E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923, 3 vols. (London, 1985), classic study of the revolution and civil war.
W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1987), reprint of well-informed, highly readable account.
B. Farnsworth, Alexandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution (Stanford, Calif., 1980), biography of leading feminist, and a useful introduction to the ‘women’s question’ in the early Soviet era.
M. Ferro, October 1917: A Social History of the Russian Revolution (London, 1980), examines the aspirations and expectations of different social groups.
O. Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside (Oxford, 1989), solid regional study of the peasantry’s role in the civil war.
———and B. I. Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The
Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, CT, 1999), exploration of the political culture emerging amidst the revolutionary upheavals of 1917.
S. Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of the Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge, 1970), standard account of cultural politics during the civil war.
P. Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking (Bloomington, Ind., 1999), on the six million refugees displaced during the First World War.
A. Gleason, P. Kenez, and R. Stites (eds.), Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), important collection of essays.
W. Husband, Revolution in the Factory: The Birth of the Soviet Textile Industry, 1917–1920 (New York, 1990), on workers, trade unions, and revolution.
H. F. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, NY, 1995), on the disintegration of a common sense of nationhood during the war.
J. L. H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization (New York, 1976), comprehensive synthesis.
D. P. Koenker and W. G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton, NJ, 1989), careful analysis of strikes and labour protest.
———and R. G. Suny (eds.), Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), valuable collection of essays.
M. McAuley, Bread and Justice (Oxford, 1991), broad-ranging study of Bolshevik policies and institution building in Petrograd.
M. McCauley (ed.), The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State, 1917–1921 (London, 1988), valuable collection of primary sources.
R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1991), anti-revisionist, political account.
———Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York, 1994), popular survey, casting blame on the intelligentsia and traditional Russian political culture for rise of authoritarianism.
A. Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 1968), close study of the July uprising in 1917.
D. J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922 (Princeton, NJ, 2002), in-depth study of a province during the civil war, with powerful evidence of its devastating impact.
———Revolution on the Volga (Ithaca, NY, 1986), case study of the 1917 Revolution in Saratov.
T. F. Remington, Building Socialism in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh, PA, 1984), on self-defeating attempts at mass mobilization.
R. Sakwa, Soviet Communists in Power (New York, 1988), on politics and government in Moscow during the civil war.
J. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb, Ill., 2003), on the role of the military in nation building in late Imperial and early Soviet periods.
J. Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–1923 (New York, 1999), reassessment of Bolshevik nationality policies, stressing improvization and the ad hoc nature of policy and its implementation at local level.
S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–18 (Cambridge, 1983), sensitive analysis of Petrograd workers during the revolution.
M. D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca, NY, 2002), examines literary works of ‘proletarian’ writers in late Imperial and early Soviet periods.
———(ed.), Voices of Revolution (New Haven, CT, 2001), valuable collection of primary documents, accompanied by interpretative text.
R. A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge, 2000), synthesizes the large volume of recent scholarship.
J. D. White, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921 (London, 1994), recent general account.
A. K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1980–7), massively researched, standard account of the devolution of the army in 1917.
10. THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY AND REVOLUTIONARY EXPERIMENT, 1921–1929
A. M. Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists (Berkeley, CA, 1987), analysis of NEP and ‘nepmany’.
———And Now my Soul Has Hardened (Berkeley, CA, 1994), study of the homeless orphans (bezprizorniki) during NEP.
F. L. Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (DeKalb, Ill., 2007), on the ‘sexual enlightenment’ campaign of doctors and public health workers in the 1920s.
E. H. Carr, The Interregnum, 1923–1924 (Harmondsworth, 1969), Socialism in One Country, 1924–1926, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1970), and (with R. W. Davies), Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1971–4), magisterial study of the first decade of Soviet rule.
W. J. Chase, Workers, Society, and the Soviet State (Urbana, Ill., 1987), on Moscow workers during the 1920s.
S. F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (Oxford, 1980), political and intellectual biography of leading Bolshevik.
V. P. Danilov, Rural Russia under the New Regime (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), analysis of peasants in the 1920s by the leading Russian agrarian historian.
J. Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924–1941 (New Haven, CT, 2005) on the role of Soviet authorities and an American Jewish organization in promoting Jewish agricultural communities in the Crimea and southern Ukraine.
S. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge, 1979), provocative study of social changes and formation of a new élite.
———A. Rabinowitch, and R. Stites (eds.), Russia in the Era of NEP (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), collection of essays by leading scholars.
C. Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922 (New York, 1986), valuable study of the artistic turmoil and experimentation in the 1920s.
J. Heinzen, Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917–1929 (Pittsburgh, PA, 2004), study of Commissariat of Agriculture and institution building in the countryside.