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WORK TITLE: Russia in Revolution
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Smith, Stephen Anthony
BIRTHDATE: 1952
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: British
https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/person/2157 * https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/sites/stage.all-souls.ox.ac.uk/files/FellowsCVs/CVsmiths.pdf * https://global.oup.com/academic/product/russia-in-revolution-9780198734826?cc=us&lang=en&#
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 82092584
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n82092584
HEADING: Smith, S. A. (Stephen Anthony), 1952-
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670 __ |a His Red Petrograd, 1982: |b CIP t.p. (S.A. Smith)
670 __ |a Phone call to Cambridge Press, 6/23/82 |b (Stephen Anthony Smith, b. Mar. 22, 1952)
670 __ |a A road is made, 2000 : |b CIP t.p. (Steve Smith) add. t.p. (S.A. Smith) data sheet (Smith, Steve, b. Mar. 22, 1952)
670 __ |a Russian Revolution, 2002: |b t.p. (S.A. Smith) jkt. (prof. of history at the Univ. of Essex)
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PERSONAL
Born March 22, 1952.
EDUCATION:Oriel College, Oxford University, B.A. (Honors), 1973; Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, M.Soc.Sci., 1974, Ph.D., 1980; University of Moscow, graduate study, 1976-77; Beijing Language Institute, certificate in advanced studies in contemporary Chinese, 1983; Peking University, graduate study, 1983.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Essex, Colchester, England, lecturer, 1977-84, senior lecturer, 1984-91, professor, 1991-2008; European University Institute, Florence, Italy, professor, 2008-12; All Souls College, Oxford University, Oxford, England, senior research fellow, 2012-13; Oxford University, professor, 2013–.
AWARDS:Fellow, Royal Historical Society; Ashley Prize, University of Birmingham, 1980; Fellow, International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University, 2004; British Academy research leave fellowship, 2006-08; fellow, British Academy.
WRITINGS
Translator (with Diane Koenker), Notes of a Red Guard: The Autobiography of Eduard Dune, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1993. Editor (with A. Thomas Lane), Biographical Dictionary of European Labor Leaders, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1995; (with Alan Knight; and contributor), The Religion of Fools? Superstition Past and Present, Past and Present Supplement 3, Oxford University Press, 2008; (with Paul Betts), Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe, Palgrave Macmillan (London, England), 2016; (with Silvio Pons; and contributor), The Cambridge History of Communism, vol. 1: World Revolution and Socialism in One Country, 1917-1940, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 2017.
Contributor to books, including A Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution. 1914-21, edited by Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu.Cherniaev and William Rosenberg, Edward Arnold (London, England), 1997; (with Catriona Kelly) Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881- 1940, edited by Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, Oxford University Press, 1998; Rabochie i intelligentsiia Rossii v epokhu reform i revoliutsii 1861- fevral’ 1917, (St. Petersburg, Russia), 1997; Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, edited by Barbara evans Clements et al, Oxford University Press, 1998; International Communism and the Communist International, edited by Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe, Manchester University Press, 1998; Reinterpreting Russian History, edited by Geoffrey Hosking and Robert Service, Edward Arnold, 1999; Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia: Realities, Representations, Reflections, edited by Regianld E. Zelnik, Institute for International Studies, 1999; The Russian Revolution: the Essential Readings, edited by Martin A. Miller, Blackwell, 2001; The Chinese Revolution in the 1920s: Between Triumph and Disaster, edited by Mechthild Leutner, et al., Curzon, 2002; The Cambridge History of Russia, vol.3, The Twentieth Century, edited by Ronald Grigor Suny, Cambridge University Press, 2006; Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe, edited by Stephen Lovell, Palgrave, 2007; China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance, edited by kate Merkel-Hells et al., Rowman & Littlefield, 2009; (also editor) Oxford Handbook in the History of Communism, Oxford University Press, 2014; The Oxford Handbook of Modern Russian History, edited by Simon Dixon, Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015; Heritage in the Modern World, edited by Paul Betts and Corey Ross, 2015; Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism, edited by Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson, Harvard University Press, 2015; The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China, edited by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Oxford University Press, 2016; (and coeditor) Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; The Palgrave Handbook on Mass Dictatorship, edited by Paul Corner and Jie-Hyun-Lim, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; The Cambridge History of Communism, vol.3: Endgames? A Global Perspective, 1960s-2000s, edited by Juliane Furst et al., Cambridge University Press, 2017); The Cambridge History of Communism, vol.1: World Revolution and Socialism in One Country, 1917-1941, Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Contributor to periodicals, including Past and Present; Europe-Asia Studies; Revolutionary Russia; Twentieth-Century Communism; Modern China Studies; Cultural and Social History; China Quarterly; American Historical Review; Forum for Anthropology and Culture; History Today; Slavic Review; International Review of Social History; Radical Science Journal and History Workshop.
SIDELIGHTS
S.A. Smith, a professor of history at the University of Oxford and an honorary research professor at the University of Essex, is a specialist in the histories of modern Russia and China and of comparative communism. He graduated from Oriel College, Oxford in 1973 and went on to obtain an M.Soc.Sci at the University of Birmingham as well as a Ph.D. from the Centre for Russian and East European Studies in 1977. While working on his doctorate, Smith spent a year at Moscow State University; later in his career, he studied at Fudan University in Shanghai. Smith began his teaching career at the University of Essex, joining its faculty in 1977 as a lecturer and rising to full professor. In 2008 he moved to the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and since 2012 has been a professor and a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Smith’s research and writing have focused on the ways in which social and political history relate to each other and to the dynamics of revolution.
Smith is the editor of The Oxford Handbook in the History of Communism, for which he wrote the introduction, “Towards a Global History of Communism,” and cowrote essays on the Comintern and on Communism in China. He has also written two concise histories on the Russian Revolution that are intended for nonspecialist audiences: The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction for Oxford University Press’s “Very Short Introduction” Series, as well as The Russian Revolution for Sterling.
Like Cattle and Horses
Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927 analyzes the connections between the growth of the Chinese working class and the emergence of Chinese nationalism. Before the establishment of foreign factories on Chinese soil in the late 1800s, the vast majority of China’s population had been peasants. With industrialization, however, came the development of a working class that, by the 1920s, was organized and agitating for better treatment. Using archival evidence from sources such as newspapers, memoirs, and police records, Smith argues that this labor movement, created by the Chinese Communist Party, was fueled more by a nationalistic rejection of foreign imperialism than by any sense of class solidarity.
Even so, says Smith, the nationalistic fervor behind the huge labor protests in the 1920s also nurtured some class consciousness. Anti-imperialist rhetoric lent legitimacy to workers’ demands and justified their participation in protests such as strikes. It also supported workers’ belief that, as citizens, they deserved to be treated with dignity and not “like cattle and horses.” In Smith’s view, nationalism provided Chinese workers with a political framework through which they could understand how their mistreatment was related both to their role as workers and to their identity as citizens of an oppressed nation.
Writing in China Review International, Xiaoqun Xu hailed Like Cattle and Horses as “one of the fine studies of late that open new lines of inquiry and invite rethinking of some seemingly ‘familiar’ issues.” Xu noted that the author expertly explains how workers’ preexisting relationships and identities informed their responses to politics, nationalism, and class consciousness. Shanghai workers were members of many social networks based on thing such as ties to their native place, relations among their family or lineage, or their trade. Guilds, native-place associations, sisterhoods and brotherhoods, and secret societies provided abounded, and contributed to a culture of personal obligation and face-keeping. At the same time, this culture informed workers’ relationships with foremen, labor contractors, and bosses. The vertical structure of these social dynamics, Smith explains, problematized the creation of both national identity and class consciousness. Activists responded by sending out speaking teams, street theater performers, and sloganeers and singers to indoctrinate workers. Material that emphasized the need to avoid national humiliation or loss of face resonated more effectively among workers than did material that invoked national sovereignty or international law. Still, workers’ connections with their previous social networks often made it difficult for organizers to break through. In some cases, activists found it necessary to join secret societies to gain influence over workers. By 1926 the Shanghai General Labor Union, led by the Chinese Communist Party, was pressuring the Green Gang, a secret society engaged in criminal activities, for control of the city’s workers. This prompting the Green Gang to cooperate with Chiang Kai-shek in his violent suppression of the Chinese Communist Party in 1927.
