The Bolsheviks Survive

Taking power in a revolution is one thing, but hanging on and establishing a functioning government is quite another. In the fourth of his meticulously documented histories of the Bolshevik Party in Petrograd, doyen of US historians of the Russian Revolution Alexander Rabinowitch sets out the formidable problems and costs of revolutionary survival as democratic instincts withered in the face of economic crisis and military threat.

Alexander Rabinowitch has likely done more than any other historian to overturn entrenched postrevolutionary and Cold War interpretations of the Russian Revolution. In this concluding volume of his landmark tetralogy on Red Petrograd, he shows how the crucible of civil war not only eroded the city’s once-central role in national and international politics but also corroded the Communist Party’s egalitarian ideals and the flexible political practices of 1917 and 1918—features so vital to Lenin’s rise to power. Essential reading for students of the Revolution and for anyone seeking to understand the origins of Stalinist governance.

In this beautifully written, meticulously researched book, the leading historian of the Russian Revolution examines the challenges the Bolsheviks faced during the Civil War. Alexander Rabinowitch brilliantly demonstrates how the Bolsheviks moved ever closer to strict centralization and single-party domination in their fierce fight for survival against advancing White Armies, foreign intervention, fuel shortages, hunger, and strikes. For anyone who ever wondered how and why Stalinist repression replaced the direct democracy of the soviets, this powerful history provides an answer.

Alexander Rabinowitch is the historian par excellence of the Bolshevik struggle for power in the first years of the revolution. In this final volume of his foundational work on party politics and leadership struggles, he tells the bleak story of the besieged regime and its desperate efforts in the revolutionary capital Petrograd when White Armies advanced on the city. He details the tragedy of how war, food shortages, and enemies within and without led the revolution from democratic euphoria in 1917 slowly toward centralization of state power, emasculation of workers’ real power, the reluctant deployment of terror as a tool of governance, and a steady drift toward dictatorship.