The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917 (Part One)

Abstract

When a student of the origins of 1917 looks back through the literature that appeared on the subject during the 1920’s and early 1930’s, he is likely to be struck by the degree of consensus in Soviet and Western treatments of the problem on two major assumptions. The first of these, then almost as widely entertained by Western as by Soviet historians, was that, just like other “classical” revolutions, the Revolution of 1917 had to be viewed, not as a historical accident or even as the product of immediate historical circumstances, but as the culmination of a long historical process–stretching back to the abolition of serfdom, if not to the appearance at the beginning of the nineteenth century of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. The second, balancing, assumption, which even Soviet historians were then still usually prepared to accept, was that, notwithstanding its deep historical roots, this revolutionary process had been substantially accelerated by the additional strains imposed on the Russian body politic by the First World War.