Russia in Revolution
In Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928, Smith examines the tumultuous buildup to the Revolution of 1917 and the equally chaotic immediate aftermath of the fight, focusing on the perspective of ordinary people rather than political elites. He begins by tracing the roots of the Revolution from the 1880s to 1905 and goes on to explain the impact of early political and social reforms. He discusses the pressures that culminated in the outbreak of world war in 1914, and the devastating consequences of Russia’s participation in that conflict; the Revolution of 1917, civil war, and the establishment of the Bolshevik regime; the power struggles and economic failures of the early 1920s; and the struggle for power after Lenin’s death, when Stalin emerged as leader and pushed for rapid industrialization as well as the forced collectivization of agriculture.
Drawing on newly available source materials, Smith discusses the ways in which the Revolution affected Russian society and its subgroups: peasants; industrial workers; army members; women and family members; youth; those not of Russian ethnicity or nationality; and the Church. This approach, he explains, is his attempt to “make an imaginative effort to recapture the hope, idealism, heroism, anger, fear, and despair” that had motivated the Revolution. The author brings fresh perspectives to his discussion of the failures of tsarist political reforms; the collapse of tsarist rule; the ability of the Bolsheviks to consolidate power after a failed attempt to create a more democratic government; the failure of centralized economic reforms in the early 1920s; and Stalin’s victory over his political rivals when he seized power after Lenin’s death in 1924.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly admired Smith’s attention to the “lived experience” of the Revolution, and said that Russia in Revolution “makes a convincing case for the relevance of Russian history” in larger debates on the dynamics of power, revolution, and societal transformation. Writing in New Statesman, David Reynolds described the book as a “deft synthesis of recent research.” Pointing out that the centennial year of the Revolution has resulted in numerous new books on the subject, Library Journal reviewer Jessica Bushore concluded that Russia in Revolution will stand out for its exceptional research.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
China Review International, spring, 2002, Xiaoqun Xu, review of Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927, p. 241.
Library Journal, February 1, 2017, Jessica Bushore, review of Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928, p. 94.
New Statesman, Feb. 24, 2017, David Reynolds, “Stumbling into revolution: how the powder keg of Petrograd exploded in 1917–with help from Russia’s Terrible Twins,” p. 40.
ONLINE
All Souls College, Oxford University Web Site, https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/ (November 13, 2017), Smith faculty profile.
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Professor Stephen Smith
BA (Hons), MSocSc, PhD, FBA, FRHistS
Senior Research Fellow since 2012
Academic Secretary
My research interests are in the histories of modern Russia and China and in comparative Communism. I am writing a book on the 'politics of the supernatural' which compares the efforts of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union (1917-41) and the People’s Republic of China (1949-76) to eliminate 'superstition' from daily life, in areas such as popular religion, calendrical and life-cycle rituals, agriculture and folk medicine. It compares the ways in which ordinary people deployed religious and magical beliefs and practices as a way of dealing with and putting meaning on the turbulent and often traumatic changes that overtook their lives.
Link to Curriculum Vitae
Contact: stephen.smith2 at all-souls.ox.ac.uk
Background
Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College (from 2012)
Professor of History, University of Oxford (from 2012)
Professor of Comparative History, European University Institute, Florence (from 2008 to 2012)
Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, and, finally, Professor, Department of History, University of Essex (from 1977 to 2008)
Postgraduate at University of Birmingham (from 1973-1977) and at University of Moscow (1976-7) (from 1973 to 1977)
Undergraduate, Oriel College, Oxford (from 1970 to 1973)
Research interests
History of modern Russia/Soviet Union
History of modern China
Comparative history
Selected publications
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
(with Alan Knight), The Religion of Fools? Superstition Past and Present, Past and Present Supplement 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927 (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
A Road is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920–27 (Honolulu/Richmond, UK: Curzon Press/University of Hawaii Press, 2000).
Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Other professional memberships and roles
Member of the Editorial Boards for: Revolutionary Russia (1989–); Past and Present (1995–, editor 2009-14); Cultural and Social History (2004–); Antropologicheskii Forum (2005–); Twentieth Century Communism (2008–); Eurasian Review (Kookmin University, South Korea) (2008–); Ricerche Storiche (2009–), Ethnography (2009–); and Journal of Social History (2011–)
Member of the Council of the Royal Historical Society (from 2006 to 2008)
Research awards and grants
British Academy Research Leave Fellowship (from 2006 to 2008).
Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Grant (from 2002 to 2007).
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Professor Steve Smith
Staff position Professor
Email smits@essex.ac.uk
Biography
I studied history at Oxford University before going on to Birmingham University to do an MSocSci and a PhD at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies. While working on my PhD, I spent a year at Moscow State University during the years of ‘stagnation’ under Brezhnev. Later, having developed a strong interest in modern China, I spent a year in Beijing taking a course in Chinese language. In 1986 I began to do research on the history of Chinese labour in the republican period (1911-1949), spending eight months at Fudan University in Shanghai. I taught at Essex University from 1977 to 2008, before moving to the European University in Florence and then being elected to a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. I am currently editor of the journal, Past and Present. I am an honorary research professor at Essex, where I still live, as well as a professor of history at Oxford University. I am a Fellow of the British Academy.
Research interests
Most of my work to date has explored the inter-relationships between social and political history, particularly in the context of revolution. In 2008, Cambridge University Press published my book, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History. This explores how social identities of peasants and workers in Russia and China were transformed in the decades leading up to Communist revolutions. I am currently writing a book that grows out of a project, generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK, which examines how the Communist regimes in the Soviet Union (1920s and 1930s) and China (1949-1976) sought to transform popular culture along lines of science and rationality and how their general policies provoked a ‘politics of the supernatural’ among significant sections of the populace. The project is based on extensive archival research in the Russian Federation and the PRC.
Previous supervision topics include:
Soviet textile workers and the New Economic Policy
The Leningrad Health Service, 1917-1934
The influence of Taoism and Quakerism on the thought of Sok Hon Ham
Family, gender and the Old Believers in Russia
Civilian internees in Japanese prisoner of war camps in the Far East during the Second World War
Industrial relations in Petrograd, October 1917-21
The changing political relationship between Moscow workers and the Bolsheviks, 1920-24
Tourism in Republican China
Publications
Books
- Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) (viii + 249pp.)
- The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) (180pp.)
[Hebrew edition, 2005; Korean edition, ParkJonghceol Publishers, 2007; Greek edition, Ellinika Grammata A. E., 2007; Kurdish edition, 2008; Turkish edition, Ankara, Dost, 2010; Arabic, Portuguese (Brazil) and German editions forthcoming]
- An expanded edition of the above appeared as The Russian Revolution: a Brief Insight (New York/London: Sterling, 2011), 217pp.
- Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927 (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2002) (x + 366pp.)
- A Road is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920-27 (Honolulu/ Richmond, UK: Curzon Press/University of Hawaii Press, 2000) (xii + 315pp.).
- Notes of a Red Guard: the Autobiography of Eduard Dune, trans. and ed. with Diane Koenker (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993) (xxxvi + 285 pp.).
- Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) [paperback edition 1985; digital reprint, 2003] (x + 347 pp.).
(Chapter eight is reproduced in The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik Victory, eds. R.G.Suny and A.E.Adams (D.C.Heath, Lexington, Mass.) 1990, 269-289 (now in its third edition).
- Oktiabr'skaia revoliutsiia i fabzavkomy (The October Revolution and the Factory Committees), vols.1 and 2, edited with introduction, notes and index (Millwood NY: Kraus International Publications, 1983).
Edited Books
S. A. Smith ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 657 pp.
S. A. Smith and Alan Knight eds, The Religion of Fools? Superstition Past and Present, Past and Present Supplement 3, (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Biographical Dictionary of European Labor Leaders, ed. A. Thomas Lane (Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn.) 1995. Subeditor
Articles forthcoming
-'Contentious Heritage: the Preservation of Churches and Temples in Communist and Post-Communist Russia and China' in Paul Betts and Corey Ross eds., Heritage in the Modern World (Past and Present Supplement, 10, 2015), 178-212.
- ‘On not learning from the Soviet Union: Religious Policy in China, 1949-65’, Modern China Studies, vol.22, no.1, 2015, 70-97.
