Alexander Rabinowitch

For generations in the West, Cold War animosity blocked dispassionate accounts of the Russian Revolution. This history authoritatively restores the upheaval's primary social actors-workers, soldiers, and peasants-to their rightful place at the center of the revolutionary process.

Written by a respected american historian of the russian revolution and early soviet period, this book kind of completes a trilogy about the Bolshevik ascension to power that started with the author's study of the failed July 1917 coup (Prelude to Revolution) and continued with his study of the October revolution (The Bolsheviks Come To Power). This volume, the first to benefit from the opening of the soviet archives in the 1990s, is devoted to the study of the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) show more Bolsheviks in the first year after October 1917. This early period of soviet rule (1917-1918) saw truly revolutionary changes in Russia, and in Petrograd in particular, and in this very interesting study we can read about them in a masterful way: the dissent within the Bolsheviks, the election to, and the dismissal of, the Constituent Assembly, the separate peace with Germany and the Brest-Litovsk treaty that precipitated the end of the coalition government with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the inauguration of the Bolshevik one-party rule that would remain in force for more than seventy years, until the downfall of the soviet regime, and also the catastrophic domestic social, economic, political, and military situation, in Petrograd and in the country, in the Spring and Summer of 1918, that led to the proclamation of the Red Terror, the onset of the civil war, the formation and early development of the Cheka. All these momentous events are seen from the perspective of a city that lost its capital status to Moscow and whose dire economical and social conditions led to a growing disenchantment of the works with the Bolshviks, resulting in the formation of independent political bodies, and the increasing depopulation of the city. The attempts of the Bolshviks to remain in power at the various levels of decision making (from factory commitees and trade unions to city, local, and national government) in face of mounting difficulties and opposition lead very quickly to the dismissal of all democratic mechanisms and to the concomitant increase in the repression aparatus that would be one of the soviet regime's staples. Rabinowitch's new book is an important contribution to our understanding of these turbulent and seminal times. show less

Reviewed in the February 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard:

http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2016/04/bolsheviks-as-history-2005....