Editing October Revolution (section)

==Historiography==
{{Marxism–Leninism sidebar|History}}

There have been few events where the political opinions of researchers have influenced their historical research as significantly as the October Revolution.<ref>{{harvnb|Acton|1997|p=5}}</ref> Generally, the [[historiography]] of the Revolution generally divides into three camps: Soviet-Marxist, Western-Totalitarian, and Revisionist.<ref>{{harvnb|Acton|1997|pp=5–7}}</ref>

===Soviet historiography===
[[Historiography in the Soviet Union|Soviet historiography]] of the October Revolution is intertwined with Soviet historical development. Many of the initial Soviet interpreters of the Revolution were themselves Bolshevik revolutionaries.<ref name="Kotkin 1998">{{Cite journal |last=Kotkin |first=Stephen |date=1998 |title=1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks |journal=The Journal of Modern History |publisher=University of Chicago Press |volume=70 |issue=2 |pages=384–425 |doi=10.1086/235073 |issn=0022-2801 |s2cid=145291237}}</ref> Bolshevik figures such as [[Anatoly Lunacharsky]], [[Moisei Uritsky]] and [[Dmitry Manuilsky]] agreed that Lenin's influence on the Bolshevik party was decisive but the October insurrection was carried out according to Trotsky's, not to Lenin's plan.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Deutscher |first=Isaac |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YGznDwAAQBAJ&q=isaac+deutscher+trotsky+the+prophet |title=The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky |date=5 January 2015 |publisher=Verso Books |isbn=978-1-7816-8721-5 |page=1283 |language=en}}</ref> After the initial wave of revolutionary narratives, Soviet historians worked within "narrow guidelines" defined by the Soviet government. The rigidity of interpretive possibilities reached its height under Stalin.{{Sfn|Acton|1997|p=7}}

Soviet historians of the Revolution interpreted the October Revolution as being about establishing the legitimacy of [[Marxist ideology]] and the Bolshevik government. To establish the accuracy of Marxist ideology, Soviet historians generally described the Revolution as the product of [[class struggle]] and that it was the supreme event in a world history governed by historical laws. The Bolshevik Party is placed at the center of the Revolution, as it exposes the errors of both the moderate Provisional Government and the spurious "socialist" Mensheviks in the Petrograd Soviet. Guided by Lenin's leadership and his firm grasp of scientific [[Marxist Theory|Marxist theory]], the Party led the "logically predetermined" events of the October Revolution from beginning to end. The events were, according to these historians, logically predetermined because of the socio-economic development of Russia, where monopolistic industrial capitalism had alienated the masses. In this view, the Bolshevik party took the leading role in organizing these alienated industrial workers, and thereby established the construction of the first [[socialist state]].{{Sfn|Acton|1997|p=8}}

Although Soviet historiography of the October Revolution stayed relatively constant until 1991, it did undergo some changes. Following Stalin's death, historians such as [[Eduard Burdzhalov|E. N. Burdzhalov]] and P.&nbsp;V.&nbsp;Volobuev published historical research that deviated significantly from the party line in refining the doctrine that the Bolshevik victory "was predetermined by the state of Russia's socio-economic development".<ref>{{Cite book |first=Alter |last=Litvin |title=Writing History in Twentieth-Century Russia |location=New York |publisher=Palgrave |date=2001 |pp=49–50}}</ref> These historians, who constituted the "New Directions Group", posited that the complex nature of the October Revolution "could only be explained by a multi-causal analysis, not by recourse to the mono-causality of monopoly capitalism".<ref>{{Cite book |first=Roger |last=Markwick |title=Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography |location=New York |publisher=Palgrave |date=2001 |page=97}}</ref> For them, the central actor is still the Bolshevik party, but this party triumphed "because it alone could solve the preponderance of 'general democratic' tasks the country faced" (such as the struggle for peace and the exploitation of landlords).{{Sfn|Markwick|2001|p=102}}