- ‘Redemptive Societies and the Communist State, 1949 to the 1980s’ in Jeremy Brown and Matt Johnson eds., Between Revolution and Reform: China at the Grassroots, 1960-1980 ( under review with Harvard University Press) (12,000 words)
- ‘Comparing Communism in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China’ in Simon Dixon ed., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Russian History (Oxford University Press, 2012) (8,500 words)
- ‘Introduction’ to ‘Villains and Victims: Justice, Violence and Retribution in late-imperial and early-Soviet Russia’. Special issue of Europe-Asia Studies, 2012.
Articles published
-‘Toward a Global History of Communism’, in S. A. Smith ed., Oxford Handbook in the History of Communism (Oxford University Press, 2014), 1-34
-Alexander Vatlin and S. A. Smith, ‘The Comintern’, in S. A. Smith ed., Oxford Handbook in the History of Communism (Oxford University Press, 2014), 187-202.
-Yang Kuisong and S. A. Smith, ‘Communism in China’ in S. A. Smith ed., Oxford Handbook in the History of Communism (Oxford University Press, 2014), 220-235.
- ‘Introduction: Reflections on Villains, Victims and Violence’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol.65, no.9, 2013, 1691-1699
- ‘Moral Economy and Peasant Revolution in Russia, 1861-1918’, Revolutionary Russia, December 2011, vol.24, no.2, 143-71.
-‘Recent Historiography of the People’s Republic of China, 1949-76’, Twentieth-Century Communism, 3, May 2011, 196-216.
- ‘R.E.F. Smith’, Past and Present, 209 (November 2010), 3-6.
- ‘Bones of Contention: Bolsheviks and the Exposure of Saints’ Relics, 1918-30’. Past and Present. 204 (August 2009), 155-94.
- ‘Pokhvala akademicheskoi monografii’ in ‘Forum o forume (ili o sostoainii diskussionnogo polia nauki) [Contribution to Forum on Dialogue in the Humanities and Social Sciences], Antropologicheskii Forum, 10, 2009, 124-30.
- ‘Spasenie dushi v Sovetskoi Rossii’ [The Salvation of the Soul in Soviet Russia], Neprikosnovennyi Zapas, 2 (64) 2009 http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2009/2/ss16.html
- ‘Gli anni di Mao: storia e politica del presente’ Passato e Presente: rivista di storia contemporanea Fascicolo 76, 2009, 5-26.
- ‘Rumor and the Sichuan Earthquake’ in Kate Merkel-Hess, Kenneth L. Pomeranz, and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, with Miri Kim (eds.) China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance (Lanham MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 91-97.
- ‘Introduction’ to The Religion of Fools? Superstition Past and Present, Past and Present Supplement 3, (Oxford University Press, 2008), pp.7-55
- ‘Fear and Rumour in the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s’, Cultural and Social History, Volume 5, Issue 3, (2008), 369–288.
- ‘The First Soviet Generation: Children and Religious Belief in Soviet Russia, 1917-41’. In Stephen Lovell (ed.), Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe (Palgrave, 2007), 79-100.
- ‘Local Cadres Confront the Supernatural: the Politics of Holy Water (Shenshui) in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-66’. China Quarterly, 186 (Dec. 2006), 999-1022.
- Republished in Julia Strauss ed., The History of the People’s Republic of China, 1949-76 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 145-68.
This was published in Chinese 地方干部面对超自然 中华人民 共和国的神水政治, 1949—1966’ in 董玥 [Yue Dong], ed., ‘ 走出区域研究: 西方中国近现代史论集粹 [Research that goes beyond the area: Complete Essays on Western Historiography of Modern Chinese History] 5 (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2013), 366-92.
- ‘The Revolutions of 1917-1918’ in The Cambridge History of Russia, vol.3, The Twentieth Century, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 114-39.
- 'Talking Toads and Chinless Ghosts: the Politics of Rumor in the People's Republic of China, 1961-65'. American Historical Review, 111:2 (2006), 405-27.
- ‘Nebesnye pis’ma i rasskazy o lese: “sueveriia” protiv bol’shevizma’ (Letters from Heaven and Tales of the Forest: “Superstition” against Bolshevism), Antropologicheskii Forum, 3 (2005), 280-306. And in an English-language version. Steve Smith, ‘Heavenly Letters and Tales of the Forest: “Superstition” against Bolshevism’, Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 2 (2006), 316-39.
- Ian Kershaw’s ‘War and Political Violence in 20th Century Europe’: A Comment, Contemporary European History, 14:1 (2005), 124-30.
- ‘Coming to Terms with the Cultural Revolution’, History Today, 53:12 (2003), 43-5.
- ‘Moscow and the Second and Third Armed Uprisings in Shanghai, 1927’, in Mechthild Leutner, Roland Felber, M.L. Titarenko, A.M. Grigoriev eds., The Chinese Revolution in the 1920s: Between Triumph and Disaster (London: Curzon, 2002), 222-41.
- ‘Masculinity in Transition: Peasant Migrants to Late-Imperial St Petersburg’ in eds. Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman and Dan Healey, Russian Masculinities in History and Culture (London: Palgrave, 2002), 94-112.
- ‘Writing the History of the Russian Revolution after the Fall of Communism’ in ed. Martin A. Miller, The Russian Revolution: the Essential Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 261-81. Republication of 1994 article.
- ‘Citizenship and the Russian Nation during World War One’, Slavic Review, 59:2 (2000), 316-29
- ‘Workers, the Intelligentsia, and Social Democracy in St Petersburg, 1895-1917’ in Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia: Realities, Representations, Reflections, ed. Reginald E. Zelnik (Berkeley CA: Institute for International Studies, 1999), 186-205.
- ‘Popular Culture and Market Development in Late-Imperial Russia’, in eds. Geoffrey Hosking and Robert Service, Reinterpreting Russian History (London: Edward Arnold, 1999), 142-55.
- ‘The Comintern, the Chinese Communist Party and the Three Armed Uprisings in Shanghai, 1926-27’ in eds. Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe, International Communism and the Communist International (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 254-70.
- ‘The Social Meanings of Swearing: Workers and Bad Language in Late-Imperial and Early-Soviet Russia’, Past and Present, 160 (1998), 167-202.
- (with Catriona Kelly) ‘Commercial Culture and Consumerism’ in eds. Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881-1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 106-155.
- ‘Rabochie, intelligentsiia i marksistskie partii: Sankt-Peterburg, 1895-1914gg. i Shankhai, 1921-27gg.’, in Rabochie i intelligentsiia Rossii v epokhu reform i revoliutsii 1861-fevral’ 1917 (St Petersburg: Institut Rossiiskoi Istorii, RAN, 1997), 556-583.
- ‘Postmodernizm i sotsial’naia istoriia na Zapade: problemy i perspektivy’, Voprosy istorii, 8 (1997), 154-161.
- ‘Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution’ A Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution. 1914-21, eds. Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu.Cherniaev and William Rosenberg, (London: Edward Arnold, 1997), 346-58. This appeared in Russian translation in 2006.
- ‘Russian Workers and the Politics of Social Identity’, Russian Review, 56:1 (1997), 1-7.
- ‘Klass, natsiia i obshchestvennaia politika v russkoi revoliutsii 1917 goda’, Vestnik Omskogo universiteta, 2 (1996), 57-66.
- ‘Workers, the Intelligentsia and Marxist Parties: St Petersburg, 1895-1917 and Shanghai, 1921-27’, International Review of Social History, 41 (1996), 1-56.
- ‘Rethinking the Autonomy of Politics in the Russian Revolution of 1917: A Reply to John Eric Marot’, Revolutionary Russia, 8:1 (1995), 104-116.
- ‘Workers against Foremen in Late-Imperial Russia’, in Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identities, eds. Lewis Siegelbaum and R.J. Suny (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 113-37.
- ‘Writing the History of the Russian Revolution after the Fall of Communism’, Europe-Asia Studies, 4:4 (1994), 563-78.
Part of this article was published in Russian as ‘Perepisyvaia istoriiu russkoi revoliutsii posle krakha kommunizma’, in Rossiia v 1917 godu: novye podkhody i vzgliady, vyp.3 (St Petersburg: Tret'ia Rossiia, 1994), 80-88.
