[May, 1999]
Recently, some French historians have called for an end to the discussion of the causes and meaning of the French Revolution, declaring it to be ‘terminated’. But an occurrence that raises such fundamental philosophical and moral questions can never end. For the dispute is not only over what has happened in the past but also over what may happen in the future. [1]
In an article written in 1994 Ronald Suny drew an arresting comparison between the historiographical debates surrounding the French, and the Russian, Revolutions. [2] The ‘dominant interpretations’ of these two great events, Suny noted, appeared to be moving in opposite directions. In the case of the French Revolution, the shift was away from a Marxist interpretation, towards one more founded on individuals, ideas and ‘cultural representations’; while in the Russian case the move was from an anti-Marxist orthodoxy grounded on personality and ideology, and towards an approach more centred on concepts of class, and class polarisation. [3] The structure of the debates appears similar, but they are mirror-images of each other: comparatively speaking, ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘revisionism’ in each case stand at opposite poles.
But Suny’s model is fundamentally flawed: the structural similarity he notes is, in fact, far more apparent than real. The reason that this should be the case, I will argue, informs us to a great degree about the structure of the debate on the Russian Revolution, and the kind of developments in historical enquiry that are necessary to rectify its lacunae.
For Suny, then, although the actual events under question stand over a century apart, the historiographical debates surrounding them not only appear to conform in pattern (although being opposite in direction), in addition they are chronologically parallel. In Suny’s model, the orthodox interpretation of each is established shortly after the Second World War (or maybe just before), and the revisionist challenge first makes its appearance around the 1960s, rising to a crescendo by the late 1970s and beyond. Now, in order to pursue the comparison, we need, in the first place, to be fairly clear as to what exactly we are referring by the labels ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘revisionism’. Thus, in the case of the French Revolution, what is generally understood to be the ‘orthodox’ account is that established in particular by Georges Lefebvre, notably in his The Coming of the French Revolution, first published in 1939; and continued by others, most notably by Albert Soboul. [4] Lefebvre’s account suggested a Marxist interpretation, while Soboul’s explicitly insisted upon one. One of the factors that lay behind the power of this account of the Revolution was the fact that it developed the conceptions of what had come to be called the ‘Great Tradition’ in French Revolutionary historiography, emanating from Thiers and Mignet, and developed along the way by, among others, Jaurès and Mathiez: the ‘social’ interpretation of Lefebvre, and then Soboul and others, stood, so to speak, at the summit of this lineage, and shared the desire to actually defend, and triumph, the Revolution in print.
In the case of the Russian Revolution, some of the landmark figures that spring to mind in the development of what Suny dubs ‘orthodoxy’ are Bernard Pares, David Shub, Bertram Wolfe and Leonard Schapiro; the foundation works from these authors spanning the Second World War. The parameters of their case are well known: the Revolution was not the work of great social classes, but of a small circle of fanatical intellectuals, driven not by a quest for justice but by a lust for power; Russian absolutism was brought down not from below, but from above; and the subsequent course of Soviet history was shaped by these brutal, unnecessary and anti-democratic conditions of the new society’s birth. [5]
Now, it should be readily apparent here that there are a number of differences in the manner of formation between the ‘orthodox’ account of the Russian Revolution and that of the French. In the first place, there is no evidence in the former case of the foundations of a ‘Great Tradition’ as there is in the French: the ‘orthodox’ Russian model is not the end point of an historiographical continuity dating back to the very event it is attempting to come to terms with. In fact the very opposite is the case: if we can identify a ‘great tradition’ in this case then it is precisely that which emerged in Russia and the Soviet Union over the course of the Revolution and its aftermath, and it is in opposition to this interpretation that the ‘orthodox’ one is constructed. The ‘orthodox’ model may indeed be just that, yet as well it is already ‘revisionist’ at birth. In the second place, French Revolutionary orthodoxy is—as the conditions of its ancestry would suggest—at heart an indigenous French phenomenon; the Russian Revolutionary orthodoxy is—allowing for the work of a small number of émigrés—a phenomenon principally of non-Russian, United States’ and British, academic discourse.
