Nogin, Viktor (1878–1924) Bolshevik activist. Initially a ‘conciliator’ who attempted to reunite Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1910. Active throughout 1917, including as chair of Moscow Soviet. Died of natural causes.
Plekhanov, Georgy (1856–1918) Marxist theorist. Founder of the Emancipation of Labour group in 1883. The pre-eminent Russian Marxist theorist between the 1880s and 1900s. Initially sided with Lenin in the split with the Mensheviks in 1903, but moved to the right. An outspoken supporter of Russia’s war effort in the First World War, very critical of the Bolsheviks. Left Russia after October 1917 and died of natural causes.
Radek, Karl (1885–1939) Marxist activist. Colourful Polish/German/Russian activist of long standing. Joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, then the Left Opposition of the party in 1923. Expelled from the Bolsheviks in 1927; capitulated to Stalin and re-entered in 1930. Imprisoned after a show trial in 1937. Died in a labour camp.
Rasputin, Grigori (1869–1916) A faith healer and priest of a peasant background, close to the last tsar and tsarina. Murdered by disaffected right-wingers.
Rodzianko, Michael (1859–1924) Conservative politician. A founder of the conservative Octobrist party in 1905, chair of the Fourth Duma from 1912 to October 1917. Supported the Whites in the Civil War. Died of natural causes.
Rovio, Kustaa (1887–1938) Marxist activist and police chief. Finnish Social Democrat and chief of the Helsingfors (Helsinki) police. Moved to Russia in 1918. Executed under Stalin.
Savinkov, Boris (1879–1925) SR politician. Member of the terrorist SR Fighting Organisation in 1904–5; joined the French army in the First World War; close to Kerensky in the Provisional Government in 1917. Organised counterrevolutionary anti-Bolshevik groups after October 1917, before fleeing Russia. Writer of sensationalist pulp political thrillers. Returned to Russia in 1921; died in prison in Moscow.
Semashko, A. I. (1889–1937) Bolshevik activist. Marxist militant, served in the First Machine Gun Regiment in Petrograd; active in the Bolshevik Military Organisation. Served in the government after October 1917. Grew disaffected and left for Brazil in 1924, to return in 1927, but was imprisoned. Executed under Stalin.
Shlyapnikov, Alexander (1885–1937) Bolshevik activist. ‘Old Bolshevik’, trade unionist, worker–intellectual. A leading Bolshevik in Petrograd in February 1917. Appointed commissar of labour after October. Leader of the Workers’ Opposition with Kollontai in 1920. Executed under Stalin.
Shulgin, Vasily (1878–1976) Conservative politician. A hard-line anti-revolutionary; persuaded Nicholas II to abdicate when his position became untenable. Supported Kornilov in August 1917, then the White movement after October 1917, fleeing Russian in 1920.
Smilga, Ivar (1892–1938) Bolshevik activist. Elected to the Bolshevik CC in April 1917; chair of the Central Committee of the Baltic Fleet in 1917–18. Member of the Left Opposition within the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. Executed under Stalin.
Spiridonova, Maria (1884–1941) Left SR activist. Assassin of Luzhenovsky, notorious security chief of Borisoglebsk; spent eleven years in jail in Siberia. Returned to Petrograd in May 1917; marginalised by party moderates. After October, entered government with the Bolsheviks. Broke with them in 1918 and supported an uprising against them by Left SRs. Remained a left critic of the Bolsheviks, and was imprisoned in a psychiatric prison in 1919, released in 1921. Executed under Stalin.
Stahl, Ludmila (1872–1939) Bolshevik activist. Fled Russia for France in 1907, returning in February 1917, where she was active in the Petrograd organisation.
Sukhanov, Nikolai (1882–1940) Socialist writer. Originally a member of the SRs; took part in the 1905 revolution, and spent years as a non-aligned radical. Returned to St Petersburg in 1913, to edit socialist journals. Joined Martov’s Menshevik–Internationalists that year, to leave in 1920. Wrote an engrossing diary of 1917. Executed under Stalin.