- ‘Gender and Class: Women's Strikes in St Petersburg, 1895-1917, and Shanghai, 1895-1927’, Social History 19:2 (1994), 141-68.
- ‘Workers and Supervisors in St Petersburg, 1905-1917, and Shanghai, 1895-1927’, Past and Present, 139 (1993), 131-77.
- ‘Workers and Civil Rights in Tsarist Russia, 1899-1917’, Civil Rights in Tsarist Russia, eds. O. Crisp and L. Edmondson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 145-169.
- ‘Workers in the Russian Revolution, 1917-21’, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution, ed. H.J. Shukman, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 19-30.
- ‘Petrograd in 1917: the Revolution from Below’ in The Workers' Revolution in Russia, 1917, ed., D.J. Kaiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 59-79. This was republished in Rex Wade ed., The Russian Revolution: New Approaches (London: Routledge, 2004), 13-32.
- ‘Spontaneity and Organization in the Petrograd Labour Movement in 1917’, Russian and Soviet Studies Centre Discussion Papers, no.1, (Colchester: University of Essex Centre for Russian and Soviet Studies, 1984).
- ‘Taylorism Rules OK? Bolshevism, Taylorism and the Technical Intelligentsia: the Soviet Union, 1917-41’, Radical Science Journal, 13 (1983), 3-27.
- ‘Craft Consciousness, Class Consciousness: Petrograd 1917’, History Workshop, 11 (1981), 33-56.
- ‘Materials for the study of the Russian Revolution in Birmingham University Library’ (with J.J.Brine), Sbornik (Study Group on the Russian Revolution), 2 (1976), 51-6.
Review Articles
- ‘The Soviet Year One’ (review of Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: the First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd, Indiana University Press: Bloomington 2007), New Left Review, 52 July-August 2008, 151-60
- ‘Kevin Murphy’s “Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory”: A Critique”’, Historical Materialism, 15:3 (2007), 167-85.
- Reginald E. Zelnik, Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet Historiography (University of Washington Press, 2005), Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7: 4 (2006), 885–92.
- ‘Two Cheers for the “Return of Ideology”’, Revolutionary Russia 17:2 (2004), 119-35.
- Martin Malia, Russia under Western Eyes and Iu.S. Borisov et al., Rossiia i Zapad: Formirovanie vneshnepoliticheskikh stereotipov v soznanii rossiiskogo obshchestva pervoi poloviny XX veka, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 1:3 (2000), 586-96.
- ‘The "social" and the "political" in the Russian Revolution’, Historical Journal 38: 3 (1995), 733-43.
- Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, Social History 17:2 (1992), 329-36.
- Tim McDaniel, Autocracy, Capitalism and Revolution in Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), Revolutionary Russia 2:2 (1989), 54-60.
- ‘Autobiography of a Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia’, European History Quarterly 18 (1988), 365-8.
- Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System, Social History, 12:1 (1987), 123-5.
- Victoria E. Bonnell, ‘Roots of Rebellion’, Theory and Society 14:3 (1985), 387-91.
- ‘Moscow Workers and the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917’, Soviet Studies 36:2 (1984), 282-9.
- ‘October 1917’, Soviet Studies 30:3 (1981), 454-9.
Miscellanea
- ‘Rumor and the Sichuan Earthquake’ http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com/ And the History News Network http://hnn.us/roundup/1.html
- Contribution to Forum ‘Sovremennye tendentsii v antropologicheskikh issledovaniiakh’ [Contemporary tendencies in anthropological research], Antropologicheskii Forum 1 (2004), 76-80 (in Russian).
- ‘Commentary’. V. Cherniaev et al., eds., Anatomiia revoliutsii. 1917 god v Rossii: massy, partii, vlast' (Glagol, St Petersburg) 1994, 252-3 (in Russian).
- Trotsky and Trotskyism (audiotape with David Law) (Sussex Publications, Brighton) 1986.
Translations
Essays commissioned for the Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (2013):
-Jean-François Fayet ‘1919’ (from French)
-Alexander Vatlin ‘The Comintern’ (from Russian)
-Yang Kuisong ‘Communism in China’ (from Chinese)
-Marco Albeltaro, ‘The Life of a Communist Militant’ (from Italian)
- T. A. Abrosimova, ‘The Composition of the Petersburg Committee of the RSDRP(b) in 1917’, Revolutionary Russia, vol.11, no.1, 1998, 37-44.
- Boris Kolonitskii, ‘”Revolutionary Names”: Russian Personal Names and Political Consciousness in the 1920s and 1930s’ Revolutionary Russia, vol.6, no.2, 1993, 210-28.
Book reviews (since 2000 only)
I published over fifty book reviews between 1977 and 1999 in journals such as the Times Higher Educational Supplement, Russian Review, Soviet Studies, Slavonic and East European Review, Slavic Review, Revolutionary Russia, Journal of Communist Studies, American Historical Review, Social History, European History Quarterly, History, Labour History Review and Oral History.
Lucien Bianco, Jacqueries et révolution dans la Chine du XXe siècle (Paris: Editions de la Martinière, 2005). The China Journal, 57 ( 2007), 221-23.
Arif Dirlik, Marxism in the Chinese Revolution(Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). China Quarterly, 188 (2006), 1140-42.
Jeffrey J. Rossman, Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Russian Review, 65:3 (2006), 539-40
Kevin Murphy, Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory (New York: Berghahn, 2005). Journal of Modern History, 79:3 (2007).
Heinzig, Dieter. The Soviet Union and Communist China, 1945-1950: The Arduous Road to the Alliance. (Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004). Slavonic and East European Review, 84:3 (2006), 566-8.
Thomas David DuBois, Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China, (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005). China Quarterly, 185 (2006), 187-8.
Joshua H. Howard, Workers at War: Labor in China’s Arsenals, 1937-53 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). American Historical Review, 110: 5 (2005),1502-3..
Stephen Jones, Plucking the Winds: Lives of Village Musicians in Old and New China, (Leiden: Chime Foundation, 2004). China Quarterly, 183 (2005), 716-18.
Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). The English Historical Review. CXX: 487 (2005), 805-7.
Adrian Chan, Chinese Marxism (London: Continuum, 2003). The China Journal, 53 (2005), 272-3.
James T. Andrews, Science for the Masses: the Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917-1934 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2003).
Laurence Schneider, Biology and Revolution in Twentieth-Century China (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). American Historical Review, June 2004, 872-3.
Alexander Lukin, The Bear Watches the Dragon: Russia’s Perceptions of China and the Evolution of Russian-Chinese Relations Since the Eighteenth Century (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003). Europe-Asia Studies. 2005.
Donald Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Slavic Review, 63:1 (2004), 192-193.
Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002). History Today, 52 (Nov.2002), 89.
Xiaoqun Xu, Chinese Professionals and the Republican State: The Rise of Professional Associations in Shanghai, 1912-1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). China Review International , 9:2 (2003), 581-84.
William J. Chase, Enemies Within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934-1939. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Slavic Review, 61: 4 (2002), 862-863.
Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals (London: John Murray, 2000). The Times Higher, 24 August 2001, 29
Alexander Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919-1927 (Richmond: Curzon, 1999). The China Journal, 45 (2001), 258-60.
Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: the Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). The Times Higher, 15 September 2000, 28.
Robert Service, Lenin: a Biography (London: Macmillan, 2000). History Today, 50:6 (2000), 59.
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Print Marked Items
Stumbling into revolution: how the powder keg
of Petrograd exploded in 1917--with help from
Russia's Terrible Twins
David Reynolds
New Statesman.
146.5355 (Feb. 24, 2017): p40.
COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd 1917
Helen Rappaport
Windmill, 450pp, 9.99 [pounds sterling]
Petrograd, 1917: Witnesses to the Russian Revolution
John Pinfold
Bodleian Library, 309pp, 25 [pounds sterling]
Russia in Revolution: an Empire in Crisis (1890-1928)
S A Smith
Oxford University Press, 4/2pp, 25 [pounds sterling]
Lenin the Dictator: an Intimate Portrait
Victor Sebestyen
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 569PP, 25 [pounds sterling]
Lenin on the Train
Catherine Merridale
Allen Lane, 368pp, 25 [pounds sterling]
The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution
Robert Service
Macmillan, 382pp, 25 [pounds sterling]
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A People's Tragedy: the Russian Revolution
Orlando Figes
Bodley Head, 960pp, 20 [pounds sterling]
Nineteen seventeen is a year that resonated through the 20th century. But place matters here as much as time-"place"
meaning not just Russia, but Petrograd, as the imperial capital became known after "St Petersburg" was de-Germanised
on the outbreak of war in 1914. Though in due course 1917 was touted as a universal model for revolution, it cannot be
detached from the impact of the Great War in a distinctive country and a uniquely combustible city. Nor can it be
separated from the intertwined stories of two almost incomprehensible men, a failed autocrat and a ruthless dictator:
Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin, Russia's Terrible Twins.
The Great War may as well have been called the Great Killing. In 1916, the London Annual Register offered this
elegant summary of the callous calculus that passed for Grand Strategy: "[T]he number of men possessed by the
Entente Powers was much greater than the number that the Central Powers could command. The war was therefore to
be a crude process of sheer killing. And then, assuming that each side killed equally effectively, the Entente would
reach victory in an inevitable manner through the working of a simple mathematical law."
But each side did not kill "equally effectively". Not only were the Germans more efficient killers than their opponents,
but the homicidal potency of each country on the battle front depended on its industrial efficiency on the home front.
Despite frequent strikes, Britain and France "worked" as societies and economies; the main member of the Entente,
Russia, did not. Its Achilles heel was the supply of fuel and food by a broken transport system during the coldest winter
in years. In early 1917 bread riots broke out in many cities. But only one of those cities was the crucible of revolution.
Petrograd was unusual, by Russian standards and those of the modern world. The fifth-largest metropolis in Europe, it
was an industrial sweatshop of 2.4 million people in a predominantly rural country. Seventy per cent of the city's
workers were employed in factories with a staff of over 1,000, a proportion unmatched even in the conurbations of
Germany and the US. Sucked in by the war boom, they lived amid squalor: more than three people on average to every
cellar or single room, double the figure for Berlin or Paris. About half the homes lacked water supply or a sewage
system; a quarter of all babies died in their first year.
Yet wealth and privilege were staring these workers in the face: the main factory district, on the Vyborg Side of the
Neva, lay just across the water from the imperial palace and the fashionable Nevsky Prospekt. This cheek-by-jowl
polarisation contrasted with more suburbanised industrial centres such as Berlin, London and Paris. Equally important,
Petrograd was a large garrison, with over 300,000 soldiers in and around the city. That, an eyewitness said, was like
placing "kindling wood near a powder keg".
Today the barracks and the sweatshops are gone. But even in modern St Petersburg one can see why Petrograd literally
walked into revolution in 1917. A 90-minute hike will take you from the Finland Station on the Vyborg Side, across the
Liteiny Bridge, west along the embankment to Palace Square and then left down Nevsky Prospekt to the Moscow
Station. Maybe an hour, if you cross the Liteiny Bridge and turn east to the Tauride Palace and Smolny Convent. Along
these axes, within the space of a few square miles, the drama of 1917 played out.
Thousands of spectators looked on and many recorded what they saw. Some were foreign residents and journalists,
whose impressions are the stuff of Helen Rappaport's lively narrative Caught in the Revolution. Sticking closer to raw
sources is John Pinfold's Petrograd, 1917, which is lavishly illustrated with postcards and prints from the Bodleian
Library's collections. Some of the city's biggest factories were British-owned and British-managed: the Thornton
Woollen Mill, employing 3,000 workers, belonged to three brothers from Yorkshire. Many of the luxury stores along
Nevsky Prospekt--tailors, dressmakers, food emporiums, bookshops--were British or French, catering for expatriates
and wealthy Russians in the days when French was still the lingua franca of the elite.
For months it had been clear that trouble was brewing. "If salvation does not come from above," one Russian duchess
warned the French ambassador, "there will be revolution from below." Yet few anticipated how Petrograd would
stumble into a new era.
Thursday 23 February (tsarist Russia still followed the Julian calendar, 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar used in
the West) was International Women's Day, a red-letter date for socialists. Thousands flocked across the bridges and the
frozen river from the Vyborg Side and other industrial areas and marched down Nevsky Prospekt demanding bread.
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Trams and other obstacles were pushed aside. "I have heard the Marseillaise sung many times," wrote Florence Harper,
an intrepid American journalist, "but that day for the first time I heard it sung as it should be"--with raw class hatred.
Marchons! Marchons! All day the tide surged along and around Nevsky. Across the river, strikes spread violently
through the factory districts. More demonstrations followed on Friday, and clashes escalated with the hated mounted
police. Yet life still went on: the Alexandrinsky Theatre, one block off Nevsky, was packed that evening for a
performance of Nikolai Gogol's classic comedy The Government Inspector, its tale of official corruption, incompetence
and self-delusion from the era of Nicholas I still richly apt in the dog-days of Nicholas II. By the weekend, however,
trams had shut down, most shops were closed and looting was rife. Troops and policemen massed around the main
squares. But when the police started sabring the crowds, Cossack troops and even crack Guards regiments sided with
the protesters.
On Monday 27 February, with temperatures rising literally as well as figuratively, thousands of mutinous soldiers
joined the milling crowds, which were now armed with booty looted from military arsenals. Army officers were
particular targets. One of them, bemedalled and swaggering, was pursued along Nevsky by a crowd of women who
stripped him of his weapons. A grey-haired woman screaming abuse broke the officer's sword over her knee and tossed
the bits into a canal. By nightfall, the tsarist regime had lost control of most of the city, except the Winter Palace and a
few government buildings nearby. It was "a revolution carried on by chance", Bert Hall, an American aviator attached
to the Russian Air Service, wrote in his diary--"no organisation, no particular leader, just a city full of hungry people
who have stood enough and are ready to die if necessary before they will put up with any more tsarism".
Although Hall's account was rather simplistic, this was indeed a revolution in search of a leader. On 2 March the tsar
abdicated, but plans for a constitutional monarchy evaporated when his brother Mikhail refused the throne, leaving
Russia headless. A rump of the parliament dithered and bickered in one wing of the Tauride Palace, while a heaving
jumble of soldiers, workers and activists in the other wing congealed into the "Petrograd Soviet". Aptly, they were on
the left of the palace and the politicians were on the right, with little to connect the two sides. The politicians became
the Provisional Government but the soviet had authority over the army. "Dual power" signalled a duel for power.
The duel proved painfully protracted. Four coalitions ensued in less than nine months, not to mention seven major
reshuffles. Meanwhile the country slipped towards civil war--a process well documented by Stephen Smith in Russia in
Revolution, based on a deft synthesis of recent research. Peasants with guns and pitchforks looted the big houses and
seized the estates. Workers' committees took control of much of the defence industry. In the army, "all discipline has
vanished", the French ambassador told Paris. "Deserters are wandering over Russia." Smith emphasises that February
aroused idealism as well as anarchy: a yearning for political rights, decent living standards and, above all, peace. Yet
the leader of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, decided to mount a summer offensive against the
Germans, which quickly became a disaster, with vast losses of troops and territory. The people were turning against the
government but the indecisive duel dragged on.
Enter Lenin. Contrary to Soviet mythology, he was not a "man of the people". His father belonged to the provincial
establishment--a reformist inspector of schools in the Simbirsk region, south-east of Moscow. Lenin's pedigree was
also hushed up by the Soviet authorities: his maternal grandfather was Jewish and his paternal grandmother was a
Kalmyk from central Asia, hence those "Mongol eyes" and high cheekbones. Most of all, he was a man who had been
going nowhere for years, or, rather, had been going round in circles. Yet when finally he went for the jugular it proved
decisive for him--and fatal for Russia.
Victor Sebestyen brings the man's complexities to life in Lenin the Dictator, balancing personality with politics in
succinct and readable prose. Like other biographers, Sebestyen roots young Vladimir's revolutionary turn in the double
trauma in 1886-87 of his father's sudden death and his elder brother's execution for plotting to kill the tsar. From now
on Lenin's one-track, control-freak mind was fixed on the goal of a Russian revolution, in defiance of Karl Marx's
insistence that this would be impossible until feudal peasant Russia had first become a bourgeois society.
