Reading Comprehension

The Russian Revolution of 1917 has, in most popular accounts, been narrated as the work of professional revolutionaries — Lenin, Trotsky, the Bolshevik party committee, the Petrograd Soviet — whose decisions, taken in offices and on platforms, are presented as the events whose succession constitutes the revolution. The narration is not false in its details; it is partial in its emphasis. Most of the actual events that overthrew the Tsarist state and, eight months later, the Provisional Government were carried out by people whose names do not appear in the popular accounts at all: soldiers, sailors, factory workers, women who joined breadlines that became demonstrations.

The point matters because it changes what the revolution is taken to be a revolution of. If the revolution is the action of a party committee, then its outcome was decided by the qualities of the committee — its theory, its discipline, its tactical decisions. If the revolution is the action of an army of soldiers refusing to fire on demonstrators, of a navy refusing to put down a strike, of a city's workers walking out of factories whose products the army needed, then the outcome was decided by the choices made, often in the same week, by hundreds of thousands of people whose names will never be recovered.

Both characterisations contain real elements. The party committee did exist, did make decisions, and the decisions did matter; the soldiers and workers did act, often independently of any party direction, and their actions equally mattered. What the more recent social history of the revolution has tried to recover is the second strand, which had been thinly present in the older accounts. The recovery does not displace the first strand; it adds the second to it, and the addition changes the proportions in which the revolution can be understood.

To say this is not to say that all revolutions are like this, or that all revolutions are best understood through their participants rather than their leaderships. It is to say that, in this revolution, the proportions of the older account were off in a way the surviving evidence allows us to correct, and that the corrected proportions yield a different sense of how the events of 1917 actually unfolded. To leave the older narration unchallenged is not to remember Russia in 1917 more clearly but to inherit a version of it shaped by the assumptions of those who first wrote it down.