Trotsky, Leon (1879–1940) Marxist activist. Long-time leading socialist theorist and activist; originally close to the left Mensheviks; joined the Mezhraiontsy in 1917, then the Bolsheviks. Deeply involved in the revolution of 1917. First people’s commissar for military and naval affairs after the revolution; head of Red Army in 1918. Leader of the Left Opposition within the Bolsheviks 1923–27. Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Moved to Mexico in 1936, where he continued vigorous agitation against Stalin. Inaugurated the 4th International (of ‘Trotskyist’ anti-Stalinist socialist groups) in 1938. Murdered by a Stalinist agent.
Tsereteli, Irakli (1881–1959) Menshevik politician. Georgian Menshevik activist and Duma deputy; exiled to Siberia in 1913. Returned to Petrograd in March 1917; became a moderate socialist leader of the Soviet. Served in the Provisional Government in 1917, as minister of posts and telegraphs, then minister of the interior. Left Russia for Georgia after 1917, then moved to Paris in 1921.
Volodarsky, V. (1891–1918) Marxist activist. Initially a member of the Jewish Bund in 1905. Moved to the US in 1913, allying with the Menshevik–Internationalists during the First World War. Returned to Russia in May 1917, joined the Mezhraiontsy, and with them the Bolsheviks shortly afterwards. Assassinated by SR activists in 1918.
Woytinsky, Wladimir (1885–1960) Menshevik activist. From an intellectual background, joined the Bolsheviks in 1905; exiled to Siberia. Defected to the moderate Mensheviks during the First World War. Active in the Soviet in Petrograd in 1917. Fled to Georgia after 1917, then to Germany in 1921.
Zasulich, Vera (1849–1919) Marxist activist. Originally anarchist-influenced, attempted to assassinate the governor of St Petersburg, Trepov, in 1878; acquited by a sympathetic jury. Became a Marxist and co-founded the Emancipation of Labour group with Plekhanov in 1883. Joined the Mensheviks in 1903. Her political activism waned after 1905. Supported the Russian war effort in the First World War. Died of natural causes.
Zavoiko, Vasilii (1875–1947) Right-wing activist. A wealthy political intriguer, amanuensis and advisor to General Kornilov. Seems to have left Russia for the USA after the revolution.
Zinoviev, Grigory (1883–1936) Bolshevik activist and politician. An ‘Old Bolshevik’ and collaborator with Lenin from 1903. Closely involved in the revolutionary movement throughout 1917; involved in various power struggles within the regime thereafter. Capitulated to Stalin in 1928, but executed by Stalin.
Further Reading
The literature on the Russian Revolution, even for those of us only confident in English, is vast – there is far more than any one normal person can read. With the interested general reader in mind, what follows is a brief, curated list of selected titles that I have found particularly helpful and/or interesting in the long research for this book, accompanied by short and, of course, subjective glosses.
I have culled from the list very many fine works that I think likely to be of mostly specialist interest; I have excluded those that do not include a particular focus on the months between February and October themselves; and but for one irresistible indulgence, I have ruthlessly avoided the pleasure of falling down the rabbit hole of artistic and fictional works on, or from, the period. With a few exceptions, I have focused on books rather than scholarly essays. I have also refrained from listing those texts not only about but of the moment – for example, any of Lenin’s many writings from these months, some mentioned in these pages. They, and much else relevant, are available at marxists.org.
Inevitably, there will be those who object to my inclusions or exclusions. My reasoning and my hope is simply that this list might provide some invaluable starting points for any reader eager to go deeper into these topics.
General Histories
E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923 volumes 1–3 (1950–53). This is only the first section of Carr’s monumental work on Russia. Not a narrative but an analysis of the revolution’s systems and structures and their evolution, it is long, dense and idiosyncratically though rigorously organised. It is no easy read: it is, however, a magisterial and brilliant one.
