Enquête Judiciaire sur l’Assassinat de la Famille Impériale Russe, Paris, 1924). The fate of the other Romanovs in Soviet hands is the subject of Serge Smirnoffs Autour de l’Assassinat des Grands-Ducs [About the Assassination of the Grand Dukes] (Paris, 1928).

The most important work on the Red Terror in all its dimensions is G. Leggett’s The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford, 1986). On early Soviet concentration camps, there is James Bunyan’s The Origin of Forced Labor in the Soviet State, 1917–1921 (Baltimore, Md., 1967).