The Cold War convictions that Soviet expansionism had forced a reluctant United States to turn from isolationism to a global containment policy, that the Cold War was almost entirely the fault of Stalin's territorial and political ambitions and that if left unchecked by Western power Communism would conquer the world were seriously challenged in the i960s by a revisionist scholarship on the origins of the Cold War. Moderate revisionists allotted blame for the division of the world to both superpowers, while more radical revisionists proposed that the United States, in its dedication to 'making the world safe for free market capitalism', was the principal culprit. The historians who wrote the new Cold War histories were almost exclusively historians of American foreign policy who had only limited knowledge of Soviet history and no access to Soviet archives. No parallel history from the Soviet side would be available until the end of the Cold War. Yet the revisionist undermining of the orthodox liberal consensus profoundly affected many young scholars who were then able to interrogate hitherto axiomatic foundational notions about the Soviet Union and the nature of communism.
Beginning in the late i960s, younger historians of Russia, primarily in the United States, began to dismantle the dominant political interpretation of the i9i7 Revolution, with its emphasis on the power of ideology, personality and political intrigue, and to reconceptualise the conflict as a struggle between social classes. The older interpretation, largely synthesised by anti- Bolshevik veterans of the revolution, had argued that the Russian Revolution was an unfortunate intervention that ended a potentially liberalising political evolution of tsarism from autocracy through constitutional reforms to a Western-style parliamentary system. The democratic institutions created in February i9i7 failed to withstand the dual onslaught from the Germans and the Leninists and collapsed in a conspiratorial coup organised by a party that was neither genuinely popular nor able to maintain itself in power except through repression and terror. Informed by participants' memoirs, a visceral anti-Leninism and a steady focus on political manoeuvring and personalities, this paradigm depicted Bolsheviks as rootless conspirators representing no authentic interests of those who foolishly followed them.
The social historians writing on 1917 in the 1970s and 1980s proposed a more structuralist appreciation of the movements of social groups and a displacement of the former emphasis on leaders and high politics. By looking below the political surface at the actions and aspirations of workers and soldiers, they revealed a deep and deepening social polarisation between the top and bottom of Russian society that undermined the Provisional Government by preventing the consolidation of a political consensus - Menshevik leader Iraklii Tsereteli's concept of an all-national unity of the 'vital forces' of the country - so desired by moderate socialists and liberals. Rather than being dupes of radical intellectuals, workers articulated their own concept of autonomy and lawfulness at the factory level, while peasant soldiers developed a keen sense of what kind of war (and for what regime) they were willing to fight. More convincingly than any of their political opponents, the Bolsheviks pushed for a government of the lower classes institutionalised in the soviets, advocated workers' control over industry and an end to the war. By the early autumn of 1917, a coincidence of lower-class aspirations and the Bolshevik programme resulted in elected Leninist majorities in the soviets of both Petrograd and Moscow and the strategic support of soldiers on the northern and western fronts. But, after a relatively easy accession to power, the Bolsheviks, never a majority movement in peasant Russia, were faced by dissolution of political authority, complete collapse of the economy and disintegration of the country along ethnic lines. As Russia slid into civil war, the Bolsheviks embarked on a programme of regenerating state power that involved economic centralisation and the use of violence and terror against their opponents.
The political/personality approach of the orthodox school, revived later in Pipes's multi-volume treatment, usually noted the social radicalisation but offered no explanation of the growing gap between the propertied classes and the demokratiia (as the socialists styled their constituents), except the disgust of the workers, soldiers and sailors with the vacillations ofthe moderate socialists and the effectiveness of Bolshevik propaganda.[112] Historians of Russian labour described the growing desperation of workers after the inflationary erosion of their wage gains of the early months of the revolution and the lockouts and closures of factories. The parallel radicalisation of soldiers turned the ranks against officers as the government and the moderate leadership of the soviets failed to end the war. As the revolutionary year progressed, tsentsovoe obshchestvo (propertied society) and the liberal intelligentsia grew increasingly hostile towards the lower classes and the plethora of committees and councils, which they believed undermined legitimately constituted authority. Taken together these works demonstrated that the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 with considerable popular support in the largest cities of the empire. What remained a matter of dispute was the degree, consistency, durability and meaning of that support.
Recognising that revolutions, by their very nature, are illegitimate, extra- legal actions overthrowing constituted political regimes, social historians did not explicitly pose the question of their 'legitimacy' as if Soviet power required the sanction of academic historians. On the other hand, the 'political conspiratorial' interpretation, dominant in the West for the first fifty years of Soviet power, implied the illegitimacy ofthe Communist government and contained within it a powerful argument for political opposition to the Soviet regime. Conservative historians, such as Malia and Pipes, rejected the notion that the revolution 'had gone wrong' in the years after Lenin or been 'betrayed' by Stalin, and argued instead that 'Stalin was Lenin writ large, and there cannot be a democratic source to return to'.[113] In the late 1980s and 1990s Soviet intellectuals, disillusioned by the economic and moral failures ofthe Soviet system, found these views, as well as the concept of totalitarianism, consonant with their own evolving alienation from Marxism. When Gorbachev proposed a rereading of Soviet history but tried to limit the critique to Stalinism, daring intellectuals opened (after 1987) a more fundamental attack on the legacy of the revolution. The interpretation of the October seizure of power as either a coup d'etat without popular support or as the result of a fortuitous series of accidents in the midst of the 'galloping chaos' of the revolution re-emerged, first among Soviet activists and politicians, journalists and publicists and later in the West in the discussion around the publication of Pipes's own study of the Revolutions of 1917.[114] Yet most Western specialists writing on the revolution considered the thesis that the revolution was popular, both in the sense of involving masses of people and broad support for Soviet power (if not the Bolshevik party itself), 'incontrovertible'.[115]
112
Richard Pipes,
113
Martin Malia, 'The Hunt for the True October',
114
An earlier version of the accidental nature of the October Revolution can be found in Robert V Daniels,