These points are, I would suggest, of some importance. Rather than, as Suny suggests, there being a similarity of pattern between the debates surrounding both the French and the Russian Revolutions, only with movement being in opposite directions, what we can observe is to all intents and purposes the contrary. The similarities in the structure of the particular debates under consideration are far more apparent than real, and the direction—from Marxism toward a non-class, non-structural ‘culturo-idealist’ interpretation—is the same. If we now more accurately characterise what we have been referring to as the ‘orthodox’ school of Russian Revolutionary historiography as in fact the first-wave of ‘revisionism’ itself, then what is apparent is that the difference between the two processes is, in fact, a simple matter of chronology: Russian Revolutionary revisionism pre-dating French Revolutionary revisionism by something like a quarter of a century. In order to address why this should be the case, and why it is necessary to continue to pursue this question, we now need to look at what it was the ‘revisionist’ historians of the Russian Revolution were actually seeking to revise.
The ‘orthodox’ interpretation of the Russian Revolution—or, as I have tried to argue, more accurately the ‘first-wave’ revisionist one—is explicitly a cold-war literature. [6] This is not to say that Lefebvre and Soboul were not motivated by concerns of political expediency either, since they clearly were: indeed, one of the central arguments of the fiercest critics of their ‘social’ interpretation of the French Revolution was precisely that it was time to stop re-fighting the Revolution’s battles in historical literature and lay the whole thing to rest as an object of historical scrutiny alone; rather, it is important for our purposes to establish the particular ideological concerns of this particular school of Russian Revolutionary historiography. Concretely, it sought to establish an interpretation of the Revolution—and consequently an analysis of contemporary Russian society—within the framework of the already existing political divisions between the super-powers that was to dominate a good part of the rest of the twentieth century. The task, in short, was an assault on Bolshevism in all its manifestations: on the historiographical front ‘revisionism’ was, in this respect, as explicitly anti-Marxist as was the wave of French Revolutionary revisionism of the 1960s and 70s; if not more so. The model of the Revolution that was under attack here was that produced by its leaders in their contemporary writings, by the historians of the Soviet state, and by the Revolution’s sympathisers abroad. There was, it would appear, no room for compromise in this field: you were either ‘for’ the Revolution and its consequences, or you were against. The cleavage in studies of the Revolution seemed as absolute as the actual cleavage in international super-power politics itself.
But, of course, this brings us on to a point of fundamental importance, and one that is often lost sight of in the litearture. Among the ‘defenders’ of the heritage of the Revolution there was by no means unanimity. Although the standard account of the Revolution produced by the official apparatus of the Soviet state and its co-thinkers world-wide predominated in this field of the literature, it did not speak alone in defence of the Revolution: already in existence were accounts of the Revolution, insistent on its legitimacy, yet by no means faithful to the standard Soviet outlook. For, as is well known, within the young Soviet state in the 1920s there occurred a desperate (and ultimately quite literally murderous) political battle over its future course. The fracture in the international Communist movement that ensued was absolute, if far from numerically equal. The ‘losers’—especially the political trend that has come to be known as Trotskyism—developed an analysis of the Revolution that was as ‘Leninist’ as you like, but which did not hold to what it considered distortions of history in the official account. [7] Indeed, Trotsky wrote a magisterial account of 1917 himself [8]—a remarkable work, at the same time a sparkling eyewitness chronicle and a penetrating account of the Revolution by one of its central leaders—and for good measure spent a good part of his post-revolutionary active political life on the one hand defending the Revolution’s heritage while on the other attempting to organise the political overthrow of who he saw as the usurpers of that heritage.
Thus there is a small yet significant body of work on the Revolution that arose from this tradition (although not all of it explicitly ‘Trotskyist’), and which runs almost parallel to the ‘official’ debate: [9] however, due to the very polarisation of the historiography of the Revolution itself, this line of work is often lost sight of. This fact, as I shall try to explain, presents us with a very serious obstacle in the way of developing an interpretation of the Revolution and its written history that is sensitive to not only a genuine explanation of what actually happened, but how this has been interpreted in the literature.
