The Russian Revolution in October 1917,¹ led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin, is the most important event in history for revolutionary socialists. For the first time, a revolution led by the working class won power in an entire country and began attempting to construct a socialist society based on the ideas of workers’ control and real democracy. For a brief period there was a glimpse of what such a society might look like, before the experiment was destroyed by civil war, foreign intervention, economic devastation, and—above all—the failure of revolutions to spread successfully to more economically advanced countries. This led by the late 1920s to the entrenchment of a bureaucratic dictatorship in the infant Soviet Union. A decade after the revolution’s initial amazing success, the dreams on which it had been based had been destroyed.

But despite its eventual defeat—indeed, partly because of it—the Russian Revolution remains a key event for all socialists to study. There are rich lessons to be learned concerning how it came about, its considerable early successes, and why it eventually failed—and one hundred years after the revolution took place there is a daunting literature on all of these topics. The aim of this very brief review is to make a few suggestions about what to read, mainly for those new to the topic.²

For those who have never read anything about the Russian Revolution, an excellent starting point is the article that Ahmed Shawki wrote for this journal twenty years ago, “80 Years Since the Russian Revolution,”³ which traces the path from the revolution’s roots in nineteenth-century Russia, through the failed revolution of 1905, World War I, and the February Revolution which overthrew the tsar, to the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power.⁴ For those who want a longer discussion of the same history that can still be read relatively quickly, the first two parts of Neil Faulkner’s recently published A People’s History of the Russian Revolution is highly recommended.⁵

Another recently published book, October 1917: Workers in Power⁶ with writings by Paul Le Blanc, Ernest Mandel, and David Mandel, is not a narrative history of the entire revolution, but includes a chronology and brief overview, as well as a useful glossary of people, places, events, and organizations, together with essays taking up some key issues, including whether the seizure of power was nothing more than a coup d’état, and the role of factory committees in the revolution. It also includes writings by the Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg (often misrepresented as an opponent of the revolution, but who was in fact a critical supporter), Lenin, and Trotsky.

A useful collection of primary documents, with statements from many participants in and observers of the events in Russia in 1917, is Michael C. Hickey’s Competing Voices from the Russian Revolution.⁷ The sources included range from “government officials and political party leaders” to “ordinary men and women who tilled fields, toiled in factories, worked in offices, or served in the military.” To get a visual feel for the revolution, take a look at some of the photographic collections put together by the late David King, which include Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Death of Stalin⁸ and Trotsky: A Photographic Biography.⁹

But undoubtedly the most important book on the revolution is Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution,¹⁰ written in 1930 and first translated into English in 1932. Indeed, Trotsky’s account of the revolution has a strong claim to being the single greatest work of Marxist history. The book was originally published in three volumes and runs over 900 pages, so it requires a serious commitment to read it, but every socialist should at some point make time to do so. Trotsky was a magnificent stylist, and the book is a page-turner, even though we already know the outcome. As a history book, there is little to compare it with. Trotsky, along with Lenin, was the leading figure in the events leading up to and following the October Revolution, so he brings the knowledge and insight of a participant to his narrative (although Trotsky makes clear at the outset that “this work will not rely in any degree upon personal recollections,” and it is based on “historically verified documents”).¹¹ But beyond that, Trotsky combines deep theoretical understanding with the ability to weave together events ranging from long-term historical changes to the microdynamics of a specific street protest. Consider, for instance, his description of a demonstration that took place on February 24 (March 9), the second day of the uprising that brought down the tsar:

The workers at the Erikson, one of the foremost mills in the Vyborg district, after a morning meeting came out on the Sampsonievsky Prospect, a whole mass, 2,500 of them, and in a narrow place ran into the Cossacks. Cutting their way with the breasts of their horses, the officers first charged through the crowd. Behind them, filling the whole width of the Prospect galloped the Cossacks. Decisive moment! But the horsemen, cautiously, in a long ribbon, rode through the corridor just made by the officers. “Some of them smiled,” Kayurov [a Bolshevik leader in the Vyborg district] recalls, “and one of them gave the workers a good wink.” This wink was not without meaning. The workers were emboldened with a friendly, not hostile, kind of assurance, and slightly infected the Cossacks with it. The one who winked found imitators. In spite of renewed efforts from the officers, the Cossacks, without openly breaking discipline, failed to force the crowd to disperse, but flowed through it in streams. This was repeated three or four times and brought the two sides even closer together. Individual Cossacks began to reply to the workers’ questions and even to enter into momentary conversations with them. Of discipline, there remained but a thin transparent shell that threatened to break through any second.

