The Workers' Revolution in Russia, 1917: The View from Below

by Daniel H. Kaiser (Editor)

More than seventy years after the birth of the Soviet Union, the events that brought the Bolsheviks to power are still poorly understood. Ever since the first reports of the revolution reached Western audiences, analysts have blamed or credited Lenin and his party for overthrowing the old order singlehandedly. Yet studies of the revolution in recent years have revealed the depth of the crisis through which Tsarist society passed late in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The essays in this book address the process of worker alienation and the way that the Bolsheviks appealed to, rather than exploited, the working population, especially in the capital cities of Petrograd and Moscow.

168 pages, Paperback

First published September 25, 1987

About the author

A specialist in medieval and early modern Russia, Mr. Kaiser has studied legal, social, and demographic history. Kaiser has taught at Grinnell since 1979, and in 2008, entered Senior Faculty Status. He is currently at work on two large projects, one devoted to the history of domestic life in early modern Russia, and another examining immigration from the Russian Empire.

Reviews

[Tom Bundy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’d say I enjoyed this book, which is rich in historical detail and class analysis of the practical situation during the Russian Revolution. However, in classic cold-war fashion, none of these essays fail to provide lazy portrayals for the ‘revolution devouring its children’ thesis, which is depicted to have definitively happened by 1920. Basically if you want something that takes you up to 1918 and can ignore the bourgeois liberal bias that comes with academic scholarship from the period of the book’s writing, it’s definitely worth checking out.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of essays giving a good explanation of the run up to and the October Revolution. It also looks to the 4-5 years afterwards all from a social history perspective. In doing so it is not a blow by blow account (it couldn’t be in a book of this length) and counters the coup/strongman narrative. Whilst this is its major strength some of the contributors are rather churlish to earlier historians