Thus by the 1960s there were two preponderant and opposing blocs within Russian Revolutionary historiography (and, as I have tried to show, a third, minority, and at times barely visible one): the ‘official’ interpretation of the Soviet state and its institutions (which I will, from now on, refer to as the ‘Stalinist’ interpretation), and the opposing ‘orthodox’, western interpretation, developed in the universities of—particularly—the United States and Britain (which, likewise, I shall refer to in what follows as the ‘cold-war’ interpretation). [10] It is into this arena that what Suny (and others) call the ‘revisionist’ account emerges, often formulated explicitly in opposition to the cold-war account. As Suny describes it: ‘A new generation of historians, primarily in the United States, began in the 1960s to dismantle the dominant liberal or orthodox interpretation of the Revolution, with its emphasis on the power of ideology, personality and political intrigue, and to reconceptualise 1917 as a struggle between social classes.’ [11] From the 1960s and on, then, there emerged a great deal of new work on the Revolution and its aftermath which began to challenge the seemingly almost absolute polarity between the Stalinist and the cold-war interpretations. There were a number of factors behind this development. In the first place, with the easing of the conditions of cold war from the late 1950s, conditions arose—most keenly felt in the United States—in which it was possible to begin to question the cold-war account without actually appearing to condone ‘Communism’. In addition, there was the notable influence of the western approach to ‘social history’, or ‘history from below’. The pressure of these two developments prompted at least the possibility of a move away from interpretations that focused solely or predominantly on the actions of ‘key figures’, party-political structures, and detached ideologies (concerns which, for clearly different reasons, were writ large in both the Stalinist and the cold-war accounts), towards paying closer attention to an examination of the deeper roots behind the crisis facing Russian absolutism in 1917, and examining in more detail the role of mass social involvement in the Revolution itself. In short, historical interpretation of 1917 began to shift its attention rather more to the ‘masses’.
The practical result of all this was the emergence—particularly from the 1970s—of a series of studies on the Revolution and its roots that began to paint a picture in which the Revolution itself is seen rather more as the outcome—initially at least—of an increasing process of class and social polarisation and relatively spontaneous mass mobilisation; [12] rather than being manipulated by crazed intellectuals or brilliantly led by disciplined revolutionary geniuses, the central political figures of the Revolution were seen to have themselves been acted on by the masses at least as much as the other way round. It is this phenomenon that represents for Suny in the essay cited above the shift away from the anti-Marxist ‘dominant interpretation’ (the cold-war school of Russian Revolutionary historiography); and it is this development that he contrasts with the increasingly anti-Marxist revisionist tend in the debate on the French Revolution.
Now, it is undoubtedly the case that the winds of ‘social history’ have certainly swept away some of the most obvious cobwebs of dogmatic thinking in this subject. [13] Yet perhaps this picture is a little over-simplified: there is a danger, I would suggest, in painting the ‘social-history’ school as the Cavalry arriving over the hill just in time save the reputation of the interpretation of the Russian Revolution from the ravages of both the cold-war and the Stalinist Indians. In the first place, although there is a communality of interest in the deep social and political roots of the mass radicalisation of 1917 and before that marks out this trend in Russian Revolutionary historiography, ‘trend’ here really is the operative word for this development. Insightful though much of this work is, and complementary to an overall picture of the Revolution as a mass social phenomenon as it is, there is far from unanimity, or even the kind of widespread agreement of the kind that we can discern in the cold-war and Stalinist schools across it. Perhaps this is to be expected as a part of the very nature of historical enquiry, as Suny himself is aware; yet the danger exists, and it is as well to be mindful of it. But there is a broader dimension to this problem. ‘Social history’ in general, as is well known, has had its critics, and this is not the place to discuss that debate in detail. [14] But it is certainly the case that, however beneficial this historiographical trend has been in the case of the Russian Revolution, it is important to be aware that a focus on history ‘from below’ to the exclusion of history ‘from above’ is not an adequate solution to our dilemmas. [15] As Suny himself noted, what is required is a ‘vital synthesis’ of social and political history into a unified whole, if the historical picture is to be rendered complete in all of its complexity. [16]
This is not an imaginary difficulty. For extant within the broad camp of the ‘history from below’ of the Russian Revolution, there is one particular trend that some have called the ‘libertarian’ interpretation. [17] What particularly marks out this train of thought on the Revolution is its explanation for what is perceived as the miscarriage of the Revolution: for all the radical and creative energy expressed by the masses, they proved ultimately unable to fashion an effective set of political instruments capable of carrying through a liberation project into the post-revolutionary period. Mass mobilisation and self-organisation proved effective to topple Tsarist autocracy, but insufficient to resist the re-establishment of a new autocracy in the form of a Bolshevik dictatorship.