More than this, Trotsky’s book offers a continuing reflection on the nature of historical change—how individuals are shaped by the historical circumstances in which they live, how the slow accumulation of small changes can give rise to sudden and enormous historical ruptures, and how at crucial points both collective agency and individual choices can play a decisive role. Trotsky’s book covers Russia’s economic backwardness, its combined and uneven development as it imported technology and capital from the West, the impact of World War I, the February Revolution and the overthrow of tsarism, the contest for power between the provisional government and workers’ soviets (councils), and the eventual triumph of the soviets in October. He does not devote much space to the failed revolution of 1905, but for that there is his earlier book 1905,¹² which he published soon after what Lenin called the “dress rehearsal” for 1917 had been defeated.

Eyewitness accounts

There are numerous eyewitness accounts of the revolution, but pride of place must go to Ten Days That Shook the World,¹³ originally published in 1919, by the radical American journalist and socialist activist John Reed. Reed was present in Petrograd during the October Revolution and gives a vivid blow-by-blow account of what took place in the days preceding and following the seizure of power. Stalin hated the book because it barely mentions him and correctly portrays Lenin and Trotsky as the revolution’s key leaders, but Lenin wrote a short introduction in which he unreservedly recommended the book “to the workers of the world” and praised it for providing “a truthful and most vivid exposition” of key events.

Another American journalist, Louise Bryant (a collaborator with Reed, who was her husband at the time), was also in Petrograd and wrote her own account of the revolution, Six Red Months in Russia,¹⁴ published in October 1918 (a few months before Reed’s book because his notes were temporarily confiscated when the two of them returned to the United States), which is well worth reading. It includes interviews with leading women revolutionaries, including Maria Spiridonova, who was a member of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries,¹⁵ and the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, the only woman to serve in Lenin’s cabinet.

The Left Socialist-Revolutionary Sergei Mstislavskii played an active role in both the February and October Revolutions, and wrote his own account in 1918, published in English as Five Days Which Transformed Russia.¹⁶ The five “days” he focuses on (the first of which actually spans three) are the February Rising (February 27–March 1); the founding of the Provisional Government (March 3); the arrest of Nicholas II (March 9), an event in which Mstislavskii personally took part; the October Revolution (October 25); and the day of the Constituent Assembly (January 5, 1918).

Morgan Philips Price came from an upper-class background in Britain, but started moving to the left as a result of his opposition to World War I. He became a war correspondent and was in Russia before, during, and immediately after the revolution. His sympathies were soon with the Bolsheviks, and as a result his reports for the Manchester Guardian were often heavily edited or suppressed at the time. Price later became a left-wing Labor MP. Long after his death in 1973, a collection of his first-hand reports from Russia was finally published as Dispatches from the Revolution: Russia 1916–1918.¹⁷ Price traveled widely in the country during his time there, and is an invaluable guide to what was going on outside Petrograd and Moscow. His short pamphlet, Capitalist Europe and Socialist Russia, published in May 1919 by the British Socialist Party, is also available online at the Marxist Internet Archive.¹⁸

A first-hand account of the revolution, The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record,¹⁹ written by a Menshevik Internationalist and one of the founding members of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, N. N. Sukhanov, is a source mined by many historians covering this period (including Trotsky). It is very much worth reading in its own right.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks

The key role played by the Bolshevik Party over the course of 1917 deserves close examination by socialists. The second volume of Tony Cliff’s biography of Lenin, All Power to the Soviets: Lenin 1914-1917²⁰ provides an excellent overview. The February Revolution took all the established parties by surprise, although Bolshevik militants at the local level played important roles once it had begun. Bolshevik leaders like Kamenev and Stalin returned to Petrograd shortly afterwards but lacked a clear strategy and offered critical support to the Provisional Government. It was only after Lenin’s return in April that the slogan of “All power to the soviets!” became the Bolsheviks’ rallying cry.