William Henry
Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921 (1935). Described sniffily as a ‘sturdy workhorse’ by Norman Stone, this remains a fine introduction.
Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy (1996). Exhaustive in scope and research, written with élan and stuffed with anecdotes that make for compelling reading. This is not necessarily the easiest starting point for a new reader, however – its scale and detail can be overwhelming for someone unfamiliar with the material. It is also characterised by unconvincing tragedianism for some lost liberal alternative; jarring elitism (‘when people learn as adults what children are normally taught in schools, they find it difficult to progress beyond the simplest abstract ideas making them resistant to the subsequent absorption of knowledge on a more sophisticated level’); preposterous offhand smears (‘hatred and indifference to human suffering were to varying degrees ingrained in the minds of all the Bolshevik leaders’); and a strange disapproving obsession with the Bolsheviks’ leather jackets – they are mentioned five times.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (2nd edition) (2008). A useful short introduction, though unconvincingly wedded to an ‘inevitabilist’ Lenin-leads-to-Stalin perspective.
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution, Petrograd: 1917 (1981). Outstanding. The definitive telling of the early days of 1917.
David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime (1983), and The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power (1984). Marxist, partisan, and impressive.
Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990). Like Figes’s, Pipes’s long book is often fascinating for its details and stories – and also fascinating, though perhaps not in the ways its author intends, for the sheer virulence of its animus against the left. Analytically, Pipes’s Bolshevikophobia leads him to take various totally unconvincing positions, such as that both the April and the July Days were attempted Bolshevik putsches.
Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (1991), and The Bolsheviks Come to Power (2004). Superb, meticulous, detailed, exciting, indispensable.
Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930). Unlike (too) many observers, the anarchist-, libertarian-inclined Bolshevik Serge never allows his commitment to the revolution to dim his critical analysis of its trajectory – hence the melancholy behind this remarkable clear-eyed narrative, written not long after the heady year itself. His perspective can be ascertained from a letter he published in the US journal New International in 1939: ‘It is often said that “the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning”. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that very sensible?’ This wonderful riposte to the canard has deservedly become celebrated – so much so that it is now something of an anti-Stalinist socialist cliché. What too often seems to escape the notice of, especially Trotskyist, admirers is that as well as defending the Bolshevik tradition, the passage allows that it contained authoritarian tendencies – which Serge did not hesitate to criticise.
Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (1930). Justly celebrated as a towering, vivid, historically vital work.
Theoretical Discussions and Collected Volumes
Edward Acton, Vladimir Cherniaev and William G. Rosenberg (eds), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution (1997). An absolutely invaluable collection of essays on the people, organisations, issues and events of the revolution, by an impressive array of writers. Very many of the essays within its pages could deservedly be listed separately within this list. In particular these include Alexander Rabinowitch on Maria Spiridonova; Ziva Balili and Albert Nenarokov on Tsereteli, and on the Mensheviks; Michael Melancon on the SRs and Left SRs; as well as several articles on regions.
Edith Rogovin Frankel, Jonathan Frankel, Baruch Knei-Paz (eds), Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917 (1992). Includes valuable work on various regions, the peasantry and the workers, and the Red Guards.
Mike Haynes, Russia: Class and Power 1917–2000 (2002). A short, provocative general history. Haynes’s sympathetic approach to the revolution is at the heart of his analysis of Russia’s later trajectory.
Steve Smith, Red Petrograd (1983). Not the easiest book for the general reader, but a key examination of Petrograd’s working class, including factory committees, trade unions, and the specifics of early ‘workers’ control’.
Various (eds), Russia’s Great War and Revolution Series, five volumes so far (2014–). Slavica publishers is involved in this ongoing multi-volume project. Each book comprises a collection of essays around a shared theme by experts in the field: at the time of writing there are five volumes, all outstandingly useful. They are listed separately in the relevant sections that follow.
