This essay tracks the evolution of English-language writing on the Russian Revolution breaking it down into three broad periods: up to the 1960s, the 1960s–1980s, and the post-Soviet era, with special stress on the latter period. It discusses trends and issues in writing on the history of the revolution and traces changes in the focus—political history, social history, cultural history, regional and nationality history, and other themes.
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See Rex A. Wade, “The Revolution at Ninety (One): Anglo-American Historiography of the Russian Revolution of 1917,” Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography 1 (2008): 1–42.
Leopold H. Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia,” Slavic Review 23, no. 4 (1964): 619–42, and vol. 24, no. 1 (1965): 1–22.
Peter Stearns, “Introduction,” Encyclopedia of European Social History, from 1350 to 2000, Ed. Peter Stearns (New York: 2001), vol. i: xix.
Paul Avrich, “Russian Factory Committees in 1917,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 11. (1963): 161–82; Paul Avrich, “The Bolshevik Revolution and Workers’ Control in Russian Industry,” Slavic Review 22 (1963): 47–63; Wilson R. Augustine, “Russia’s Railwaymen, July–October, 1917,” Slavic Review 24, no. 4 (December 1965): 666–79.
Rex A. Wade, “The Rajonnye Sovety of Petrograd: The Role of Local Political Bodies in the Russian Revolution,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 20 (1972): 226–40; Teddy J. Uldricks, “The Crowd in the Russian Revolution: Towards Reassessing the Nature of Revolutionary Leadership,” Politics and Society 4, no. 3 (1974): 397–413; Ronald Grigor Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917–1918; John L. H. Keep, The Russian Revolution, Rosenberg, Liberals.
Suny, “Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917,” 182.
Forth, “Cultural History and New Cultural History,” Encyclopedia of European Social History, i: 83.
Michael C. Hickey, “Discourses of Public Identity and Liberalism in the February Revolution: Smolensk, Spring 1917,” The Russian Review 55, no. 4 (1996): 615–37, and Michael C. Hickey, “The Rise and Fall of Smolensk’s Moderate Socialists: The Politics of Class and the Rhetoric of Crisis in 1917,” in Donald J. Raleigh, ed., Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimension of Soviet Power, 1917–1935 (Pittsburgh, 2001), 14–35.
Matthew Rendle, “The Symbolic Revolution: The Russian Nobility and February 1917,” Revolutionary Russia 18, no. 1 (2005): 23–46; Matthew Rendle, Defenders of the Motherland: The Tsarist Elite in Revolutionary Russia (Oxford, 2010).
Aaron B. Retish, “Creating Peasant Citizens: Rituals of Power, Rituals of Citizenship in Viatka Province, 1917,” Revolutionary Russia 16, no. 1 (June 2003): 47–67; Aaron B. Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922 (Cambridge, 2008).
Diane Koenker, “Scripting the Revolutionary Worker Autobiography: Archetypes, Models, Inventions, and Markets,” International Review of Social History 49, no. 3 (2004): 371–400.
Ian Thatcher, “Memoirs of the Russian Provisional Government,” Revolutionary Russia 27, no. 1 (June 2014): 1–21; Ian Thatcher, “Scripting the Russian Revolution,” in Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, Scripting Revolution (Stanford, 2015), 213–27, 399–402.
Steve Smith, “Russian Workers and the Politics of Social Identity,” The Russian Review 56, no. 1 (January 1997): 1.
William G. Rosenberg, “Representing Workers and the Liberal Narrative of Modernity,” Slavic Review 55, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 245–69; Michael C. Hickey “Discourses of Public Identity and Liberalism in the February Revolution: Smolensk, Spring 1917,” The Russian Review 55, no. 4 (1996): 615–37.
Vera Kaplan, “A Dress Rehearsal for Cultural Revolution: Bolshevik Policy towards Teachers and Education between February and October, 1917,” History of Education 35, nos. 4–5 (2006): 427–52.
Murray Frame, “Theatre and Revolution in 1917: The Case of the Petrograd State Theatres,” Revolutionary Russia 12, no. 1 (June 1999): 84–102; Murray Frame, et al., eds., Russian Culture in War and Revolution.
Michael C. Hickey, “Moderate Socialists and the Politics of Crime in Revolutionary Smolensk,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 35, nos. 2–3 (2001): 189–218; Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, “Crime, Police, and Mob Justice in Petrograd during the Russian Revolutions of 1917,” in Religious and Secular Forces in Late Tsarist Russia. Essays in Honor of Donald W. Treadgold, ed. Charles E. Timberlake, (Seattle, 1992): 241–71; Hasegawa is preparing a book-length work on crime in Petrograd in 1917 and early 1918.
Catherine Evtuhov, “The Church in the Russian Revolution: Arguments for and against Restoring the Patriarchate at the Church Council of 1917–1918,” Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (1991): 497–511; Catherine Evtuhov, “The Church’s Revolutionary Moment: Diocesan Congresses and Grassroots Politics in 1917,” in Frame, et al., eds., Russian Culture, Book 1: Popular Culture, and Pavel Rogoznyi, “The Russian Orthodox Church during the First World War and Revolutionary Turmoil,” in the same volume.
Melissa, Stockdale, “‘My Death for the Motherland is Happiness’: Women, Patriotism, and Soldiering in Russia’s Great War, 1914–1917,” American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (2004): 78–116.
Sarah Badcock, “Women, Protest, and Revolution: Soldiers’ Wives in Russia during 1917,” International Review of Social History, 49 (2004): 47–70; Badcock, Politics and the People.
Christopher Read, “The Russian Revolution after the Fall of Communism,” The Historical Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1997): 1127.
Rex A. Wade, “The Revolution in the Provinces: Khar’kov and the Varieties of Response to the October Revolution,” Revolutionary Russia 4, no. 1 (1991): 132–42; Rex A. Wade, “Ukrainian Nationalism and Soviet Power: Kharkiv, 1917,” in Ukrainian Past, Ukrainian Present, ed. Bohdan Krawchenko (New York, 1993): 70–83.
John-Paul Himka, “The National and the Social in the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1920, The Historiographical Agenda,” Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte 34 (1994): 95–110; Vladyslav Verstiuk, “Conceptual Issues in Studying the History of the Ukrainian Revolution,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 24, no. 1 (1999): 5–20.
Serhy Yekelchyk, “Writing the History of Ukrainian Culture Before, Under, and After Communism,” Australian Slavic and East European Studies 20, nos. 1–2 (2006): 15–37.
Mark Baker, “Beyond the National: Peasants, Power, and Revolution in Ukraine,” Journal of Ukrainians Studies 24, no. 1 (1999): 39–67 (quotation on p. 44); Mark Baker, Peasants, Power, and Place: Revolution in the Villages of Kharkiv Province (Cambridge, ma, 2016).
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This essay tracks the evolution of English-language writing on the Russian Revolution breaking it down into three broad periods: up to the 1960s, the 1960s–1980s, and the post-Soviet era, with special stress on the latter period. It discusses trends and issues in writing on the history of the revolution and traces changes in the focus—political history, social history, cultural history, regional and nationality history, and other themes.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 2372 | 271 | 25 |
| Full Text Views | 682 | 66 | 2 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 996 | 159 | 7 |