But while Lenin’s leadership of the Bolsheviks was never in question, it was far from the case that he dictated their policies by fiat. There were fierce arguments inside the party about the way forward, both before and after the revolution, and Lenin did not always win them. Alexander Rabinowitch provides an excellent account of the months leading up to the October Revolution in The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd,²¹ which demonstrates beyond any doubt that the Bolsheviks were not monolithic, and that disagreement and debate were central to the way the party operated. The book provides perhaps the most detailed presentation of the role the Bolsheviks played, top to bottom, in the months leading up to the October Revolution.

Trotsky’s short book The Lessons of October,²² written in 1924 soon after Lenin’s death as part of a political debate against the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, who by that time were leading the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks had renamed themselves in 1918), is also essential reading. Against the triumvirate’s efforts to portray themselves as the guardians of an infallible “Leninist” tradition, Trotsky analyzed the actual course of the revolution to show the mistakes that leading Bolsheviks (and especially the triumvirate) had made along the way. He argues that “events have proved that without a party capable of directing the proletarian revolution, the revolution itself is rendered impossible,” but he also claims that in a revolutionary situation, it is “almost an unalterable law that a party crisis is inevitable in the transition from the preparatory revolutionary activity to the immediate struggle for power.”

Lenin’s own writings from his return to Russia until July 1918 can be found in volumes 24–27 of his Collected Works.²³ There is a lot to read in these volumes, but some of the key works are The April Theses, The Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution, War and Revolution, The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power, Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, “Left-Wing” Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality, and Theses On The Present Political Situation.

Two other important guides to Lenin’s political career and the history of the Bolsheviks are Paul Le Blanc’s Lenin and the Revolutionary Party²⁴ and Marcel Liebman’s Leninism Under Lenin.²⁵ Both have excellent chapters on the party’s role in 1917. And for those wondering whether this history still has relevance for today, Le Blanc’s Unfinished Leninism: The Rise and Return of a Revolutionary Doctrine,²⁶ is a must read.

The working class and revolution from below

Modern historians have done a considerable amount of work uncovering the active role played by workers in the revolution. Steve A. Smith’s Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917–18²⁷ looks at the attempts to establish workers’ control in factories from the February Revolution to the middle of 1918. Two volumes by David Mandel are also important: The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Régime: From the February Revolution to the July Days, 1917²⁸ and The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July 1918.²⁹ All three books show the debates within, and the initiatives taken by, Petrograd’s working class.

Smith’s research is summarized more briefly in his essay “Petrograd in 1917: The View From Below,” in The Workers’ Revolution in Russia, 1917: The View From Below, edited by Daniel H. Kaiser,³⁰ which includes articles on Moscow as well as Petrograd. Smith’s work serves as an antidote to the myth that the Bolsheviks used “demagogy and lies” to win working class support. According to Smith:

Bolshevik agitation and organization played a crucial role in radicalizing the masses. But the Bolsheviks themselves did not create popular discontent or revolutionary feeling. This grew out of the masses’ own experience of complex economic and social upheavals and political events. The contribution of the Bolsheviks was rather to shape workers’ understanding of the social dynamics of the revolution and to foster an awareness of how the urgent problems of daily life related to the broader social and political order. The Bolsheviks won support because their analysis and proposed solutions seemed to make sense. A worker from the Orudiinyi works, formerly a bastion of defensism [i.e., support for the war] where Bolsheviks were not even allowed to speak, stated in September [1917] that “the Bolsheviks have always said: ‘It is not we who will persuade you, but life itself.’ And now the Bolsheviks have triumphed because life has proved their tactics right.”

For the role of women workers in particular, see Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar, Midwives of Revolution: Female Bolsheviks and Women Workers in 1917,³¹ which considers the position of women in Russia before the revolution, the activities of prominent women revolutionaries, such as Nadezhda Krupskaya and Alexandra Kollontai, and the crucial role played by women workers in Petrograd in 1917.

Achievements of the revolution

The Bolshevik victory in October was followed in the next days, weeks, and months by a flurry of radical reforms. The new government announced its intention to immediately withdraw Russia from the war. Peasant land seizures in the countryside and worker control of the factories were legalized. Government officials were to be paid only the average wage of a skilled industrial worker.