Rex A. Wade (ed.), Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches (2004). This book contains some very useful pieces of, particularly, social and cultural history, including on the particular nuance of the term ‘democracy’, by Boris Kolonitskii, a fascinating look at crime and policing in Petrograd by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, and more by Michael Melancon on the SRs.
Anarchists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs
Barbara Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885–1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik (2015). This biography of a Bolshevik worker–intellectual provides a vivid alternative to the common focus on the party’s best-known leaders, and insight into Bolshevik political culture, internal debates and all.
Abraham Ascher (ed.), The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution (1976). Collected Menshevik documents, illustrating the range of and changes in Menshevik analyses before, during and after the revolution.
Paul Avrich, The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution (1973), and The Russian Anarchists (2005). Pioneering, sympathetic and involving.
Tony Cliff, Lenin, four volumes (1975–79). Volume 2 of this quartet is the most pertinent for this book. A valuable political biography, and an articulation of a particular ‘Leninism’. Though not hagiographical, Cliff’s enthusiasm sometimes leads him to retrospectively ‘en-wisen’ Lenin and/or ‘Leninify’ wisdom, as for example when he describes the Bolsheviks during the Kornilov Affair as ‘following the line put so clearly by Lenin’, when it was in fact reached before any – latterly approving – word from Lenin arrived.
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky (2015). This is the collected edition of Deutscher’s magisterial three-volume biography written in the 1950s and 1960s.
Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (1967). A seminal, sympathetic, not uncritical portrait of the man consigned by Trotsky to ‘the dustbin of history’, by a writer melancholically committed to the ‘losers’ of the revolution – his term. His later book, Kronstadt 1917–21: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (1983) is also of great interest.
Lars T. Lih, Lenin (2011). This very short book is chosen here as an introduction to Lih’s pioneering work. Over many years, in books and articles, Lih has been assiduously revolutionising and demythologising our understandings of the political positions of the Russian revolutionaries, most famously in Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context (2006). The discussion above of the Bolshevik responses to Lenin’s ‘Letters from Afar’ is indebted to Lih’s archival work, in ‘Letters from Afar, Corrections from Up Close’ (2015), in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, volume 16, number 4.
Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar, Midwives of the Revolution: Female Bolsheviks and Women Workers in 1917 (1999). A key text bringing to the fore the central role of women in the revolution, focusing on Bolshevik activists and masses, as well as the better-known cadre.
Oliver Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries Februar
y–October 1917 (1958). A wonderful and vivid overview of this strange, fractured party.
Liliana Riga, The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire (2012). Fascinating on the sheer cosmopolitanism of the revolutionary movement.
Beyond Petrograd
Sarah Badcock, Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia (2007). The revolution as experienced from a variety of perspectives in two Volga provinces, with an enlightening focus on the dynamics between political leaders and the grassroots.
Sarah Badcock, Liudmila G. Novikova and Aaron B. Retish (eds), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 1. Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective (2015). One of the excellent volumes in Slavica’s ongoing series, containing essays by a large number of scholars on various issues and regions.
Andrew Ezergailis, The 1917 Revolution in Latvia (1974). A detailed examination of one of the most intriguing and exciting revolutionary regions of the empire in 1917.
Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (1989). More specialist and focused than the book for which he is most famous, and a clear and useful exposition of the trajectories of rural insurgency.
Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (1981). A classic work, focusing on the second city, and on the politics and agency of its working class.
Eric Lohr, Vera Tolz, Alexander Semyonov and Mark von Hagen (eds), The Empire and Nationalism at War (2014). One of Slavica’s multi-volume series, on the war, the empire and the revolution around Russia and its territories.
Kevin Murphy, Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory (2005). An excellent close examination of the revolution from below, this deservedly won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.
Ronald Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (1972). An indispensable examination of the complexities of class and intersecting national politics.