Volume 24, Number 5 · March 31, 1977
Two Years That Shook the World
By Leonard Schapiro
The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd
by Alexander Rabinowitch
Norton, 393 pp., $14.95
The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization
by John L.H. Keep
Norton, 614 pp., $19.50
Class Struggles in the USSR: First Period 1917-1923
by Charles Bettelheim, translated by Brian Pearce
Monthly Review Press, 567 pp., $18.95
The File on the Tsar
by Anthony Summers, by Tom Mangold
Harper & Row, 416 pp., $12.50
The Secret Police in Lenin's Russia
by Lennard D. Gerson
Temple University Press, 368 pp., $15.00
Nearly sixty years have passed since the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd—traditionally on November 7, 1917, because that was when the Second Congress of Soviets voted them into power. Actually power had been in their hands for some time before, but it is regarded as more democratic to stress the vote of the Congress rather than the military coup d'état, and hence the myth of the date, one of many, which has become firmly rooted in the popular presentation of the Russian revolution. Seizure of power without enacting any democratic pantomime was Lenin's determined plan: he was opposed on this by Trotsky and others, who realized that there was a wide divergence between Lenin's intention of establishing communist party rule, disguised as democratic, mass rule, and that of the 'masses' concerned who wanted power to be taken over by the Soviets, which they saw as a coalition of numerous left-wing parties, both communist and socialist.
Review, 3191 words
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