The death penalty was abolished in the military (it had been abolished for civilian offenses following the February Revolution). Freedom of religion was established (ending the legal oppression of Jews), and the state and education were separated from the church. Free education was introduced and mass literacy campaigns were begun, descibed in Megan Behrent’s, “Education, Literacy, and the Russian Revolution,” in ISR 82, March-April, 2012.

All the old legislation that had served to oppress women was also swept away. Equal pay for women became the law. Marriages could be ended at the request of either partner. Children born out of marriage were given equal rights. All legal restrictions on abortion were ended. State-funded maternity homes and free nurseries were established, and Women’s Departments were set up in all areas of the country with the aim of bringing women together to play an active role in changing society. Part one of William G. Rosenberg’s anthology Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia,³² a collection of writings by Kollontai, Trotsky, and many other participants in the revolution, covers “The Culture of a New Society: Ethics, Gender, the Family, Law, and Problems of Tradition,” and is essential reading on these topics. Also see Wendy Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936³³ and Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia.³⁴

All references to sex practices were removed from Russia’s criminal code and homosexuality ceased to be a crime. In 1923, Dr. Grigory Batkis, the director of the Moscow Institute for Sexual Hygiene, described the new approach:

Soviet legislation . . . declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as no one’s interests are encroached upon. Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offences against public morality, Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called “natural” intercourse.

Dan Healey examines the experience of gay men and lesbians before and after the revolution in Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent.³⁵

The vibrancy of the new society was reflected in a huge surge of activity in the cultural field. There was a flowering of artistic endeavor in the visual arts, drama, filmmaking, and literature. Some of this is described by Victor Serge (a Belgian-born anarchosyndicalist who joined the Bolsheviks shortly after the revolution) in his outstanding book Year One of the Russian Revolution,³⁶ first published in 1930, which provides a detailed narrative of the revolution’s first twelve months:

Such a thirst for knowledge sprang up all over the country that new schools, adult courses, universities and Workers’ Faculties were formed everywhere. Innumerable fresh initiatives laid open the teaching of unheard-of, totally unexplored domains of learning. In this period too, the museums were enriched by the confiscation of private collections: extraordinary honesty and care characterized this expropriation of artistic riches. Not one work of any significance was lost.

Part two of Rosenberg’s anthology Bolshevik Visions focuses on “Creating Soviet Cultural Forms: Art, Architecture. Music, Film, and the New Tasks of Education.” Also well worth a look is Abbott Gleason, Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution.³⁷ For examples of Russian revolutionary art see John Milner, et al., Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932,³⁸ produced to accompany a centenary exhibit in Britain. Another wonderful visual collection is David King’s Russian Revolutionary Posters: From Civil War to Socialist Realism, From Bolshevism to the End of Stalinism.³⁹

The national question

The Russian Empire was a vast edifice encompassing many smaller nations. In a series of writings before and during World War I—including “Theses on the National Question” (1913), “Critical Remarks on the National Question” (1913), “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1914), and “The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1915), Lenin argued that socialists in dominant countries must unequivocally support the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, while socialists in oppressed nations should argue for the necessity of international working-class solidarity.

Following the October Revolution, these principles were put into practice. The old Russian Empire was replaced by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and its constituent nations were given the right of self-determination. Special efforts were also made to win the support of oppressed nationalities—see especially two volumes edited by John Riddell: To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920—First Congress of the Peoples of the East, and Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress of the Communist International, 1920.⁴⁰ Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question⁴¹ is a useful guide. Also see Eric Blanc, “Anti-Imperial Marxism: Borderland Socialists and The Evolution of Bolshevism on National Liberation,” ISR 100, Spring 2016.

How the revolution was lost

The achievements of the first few months and years of the revolution were impressive, but the Bolshevik government soon found itself faced with severe difficulties. Despite pockets of advanced industry, Russia was an economically backward country which had been set back even further by the disruption and destruction of the war. By the summer of 1918 there was a cholera epidemic in Petrograd and severe food shortages throughout the country. An assassination attempt left Lenin seriously injured. Shortly afterwards, Russia was invaded by armies from many of the major capitalist powers, including the United States, Britain, and France. These countries gave vital support to the White Armies of the deposed ruling class, plunging Russia in to a full-scale civil war, which further devastated the country.

