Revising the Revolution

The Unmaking of Russia's Official History of 1917

Larry E. Holmes

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780253054791
• eBook ISBN: 9780253054821
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

The clash between scholarship and politics—between truth and propaganda—was ruthless for historians in Istpart, the Russian Communist Central Committee's official historical department.

Istpart was tasked with preserving the documentary record, compiling memoirs, and upholding ideological conformism within the national narrative of the 1917 revolution. In Revising the Revolution, Larry E. Holmes examines the role of Istpart's historians, in both the Moscow office and a regional branch in Viatka, who initially believed they could adhere to the traditional standards of research and simultaneously provide a history useful to the party. However, they quickly realized that the party rejected any version of history that suggested nonideological or nonpolitical sources of truth. By 1928, Istpart had largely abandoned its mission to promote scholarly work on the 1917 revolution and instead advanced the party's master narrative.

Revising the Revolution explores the battle for the Russian national narrative and the ways in which history can be used to centralize power.

ONE

Istpart’s Origins and Mission

FROM THE OUTSET, ISTPART SOUGHT to serve the twin gods of scholarship and politics. Ideological, personal, and financial threats immediately challenged Istpart’s self-professed calling.

CREATION

In summer 1920, Vladimir Lenin wanted an official history of the 1917 revolution and the infant Soviet Republic. That August, he invited the party’s historian, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovsky, to undertake the project. In the meantime, an impatient Lenin endorsed the creation of a commission at the State Publishing House (Gosizdat) to study the party’s past. Lenin placed it under the direction of Mikhail Stepanovich Ol’minsky, Old Bolshevik and journalist. Ol’minsky wanted an agency that would produce work with a popular appeal and encourage the publication of memoirs. Pokrovsky returned at the end of August with a proposal for an organization that would promote original scholarship. Lenin informed a surprised Pokrovsky of Ol’minsky’s commission and insisted on its cooptation of Pokrovsky’s project. Pokrovsky objected. A scholarly history of the October Revolution required specialists—and not just those from the Bolshevik party—who were able to work with a variety of documents. Conversely, Pokrovsky argued, surveys of the party’s history would rely primarily on memoirs of party comrades because of the relative absence of documentation, which was either never kept or destroyed during the party’s largely underground existence before 1917.¹

Lenin got his way, although he agreed on the need for “historians-specialists,” as Pokrovsky put it. In late September 1920, the Soviet Republic’s Council of Peoples Commissars created Istpart with Pokrovsky as its head. The council placed the new agency under the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros). A little more than a year later, in December 1921, Istpart was removed from Narkompros and put under the jurisdiction of the Central Committee’s secretariat.²

Pokrovsky had wanted research and the publication of original work as Istpart’s chief mission. A majority of the agency’s original nine-person collegium, much like Ol’minsky, insisted instead on the preparation of material suitable for party propagandists and on the compilation of memoirs. Within days of the organization’s official opening, Pokrovsky resigned because, he said disingenuously, of his burdensome duties as deputy head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment. On September 29, 1920, Istpart’s collegium approved Ol’minsky as the new director. Nevertheless, Pokrovsky’s designs remained an important part of Istpart’s agenda, and he continued as a key and outspoken figure there.

DUAL MISSION

Istpart’s charge was unforgivingly political from the outset. Lenin had wanted a useful history. When the Central Committee took control of Istpart in 1921, it hoped for a history to parry multiple challenges at the time to the legitimacy of the party’s rule. They came from sailors in rebellion at the Kronstadt Naval Base and from the Bolshevik party’s own cadre, among them adherents of the Workers Opposition and Democratic Centralists, who were disappointed with Lenin’s harsh policies toward labor unions and with his New Economic Policy. Rebellious sailors and Bolshevik dissidents all believed, albeit for somewhat different reasons, that the Bolshevik government had betrayed the principles of Marxism and of the October Revolution itself. But regardless of the politics associated with Istpart’s founding, no one at the time, including Ol’minsky, intended that it generate little else than crude political diatribe. The Central Committee had another apparatus for that purpose, its Department for Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop). In 1922, the Istpart’s monthly journal, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, announced the commission’s intent to publish not only memoirs but also well-researched articles and monographs. Those publications “must have the characteristics neither of an apologia (especially of an institution) nor of agitational literature.” Their content “must be researched and expressed dispassionately.” Confident of the rightness of their ideology and their politics, Istpart’s personnel believed that such works of scholarship would necessarily provide “a strictly Marxist evaluation.”³

Figure 1.1. M. N. Pokrovsky, 1925. Courtesy of the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive.

Such hopes for a synthesis of politics and scholarship derived from the careers to date of Istpart’s leaders. Pokrovsky possessed impressive professional and political credentials. He had studied under the highly respected historian Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevsky at Moscow University. He had been the main contributor to a valuable work, History of Russia since Ancient Times and author of Outlines on the History of Russian Culture.⁴ In 1917, Pokrovsky served as chair of the Moscow Soviet. The following year, he joined a commission that drafted the first constitution for the Russian Republic and, as mentioned previously, served as a deputy commissar of Narkompros.