During the late Soviet period, the opening of select [[State Archive of the Russian Federation|Soviet archives]] during [[glasnost]] sparked innovative research that broke away from some aspects of Marxism–Leninism, though the key features of the orthodox Soviet view remained intact.{{Sfn|Acton|1997|p=7}}

Following the turn of the 21st century, some Soviet historians began to implement an "anthropological turn" in their historiographical analysis of the Russian Revolution. This method of analysis focuses on the average person's experience of day-to-day life during the revolution, and pulls the analytical focus away from larger events, notable revolutionaries, and overarching claims about party views.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Smith |first=S. A. |date=2015 |title=The historiography of the Russian Revolution 100 Years On |journal=Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History |volume=16 |issue=4 |pages=733–749 |doi=10.1353/kri.2015.0065 |s2cid=145202617}}</ref> In 2006, S. V. Iarov employed this methodology when he focused on citizen adjustment to the new Soviet system. Iarov explored the dwindling labor protests, evolving forms of debate, and varying forms of politicization as a result of the new Soviet rule from 1917 to 1920.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Iarov |first=S.V. |date=2006 |title=Konformizm v Sovetskoi Rossii: Petrograd, 1917–20 |journal=Evropeiskii Dom |language=ru}}</ref> In 2010, O. S. Nagornaia took interest in the personal experiences of Russian prisoners-of-war taken by [[German Empire|Germany]], examining Russian soldiers and officers' ability to cooperate and implement varying degrees of [[autocracy]] despite being divided by class, political views, and race.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Nagornaia |first=O. S. |date=2010 |title=Drugoi voennyi opyt: Rossiiskie voennoplennye Pervoi mirovoi voiny v Germanii (1914–1922) |journal=Novyi Khronograf |language=ru}}</ref> Other analyses following this "anthropological turn" have explored texts from soldiers and how they used personal war-experiences to further their political goals,<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Morozova |first=O. M. |date=2010 |title=Dva akta dreamy: Boevoe proshloe I poslevoennaia povsednevnost ' veteran grazhdanskoi voiny |journal=Rostov-on-Don: Iuzhnyi Nauchnyi Tsentr Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk |language=ru}}</ref> as well as how individual life-structure and psychology may have shaped major decisions in the civil war that followed the revolution.<ref>{{Cite journal |first=O. M. |last=Morozova |date=2007 |title=Antropologiia grazhdanskoi voiny |journal=Rostov-on-Don: Iuzhnyi Nauchnyi Tsentr RAN |language=ru}}</ref>

===Western historiography===
{{see also|Soviet and communist studies|Totalitarianism#Politics of historical interpretation}}
==== "Totalitarian" historians ====
During the [[Cold War]], Western historiography of the October Revolution developed in direct response to the assertions of the Soviet view. As a result, Western historians exposed what they believed were flaws in the Soviet view, thereby undermining the Bolsheviks' original legitimacy, as well as the precepts of Marxism.{{Sfn|Acton|1997|pp=6–7}} The view which originated in the early years of the Cold War became known as "traditionalist" and "totalitarian" as well as "Cold War" historians for relying on concepts and interpretations rooted in the early years of the Cold War and even in the sphere Russian [[White émigré]]s of the 1920s.{{Sfn|Acton|1997|pp=4–13}}<ref name="mawdsley">{{Cite book |last=Mawdsley |first=Evan |author-link=Evan Mawdsley |title=The Russian Civil War|year=2011|publisher=Birlinn |isbn=9780857901231}}</ref>

These "traditionalist" historians described the revolution as the result of a chain of contingent accidents. Examples of these accidental and contingent factors they say precipitated the Revolution included [[World War&nbsp;I]]'s timing, chance, and the poor leadership of Tsar Nicholas&nbsp;II as well as that of liberal and moderate socialists.{{Sfn|Acton|1997|p=7}} According to "totalitarian" historians, it was not popular support, but rather a manipulation of the masses, ruthlessness, and the party discipline of the Bolsheviks that enabled their triumph. For these historians, the Bolsheviks' defeat in the [[1917 Russian Constituent Assembly election|Constituent Assembly elections]] of November–December 1917 demonstrated popular opposition to the Bolsheviks' revolution, as did the scale and breadth of the Civil War.{{Sfn|Acton|1997|pp=7–9}}

