Paper Topic:

History: Russia 1917

RUSSIA-1917

A new way of looking at the Russian revolution is emerging . Twenty years ago , Petrograd was seen as the pacemaker of revolution , each stage beginning in the capital and spreading to the country , putting considerable emphasis on national politics conducted in the capital . The almost exclusive actors in the drama were the Provisional Government the Petrograd Soviet and the leaders of the main parties within them . In particular , the conspiratorial role of the Bolsheviks was often stressed . Such a view , in simple form , can no longer be sustained . For some

two decades revisionist historians paid more attention to social and , though still to a surprisingly small extent , economic history . The grass roots began to be understood better , though workers and the major cities of Petrograd and Moscow was still the centre of attention Peasants and the provinces remained largely unexamined . Even more surprising , there were relatively few studies of soldiers and sailors who were deemed to be peasants (or , in some cases , workers ) in uniform Even so , the revisionists made it clear that without taking account of pressures from the provinces and the grass roots , the evolution of high politics could not be understood . Today there is more emphasis on the multitude of conflicting pressures and aspirations released by the collapse of the autocracy . There is a greater awareness of the activity of ordinary people as rational participants in the revolution in their own right . The various regional Russian and non-Russian populations of the Empire experienced revolutions different from one another in origin aspiration , evolution and outcome , depending on local conditions such as proximity to the war front , the number of landowners , the density of population or the fertility of the soil . As a result , events in the Russian Empire do not constitute a single revolution but a multitude of sometimes conflicting revolutions . Every social group , every nationality , every region , every town , every village , had its own revolution

The building block of each revolution was the individual , and , although there are no typical examples since every person is unique , one must bear in mind that people - their hopes , their achievements , their sufferings , their failures - lie beneath the abstractions with which one is forced to deal . Consider two contrasting cases . Karl Ranni was born in Estonia to a family of farm laborers who moved to the town of Narva on the edge of the St . Petersburg region , in search of work . When the revolution broke out he was a telegraphist in his early twenties . The war had brought a great demand for his services , modern communications being essential to military endeavor . The revolution of 1917 found him in Kronstadt . He had already been in contact with revolutionaries in Narva and he was one of 200 Kronstadt sailors selected to greet Lenin on his arrival at the Finland Station on 3 April . I joined the guard of honor . We stood in a circle around the legendary armored car from which Lenin spoke - so I was lucky , I heard every word of...

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