The Bolsheviks In Power

Access to newly opened archives has allowed Alexander Rabinowitch to substantially rewrite the history of how the Bolsheviks consolidated their power in Russia. Focusing on the first year of Soviet rule in St Petersburg, he shows how state organs evolved in the face of repeated crises.

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.

..". an expert work... remarkable for its objectivity, judiciousness, and its sure handling of the available evidence." -- Political Science Quarterly ..". a fine piece of historical writing." -- Soviet Studies "An able and scholarly inquiry into the perplexing abortive Petrograd uprising of June and July 1917... a very interesting view of revolutionary action on the local level." -- Foreign Affairs First published in 1968, this pioneering study of revolutionary events in Petrograd in the summer of 1917 revised the established view of the Bolsheviks as a monolithic party. Rabinowitch documents how the party's pluralistic nature had crucial implications for the outcome of the revolution in October.

This book explores the 1917 Russian Revolution from its February Revolution beginning to the victory of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October.

In a timely re-examination of the origins of the system which fell apart so dramatically in 1991, this book deals with the policies of the Soviets towards the non-Russian nationalities of the former Russian Empire. Making extensive use of previously unavailable material from the Soviet archives, Jeremy Smith explores the attempts of the Bolsheviks to promote the development of minority nationalities in the Soviet context, through a combination of political, cultural and educational measures, and looks at the disputes surrounding the creation of the Soviet Union.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR's internal borders, led expeditions to study "the human being as a productive force," and created ethnographic exhibits about the "Peoples of the USSR." In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories . Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.

A Dorothy Rosenberg Prize–winner: "A remarkable social history that investigates the process of Sovietization among Jews in Belorussia” (Jeffrey Veidlinger, author of In the Shadow of the Shtetl). This insightful history demonstrates how Jewish life in Belorussia fundamentally changed when Jews started joining the Bolshevik movement and populating the front lines of the revolutionary struggle. While Andrew Sloin’s story follows the arc of Bolshevik history, it also shows how the broader movement was enacted in factories and workshops, workers’ clubs and union meetings, and on the Jewish streets of White Russia. In the eyes of the Bolshevik leadership, the project of transforming Jews into integrated Soviet citizens was bound inextricably to labor. The protagonists here are shoemakers, speculators, glassmakers, peddlers, leatherworkers, needleworkers, soldiers, students, and local party operatives who were swept up, willingly or otherwise, under the banner of Marxist socialism. With extensive research and keen insight, Sloin stresses the fundamental relationship between economy and identity formation as party officials grappled with the Jewish Question in the wake of the revolution.

A study of Lenin and the Russian Revolution. It is designed to fulfil the AS and A Level specifications in place from September 2000. The AS section deals with narrative and explanation of the topic. The A2 section reflects the different demands of the higher level examination.