The Russian Revolution [antikvár]

IntroductionSince revolutions are complex social and political upheavals, historians who write about them are bound to differ on the most basic questions - causes, revolutionary aims, social support and impact on the society, political outcome, and even the timespan of the revolution itself. In the case of the Russian Revolution, the last question presents peculiar problems. While the great French Revolution has a clear conventional starting-point (1789) and an end which can be no later than Napoleon's defeat and the Bourbon restoration in 1814-15, the Russian Revolution tends to be given either a very narrow definition (February to October 1917)' or an open-ended one. There was no Romanov restoration in Russia. Nor, by any reasonable definition, did the revolutionary upheaval end when the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917, since a civil war remained to be fought. Did the Bolsheviks' Civil War victory in mid-1920 mark the end of the revolution? Should we look further forward, to some later definitive 'betrayal of the revolution' (as Trotsky and others have suggested) or an equally definitive achievement of revolutionary objectives? Or should we perhaps accept the view, sometimes expressed by both Soviet and anti-Soviet commentators, that the revolution continues up to the present day?In his Anatomy of Revolution, Crane Brinton suggested that revolutions have a life-cycle passing through phases of increasing fervour and zeal for radical transformation until they reach a climax of intensity, which is followed by the 'Thermidorian' phase of disillusionment, declining revolutionary energy and gradual moves towards the restoration of order and stability.^ The Russian Bolsheviks, bearing in mind the same French-Revolution model that lies at the basis of Brinton's analysis, feared a Thermidorian degeneration of their own revolution, and half suspected that one had occurred at the end of the Civil War, when economic collapse forced them into the 'strategic retreat' marked by the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921.