Volume 8, Number 11 · June 15, 1967
1917
By Walter Laqueur
Russia 1917: The February Revolution
by George Katkov
Harper & Row, 489 pp., $8.50
The Triumph of Bolshevism: Revolution or Reaction
by Stuart Ramsay Tompkins
University of Oklahoma Press, 331 pp., $5.95
Russia, Bolshevism and the Versailles Peace
by John M. Thompson
Princeton, 429 pp., $11.50
Lenin and the Russian Revolution
by Harold Shukman
Putnam, 224 pp., $5.95
Russia in Revolution 1890-1918
by Lionel Kochan
New American Library, 352 pp., $6.95
Revolutions seldom happen unexpectedly. Usually, they are preceded by unmistakable warning signs: the grand peur in 1789, the universal expectation of a revolution years before 1848. There had been ominous signs in Russia for a century before 1917. Herzen wrote in 1853 that any day Russia might be drawn into a terrible revolution. Generations of Russian revolutionaries had talked and dreamed revolution, yet when it actually happened in 1905, and again in 1917, it was without a plan or central leadership; Proudhon's comment on Paris in 1848 applies equally to Petersburg in March 1917: 'Le 24 fèvrier a été fait sans idée.' The extreme Left was no exception. Sukhanov, the Boswell of the Russian Revolution, noted in his diary that not one party was prepared. Lenin, lecturing in his Swiss exile on the lessons of 1905, ended on a resigned note: 'We of the older generation may not see the decisive battle of the coming revolution.' Trotsky wrote that it had been a spontaneous uprising spurred by universal indignation; the Bolsheviks were at the time a headless organization with a scattered staff and weak illegal groups.
Review, 2755 words
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