"Totalitarian" historians saw the organization of the Bolshevik party as totalitarian. Their interpretation of the October Revolution as a violent coup organized by a totalitarian party which aborted Russia's experiment in democracy.<ref>{{Cite journal |first=Norbert |last=Francis |url=http://www.ijors.net/issue6_2_2017/pdf/__www.ijors.net_issue6_2_2017_article_2_francis.pdf |title=Revolution in Russia and China: 100 Years |journal=International Journal of Russian Studies |volume=6 |issue=July 2017 |pp=130–143}}</ref> Thus, Stalinist totalitarianism developed as a natural progression from [[Leninism]] and the Bolshevik party's tactics and organization.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Hanson |first=Stephen E. |title=Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions |date=1997 |publisher=University of North Carolina Press |isbn=978-0-8078-4615-5 |page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=wSaLSRHnoygC&pg=PA130 130]}}</ref> To these historians, Soviet Russia in 1917 was as totalitarian as the USSR under Joseph Stalin in 1930s.<ref name="mawdsley"/> More to it, such historians have blamed Lenin and the Bolsheviks for inventing policies further implemented by totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, such as the [[Holocaust]]: for example, according to [[Richard Pipes]], a prominent "totalitarian", "The Stalinist and Nazi holocausts" stemmed from Lenin's [[Red Terror]] and had "much greater decorum" than the latter.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Suny |first=Ronald Grigor |author-link=Ronald Grigor Suny |title=Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians and the Russian Revolution |date=2017 |publisher= Verso Books}}</ref>

==== "Revisionist" historians ====
The 1960s-1970s saw a rise of a young historians who opposed the "totalitarian" historians and began challenging, revising and refuting the dominant and accepted conceptions, as well as criticizing the bias towards the USSR and the Left in general; they lacked a full-fledged doctrine or philosophy of history, but were distinguished as "revisionists"; in contrast with the focus of "totalitarian" historians on "politics" "from above" and on personalities of the leaders of political movements, "the one man", the revisionists have produced "history from below" and put attention on social history.{{Sfn|Acton|1997|pp=4–13}}<ref name="mawdsley"/> These historians tend to see a rupture between Stalinist totalitarianism and Leninism and refute the definition of the Revolution as a totalitarian coup carried out by a minority group; the 'revisionists' stress the genuinely 'popular' nature of the Bolshevik Revolution. According to [[Evan Mawdsley]], "the 'revisionist’ school had been dominant from the 1970s" in academic circles, and achieved "some success" in challenging the traditionalists;<ref name="mawdsley"/> however, they continued to be criticized by "totalitarians" who accused them of "Marxism" and failing to see the primary reason of political events, the personality of the leaders. During the rise of the "revisionists", "totalitarians" retained popularity and influence outside academic circles, especially in politics and public spheres of the [[United States]], where they supported harder policies towards the USSR: for example, [[Zbigniew Brzezinski]] served as National Security Advisor to President [[Jimmy Carter]], while Richard Pipes headed the CIA group [[Team B]]; after 1991, their views have found popularity not only in the West, but also in the former USSR.<ref name="suny2011"/>

===Effect of the dissolution of the Soviet Union on historical research===
The [[dissolution of the Soviet Union]] affected historical interpretations of the October Revolution. Since 1991, increasing access to large amounts of Soviet archival materials has made it possible to re‑examine the October Revolution.<ref name="Kotkin 1998"/> Though both Western and Russian historians now have access to many of these archives, the effect of the dissolution of the USSR can be seen most clearly in the work of the latter. While the disintegration essentially helped solidify the Western and Revisionist views, post-USSR Russian historians largely repudiated the former Soviet historical interpretation of the Revolution.{{Sfn|Litvin|2001|p=47}} As [[Stephen Kotkin]] argues, 1991 prompted "a return to political history and the apparent resurrection of totalitarianism, the interpretive view that, in different ways…revisionists sought to bury".<ref name="Kotkin 1998"/>