During my childhood and earliest formative years, when my father was at MIT, our family was an integral part of a vibrant Russian emigre community on the east coast of the United States. We spent summers in the lush Green Mountains of southern Vermont where my father bought a dacha, a summer home, not far from that of Michael Karpovich, a moderate socialist in 1917, an eminent Harvard historian, and the doyen of Russian historical studies in the United States. Some of my most vivid recollections of that time revolve around endless lunches and dinners on Karpovich's front porch at which some of the most prominent Russians then living in the United States discussed issues related to Russian history, literature, and current events—from such figures as Vladimir Nabokov to Alexander Kerensky, the last head of the Provisional Government that replaced the tsar in February 1917. At times, these conversations in Vermont developed into lively arguments. Yet there were some matters about which almost everyone agreed. Among these was that the October revolution, which had uprooted them was a military coup carried out by a tightly knit group of revolutionary fanatics led by Lenin and Trotsky, financed by the enemy Germans, and devoid of genuine popular support. Another point of broad agreement was that everything that flowed from "Red October" was an abomination and a global threat. Thus, while my lifelong interest in Russian history and culture grew out of these early family associations, especially from interactions with Karpovich and the Menshevik leader, historian, and principal archivist of Russian Social Democracy Boris Nicolaevsky, they left me with an uncompromisingly negative view of the Bolsheviks, the revolution that brought them to power, and, indeed, virtually the entire Soviet historical experience.
These critical attitudes toward most everything connected with the Bolsheviks and "Red October" were reinforced by the ever increasing climate of hostility toward the Soviet Union during my high school and college years [1948—1956]. These years coincided with the McCarthy era and the Korean War. Following college, these attitudes were further reinforced during my two years as an ROTC army officer. In the army, I was trained to think of the Soviet Union as the very incarnation of evil and the archenemy of the "free world."
I began formal study of Russian history first with the late Leopold Haimson at the University of Chicago, and then at Indiana University with the diplomatic historian John M. Thompson. Together, Haimson and Thompson awakened my interest in the Russian Revolution as a seminal political and social phenomenon worthy of serious study. Nonetheless, when the time came to pick a topic for my doctoral dissertation, my fundamental views about the Soviet Union and its birth remained unchanged. My first choice of dissertation topics was a biography of Iraklii Tsereteli, a prominent Georgian Menshevik, a minister in the Provisional Government, the de facto head of the moderate socialist bloc in the national soviet, and an inveterate enemy of Bolshevism. But after it became apparent that a full-scale biography of Tsereteli required knowledge of Georgian, I focused my doctoral research on Tsereteli during the political crises of spring and summer 1917, especially following the abortive July uprising. At that time, Tsereteli led an effort to buttress Kerensky and to criminalize the Bolsheviks as instigators of the attempted uprising and as paid agents of enemy Germany.
How then did I come to shift my interest from the fiercely anti-Bolshevik Tsereteli to his archenemies, the Bolsheviks? And, looking ahead, how did I come to make a sharp break with my initial views about the Bolsheviks and about the movement that brought them to power? Over the years, I have often been asked these questions and the answers are quite simple. My work with Haimson and Thompson had instilled in me a passion for gathering historical evidence as well as a commitment to being as honest as humanly possible in interpreting it. And the fact is that early on, I concluded that Tsereteli's view of the July uprising as no more than a failed Leninist coup was belied by the images that emerged starkly from the relatively limited body of primary source material then available to me—primarily contemporary Russian newspapers, published documents, and memoirs. Even before the fall of 1963, when I began a nine-month appointment as a graduate exchange student in Moscow, my main research interest had shifted from Tsereteli to the then still puzzling and controversial question of the Bolshevik role in the July 1917 uprising.
Some sources that had been available in the United States helped me to begin answering this question. They confirmed the momentous role played by Lenin in pointing the Bolsheviks squarely toward an early socialist revolution following his return to Russia in April 1917, with his well-known "April Theses." These theses were officially adopted at the Seventh All-Russian [Bolshevik Party] Conference. However, published records of the conference also revealed deep divisions about the revolution and revolutionary strategy still remaining among the party's top leaders after they were adopted—most importantly, among members of the newly elected Central Committee.2 An even more significant source for me was the detailed minutes of weekly meetings of the local Bolshevik Petersburg Committee in 1917. First published in 1927 but suppressed under Stalin and rarely consulted, they also reflected the diversity of political views within the Bolshevik Party organization then, as well as something else of no less importance, namely the Bolshevik Party's rapid growth from a small conspiratorial organization in the late tsarist era into a mass political party, firmly rooted in factories and barracks, after the fall of tsarism. This critically important, long-neglected source also reflected the party's relatively decentralized, flexible, and democratic structure and operational style in 1917 (which tended to make lower party bodies responsive to the evolving popular mood).3
Rare Bolshevik memoirs published in the relatively free 1920s and also available for study in the West strongly reinforced these images. Ironically, Nicolaevsky, who shared Tsereteli's demonic view of Lenin and of his central role in organizing the July uprising, steered me to the memoirs of Vladimir Nevskii, an important early historian of the Russian revolutionary movement and a Petrograd Bolshevik with whom Nicolaevsky had personal ties (Nevskii's writings helped document the independent role of the Bolshevik Military Organization in encouraging the July uprising against the wishes of Lenin and the Central Committee4).
Although access to Soviet archives was out of the question for Western historians like me until the Gorbachev era, my ten months as an exchange scholar in Moscow and Leningrad during the 1963—64 academic year proved indispensable in further clarifying still puzzling aspects of the Bolshevik role in the July uprising and shedding new light on broader fundamental questions stemming from my research regarding the structure and operation of the party and its relation to the growing restlessness unfolding at a popular level. For example, close comparison of the Central Committee's main newspaper, Pravda, and the Bolshevik Military Organization's Soldatskaia Pravda during the run-up to the July uprising (Soldatskaia Pravda had not been available in the West) documented the growing divergence between the tactical caution of the Central Committee and the radicalism of the Military Organization. Moreover, the pages of Soldatskaia Pravda as well as of the Kronstadt daily Izvestiia Kronshtadtskogo soveta during the weeks preceding the July uprising mirrored sharply rising unrest among soldiers of the Petrograd garrison and Baltic Fleet sailors and helped reveal crucial connections between it and the Bolshevik Military Organization's escalating militancy and resulting separatism. (Complete runs of both papers were available in what was then called the Lenin State Library in Moscow.)