A Short History of the Russian Revolution

As a history graduate I have read a variety of books. My biggest passion is Russian history and I had been looking for a nice concise guide to the Revolution, especially with the 100th anniversary of it coming up.
This was well written, accessible (which can be incredibly hard for History books) and interesting.
I would definitely recommend this to someone who has an interest in the topic but does not want a bulky, heavy read.

This was a random read for me- having no particular interest in the topic! It's very readable and I found it very informative! In fact this book has made want to read more about it! A really interesting and informative read!

In this volume in the I.B. Tauris Short Histories series the reader gets, in the space of 232 pages, or just over 200 if you exclude footnotes, bibliography and index, not only a punchy summary of Swain’s long research in the field but a distillation of scholarly debate on the Russian Revolution.

The argument is lucid and up front, with Swain stating his twin theses in his introduction, namely, that “as Soviet scholars once argued … the October Revolution represented the culmination of those revolutionary ambitions first articulated by Russia’s masses during the failed 1905 Revolution” and that, “unlike any Soviet scholarship”, the Bolsheviks directed the masses “along an unnecessary path which led to dictatorship and terror”. The latter claim is uncontentious but the first is very contentious indeed.

In seeking to make his case Swain rejects the orthodox western Cold War view, associated with Leonard Schapiro and Richard Pipes, that October 1917 was a Bolshevik coup, and in Trotskyite declamatory mode asserts that his book “will not consign … to the dustbin of history” the contrary views of social historians such as Steve Smith and William Rosenberg on the proletariat, Rex Wade on Red Guards, Alan Wildman on soldiers, Graeme Gill on the peasantry and Moira Donald and Sarah Badcock on women. To this end Swain charts “rising impatience with Kerensky’s Government” on the part of the populace “as October … approached.”

Stated in these terms there is little with which to disagree but there is, however, a world of difference between “impatience” and revolutionary intent. It is clear that by October 1917 the Provisional Government had very few friends and even fewer willing to risk their lives in its defence. It is also possible to argue convincingly that the masses gave their tacit support to the Bolshevik takeover, not least attracted by a false prospectus centred on ‘Peace, Bread, Land’ and ‘All Power to the Soviets’. That does not, however, alter the fact that the seizure of power in October was actually accomplished not by the masses but by an elitist party. After all, the basic rationale of the Bolshevik party was that it had to act in the interests of and on behalf of the proletariat because the latter was prey to a false consciousness which militated against its achieving its historic mission of realizing proletarian revolution.

Swain’s book faces stiff opposition from volumes such as Sheila Fitzpatrick’s ‘The Russian Revolution’ (now in its third edition) and S. A. Smith’s ‘The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction’. In terms of scholarship, brevity and clarity it faces that challenge well but it is in terms of passion that some will feel it falls down, while others feel it has an edge. This reader disagrees with some of Swain’s conclusions but nevertheless admires the vigour with which they’re argued. At the very least the book lives up to the admirable aspiration of the series to which it belongs, never to be bland.