Review by Choice Review
McMeekin (Bard College), who previously broke new ground with The Russian Origins of the First World War (2011), culled recent Russian archives to write a thoroughly representative "new history" of the Russian Revolution. He presents a complete appraisal of Russia under czarist rule, the attempts of liberals to create a democratic revolution in February 1917, and the breakthrough of the October Revolution of 1917 under Lenin and the Bolsheviks. McMeekin views history as reality but notes that certain events could have turned it around. For example, he believes if Czar Nicholas II had listened to Rasputin in 1914 and stayed out of the German-Austrian Balkan struggle, Russia might have survived his rule. McMeekin sees Kerensky as butchering his chances by forcing offensives in the army during the summer of 1917 while trying to beat back Bolshevik domestic pressure. Finally, he sees Lenin as a voyeur who knew that "declaring peace" would win over war-weary soldiers. McMeekin shows how after Brest-Litovsk, Lenin turned on the peasants, the church, and the anti-Bolsheviks (Whites) to cause five years of utter turmoil. Though not all historians will agree with every McMeekin analysis, his efforts at a revisionist history are highly commendable. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Andrew Mark Mayer, College of Staten Island
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
ON THE AFTERNOON of July 4, 1917, thousands of soldiers, sailors and workers converged on a former royal palace, a sprawling Palladian structure in the Russian capital, then called Petrograd. The palace was serving as the seat of the Petrograd Soviet - or council - of workers' and soldiers' deputies, a group of mostly radical revolutionaries that was sharing power with the country's provisional government. Four months had passed since the so-called February Revolution forced Czar Nicholas II from the throne, and the democratic socialists and liberals who had taken control were locked in a mounting power struggle marked by shifting alliances, palace intrigues and occasional street fighting. Denouncing them as bourgeois "minister-capitalists," the mobs now demanded that the Soviet take full command of the country. The protesters were acting on the orders of the small but militant Bolshevik wing of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Party, which had been busy propagandizing military units and factory workers. Although the Bolsheviks had called for a peaceful demonstration, their real plan was to seize power in a coup d'état. With gangs in armored cars and trucks roaming the city, they were already in de facto control. Vladimir Lenin was inside the palace waiting to proclaim a new government. When a leading minister stepped outside to calm the crowd, a worker raised a fist to his face, shouting, "Take power, you S.O.B., when they give it to you!" Others seized him and dragged him into a car. But the Bolshevik plan soon fizzled. Whether due more to a loss of nerve than bad planning, the mobs dissipated and the Bolshevik leaders were arrested. With evidence that they were being lavishly financed by Russia's wartime enemy Germany, the provisional government prepared to dispatch the traitorous radicals. "Now they are going to shoot us," Lenin warned his co-conspirator Leon Trotsky before shaving his beard and fleeing to Finland. He would not be seen again in public until the Bolsheviks staged a second coup attempt nearly four months later, this time resulting in the cataclysmic October Revolution, which, according to Sean McMeekin's estimates, ultimately caused 25 million deaths, radically transformed Russian society and polarized global politics for more than half a century. Striking as the Bolshevik reversal was in July 1917, the provisional government's response to the failed coup was even more stunning. Even with public and political sentiment turning against the Bolsheviks, Alexander Kerensky - the ambitious 36- year-old lawyer who had emerged as the government's leader - dropped treason charges against them, freed their leaders and even allowed them to rearm. The next time they saw an opportunity, the Bolsheviks wouldn't pass it up. During the successful coup of Oct. 25, the Red Guards arrested the ministers of Kerensky's liberal government and seized control. What could Kerensky have been thinking? That's one of the chief questions posed by McMeekin, the latest historian to tread the well-worn path of revolution scholarship in a new book published to coincide with the event's centenary this year. A professor at Bard College, McMeekin argues that one of the seminal events of modern history was largely a matter of chance. Well-written, with new details from archival research used for vivid descriptions of key events, "The Russian Revolution" comes nearly three decades after Richard Pipes's masterpiece of the same name. Pipes's monumental work rejected the traditional view of the revolution as somehow the result of social movements from below, characterizing the outcome instead as a coup by "identifiable men pursuing their own advantages." McMeekin takes that line further. For Pipes, the revolution reflected the gradual breakdown of Russia's distinct autocracy, shaped by a centuries-old tradition of collectivism and patrimonial rule, but McMeekin disputes Pipes's arguments, seeing virtually no difference between the Russian