The Bolsheviks Come To Power

For generations in the West, Cold War animosity blocked dispassionate accounts of the Russian Revolution. This history authoritatively restores the upheaval's primary social actors-workers, soldiers, and peasants-to their rightful place at the center of the revolutionary process.

Access to newly opened archives has allowed Alexander Rabinowitch to substantially rewrite the history of how the Bolsheviks consolidated their power in Russia. Focusing on the first year of Soviet rule in St Petersburg, he shows how state organs evolved in the face of repeated crises.

..". an expert work... remarkable for its objectivity, judiciousness, and its sure handling of the available evidence." -- Political Science Quarterly ..". a fine piece of historical writing." -- Soviet Studies "An able and scholarly inquiry into the perplexing abortive Petrograd uprising of June and July 1917... a very interesting view of revolutionary action on the local level." -- Foreign Affairs First published in 1968, this pioneering study of revolutionary events in Petrograd in the summer of 1917 revised the established view of the Bolsheviks as a monolithic party. Rabinowitch documents how the party's pluralistic nature had crucial implications for the outcome of the revolution in October.

Why did the 1917 American Red Cross Mission to Russia include more financiers than medical doctors? Rather than caring for the victims of war and revolution, its members seemed more intent on negotiating contracts with the Kerensky government, and subsequently the Bolshevik regime. In a courageous investigation, Antony Sutton establishes tangible historical links between US capitalists and Russian communists. Drawing on State Department files, personal papers of key Wall Street figures, biographies and conventional histories, Sutton reveals: The role of Morgan banking executives in funnelling illegal Bolshevik gold into the US; the co-option of the American Red Cross by powerful Wall Street forces; the intervention by Wall Street sources to free the Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, whose aim was to topple the Russian government; the deals made by major corporations to capture the huge Russian market a decade and a half before the US recognized the Soviet regime; the secret sponsoring of Communism by leading businessmen, who publicly championed free enterprise. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution traces the foundations of Western funding of the Soviet Union. Dispassionately, and with overwhelming documentation, the author details a crucial phase in the establishment of Communist Russia. This classic study - first published in 1974 and part of a key trilogy - is reproduced here in its original form. (The other volumes in the series include Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler and a study of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 Presidential election in the United States.)

Deals with problem of workers' control in Russia

This book explores the 1917 Russian Revolution from its February Revolution beginning to the victory of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and also profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of the twentieth century. Now, to mark the centenary of this epochal event, historian Steve Smith presents a panoramic account of the history of the Russian empire, from the last years of the nineteenth century, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1917 and the establishment of the Bolshevik regime, to the end of the 1920s, when Stalin simultaneously unleashed violent collectivization of agriculture and crash industrialization upon Russian society. Drawing on recent archivally-based scholarship, Russia in Revolution pays particular attention to the varying impact of the Revolution on the various groups that made up society: peasants, workers, non-Russian nationalities, the army, women and the family, young people, and the Church. In doing so, it provides a fresh way into the big, perennial questions about the Revolution and its consequences: why did the attempt by the tsarist government to implement political reform after the 1905 Revolution fail?; why did the First World War bring about the collapse of the tsarist system?; why did the attempt to create a democratic system after the February Revolution of 1917 not get off the ground?; why did the Bolsheviks succeed in seizing and holding on to power?; why did they come out victorious from a punishing civil war?; why did the New Economic Policy they introduced in 1921 fail?; and why did Stalin come out on top in the power struggle inside the Bolshevik party after Lenin's death in 1924? A final chapter then reflects on the larger significance of 1917 for the history of the twentieth century - and, for all its terrible flaws, what the promise of the Revolution might mean for us today.

With new research and detailed analysis, this historical study reframes the October Revolution of 1917 and its terrible aftermath in the Russian capitol. A major contribution to the historiography of twentieth century Russia, The Bolsheviks in Power shines a revealing spotlight on the fateful first year of Soviet rule in Petrograd. It examines events that profoundly shaped the Soviet political system that endured through generations. Drawing largely from previously inaccessible Soviet archives, Alexander Rabinowitch demolishes standard interpretations of the origins of Soviet authoritarianism by demonstrating that the Soviet system evolved ad hoc as the Bolsheviks struggled to retain political power amid spiraling political, social, economic, and military crises. The book covers issues such as the rapid fall of influential moderate Bolsheviks, the formation of the dreaded Cheka, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the Red Terror, the national government’s flight to Moscow, and the subsequent rivalry between Russia’s new and old capitals.

From the accliamed authority on Russia and the Russian Revolution—the final volume in his magisterial history of the Russian Revolution, covering the period from the outbreak of the Civil War in 1918 to Lenin's death in 1924 "Offers a penetrating analysis of the making of the Soviet system.... [It is] a passionate book whose outstanding scholarship is rooted in universal values like truth, honor, responsibility and the sacredness of human life." —Philadelphia Inquirer "Timely.... The work is enriched in intriguing ways by the author's access to the once-secret archives of the Soviet Union." —Los Angeles Times