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Rethinking Political Agency in the Russian Revolution: A View from the Russian Empire's Borderlands

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Wiktor Marzec, Rising Subjects: The 1905 Revolution and the Origins of Modern Polish Politics (Pittsburgh, 2020).
Eric Blanc, Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics across the Russian Empire (1882–1917) (Leiden, 2021).
Brendan McGeever, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, 2019).

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2023

Inna Shtakser
Inna Shtakser*
Affiliation:
Researcher, Tel-Aviv University
*
E-mail:[email protected]
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Abstract

The four books under review challenge the revolutionary leadership-centered view of the Russian Revolution from various perspectives. Specifically, they highlight the influence on revolutionary politics of seemingly peripheral groups such as workers and Jewish revolutionary activists. Each of the authors claims that the agendas of these groups were considerably more important than the agendas of the revolutionary leadership in ensuring the success or the failure of revolutionary policies.

Type
Review Essay
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 102: Workers and Obsolescence , Fall 2022 , pp. 260 - 266
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2023

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References

Notes

1. See for example, Budnitskii, Oleg, Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites, 1917–1920 (Philadelphia, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frankel, Jonathan, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Engelstein, Laura, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914–1921 (Oxford, 2017)Google Scholar. Although some of these works emphasize the political agency of workers, Jews, and Jewish workers, this agency is always expressed as a product of interaction with the revolutionary leadership.

2. Wildman, Allan K., The Making of the Workers’ Revolution: Russian Social Democracy. 1891–1903 (Chicago, 1967)Google Scholar.