empire and its European rivals. Significantly shorter than Pipes's study, or Orlando Figes's worthy "A People's Tragedy" (1998), McMeekin's history follows the main events and players, though without much of Pipes's sweeping context and analysis of Russian and European history. Far from the hopeless backwater depicted in most histories, McMeekin argues, Russia's economy was surging before the war, with a growth rate of 10 percent a year - like China in the early 21st century. "The salient fact about Russia in 1917," he writes, "is that it was a country at war," yet he adds that the Russian military acquitted itself well on the battlefield after terrible setbacks in 1915, with morale high in early 1917. "Knowing how the story of the czars turns out, many historians have suggested that the Russian colossus must always have had feet of clay," he writes. "But surely this is hindsight. Despite growing pains, uneven economic development and stirrings of revolutionary fervor, imperial Russia in 1900 was a going concern, its very size and power a source of pride to most if not all of the czar's subjects." Nicholas II - rightly characterized as an incompetent reactionary in most histories - is partly rehabilitated here. His fundamental mistake, McMeekin says, was to trust his liberal advisers, who urged him to go to war, then conspired to remove him from power after protests over bread rations led to a military mutiny. Even the royal family's trusted faith healer Rasputin, the ogre of conventional wisdom, largely gets a pass for sagely advising the czar that war would prompt his downfall. Although McMeekin agrees the real villains are the ruthless Bolsheviks, he reserves most criticism for the hapless liberals. Leaving Kerensky's motivations during the July events largely unexplained, he only hints at the common rationale for Kerensky's refusal to prosecute the Bolsheviks: Deeply unpopular among the liberals, he needed the leftists on his side, believing the greater threat to his government came from right-wing leaders aiming to restore Nicholas to the throne. The Bolsheviks, meanwhile, cunningly pursued Lenin's master plan to "turn the armies red," encouraging mutinies and desertions with their promise to end the war and redistribute land. "In view of Kerensky's impotence, the only really surprising thing about the course of events is how long it took the Bolsheviks to act," McMeekin writes. Having taken power, the Bolsheviks turned on the unwitting soldiers and peasants who were among their most fervent supporters, unleashing a violent terror campaign that appropriated land and grain, and that turned into a permanent class war targeting ever-larger categories of "enemies of the people." Unconcerned about Russia's ultimate fate, they were pursuing their greater goal of world revolution. McMeekin depends on a surprisingly narrow focus to make his overarching argument, eschewing analysis of the deeper social and political forces required for any comprehensive study of the revolution and its lessons for us today - when radical political groups are again relying on subterfuge and populism to force a fundamental change of the world order. Yes, Russia was rapidly reforming at the turn of the century while its economy was growing - and revolution was far from inevitable. But there were reasons the empire had so much catching up to do, which involved uniquely Russian characteristics like its sprawling landmass, terrible climate and poor soil. These made scratching out a living difficult, and governing unwieldy. The symbolic role of the boss - whether in the form of a village elder or the czar - provided crucial stability for a society in which most saw individual freedoms as a threat to group survival. Of the three-quarters of the population classified as peasants by a government census in 1897, the vast majority were illiterate - very conservative people with a long tradition of highly centralized rule for whom drastic change mainly in the urban centers was deeply destabilizing. McMeekin leaves no doubt that chance certainly played a significant role in the Bolsheviks' ascent, but it was no mere coincidence that following the revolution's dramatic destruction of the ruling elite, the Bolsheviks' extreme centralization succeeded in re-establishing Russia's traditional political culture by the 1930s. THAT PATTERN REPEATED itself six decades later. After the Soviet collapse in 1991 ushered in 10 years of destabilizing westernizing reform, another autocratic leader who took power by chance succeeded in consolidating it by returning the country to its longstanding political roots. A hundred years after the revolution, Vladimir Putin's Russia still faces many of the same fundamental problems: rigid authoritarianism, widespread poverty and deeply rooted corruption. Little wonder the Kremlin has been at pains to play down celebration of the revolution's centenary this year. What are the lessons of this history a century on? McMeekin points to what he calls a resurgence of Marxist-style philosophy, warning readers to be wary of "openly avowed socialists" like Bernie Sanders - as if right-wing ideologies played no part in the 20th century's convulsions. This is an especially bizarre conclusion when mounting nationalism and a global shiftto the right are threatening the postwar liberal order today. With Putin and Donald Trump again exploiting popular insecurities, the Russian Revolution's real lesson must surely be that however unlikely their rise, populist tyrants ultimately succeed when rapid social change, even in times of relative peace and prosperity, alienates the masses enough to rebel against their ruling elites. 