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Russian Revolution

  • 1/22/2023

    What's Hiding in Putin's Family History?

    by Chris Monday

    The details of Vladimir Putin's personal and family life are surprisingly (and by design) difficult to pin down. A historian suggests that his grandfather was more powerful, and more influential on the future Russian leader's fortunes, than Putin's common man mythology suggests. 

  • SOURCE: History.com
    4/28/2021

    How World War I Fueled the Russian Revolution

    Stephen Miner of Ohio University says that while the collapse of Czarist Russia was likely without the first world war, the conflict made it virtually inevitable. Lynne Hartnett of Villanova says war exposed the weaknesses of the regime. 

  • SOURCE: Slate
    2/3/2021

    The GOP’s Bolshevik Moment

    by Fred Kaplan

    Alexander Kerensky's tenure as Russia's only prime minister between the overthrow of the Czar and the Bolshevik takeover was cut short in part because he viewed Lenin as an ally against his monarchist enemies. Republican Party leaders risk the same fate if they accept the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene as allies against Joe Biden.

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    10/6/2020

    Did the US Try to Assassinate Lenin in 1918?

    A new book demonstrates that the United States and western allies attempted to thwart the Bolshevik revolution and actually started the Cold War with an ill-fated 1918 invasion of Russia, but is on more speculative ground tracing an assassination attempt against Lenin to the US.  

  • SOURCE: The Boston Globe
    11-13-17

    The cautionary tale of the Bolshevik revolution

    by Niall Ferguson

    A century ago it was the West’s great blunder to think it would not matter if Lenin and his confederates took over the Russian Empire. Incredible as it may seem, I believe we are capable of repeating that catastrophic error.

  • Revolutions: Three Different Kinds

    by Rex Wade

    Alyssa's posting, like Peter Stearns' earlier, implicitly touch on the questions of leadership and revolutionary stages. Perhaps in any discussion of revolutions it may be worth keeping in mind that those who begin revolutions rarely are the ones who finish them. (The American Revolution, perhaps better called by its other common term, the War for Independence, is an anomaly that perhaps misleads Americans about revolutions.) In comparing revolutions and leadership, perhaps several variants are worth keeping in mind:1) Places where the revolution “succeeds,” in the sense of the old regime being swept away, but successive leadership changes and even mini-revolutions and regime changes occur before things are stabilized in a new order, as in France after 1789 and Russia in 1917.2) Those (rare?) instances where the original revolutionaries successfully sweep away the old regime and replace it by something genuinely new that is reasonably stable and permanent, such as Turkey with Ataturk.3) Instances where revolutionaries have temporary success but the old regime soon reconstitutes itself in slightly altered form (“Revolution of 1905” in Russia, 1848 in Central Europe).

  • Don't Overestimate the Cohesion of the Military during Revolutionary Moments

    by Rex Wade

    As Jack Censer’s post has pointed out, the role of the military in revolutionary situations is critical to understanding them. Yet, it varies so much that finding common threads can be extremely difficult, and even then misleading. Yet, clearly, they play central roles. Perhaps one useful way of exploring that is to examine the extent to which the military is unified in outlook -- ideological, cultural, social, and hierarchically -- or divided, most likely between officers and rank and file men, which in turn can reflect social or ideological differences (although there could be other fault-lines, such as religion or ethnicity). Moreover, this can change as the revolution progresses.In the Russian Revolution of 1917, for example, both officers and men were unhappy with the tsarist government of Nicholas II as the year opened, with discussion of palace revolution emerging among high-ranking officers by the end of 1916 while rank-and-file soldiers (and lower level officers) were alienated by the ongoing war (World War I). Both immediately supported the February Revolution -- indeed a rebellion of rank-and-file soldiers in the capital city garrison played a critical role in toppling the regime-- and the new liberal provisional government.