Historically Inevitable?

Turning Points of the Russian Revolution

Tony Brenton

• Publisher: Profile Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781781250228
• eBook ISBN: 9781847658593
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Marx held that the progression of society from capitalism to communism was 'historically inevitable'. In Russia in 1917, it seemed that Marx's theory was being born out in reality. But was the Russian Revolution really inevitable? This collection of fourteen contributions from the world's leading Russian scholars attempts to answer the question by looking back at the key turning points of the revolution. From the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904-5 through to the appropriation of church property in 1922, and focusing especially on the incredible chain of events in 1917 leading to the October Revolution itself, Historically Inevitable? is a forensic account of Russia's road to revolution.Each contribution gives not only a fast-paced, incisive narrative account of an individual aspect of Revolution but also, for the first time, an intriguing counter-factual analysis of what might have gone differently. Featuring Richard Pipes on the Kornilov affair, Orlando Figes on the October Revolution, Dominic Lieven on foreign intervention and Martin Sixsmith on the attempted assassination of Lenin in 1918, Historically Inevitable? explains how each of these moments, more through blind luck than any historical inevitability, led to the creation of the world's first communist state. Tony Brenton's afterword to the volume draws parallels between the Revolution and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and places the events of 1917 in the context of more recent events in Russia and the Crimea.Featuring contributions from:
Donald Crawford - Sean McMeekin - Dominic Lieven - Orlando Figes - Richard Sakwa - Douglas Smith - Martin Sixsmith - Simon Dixon - Boris Kolonitsky - Richard Pipes - Edvard Radzinsky - Catriona Kelly - Erik Landis - Evan Mawdsley

Table of contents

• Copyright Page
• Contents
• A Note to the Reader
• Chronology
• Acknowledgements
• Map
• Introduction
• 1: 1900–1920: Foreign intervention: The long view
• 2: September 1911: The assassination of Stolypin
• 3: June 1914: Grigory Rasputin and the outbreak of the First World War
• 4: March 1917: The last Tsar
• 5: April–July 1917: Enter Lenin
• 6: August 1917: The Kornilov affair: A tragedy of errors
• 7: October 1917: The ‘harmless drunk’: Lenin and the October insurrection
• 8: January 1918: The short life and early death of Russian democracy: The Duma and the Constituent Assembly
• 9: July 1918: Rescuing the Tsar and his family
• 10: August 1918: Fanny Kaplan’s attempt to kill Lenin
• 11: November 1918: Sea change in the Civil War
• 12: March 1920: The fate of the Soviet countryside
• 13: February 1922: The ‘Bolshevik Reformation’
• 14: 1917–22: The rise of Leninism: The death of political pluralism in the post-revolutionary Bolshevik party
• Afterword: Lenin and yesterday’s utopia
• Notes
• Dramatis Personae
• Contributors
• Index