The Revolution Turns Eighty: New Literature on the Russian Revolution and its Aftermath

Abstract

Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996 (reviewed in Pimlico edition, 1997), 923 pp., ISBN 0–150–24364–X.

Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Russian Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 455 pp., ISBN 0–691–03278–5.

Edward Acton, William G. Rosenberg and Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914–1921 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 782 pp., ISBN 0–340–61454–4.

Ronald Kowalski, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921 (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 269 pp., ISBN 0–415–12437–9.

André Liebich. From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 476 pp., ISBN 0–674–32517–6.

Over eighty years after it occurred, the Russian Revolution continues to engender debate among professional historians as well as the interested public. If the French Revolution is any guide, this interest is very likely to continue indefinitely. Causes and consequences, the meaning and significance of individual component events, the interplay of social forces, and cultural, political, intellectual, economic and a myriad of other aspects have and will continue to be examined and sifted through. Last year – the eightieth anniversary – produced a number of important works on the revolution and its consequences. Those under review here, including an older one from 1994, represent a range of approaches, from introductory accounts for the general reader to summations of the state of knowledge to histories of the revolution's ‘losers’.