It should be apparent that there is a problem with this line of argument. The central weakness of both the cold-war and the Stalinist accounts of the Revolution was their inability to address the complex relationship between revolutionary developments from ‘above’ and from ‘below’, to the detriment of an understanding of the significance of the latter. What we encounter here is a problem of the opposite type, which rather leads us to similar conclusions. For if, as the argument runs, the Bolsheviks were able assume power on the back of the mass radicalisation and then usurp it, that puts the masses back into the paradigm of having been ‘duped’ by evil Bolshevik geniuses—which is precisely the argument of the cold-war interpretation. It also flies in the face of the largely accepted wisdom in the social-history camp—based on solid research—that what lay behind October was the high degree of confluence between the aspirations of the masses—in particular the urban masses—and the programme of the Bolsheviks. Suny, elsewhere, has already spelled this out: ‘What seems at first to be a “social history with the politics left out” might be characterised more accurately as a “political history thinly disguised as social history,” for there is no feel [...] for the coincidence of workers’ aspirations and Bolshevik ideals in the context of deepening social polarisation.’ [18] This is not to say that social history in general has not had a tremendously energising impact on our understanding of the Revolution: far from it. What it does suggest is that an undue sensitivity—to the exclusion of other aspects—to the ‘social’ side of the Revolution embodies the danger of an interpretation as unbalanced as the very conceptions it seeks to correct.
This is the picture of the state of play with regard to the historiography of the Russian Revolution by the end of the 1980s; our story, however, is as yet incomplete: There are two further fundamental factors that were need to take note of. The first—and most obvious—is the fact that in December 1991, with collapse of the USSR in the form of national disintegration, we saw the formal demise of the very entity that the Russian Revolution was to create. ‘Communism is Dead!’ was the banner headline splashed onto newspaper front pages world-wide. The second, and not entirely unrelated factor, is the rise of a new wave of ‘cold-war’ literature on the Revolution. For those who have welcomed the social-history interpretation of the Revolution, for all its short-comings, these are warnings against complacency.
It is the second of these occurrences that concerns us here. In 1990, the doyen of the old cold-war school, Richard Pipes, published a massive new history of the Revolution. [19] The work was intended by its author to leave a fundamental mark: ‘This book is the first in any language to present a comprehensive view of the Russian Revolution [...],’ was its rather grandiloquent first sentence. [20] This outlandishness persisted over the course of the book: Pipes’ essential aim was to dismantle every received notion about the Revolution that had emerged from the social-history period, and, in order to achieve this, he ignored practically every one of the significant contributions of recent historiography. The result, in Suny’s own description, was ‘a personal political vision, an indictment that is highly selective, uneven in its treatment, and eccentric in its emphases and omissions.’ [21] Yet, worryingly, the book did not receive the opprobrium it perhaps deserved. Reviewing it in The National Interest in the summer of 1991, Marc Raeff declared it ‘a magisterial and original synthesis’, and continued:
In the 1960s there arose a ‘revisionist’ historiography rooted in the methodology and presuppositions of avant-garde, Marxist-coloured, social history. [...] Unfortunately, although these works put into circulation an appreciable amount of new factual information, they are often marred by a ‘philosophy’ of history that assumes the inevitability of revolution and justifies the Bolshevik coup for allegedly reflecting the dynamics of the proletariat’s class consciousness and values. By ignoring this literature [...] Professor Pipes implies its irrelevance for a genuine understanding of events. [22]
A clearer statement of the stakes in the debate could not be wished for.
