Since the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union the historiography of revolutionary Russia has developed a distinct provincial turn. The opening of Soviet central and provincial archives provided new research opportunities to historians. Numerous articles and volumes focusing on Russia’s provinces have since appeared on both sides of the former Soviet border, and the historiography of the Russian revolution matured with an accelerated speed to account for multiple local variables. The understanding of multiplicity of local experiences profoundly changed and challenged the historical interpretations of the crisis that played out in Russia from 1917 to 1921. The article discusses the variety of local revolutionary experiences as they are revealed in recent historiography, but also focuses on some larger themes and issues where this regional perspective provides new insights and affects the general understanding of the Russian revolution. In particular, it discusses the factors contributing to the disintegration and reconstruction of the state, including the patterns and meaning of power in a provincial context, mechanisms of popular mobilization in the civil-war period including in Russia’s non-Russian regions, as well as transition to peace.
To answer this question the author analyses the nature of the revolutionary crisis in Russian traditional agrarian society and possibilities to overcome it by using different legal reform strategies. This bulk of social technologies was elaborated by Imperial administration in the period of Great Reforms and practically used at the beginning of XX-th Century in order to enforce agrarian transformation and to stop the Revolution in Russia. In the situation of unstable social balance, which is typical for all countries under modernization, danger of the revolutionary break was not fatal and could be avoided by skillful reformers. From this point of view the author makes representation of variable parameters of revolutionary conflict, analyses mistakes of liberal reformers and legal possibilities to overcome the revolutionary crisis of 1917.
The chapter is devoted to the history of Russian Jews in the Period of War I, Revolution, and Civil War (1914-1920).
This is a review of Rendle's scholarly study of Russian tsarist elites in 1917. The review analyses the main argument and the evidence provided in the book.