6 - Conclusion: understanding the Russian Revolution

Summary

If the views of so many American students about revolutions and revolutionary change were not still so firmly rooted in notions of political subversion and communist conspiracies, it would be less distressing (and distinctly less important) to urge a “rethinking” of 1917. Yet as the contributors to this volume have emphasized, Alexander Kerensky's view that “only by way of conspiracy, only by way of a treacherous armed struggle was it possible to break up the Provisional Government and stop the establishment of a democratic system …” is still broadly held; and similar arguments are frequently made about Nicaragua, Cuba, Vietnam, China, and other areas where social revolutions have helped propel Lenin's followers to power. Both the conceptual and factual weaknesses of this emphasis on subversion and conspiracy should now be apparent. So should the consequences in the contemporary world of perspectives and policies based on inadequate understanding of the relationships between political and social change. The complexities of such connections and the difficulties in perceiving them, sometimes offered after the fact as explanation of why things went wrong, only reinforce the need for serious, open-minded study, and the importance of asking ourselves what “wrong” means in revolutionary situations.

We need not dwell by way of conclusion on the factual weaknesses of the overemphasis on conspiratorial politics. As Professors Suny, Smith, and Koenker show very well, conspiracy explanations fail to appreciate both the development of social and institutional foundations of Bolshevik power in urban Russia, and the corollary deterioration of the provisional regime's own institutional (or “infrastructural”) base, ignoring in the process that Lenin came to power without significant resistance.