Thus, with a resurgence of the cold-war interpretation (perhaps now we need to label it the ‘new world order’ interpretation), in a broader context of an almost total discrediting of the ‘project’ of the Russian Revolution itself following the ignominious demise of the USSR, those of us who have any stake or interest in defending the Russian Revolution as a reflection of a genuine process of radicalisation and mass mobilisation, really do need to sharpen our arguments. And it is here that the ideological legacy of the very Stalinist interpretation itself is perhaps felt most forcefully. For, in the essay by Suny referred to right at the beginning of this survey, in the metaphor he drew between the differing interpretations of the Russian and the French Revolutions, he was very careful not to paint the direction of the debate in the Russian case as away from an anti-Marxism towards Marxism itself, but rather to describe it as gravitating towards, for example, ‘a social historical interpretation that reevaluted and considerably modified the concept of class.’ [23] This is not, I would judge, euphemism. For there is a very real reluctance—understandable perhaps—on the part of historians, often very radical historians, like Suny himself, to embrace the methodology associated with Marxism on any subject, let alone with regard to the Russian Revolution: the weight of the Stalinist legacy in this respect weighs heavy indeed. Yet I would suggest that this is precisely what is needed: that this is precisely the kind theoretical re-armament that is necessary for those who wish to resist the kind of onslaught that is being unleashed by Pipes and his co-thinkers.
As I suggested earlier, there is, as a product of the historic split that occurred in the international Communist movement over the course of the 1920s and 30s, more than one Marxist interpretation of the Russian Revolution (and more than one Marxism of any kind, in fact): the Stalinist interpretation, which now stands discredited, and rightly so, and the tradition, often obscured from view, represented by Trotsky, by Serge, and by Deutscher. It is this tradition, I would suggest, that needs to be reclaimed: it stands alone, of all the developed schools of interpretation, as the one least damaged by the results of the social-history excursions of the 1970s and 80s, and the latter can only benefit, I would argue, from an attempt to reclaim the heritage of the former.
Why is all this important? Well, it will be recalled that François Furet, in a seminal work of French Revolutionary anti-Marxist revisionism, declared that ‘the French Revolution is over’; [24] and the admonition by Richard Pipes himself right at the start of this survey is paradoxically directed against that very demand in the case of Russia. I included it because here I absolutely agree: one cannot simply lay events such as these to rest, and it is precisely because they concern not so much what has happened in the past but what is to happen in the future that one needs to address these issues. The Soviet Union may have gone, but the Russian Revolution is most decidedly not over; not, that is, while we continue to live in the kind of world that we do. And this is why it is essential to continue to rejoin the historiographical battles over the Revolution’s causes and consequences; Richard Pipes understands this, although come the day we shall be opposing barricades. The stakes are high in these debates, and the tasks necessary to win them are difficult. But won they must be; history, real history, will not be kind to us should we fail.
[1] Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899-1919 (London, 1990), xxiv.
[2] Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and its Critics’, American Historical Review 53 (1994) 165-82.
[3] Ibid., 165.
[4] Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, (Princeton, 1947); Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 1787-1799: From the Storming of the Bastille to Napoleon, (London, 1974). Space precludes any serious treatment of the historiography of the French Revolution here: for concise summary accounts see William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1980), 7-40; George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London, 1987), 5-27, 32-52; and Gwynne Lewis, The French Revolution: Rethinking the Debate (London, 1993), 106-13.
[5] See, for example, and a selection more representative than comprehensive: Bernard Pares, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy: A Study of the Evidence (London, 1939), David Shub, Lenin: A Biography (Harmondsworth, 1966, rev. edn.) (originally 1948), Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History (London, 1956) (originally 1948), and Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase, 1917-1922 (London, 1955). For useful accounts of the contours of this interpretation, see Walter Lacquer, The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History (London, 1967), 63-82, Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution (London, 1990), 35-39, and Suny, ‘Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917’, passim. I have deliberately refrained from commenting on the work of Richard Pipes at this point, although his contribution is a fundamental one, and his The Russian Revolution 1899-1919 occupies a central position in the debate; I shall, of course, return to him below.
[6] Which is not in itself sufficient to necessarily suggest any sinister intent. Much of the literature referred to above was—and, allowing for the passage of time, remains—of significant interpretative value: if its authors are guilty of anything it is of having a distinct political view. Indeed, in order to be able to retrieve what is of real value in this field an assessment of its ideological outlook is essential.
[7] For an account of the way that the Soviet historical profession was subjected to state political influence by the nascent Stalinist apparatus, see John Barber, Soviet Historians in Crisis, 1928-1932 (London and Basingstoke, 1981), especially 118-44.