'Imperial Russia in 1900 was a going concern,' McMeekin says, a 'source of pride' to most Russians. GREGORY FEIFER is the author of "Russians: The People Behind the Power."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 18, 2017]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this brisk history, McMeekin (Ottoman Endgame), professor of history at Bard College, reevaluates the 1917 Russian Revolution on its centennial. With strong scholarly foundations and a riveting narrative, this book provides a broad survey of this tumultuous and fateful social transformation-the dethroning of the czar, the Bolsheviks' improbable rise to power, and the establishment and consolidation of Bolshevik rule. McMeekin begins with a detailed background, reviewing czarist rule, its weaknesses, and its persistence. The turmoil of WWI roused simmering tensions and the Romanov regime collapsed amid charges of defeatism and treason-and growing protests, strikes, and mutinies. McMeekin navigates the complex political ructions as various factions vied for power, culminating in the Bolsheviks' triumph. Developments in subsequent years threatened Bolshevik rule, but their victory was solidified with the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo, where the book concludes. McMeekin's analysis privileges wartime action over the various factions' raisons d'être, and he suggests-based on flimsy evidence-that Lenin was a German agent and the Bolshevik insurrection was rooted in German strategic policy. The work claims to be "unmediated by our current prejudices," but it is emphatically anti-Bolshevik. Despite the glaring divergence between its objective and its content, this fluid work offers an overview of the revolution's wartime context. Maps & illus. Agent: Andrew Lownie, Andrew Lownie Literary (U.K.). (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Competing against a slew of titles commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, McMeekin (history, Bard Coll., The Ottoman Endgame) seeks to compile a definitive and seminal analysis utilizing newly accessible archival research. The book spans a wider timeframe starting in 1905 to allow more perspective on contributing events leading to the uprising. Additionally, the goal is to "rediscover the revolution as it transpired in real time, from the perspective of key actors who did not know, as they acted, how the story would turn out." The rise of what we now know as communism was not always a forgone conclusion. This title is similar to S. A. Smith's Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928, which also covers an extended timeframe on both sides of the revolution within a broader critical analysis. But McMeekin succeeds in offering a fresh take through inclusivity of contributing events beyond the depth of all other titles. However, this inclusivity is at times its weakness, as the work becomes overwhelming with lesser-known personages and events. VERDICT A well-written and rewarding read on the Russian Revolution's lasting historical import. Essential for research collections, scholars, and informed readers.-Jessica Bushore, Xenia, OH © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A fresh history of the revolution "as a concrete historical eventcontroversial and significant in its lasting impact on world politics, but also worth understanding on its own terms, unmediated by our current prejudices."McMeekin (History/Bard Coll.; The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923, 2015, etc.) refreshingly doesn't muddy the waters with too many characters, but he is thorough in his treatment, which is that much more interesting due to the wealth of information released following the downfall of the Soviet Union. "Fortunately for historians of the revolution," he writes, "the years since 1991 have seen an explosion of research into Russia's military performance in World War I from 1914 to 1917." Of course, Lenin springs to mind as the great leader of the revolution, but when he finally appeared, he had been out of the country for years. However, he knew that the country needed an enemy to unite against, and Germany wouldn't provide it; troops were bored and ripe for infiltration by the Bolsheviks. The author also explores the explosive Order No. 1, effectively telling troops to disarm officers, as well as Lenin's abilities to control the armed forces, one of the keys to Bolshevik success. His goal was not revolution but civil war, and he got it: "Lenin's imperative was to transform the imperialist war' into a civil war." However, the author points out how easily things might have gone the other way. Peter Stolypin's 1906 agriculture reforms pleased nearly everyone, and the army was well taken care of. Czar Nicholas II does not escape McMeekin's scrutiny, either. His ineffectiveness and reliance on Rasputin turned the people away, even though it was Rasputin who warned him about the war. McMeekin effectively shows how easily one man could undermine the foundations of a nation, and he makes the revolution comprehensible as he exposes the deviousness of its leader. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