The best overview of this period can be found in third volume of Cliff’s biography of Lenin, Revolution Besieged: Lenin 1917–1923⁴² and, to a lesser extent, Trotsky: The Sword of the Revolution 1917–1923,⁴³ the second volume of his biography of Trotsky. Revolution Besieged in particular provides a clear sense of the impossible conditions faced by the Bolsheviks and how the material privations, war, and economic collapse in the context of the revolution’s failure to spread rendered the building of a society based on workers’ control impossible.

The standard history of the civil war is W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War.⁴⁴ It is, however, marred by its unconcealed hostility to the revolution: the first sentence describes the months between February and October 1917 as an “orgy of proletarian self-indulgence.” For Trotsky’s own account of how he organized and led the Red Army to victory, see Trotsky’s Military Writings.⁴⁵

There are also a number of eyewitness reports of the difficulties Russia was experiencing during these years. Arthur Ransome, a British journalist (and later a well-known author of children’s books) who married Trotsky’s personal secretary, published Russia in 1919 and The Crisis in Russia (1920), both reissued by Redwords in 1992, but now most easily found online.⁴⁶ Some of Victor Serge’s articles from the same period are collected in Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 1919-1921.⁴⁷ Alfred Rosmer, a French syndicalist who joined the Communist movement after the revolution, regularly visited the Soviet Union in the early 1920s and published his recollections in Lenin’s Moscow⁴⁸ in the 1950s.

From the outset, Lenin and Trotsky were both clear that in order to survive, the revolution needed outside support. As Lenin put it in March 1919: “The absolute truth is that without a revolution in Germany we shall perish.” Germany did experience its own February Revolution in November 1918, when an uprising overthrew the kaiser and ended the war, but despite several years of political instability after that, there was no equivalent of the Russian October. In other countries, Russia’s revolution inspired high levels of militancy, factory occupations, and even workers’ councils, but no successful working-class revolution.

In Russia itself, the Red Army, led by Trotsky, eventually defeated the counterrevolution, but only at a huge human and material cost. Food shortages resulted in a mass exodus from the cities to the countryside, and the number of workers in urban areas fell from 3 million to 1.25 million. Thousands of the most dedicated working-class militants died in the civil war. The combined effects of international isolation, scarcity, and the disintegration of Russia’s working class, put the revolution’s gains under threat. In Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory,⁴⁹ Kevin Murphy shows that in some factories workers retained considerable control over production until as late as 1927, winning regular wage increases, but in many others workers’ power had become an abstract slogan long before then, while the soviets became little more than talk shops.

In the dire conditions of the civil war and its aftermath, the Bolsheviks felt compelled to outlaw political parties that were critics of the revolution, some of which had openly sided with the counterrevolution. The Western capitalist powers had been unable to crush the workers’ state directly, but they had created the conditions for decay from within, manifested in serious and sometimes violent tensions between the working class and the peasantry.

As the democratic soviets withered, the Communist Party fell under the control of a bureaucracy of full-time officials and opportunists. Stalin, who had played an inconsequential role in the October Revolution, had maneuvered himself into the position of general secretary of the party. In Lenin’s Last Struggle,⁵⁰ Moshe Lewin shows that Lenin fought against the growing bureaucratization of the revolution in the final months of his active political life, including writing a testament in which he advocated that Stalin be replaced as general secretary. But Lenin suffered a series of strokes in 1922. By early 1923 he was physically incapacitated and the attempt to remove Stalin failed. By the time of Lenin’s death in January 1924, the Communist Party was very different from the workers’ organization it had been in 1917.

In the course of the 1920s, Stalin defeated his political rivals until, by 1928, he reigned supreme. The last gains of the revolution were destroyed, the remaining members of the Bolshevik “old guard” were physically eliminated, and the Soviet Union was industrialized on the backs of the working class and the peasantry, resulting in millions of deaths. The river of blood that separated the early years of the revolution from Stalin’s dictatorship is the proof that Stalin’s rise represented the triumph of counterrevolution—as Victor Serge argued in his 1937 book From Lenin to Stalin⁵¹—not a continuation of the Bolshevik revolution.

Chris Harman outlined the underlying causes of the revolution’s eventual defeat in his 1967 article “Russia: How the Revolution was Lost,”⁵² reprinted in Anthony Arnove et al., Russia: From Worker’s State to State Capitalism.⁵³ Neil Faulkner covers the same ground in part three of his People’s History. Both Harman and Faulkner draw on the analysis in Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed,⁵⁴ originally published in 1936, which offers a Marxist materialist analysis of the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy. However, both Harman and Faulkner disagree with Trotsky’s claim that the Soviet Union remained some kind of workers’ state in the 1930s, and argue instead that the bureaucracy had transformed itself into a new ruling class.

