What Happened in Red October, Richard Pipes Asserted, Was Not a Revolution, Not a Mass Movement from Below, but a Top-Down Coup d’État

Like 1789, when the French Revolution erupted, 1917 has entered the lexicon of world-historical dates all educated citizens are expected to know and remember. The meaning of 1917, however, remains much contested, not least because two very different revolutions took place in Russia that fateful year. The February Revolution toppled the Russian monarchy and ushered in a brief era of mixed liberal and socialist governance, only to be superseded by the more radical October Revolution, which saw Lenin’s Bolshevik Party impose a Communist dictatorship and proclaim an open-ended world revolution against “capitalism” and “imperialism.” Each of these developments was significant enough to merit serious historical study. Together they constitute one of the seminal events of modern history, which introduced Communism to the world and paved the way for decades of ideological conflict, culminating in the Cold War of 1945–1991.

Because the Bolsheviks were avowed Marxists, our understanding of the Russian Revolution has long been colored by Marxist language, from the idea of a class struggle between “proletarians” and the “capitalist” ruling classes, to the dialectical progression from a “bourgeois” to a socialist revolution. Even many non-Marxist historians tended, in the Cold War years, to accept the basic Marxist framework of discussion about the Russian Revolution, concentrating on such matters as Russia’s economic backwardness vis-à-vis more advanced Western capitalist countries, the stages of her emergence from feudalism and her “belated” industrial development, inequality and Russia’s lopsided social structure, and so on. As late as 1982, Sheila Fitzpatrick, in an influential college textbook titled The Russian Revolution, described Lenin’s aim in the October Revolution unambiguously as “the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat.”

This relatively uncritical approach to the Russian Revolution proved surprisingly resistant to revision over the decades, in part because the great anti-Communist writers of the Cold War years, from George Orwell to Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Robert Conquest, focused on Communism in its period of Stalinist “maturity” in the 1930s and 1940s, not on its origins in the Revolution. Serious new studies of the February Revolution did appear, such as George Katkov’s Russia 1917 (1967) and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s February Revolution (1981). Not until Richard Pipes’s The Russian Revolution (1990) however, was there a serious reappraisal of the revolutions of 1917 as a whole. What happened in Red October, Pipes asserted, was not a revolution, not a mass movement from below, but a top-down coup d’état, the “capture of governmental power by a small minority.” Far from being a product of social evolution, class struggle, economic development, or other inexorable historical forces foreseen in Marxist theory, the Russian Revolution was made “by identifiable men pursuing their own advantages,” and was therefore “properly subject to value judgment.” Pipes’s judgment of these men was withering.

--Sean McMeekin, introduction to The Russian Revolution: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), xi-xii.