For three decades, however, the would-be revolutionary was a failure, spending much of his time in exile flitting
between Munich, London, Paris and various "holes" in Switzerland--Geneva, Bern, Zurich--endlessly plotting
revolution, frenziedly writing revolution, but not actually doing revolution. In fact, Lenin seemed to have a knack of
being in the wrong place at the right time: outside Russia in the upheavals of 1905, likewise when war broke out in
August 1914, and again when tsarism was toppled in February 1917. It was almost as if he was so obsessed with
revolution that he could never see it coming.
This life of frustrated waiting took an enormous toll on nerves and health. Sebestyen describes particularly keenly how
this ruthless, domineering, often vicious man depended on three women to sustain him. There was Maria Ulyanova, his
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mother, who provided financial and emotional support until her death in 1916. Then his wife, Nadezhda ("Nadya")
Krupskaya--written off in Soviet times as a mere cook and amanuensis, but who Sebestyen and other biographers show
to be an intelligent and devoted partner in the revolutionary project and one with whom Lenin talked out his ideas
before writing them down. And Inessa Armand, a chic French divorcee for whom Lenin fell, passionately, in the only
real "affair" of his life. A superb linguist and accomplished pianist, Inessa was not only his sharpest intellectual critic
but also an intrepid party organiser, undertaking dangerous missions in Russia. Nadya accepted the menage a trois with
remarkable equanimity and the two women seem to have become good friends. Nadya, who was childless, was
especially fond of Inessa's two young daughters.
Lenin might have gone to his grave playing out this pointless life of head and heart but for the accident of the February
revolution. Now frantic to get back to Petrograd, he could not see how to travel from Zurich across or around war-torn
Europe. His plans to do so became increasingly surreal. A wig to conceal his giveaway bald pate? Maybe a Swedish
passport? (Forgeries were easily obtained.) "Find a Swede who looks like me," he instructed a Bolshevik in Stockholm.
"But as I know no Swedish, he will have to be a deaf mute."
In the end, the kaiser's Germany came to his rescue, eager to undermine Russia's home front. To quote Winston
Churchill's celebrated one-liner, "They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into
Russia."
In Lenin on the Train, Catherine Merridale tells the famous story with colour and detail, setting it in the crucible of a
Europe at war. Her introduction relates how she faithfully retraced his 2,000-mile journey to Petrograd, even leaving
Zurich on the same date as Lenin, though this personal odyssey is not then woven into the body of the book. And
because her account does not extend as far as the October revolution, we finish the book on a slight sense of
anticlimax. But Merridale offers an engrossing account of the physical train ride--in a single wooden carriage, painted
green, consisting of three second-class and five third-class compartments plus a baggage room. German guards sat at
the back behind a chalk line on the floor, to preserve the fiction that Lenin had no contact with Russia's enemy.
A martinet as ever, he imposed specific sleeping hours on his Bolshevik fellow travellers, banned smoking in the
compartments and corridor, and instituted a pass system to regulate use of the toilet between smokers and those
answering the call of nature. After a tense delay in Berlin, the train chugged on to Germany's Baltic coast, from where
a ferry and then more train journeys through Sweden and Finland brought Lenin to the Finland Station in Petrograd on
Easter Monday, 3 April.
That night he delivered a tub-thumping, two-hour speech to his socialist comrades explaining that the first phase of
Russia's revolution was over and the second was beginning. Not for him a coalition of the left, let alone the
British/French staging post of liberal democracy: the Russian bourgeoisie was locked in to capitalism and wedded to
the war. No, the second stage was quite simply to "place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections
of the peasantry". To most of his listeners, Merridale remarks, "this was not just bad Marxist theory; it was an
invitation to political suicide". Even Nadya was overheard telling a friend, "I am afraid it looks as if Lenin has gone
crazy."
Once home again, Lenin seemed to succumb to the Petrograd paralysis. He hectored large crowds and churned out
endless articles, insisting, "No great question ... has yet been resolved in history other than by force." But in June he
warned key aides not to let anti-war demonstrations get out of hand: "Even if we were now able to seize power, we're
in no position to hold it." When the protests did escalate and the government cracked down, he fled to Finland,
provoking bitter accusations of cowardice from many of his jailed supporters.
But finally he went for broke. After three months in exile again, he slipped back into Petrograd on the night of 10
October to browbeat the Bolshevik Central Committee into affirming that the time was "perfectly ripe" for "an armed
uprising" against Kerensky and the Provisional Government, rejecting arguments that they should work for a peaceful
transfer of power at the Second Congress of Soviets 15 days later. As Sebestyen observes, "If anything disproves the
Marxist idea that it is not individuals who make history but broad social and economic forces it is Lenin's revolution."
On 24 October, Lenin's comrades tried to keep him tucked away on the Vyborg Side because he was still on the
government's wanted list. But by the evening he could not endure to wait yet again in the wings. Crudely disguised
with glasses, a grey wig and a worker's peaked cap, he took off for the Smolny Institute where the Bolsheviks had their
military headquarters. Without a car or tank for transport, he and one bodyguard got on a tram to the Liteiny Bridge
and then tramped the rest of the way along the embankment, narrowly avoiding arrest. Like the protesters in their
February revolution, Lenin walked into Red October--and finally into history.
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Today Lenin's mummified body still resides in its shrine in Red Square, in the heart of Moscow. But in fact, as
Sebestyen writes. Tsar Nicholas "did as much as anyone, including Lenin, to bring about the destruction of the
Romanov dynasty and to ensure the Communist takeover in Russia"--not just by setting his face against reforms that
might have averted revolution, but also because he had "no understanding of the nature of power". Russia in 1917 was
"an autocracy without an autocrat".
In The Last of the Tsars, Robert Service examines the mentality of this lost leader. He does so through the lens of
Nicholas's experiences and reflections during the 16 months between his abdication in March 1917 and his family's
grisly end in July 1918. The tsar's limp surrender of the throne continues to amaze. Emotional exhaustion; pressure
from the army command; concern for his haemophiliac son; the impossibility of squaring a constitutional monarchy
with his coronation oath: one can intuit possible explanations. But it still seems astonishing that this proud scion of the
Romanov dynasty, rulers of Russia for three centuries, signed away his throne on a provincial railway station with
blank calm--as if, to quote one aide, "he were turning over command of a cavalry squadron".
The abdication wasn't something Nicholas discussed during his peripatetic house arrest in 1917-18 around western
Siberia and the Urals. Nor did the eks-Imperator (as he was described on his ration card) express any regret about his
record as a ruler: he blamed Russia's woes on alien forces instead. Top of the list were the German invaders and the
Bolshevik revolutionaries: he described the peace treaty that Lenin signed with the Kaiserreich, surrendering the Baltic
states and the Ukraine, as a "nightmare". The tsar may have been a devoted husband and father--romanticised in the
movie based on Robert Massie's 50th-anniversary encomium Nicholas and Alexandra--but, as Service writes: "In
power and out of it, he was a nationahst extremist, a deluded nostalgist and a virulent anti-Semite."
Originally the Bolsheviks had envisaged a show trial, like those of Charles I in England and Louis XVI in France. But
by July 1918 the time had passed for political theatre: Russia was engulfed in civil war and hostile Czech troops were
closing in on Ekaterinburg, where the Romanovs were now being held. Service has no doubt that Lenin authorised the
killing but--as in 1917 when he was trying to cover up German help and money any documentation was destroyed.
Instead, conveniently in keeping with the Bolshevik slogan "All power to the soviets", responsibility for the deed was
ascribed to party leaders in Ekaterinburg.
Yet even after Nicholas's death his regime lived on. "As a form of absolutist rule the Bolshevik regime was distinctly
Russian," Orlando Figes remarked in his 1996 classic, A People's Tragedy." It was a mirror-image of the tsarist state."
Lenin and Stalin replaced the Tsar-God, and the Cheka/NKVD/KGB continued (even more systematically) the brutal
work of the tsarist pohce state. In a new introduction to a reprint of his book, Figes emphasises that Putinism is also
rooted in this Russian past--in the enduring weakness of civil society and the scant experience of deep democracy.
Not that the West can easily point the finger at Russia. In the age of Trump and Brexit, with an ossified EU and a global
refugee crisis, we should not be complacent about the sophistication of our own democracy, or about the thin screen
that separates peace and civilisation from the law of the jungle.
