Introduction

Summary

In 1916, less than a year before the Russian Revolution, Richard Washburn Child rejected rumors of impending turmoil: “Cool heads in Russia believe the idea of revolution is ridiculous. Something less dramatic is in store for Russia.” On the contrary, Child detected a new nationalism, a surge in a Russian spirit infused with religion and fealty to the Tsar, that existed not only among the peasants and the military but even among bureaucrats and workers. Despite the stresses of war, he believed, “There was not even the glimmer of revolution.” Child wrote these words approximately a year before Tsar Nicholas II would abdicate the throne and Vladimir Lenin would return to Russia and lead the Bolsheviks in a seizure of power. Indeed, Child's prediction about the impossibility of a revolution or a separate peace was but one of many things that he got wrong in his appraisal of Russia. But it is precisely these miscalculations that make his book a fascinating read. Child believed that he understood Russia, but his failure to sense the spirit of unrest raises interesting questions about the long-debated inevitability of the revolution.

The social and political breakdown that rocked Russia in 1917 had been developing for years, of course. Russia had been experiencing the growing pains of industrialization and modernization, including the growth of a working class and an industrial middle class, for decades. Its bureaucracy was simultaneously bloated and inefficient. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 gave a boost to the country's economy, but it also struck at the heart of Russian traditional society. Meanwhile, Russia's intelligentsia—that group of educated, questioning citizens—had grown from a small cluster of privileged nobles to a much larger group that included men and women from not only the nobility but also the children of teachers, bureaucrats, priests, and lawyers. Influenced by the various strains of socialism popular in Western Europe, these intellectuals eventually began to demand the rights and freedoms of their contemporaries elsewhere. The most radical of these became revolutionaries, advocating violence to bring down the system by attacking its center, the monarchy.