On Studying the 1917 Revolution: Autobiographical Confessions and Historiographical Predictions

My first article on the history of the 1917 revolution came out in 1983, the year that I entered graduate school at age 27.¹ Prior to this, I had spent several years working with sources and reviewing the literature in the field. I decided to take up the history of the Russian Revolution in the late 1970s, after studying at the A. I. Herzen Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute, serving in the Soviet army, and working at the State Public Library, where I was a bibliographer. By Soviet standards, my academic career had not been terribly successful. Due to the administrative policies of the era, I was not accepted to graduate school for several years despite my desire to become a scholar. However, this initial delay had an upside: I had time to think through my research topic.

As an undergraduate, I had never considered studying the history of the revolution. I was drawn to completely different topics, focusing primarily on U.S. and English history. Nevertheless, several years later, I decided to study the history of 1917. My friends found my choice odd. They pointed out the danger of studying a topic that came under close scrutiny from party ideologists. Some historians treated their colleagues who studied the revolution with disdain: such a topic seemed too “party-oriented,” excessively “Soviet.” Above all, the history of 1917 struck my acquaintances as dull. “How could you find anything new? That topic has been completely researched,” said my graduate-school friends. This opinion stemmed from the Soviet Union’s hyperideologized educational system: every student knew the history of the Communist Party, could summarize Lenin’s works and the resolutions of various party congresses, and remembered the main events of 1917. Everyone had heard something about Smolnyi, the cruiser Aurora, and the storming of the Winter Palace, although most would not have guessed the extent to which their knowledge was mythologized. Among many educated people, inescapable familiarity with the myth called on to sacralize the dawn of a new era had created the false impression that “everything is known,” “everything has already been researched.”

Meanwhile, the Soviet myth’s obvious discrepancy even with accessible historical accounts fueled my interest in the revolution. As a 14-year-old schoolboy, I read John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World.² I found it a true cultural shock, the same shock that many of my students would experience beginning in 1977, when I started teaching history at an institute in Leningrad and required them to read this book. John Reed was a biased author but a very good journalist. Unsurprisingly, from the early 1930s on his book was banned in the USSR because it had “too much” Trotskii and “too little” Stalin. It began to be reprinted only in the late 1950s.³ The Soviet historical myth that all educated people had to know contained several key features. Its portrayal of the 1917 revolution was Lenin-centric, Bolshevik-centric, and Petrograd-centric. The main engine of history was the Bolshevik Party with Lenin at its head, and the narrative was limited primarily to the capital. Above all, the vision of the revolution advanced by communist propaganda and Soviet political memory was black and white (or red and white). The Bolsheviks, who embodied progress, stood in opposition to a unified camp of “reactionary forces.” Reed’s vivid, colorful picture of multidimensional political conflict contradicted the spectrum of official myth. “This is an anti-Soviet book!” my shocked students told me. They were particularly amazed by the scene in which illiterate soldiers wanted to shoot Reed. In the sacralized version of Soviet history, true revolutionaries could never have acted this way.

Reading other sources intensified this feeling, and the clear inconsistences between the official myth and eyewitness accounts drove me to take a further interest in the history of the revolution. In the late 1970s, I was able to work with sources that had previously been inaccessible to me. Several of my friends were involved in samizdat and tamizdat networks. These networks made it possible...