The American diplomat and historian George Kennan described the Great War as "the seminal tragedy" of the 20th
century--seedbed of so many horrors to come. The events of 1917 were its bitter first fruit. As Stephen Smith writes, "
[T]here is a great deal to learn from the history of the Russian Revolution about how the thirst for power, the
enthusiasm for violence, and contempt for law and ethics can corrupt projects that begin with the finest ideals."
David Reynolds is the author of "The Long Shadow: the Great War and the 20th Century" (Simon Schuster)
Caption: The perfect storm: sailors at a demonstration in Petrograd, 1917. Gaping inequalities of life in the city
produced a combustible atmosphere
Caption: Lenin in 1917: In disguise in Finland (on the left) and as the leader of the Bolshevik uprising (right)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Reynolds, David. "Stumbling into revolution: how the powder keg of Petrograd exploded in 1917--with help from
Russia's Terrible Twins." New Statesman, 24 Feb. 2017, p. 40+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA488689244&it=r&asid=3a475c9102660c291b18d2a4845cc0df.
Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A488689244
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Revolutionary Russia
Library Journal.
142.2 (Feb. 1, 2017): p94.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Merridale, Catherine. Lenin on the Train. Metropolitan: Holt. Mar. 2017.368p. illus. maps, notes, index. ISBN
9781627793018. $30; ebk. ISBN 9781627793025. HIST
In her new book, Merridale (Red Fortress) has delicately woven the complex tale of the exiled Vladimir Lenin's trip
from Zurich, Switzerland, back to Petrograd, Russia, in 1917, to a nation both part of World War I and the revolution
taking place there. Merridale re-creates the difficult journey and vividly takes readers through the history and locales.
The result is a gripping narrative with first-hand accounts and sources of Russian history that make the rich, intricate
story of the Bolsheviks' journey feel close at hand. The author details the indirect and complex negotiations between
the Bolsheviks and Germany, looking to find a revolutionary group to support who could remove Russia from the war.
Next, she chronicles Lenin's travels via train, taking readers to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) to understand the political
actions of the British and the French during the critical prerevolutionary period of 1917. The maps and illustrations in
this book are to be mentioned, as they aid in understanding the travels of Lenin's "sealed train" through Russia and
war-torn Germany. VERDICT This book should be read by anyone interested in war-time history or the history of
Russia and the Soviet Union; there is much to be learned here. [See Prepub Alert, 11/16/16.]--Amy Lewontin,
Northeastern Univ. Lib., Boston
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
* Smith, S.A. Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928. Oxford Univ. Mar. 2017.448p. illus. maps,
notes, index. ISBN 9780198734826. $34.95. HIST
In the upcoming centenary of the historic and volatile year 1917, new research yields an insightful look into the 1917
Russian Revolution. Smith (senior research fellow, All Souls Coll., Oxford; Revolution and the People In Russia and
China) posits we must look beyond the surface carnage and political upheaval to "make an imaginative effort to
recapture the hope, idealism, heroism, anger, fear, and despair that motivated it." Analyzing the revolution's catalyst
through fresh investigation results in newfound knowledge of the succession of Bolshevism, Leninism, and Stalinism
that swept Russia. Previous works have underemphasized the role of economic backwardness over politics, with Smith
declaring the Bolsheviks "a party of state builders" rather than insurrectionists in a "flawed attempt to create a better
world." Smith's revisionist history is entering the market with a flood of centenary works, including John Medhurst's
No Less Than Mystic, but Smith's work will be declared a subject standard, sure to stand out for its stellar research.
Although Smith states the target audience are newcomers, the minutia of information is better suited to enthusiastic or
informed readers ready to tackle a dense tome. VERDICT A challenging revisionist history reassessing the ongoing
significance of the Russian Revolution.--Jessica Bushore, Xenia, OH
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Revolutionary Russia." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 94. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301301&it=r&asid=80c4b66e7926b23c3929cea82902ff3f.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A479301301
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S. A. Smith. Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism
and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927
Xiaoqun Xu
China Review International.
9.1 (Spring 2002): p241.
COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Hawaii Press
http://uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/
Full Text:
Comparative and International Working-class History Series. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. x,
366 pp. Hardcover, ISBN 0-8223-2783-x. Paperback, ISBN 0-8223-2793-7.
With paradigms having shifted away from grand narratives toward approaches that are sensitive to time and spacespecific
contingencies and local variations, recent scholarship in the China field has yielded new insights into and fresh
understandings of various aspects of modern Chinese history. S. A. Smith's Like Cattle and Horses represents one of
the fine studies of late that open new lines of inquiry and invite rethinking of some seemingly "familiar" issues.
Chinese nationalism and Chinese labor movement are certainly familiar subjects, yet they are far from being exhausted
in terms of interpretation as well as empirical evidence. Smith masterfully integrates the two stories, the result being an
informative, enlightening study. The central argument of the book is that Chinese labor movement during the period
1895-1927 was informed, inspired, and conditioned by Chinese nationalism, a nationalism that was inflected by a
language of class. (By "labor movement" Smith means both the outbreak of labor unrest such as strikes and stoppage
and the formation of labor organizations.) Smith builds his argument with theoretical sophistication and a solid
empirical foundation.
Taking stock of theories on nationalism, Smith rejects some of them and accepts and modifies others. He notes, for
example, that "Gellner's insistence on the correlation of nationalism with industrialism and mass education is only of
limited relevance to China, since it was still overwhelmingly agrarian and illiterate when the CCP took power in 1949"
(p. 2). He also argues that Benedict Anderson's emphasis on the significance of print capitalism in imagining the nation
needs to he qualified at least when it comes to the case of China. On the other hand, Smith sees the relevance of
Anthony Smith's view that national identity is constrained by its ethnic antecedents. On the notion of national identity,
he appreciates the views of Prasenjit Duara and Katherine Verdery about multiple identities and the different
imaginations of different social groups and argues that "in the republican period, class formed one fault line around
which competing conceptions of the nation crystallized" (p. 7). He sets out "to explore how, and to what extent,
workers identified with the new conceptions of nation and class" and "how these conceptions became meaningful for
their understanding of who they were and of their place in the political and social order" (p. 8).
In examining how the identities of nation and class were disseminated among workers, Smith follows Michel Foucault
"in conceiving discourse as a particular system of language," but "gives more emphasis to the role of human agency in
creating, sustaining, and utilizing discourses for specific ends" (p. 9). Taking a cue from Michael Billig, who defines
national identity as "forms of social life" and as "ways of talking about nationhood" (p. 8), he treats class and nation
not only as "ideas and representations" but also as "fields of practice" encompassing "forms of organization, collective
action, and sociability" (p. 9). Analyses of both constitute the main stories of the book.
In step with the more recent studies on Shanghai workers by Emily Honig, Elizabeth Perry, and Alain Roux, Smith
pays a great deal of attention to the social networks and identities with which Shanghai workers were traditionally
associated. He points out that the responses of workers to the politics of nation and class were shaped by their
preexisting relationships and identities and their culture or subculture. As Smith describes them, the social networks
and identities of workers were constructed around native-place ties, family/lineage relations, and trade or job-related
favors and obligations, and took the forms of guilds, native-place associations/groupings (bang),
sisterhoods/brotherhoods, and secret societies. A culture of personal obligations, reciprocity, and keeping face
permeated these networks and identities, and clientelist relationships widely existed between workers on the one hand
and foremen/women, labor contractors, and secret-society bosses on the other. These particularistic identities were
articulated along vertical instead of horizontal axes and therefore posed some difficulty to the construction of national
identity and even more so to that of class identity. Smith tries to show how "when caught up in broader social and
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political movements, particularistic identities could be discursively reconfigured so that they endowed workers with
organizational coherence and a novel sense of purpose" (p. 37).
Smith traces the evolution of the idiom of nationalism from 1895 to 1927. In the aftermath of China's defeat by Japan
in 1895, a discourse of nation and nationalism appeared with two approaches. Constitutionalists such as Kang Youwei
and Liang Qichao, working from a cultural idiom, envisioned a rejuvenation of the nation through the reforming of the
Chinese cultural heritage and especially through changing the relationship between the ruler and the people.
Revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen, Zhang Binglin, and Wang Jingwei, drawing on an ethnocentric idiom, saw the
expulsion of the Manchus as the key to rescuing the nation from extinction. After the 1911 Revolution, antiManchuism
disappeared as the dominant discourse of nationalism, but the ethnic idiom of national identity continued
to be influential. In the early years of the Republic a more civic rendition of national identity, actively advocated by
socialists and anarchists, came to the fore. Symbolized by such key words as "people's will," "people's rights," and
"politics of the common people," the civic idiom of national identity reached its peak during the May Fourth
Movement of 1919. In the meantime the nationalist movement was transformed from an elite movement to a mass
movement, with the participation of students, merchants, small traders, and workers. By the time of the May Thirtieth
Movement in 1925, a new idiom of class-inflected anti-imperialism dominated the discourse. Sun Yat-sen's Three
Principles of the People had been refashioned along Leninist lines, and nationalism had been redefined as the struggle
against imperialism by the extensive layers of peasants, workers, intellectuals, and the commercial-industrial strata.
The anti-imperialist nationalism was only secondarily linked with anti-warlordism in rhetoric, even though in practice
the national revolution of 1927 was primarily a campaign against warlords and for the national unification.
Smith closely examines the relationship of a series of nationalist events to labor movement during the period under
study. The major nationalist events included the resistance movement against Russia in 1902, the anti-American
boycott in 1905, the 1911 Revolution, the resistance to the Twenty-one Demands in 1915, the May Fourth Movement
in 1919, the May Thirtieth Movement in 1925, and the National Revolution in 1927. Labor movement increasingly
accompanied these events as well as happening in between. During these years the Socialist Party, the Labor Party, the
GMD, the anarchists, and the CCP all worked to "awaken" workers, form labor organizations, and lead labor unrest, all
with varying degrees of success. The general trend was that workers, informed by anti-imperialism, became more and
more involved in labor movement, culminating in the three-month strikes in the summer of 1925 and the three
uprisings in the spring of 1927. Such involvement, as "forms of social life" and "ways of talking about nationhood,"
shaped and formed the national identity and class identity of workers. The common theme that underlay both the
nationalist and class discourses was the phrase "like cattle and horses." In the class discourse employers treated
workers, and in the nationalist discourse imperialist powers treated China, "like cattle and horses." Smith finds that
labor unrest occurred more frequently in foreign-owned factories than in Chinese-owned factories. In the former the
nature of labor-capital relations could not easily be distinguished from the nature of China-foreign power relations. The
strike wave in 1925, for example, "was rooted in economic grievances, but because it was concentrated in the Japanese
and British cotton mills it quickly acquired a powerful anti-imperialist dimension" (p. 200).
What did political activists do to disseminate notions of nation and class among workers? Smith highlights the
importance of the spoken word for activists in the mobilization of workers. Speaker teams, public fund-raisers, streettheater
presentations, slogans, and songs were widely used. So were written words in the form of handbills, leaflets,
banners, inscriptions, and flags, and visual imagery in the form of posters, cartoons, and chalk drawings on the street--
all effectively conveying simple messages. By the May Thirtieth Movement, the propaganda techniques included
advertising, newsreel films, and gramophone records (commercial recordings of patriotic songs). In other words,
nonprint and even traditional media, not "print capitalism," served to open new ways for nationalist discourse and
cause national identity to emerge among illiterate workers. While Smith's point here is well taken, it is worth noting
that the intellectuals who worked to disseminate notions of nation and class through the nonprint media themselves
learned, publicized, debated, and disagreed over a host of ideas, including those of nation and class, through print
media in the first place. The development of print media as well as of modern education, therefore, would still be the
necessary condition for the formation of any discourse even in China, where the majority of people were illiterate.
As for the content of anti-imperialist propaganda, modern notions of sovereignty, human rights, and international law
were invoked, but more effective were such words as "national humiliation" (guochi), "national extinction" (wangguo),
and the like. "National humiliation" was understood as China "losing face," a concept to which workers could easily
relate. The danger of "national extinction" was dramatized by recalling historical antecedents such as the fall of the
Song dynasty to the Jurchen and the Mongols and the Ming dynasty to the Manchus. The ultimate point to be conveyed
about the relationship between China and the imperialist powers (and between workers and employers) was rather
simple: the rich and powerful should be righteous, compassionate, and humane toward the poor and powerless--who
should not be treated like cattle and horses. This was something workers could understand even from their traditional
culture or subculture.
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The discourse of class was forged during the May Fourth Movement, thanks to anarchists as well as the Communists.
They talked about the sacredness of labor, the dignity and the innate goodness of workers, the awakening of workers to
the fact of their exploitation, and so on. Smith observes that discourses such as these could and would be used to
promote both class cooperation and class conflict. Anarchists and the GMD leaders from Sun Yat-sen on had class
cooperation and social unity in mind when they talked about the role of workers in the nation's destiny. In this
connection, Smith discusses the usage of the word jie, "section of society," in the discourse of class. The idiom became
widely used from the early years of the twentieth century, an easy carryover from the traditional notion of the four
vocations: scholars, peasants, artisans, and merchants.
Scholars disappeared while students emerged as xuejie. Similarly, doctors appeared as yijie, lawyers as fajie, journalists
as baojie, and merchants as shangjie. The word gongjie, "workers' section of society," initially referred to people who
worked in the industry and who were self-supporting including employers and employees, but "by the time of the May
Fourth Movement the term was used more or less exclusively of and by workers" (p. 129). (One might add that yijie,
baojie, shangjie, and the like all referred to people of different positions but in the same sector--doctors and nurses,
newspaper owners and reporters, commercial firm owners and salesmen/clerks.) Significantly, workers regularly
referred to themselves as tongren (colleagues) or tongbao (people born of the same womb) or xiongdi (brothers)--terms
that had no class connotations. "At this stage only a small minority of workers were touched by this [class] discourse.
For the majority, beliefs and values continued to be shaped by Confucian culture, and social identities continued to be
defined in terms of native place, secret-society affiliation, guild membership, or guanxi with foremen and labor
contractors" (p. 131). The notion of class or class struggle encountered the "deeper social norms that valorized
harmony, stability, and hierarchy" (p. 213). In the Chinese-owned factories, workers tended to perceive conflict with
employers not in light of class relations but as a moral failure on the part of employers. This is in part why the
discourse of class would only inflect but not replace or overshadow the discourse of nation.
In Smith's analysis, compared to spreading messages, political activists had a much tougher task at hand in organizing
and leading labor movement because they had to reckon with the social networks and identities that workers already
had. From the early years of the twentieth century leaders of guilds and native-place associations/groupings were
instrumental in leading limited labor unrest. Even when they gradually lost their influence over workers to some
degree, the grip of labor contractors, foremen, and secret society bosses over workers hardly loosened (labor
contractors and foremen were often the Green Gang members). Political activists sometimes had to join the Green
Gang in order to have some influence among workers. Strikes and stoppages were launched with the cooperation of
such elements and were often broken due to their indifference or worse. The vigorous efforts of the CCP-led Shanghai
General Labor Union (GLU) in 1926-1927 to compete with the Green Gang to control workers accounted for the Green
Gang's cooperation with Chiang Kai-shek in the bloody April 1927 coup against the GLU and the CCP.
Smith's book is based on extensive research into the files of the Shanghai municipal police, the newspapers and
periodicals of the time including labor journals, and collections of documents published in the PRC. He also uses a
wide range of secondary sources to good effect. He readily admits that his research relies on what observers believed
workers were thinking and doing or what radical intellectuals would have them think and do. To avoid "the danger of
inferring motivations from collective action" and choosing the interpretation that fits one's prejudices, he says that he
concentrated on "tracing the processes whereby subject-positions were put into circulation and then sought for
evidence of workers identifying with them" (pp. 13-14). He has accomplished as much and more.
Xiaoqun Xu is an associate professor of history at Francis Marion University specializing in modern Chinese history.
Xu, Xiaoqun
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Xu, Xiaoqun. "S. A. Smith. Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927." China Review
International, Spring 2002, p. 241+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA109083773&it=r&asid=e5b62a17b425eace96bda1a02ee56c26.
Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A109083773