Wood - The Origins of the Russian Revolution, 1861-1917

Since the first edition of this pamphlet was published in 1987, dramatic, and at that time unpredictable, changes have taken place in the former Soviet Union, a nation which was created by the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 and the Bolshevik victory in the ensuing Civil War (191822). In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and inaugurated a programme of far-ranging economic and institutional restructuring (perestroika), and a policy of openness and freedom of information (glasnost) unprecedented in Soviet experience. By 1991 his reforms had generated so much social discontent, political dissatisfaction, economic chaos and ethnic unrest in the non-Russian Republics, that in August of that year a cabal of hard line politicians attempted to launch a putsch against him, placed him under house arrest, and declared a state of national emergency. The putsch was defeated, but in the whirlwind of political transformation that followed, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was obliterated, Gorbachev was forced to resign, and the USSR was formally abolished. The Soviet period of Russian history was over.

This situation of revolutionary change and uncertainty, which is still going on inside present-day Russia, has had a profound impact on the way in which the history of the 1917 Revolutions is now understood, studied and taught in the country where it took place. Some of the new theories, circumstances and perspectives in the rewriting of the Russian Revolutions are discussed in a completely revised final chapter. Otherwise, the text remains substantially the same as in the first edition, and the interpretation of the forces which formed the origins of the Russian Revolution stays basically unaltered. The central thesis is still that the events of 1917 itself, to which a separate chapter is devoted, can only be properly understood against the complex background of social, political, economic and intellectual developments within the Russian Empire in the period which began with the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The last decades of the nineteenth century were a period during which the peoples of the Russian Empire went through the painful and ambiguous process of what Marxist historians would describe as a transition from feudalism characterized by autocracy and serfdom, to capitalism marked in what was still a basically peasant country by an imperfect modern economic infrastructure, new urban-based social forces, and the tsarist governments reluctant experiments with quasi-parliamentary political and legislative institutions. It is in the volcanic soil of this transitionary era that the seeds of the Revolution were set.