Pokrovsky enthusiastically embraced Istpart’s dual mission of scholarship and partisanship. He spoke disparagingly of dilettantes and pamphleteers who paraded about as historians but who neither loved the facts nor respected the principle of documentation.⁵ Historical talent, a difficult gift to master, was the first prerequisite for writing history, Pokrovsky insisted in 1926.⁶ Those who would throw away the work of the nineteenth-century Russian historian Sergei Mikhailovich Solov’ev and of Kliuchevsky “on the ground that they are not Marxists,” he warned that same year, “would prove themselves to be an extraordinary fool.”⁷

Another Bolshevik historian, Sergei Andreevich Piontkovsky—one of Istpart’s nine original members and an instructor at Sverdlov Communist University—shared Pokrovsky’s faith in the compatibility of political and scholarly agendas. In 1922, he praised the journals Krasnaia letopis’, Byloe, Golos minuvshego, and Dela i dni (the last three nonparty periodicals) for their publication of reminiscences and documents that represented various points of view.⁸ In 1923, in a review of memoirs on 1917 written by non-Bolsheviks, Piontkovsky acknowledged their subjectivity but valued them as a “rich storehouse of testimony and of facts on the history of our present revolution.”⁹ In 1926, Piontkovsky still believed, or wanted to believe, that the publication and use of a whole range of party and nonparty documents would necessarily portray the Bolshevik party as a progressive force in history. He complained that the Central Archival Administration selected and published documents for political and not scholarly purposes. “Partisanship (partizanshchina) and haphazardness (sluchainost’),” he declared, “must be eliminated in the publication of materials and in the study of the October Revolution.”¹⁰

MISSION THREATENED

In the early and mid-1920s, Istpart’s plan for a mutually supportive arrangement between Bolshevik politics and the traditional canons of scholarship endured multiple challenges. The party’s ideology, the publication of Trotsky’s version of the events of 1917 in “Lessons of October,” conflict among strong-willed leaders at Istpart, and inadequate human and material resources made it difficult, but not yet impossible, for the commission to fulfill its mission.

MARXISM-LENINISM

The very fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism threatened any attempt to balance an objective view of the world, past or present, with Bolshevik politics. In promoting their goal of changing society, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels took a sharply utilitarian and partisan view of all intellectual endeavor. “For the practical materialist, i.e. the communist,” they insisted, “it is a question of revolutionizing the existing world, of practically attacking and changing existing things. . . . Philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, the point is to change it.”¹¹ Lenin expressed the same sentiments but more forcefully. He demanded that everything become a hammer for the revolutionary transformation of Russian society. Nothing could or should be nonpartisan. And yet in the face of these ideological precepts, as menacing as they might be, Istpart could pursue its initial mission as long as its historians managed to retain the belief that scholarship and political service reinforced each other.

LESSONS OF OCTOBER

After Lenin’s death, disputes among his successors turned the story of 1917 into a political battleground. On the occasion in 1924 of the seventh anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Gosizdat printed the third volume of Trotsky’s collected works. Entitled 1917, it covered the months from February to October of that year. Just before its submission for printing, Trotsky hastily wrote a preface, “Lessons of October.”¹² He finished it in mid-September. The following month, the publisher released five thousand copies of the volume, with thirty-five thousand more soon to follow.

Trotsky’s rambling and egregiously self-serving preface created an immediate sensation. There he presented the party’s history in 1917 as an ongoing internal conflict between those militants, himself included, who had demanded that Bolsheviks take power and dissidents—the “right wing” of the party, most notably Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev—who opposed any such revolt and a Bolshevik dictatorship to follow. In October, the Petrograd Soviet, not coincidentally led by Trotsky, supported the Petrograd garrison’s defiance of any order for its dispatch to the front. At that moment, Trotsky argued, a victorious insurrection in the capital had been three-quarters, even nine-tenths, achieved, even if Lenin was not fully aware of it. The seizure of power on Lenin’s orders on October 24 and 25 was, therefore, little more than an anticlimax to events of the preceding days. In the unkindest cut of all, Trotsky made no mention of Stalin at any point in 1917.¹³

On the volume’s publication, a so-called literary disc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Abbreviations
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1. Istpart’s Origins and Mission
• 2. At the Periphery
• 3. Multiple Scripts for 1905 and 1917
• 4. Viatka’s 1917 Revolution in the Past and the Present
• 5. Fractured Finances
• 6. Moscow’s Embrace of the Political
• 7. The Passing of Istpart and Professional Civility
• 8. Methodology Ex Cathedra: Stalin Speaks and Istpart’s Legacy
• 9. Their Fate
• Conclusion
• Glossary of Prominent Individuals
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author