Was the defeat of the Russian Revolution inevitable? I would argue it was not, but I will leave the final word to Serge:

It is often said that “the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning”. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that very sensible?⁵⁵

Top five

This survey has referenced many books. Read as much as you can, but here are my top five recommendations:

Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World

Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution

Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power

Neil Faulkner, A People’s History of the Russian Revolution

---

1. Russia was such a backward country in 1917 that it still used the old Julian calendar, abandoned by the rest of Europe centuries earlier, by this time running thirteen days behind the modern Gregorian calendar. So the seizure of power took place on October 25, by the Russian calendar, which was November 7 for most of the rest of the world.
2. Publisher information for titles mentioned is included in the endnotes, below.This guide will focus on positive recommendations, but there are also books to avoid. Included on the latter list would be the numerous works of professional anticommunist Richard Pipes (for many years a professor of history at Harvard), who scrupulously ignores evidence and research contrary to his views. Also worth a miss is A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (Viking, 1997) by British historian Orlando Figes, which relies on dubious sources and distortion to paint a negative picture of the revolution.
3. International Socialist Review, Issue 3, Winter 1997, http://www.isreview.org/issues/03/russia....
4. This article, along with Trotsky’s 1932 speech, “In Defense of the Russian Revolution,” will be published by Haymarket Books later this year.
5. Published by Pluto Press, 2017. The British science fantasy writer and Marxist China Miéville’s book from Verso Books, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, also looks like a promising guide, but I have not yet read it. See Paul Le Blanc’s review of Miéville’s book, along with Neil Faulkner’s new book on the Russian Revolution, elsewhere in this issue.
6. Merlin Press, 2016.
7. Greenwood Press, 2011.
8. Tate, 2016.
9. Blackwell, 1986.
10. Haymarket Books, 2008.
11. For Trotsky’s personal recollections of the revolution, see chapters 24–28 of My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (Dover Publications, 2012), originally published in 1930.
12. Haymarket Books, 2016.
13. Penguin, 2007.
14. Kessinger Publishing, 2010.
15. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party was a populist party based on the peasantry. In the course of 1917 it split into moderate (right) and radical (left) factions.
16. Indiana University Press, 1988.
17. Pluto Press, 1997.
18. https://www.marxists.org/archive/price/1918/europe-russia.htm
19. Princeton, 1984.
20. Haymarket Books, 2004.
21. Haymarket Books, 2009. A new Haymarket edition with a new author’s introduction will be published this year.
22. Haymarket Books, 2017.
23. Progress Publishers, 1964.
24. Haymarket Books, 2015.
25. Haymarket Books, 2017.
26. Haymarket Books, 2014.
27. Cambridge University Press, 1983; to be reissued by Haymarket Books this year.
28. Macmillan, 1983.
29. Macmillan, 1984.
30. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
31. Ohio University Press, 1999.
32. University of Michigan Press, 2nd edition, 1990.
33. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
34. Indiana University Press, 1997.
35. University of Chicago Press, 2001.
36. Haymarket Books, 2015.
37. Indiana University Press, 1985.
38. Royal Academy Publications, 1917.
39. Tate, 2012.
40. Both by Pathfinder Press, 1993, 1999.
41. Macmillan, 1999.
42. Haymarket Books, 2012.
43. Bookmarks, 1990.
44. Simon & Schuster, 1989.
45. Merit Publishers, 1969.
46. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/601.
47. Haymarket Books, 2011.
48. Haymarket Books, 2016.
49. Haymarket Books, 2007.
50. Monthly Review Press, 1968.
51. Pathfinder Press, 1973.
52. https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1967/xx/revlost.htm.
53. Haymarket Books, 2017.
54. Dover Publications, 2004.
55. “Reply to Ciliga,” New International, Vol. V, No. 2, February 1939, https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1.... Ante Ciliga was a Yugoslav Communist who was at one time a supporter of Trotsky’s Left Opposition. He later abandoned Marxism for Croatian nationalism.