[8] Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (London, 1977) (First published in English in 1932-33)
[9] For example: Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921 (London, 1954), Stalin: A Political Biography (Oxford, 1961), and The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967 (Oxford, 1967); Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution (London, 1972).
[10] One does, of course, run the risk of over-simplifying the picture in exercises such as these. There is, really, no room in this model for, in particular, E. H. Carr’s monumental and genuinely path-breaking history, especially the first three volumes covering the Revolution itself: The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, 3 vols. (London, 1950-3); but also perhaps the work of Moshe Lewin, especially his Lenin’s Last Struggle (London, 1969).
[11] Suny, ‘Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917’, 167.
[12] Representative of the best fruits of these developments in my view are: Ronald Grigor Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton, 1972); Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York, 1976); Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, 1981); David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime: From the February Revolution to the July Days, 1917 (London, 1983), and The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July 1918 (London, 1983); and Teodor Shanin, Russia as a ‘Developing Society’ (Basingstoke, 1985), and Russia, 1905-07: Revolution as a Moment of Truth (London, 1986).
[13] It should be noted that this is the current of Russian Revolutionary historiography that both Suny and others label ‘revisionist’ (Suny, ‘Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917’, 165; Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution, 44-48); to maintain a degree of consistency with my own argument, however, I am going to persist with my terminology and call this trend the ‘social-history’ one, which is admittedly far from strictly accurate, but still more consonant, I would suggest, with the actual patterns of the debate.
[14] ‘History with the politics left out’, was Trevelyan’s belligerent judgement; note also E. J. Hobsbawm’s remarks: ‘Social history can never be another specialisation like economic or other hyphenated histories because its subject matter cannot be isolated. [...] [T]he social or societal aspects of man’s [sic] being cannot be separated from the other aspects of his being, except at the cost of tautology or extreme trivialisation.’ (‘From Social History to the History of Society’, in E. J. Hobsbawm, On History (London, 1998), 99-100.)
[15] As Perry Anderson noted in a different context, tangential, but by no means irrelevant, to our discussion: ‘Today, when “history from below” has become a watchword in both Marxist and non-Marxist circles, and has produced major gains in our understanding of the past, it is nevertheless necessary to recall one of the basic axioms of historical materialism: that social struggles between classes is ultimately resolved at the political—not at the economic or cultural-level of society. [...] A “history from above” [...] is no less essential than a “history from below”: indeed, without it the latter in the end becomes one-sided (if the better side).’ (Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974), 11.)
[16] Suny, ‘Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917’, 177.
[17] Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution, 39-44; see also his ‘The Libertarians Vindicated? The Libertarian View of the Revolution in the Light of Recent Western Research’, in Edith Rogovin Frankel, Jonathan Frankel and Baruch Knei-Paz (eds.) Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917 (Cambridge, 1992), 388-405.
[18] Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Toward a Social History of the October Revolution’, American Historical Review 88 (1983), 46. Suny’s polemic here is in fact directed at John Keep’s The Russian Revolution, yet the problem is a common one.
[19] The Russian Revolution 1899-1919. Pipes’ ideological standpoint can perhaps be better appreciated by knowledge of the fact over 1981-2 he was the director of East European and Soviet Affairs for the National Security Council in the United States (then incumbent in the White House: one Ronald Reagan). That noted, however, it is also fair to point out that Pipes is the author of one of the genuinely path-breaking post-war works on the national question in the Russian Revolution: The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism 1917-1923 (New York, 1980, rev. edn.), originally published in 1954. Even though Pipes’ argument in the book was, unsurprisingly that: ‘Lenin’s theory of national self-determination, viewed as a solution to the national problem in Russia, was entirely inadequate. [...] Lenin looked upon national problems as something to exploit, and not as something to solve. But as a psychological weapon in the struggle for power [...] the slogan of self-determination [...] was to prove enormously successful. The outbreak of the Russian Revolution allowed the Bolsheviks to put it to considerable demagogic use [...]’ (49), it remains the case that this is still a work of real value.
[20] Ibid., xxi.
[21] Ronald Grigor Suny, review of Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899-1919, American Historical Review 96 (1991), 1582.
[22] Cited by Suny, ‘Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917’, 170.
[23] Ibid., 165.
[24] François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1981), 1.