Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914-1921 (Hodder Arnold Publication) [Paperback]

Edward Acton (Editor), Vladimir Cherniaev (Editor), William Rosenberg (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0340763655 | ISBN-13: 978-0340763650 | Publication Date: February 2, 2001

The "Companion" constitutes a landmark in the study of the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Civil War. Published in parallel in English and Russian, it provides direct access to modern research on the subject. It is able to reflect the impact on the study of the Revolution made by the collapse of the USSR; much freer access to the archives; current concern with the analysis of language, discourse and identity; and the new opportunities for collaboration between Russian and non-Russian specialists drawn from across the world.

Edward Acton, Professor of Modern European History, University of East Anglia, UK

 

William G Rosenberg, Professor of Modern Russian and Soviet History, University of Michigan,

 

Vladimir Cherniaev, Institute of Russian History, RAN, St Petersburg, Russia

The "Companion" constitutes a landmark in the study of the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Civil War. Published in parallel in English and Russian, it provides direct access to modern research on the subject. It is able to reflect the impact on the study of the Revolution made by the collapse of the USSR; much freer access to the archives; current concern with the analysis of language, discourse and identity; and the new opportunities for collaboration between Russian and non-Russian specialists drawn from across the world.

"One of the most comprehensive surveys of the new information becoming available about the Russian Revolution and the new interpretations of the revolutionary period."—Kirkus Reviews

"One of the most comprehensive surveys of the new information becoming available about the Russian Revolution and the new interpretations of the revolutionary period."—Kirkus Reviews

"A landmark reference work."—Lingua Franca

"Breaks the mold of the anti-soviet paradigm."—Library Journal

"It is well edited, and the historians are well chosen...the collection as a whole provides a succint exposition of the different interpretations of key issues."—The Economist

"The truly impressive work is an invaluable addition to studies of the Russian Revolution, a book one hopes will find its way into all college and university libraries as well as into public libraries and personal collections."—Slavic Review

"Acton and his colleagues deserve great credit for bringing together the best of contemporary expertise on a host of historical problems."—English Historical Review

"A great accomplishment that will be useful to every student of the period for many years to come."—The Russian Review

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Drawing on the work of dozens of scholars from Russia, Europe, Japan, and the United States, this encyclopedic volume provides a useful overview of the early years of the Soviet Union. Among the topics covered are the collapse of the moderate Kerensky government and the rise of Bolshevik power, the sweeping militarization of Soviet society (the Red Army had 4,400,000 regulars in 1920), and the contribution of members of the Russian intelligentsia to the apparatus of the Soviet state. Students of Soviet history will find this compendium, which weighs in at nearly 800 pages, to be a valuable resource. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

The three editors of this massive volume?Acton (modern European history, Univ. of East Anglia, Norwich), Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev (Inst. of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg), and William G. Rosenburg (modern Russian and Soviet history, Univ. of Michigan)?have collected here 68 entries from 46 leading historians about the Russian Revolution. While all works on this topic appearing in the past five or six years (e.g., Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy, Viking, 1997, pap., and Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution, LJ 10/1/95) claim to use newly opened Soviet archives, the difference, claimed by Acton, is that those authors were slaves of the old historical wave?reaction to Soviet invented history?resurrected in the early 1980s as the traditional Western view. This new volume breaks the mold of the anti-Soviet paradigm. Recommended for academic libraries.?Harry V. Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. System, Iola
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 800 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (February 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0340763655
• ISBN-13: 978-0340763650
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,975,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent but loosely coordinated essays, December 30, 1999

By 

Victor A. Vyssotsky "mandvav" (Orleans, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914-1921 (Hardcover)

This book is a necessary addition to the library of anyone who already knows a fair amount about the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War. It provides for the first time in one volume the advances in understanding that result from availability of Soviet archives and close cooperation between Western and Russian scholars. It also points out numerous topics on which further research would be useful.

However, it has its flaws. Some topics are covered redundantly in various essays, and not always the ones one would expect; other topics get inadequate attention. Makhno's anarchist army in Ukraine, for example, is barely mentioned in Mark von Hagen's essay on Ukraine, given an unsympathetic paragraph in Vladimir Chernaiv's essay on anarchists, and a longer and somewhat more useful paragraph in Orlando Figes' essay on peasant armies. Given that at times Makhno's army was the most effective military force in Eastern Ukraine, and that all other combatants in Ukraine had to worry about what Makhno was going to do next, this is fragmented and incomplete treatment of an important topic. As another example, the description of what happened in Latvia between 1917 and 1920 is seriously incomplete; the bitter division between pro-Bolshevik and Latvian nationalist elements is not brought out clearly, nor is the intensity of the war that took place in Latvia, with many Latvians, German troops (the von der Goltz Iron Division) and some Russians (the Bermondt-Avalov force) on one side, and the Latvian Bolsheviks and the Red Army on the other. One would not guess from this book how disastrous this was for Latvia; by the end of the fighting, about half the population of Latvia had fled the country or died.

Rather than cite other such topics, I'll turn to the observation that most of the bibliographies of these essays consist mainly of secondary rather than primary sources. This is a drawback in a book which implicitly assumes that the reader already has a general familiarity with the subject matter. To be sure, not all primary sources that presumably exist are accessible even now; in particular, one suspects that somewhere in British government archives are documents that would clear up various puzzling issues. But there is a conspicuous lack of references to the extensive German political and military archives related to the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Indeed, the German role is so incompletely treated that one suspects some of the authors are, quite understanably, not familiar with this material. But from 1917 through mid-1919 the Germans deliberately shifted their weight to keep any of the forces contesting for power in Russia from winning a clear victory; the Germans occupied here, distributed weapons there, stirred up trouble over yonder, and generally tried to make sure that revolution and civil war in Russia would not spread to Germany. A careful discussion of German policy and its effects on the course of events in the first half of the Russian Civil War would be extremely helpful; lacking that, a good bibliography of the primary sources in German would be most useful.

Despite these criticisms, the book is a big step forward in understanding what really happened and who did what to whom in the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War. I hope that a decade or two from now there will be a second edition clarifying some of the topics not easily understood from this first edition.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Critical Companion to Russian Revolutions, January 13, 2003

By 

Valentine Michael Smith "VMSMITH" (Phoenix, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914-1921 (Hardcover)

This is a solid, definitive, wide-ranging and in-depth look at the Revolutions told from a variety of viewpoints, ideologies and mindsets. Modeled after the Foucoult/Ozuf Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, this is an excellently assembled book, with very current material, well worth having by any scholar of this period.