The findings of my doctoral dissertation research were reflected in my first book, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising.:5 Following its appearance, Soviet historians labeled me a "bourgeois falsifier" for raising doubts about the Bolsheviks' fundamental unity behind Lenin. However, most Western reviewers of the book seemed persuaded by my depiction of the July uprising as a valid reflection of popular frustration with the meager results of the February revolution, which was encouraged and supported by radical elements in the Bolshevik Military Organization and the Petersburg Committee. Most also accepted my conclusion that although the uprising was in part the outgrowth of months-long Bolshevik anti-government agitation and propaganda, it erupted against the wishes of the Central Committee, some of whose members, like Lenin, were justifiably fearful that the overthrow of the Provisional Government would be opposed by the vast majority of peasants in the provinces and loyalist soldiers at the front, and others, like Lev Kamenev, who remained convinced that a socialist revolution in backward Russia was premature. At the time, Bolshevik moderates along with the Menshevik-Internationalists and Left SRs, were concerned most of all with not undermining construction of the strongest possible anti-government alliance of left-socialist parties and groups pending convocation of a representative Constituent Assembly.
Prelude to Revolution was published during a period when neo-Stalinist approaches to history were reimposed following Nikita Khrushchev's ouster in 1964. As in the Stalin era, Soviet historians were again tasked with "exposing" Western historians of the revolution as "bourgeois falsifiers." Typical of the hostile attacks on me at this time was a review article, "The Events of July 1917 in Contemporary Bourgeois Historiography," by the Moscow historian N. V. Romanovskii. Romanovskii summarily dismissed the legitimacy of my source base, rejected out of hand all my findings regarding the underlying causes and character of the July movement, and, most importantly, blasted my view of differences in the behavior of top Bolshevik leaders in 1917, particularly as it related to the important independent role of ultra-radical Bolsheviks in the Petersburg Committee and Military Organization and their differences with Leninists and party moderates during the run-up to and eruption of the July uprising. "The correct approach to differing opinions existing within the party," Romanovskii insisted, "should be based on the fact that at no time did they disrupt the programmatic and organizational unity of the Bolshevik party, or deter it from following the course set by Lenin."6 Happily for me, Western reviewers of Prelude to Revolution were more generous than their Soviet counterparts. Most praised my book for providing a compelling, solidly documented explanation of the previously puzzling role of the Bolsheviks in the July uprising. Thus, Marc Ferro, the leading French historian of the Russian Revolution, commented in Annales that I had "broken through the protective wall surrounding the history of the Communist Party during the revolution of 1917." "Pursuing clues like a true Sherlock Holmes," he went on, I had "discovered and proven the unexpected—that in July 1917, the Bolshevik party was not a centralized disciplined organization and was divided not only by strategic and theoretical conflicts but also by the existence of relatively autonomous party branches."7
The Israeli historian Israel Getzler concluded that Prelude to Revolution made the July uprising "intelligible as the runaway climax of uncoordinated and contradictory Bolshevik policies and activities," at the same time that one of the doyens of American historians of modern Russia, Nicholas V. Riazanovsky, praised the book for its "objectivity, judiciousness, and sure handling of the evidence."8 Pointing to the July crisis as a major turning point in the revolution as well as to the thoroughness and fairness of my research, the British historian John L. H. Keep concluded that had I been given access to archives, my account of developments at the regimental or factory level might have been fuller, but that "it was doubtful that there were party documents hidden from view that would have significantly altered my conclusions."9 In a similar vein, Keep's American colleague Theodore H. Von Laue added that Prelude to Revolution demonstrated that "sound scholarly investigations of critical moments and issues in 1917 were both possible and profitable, even under existing [source] limitations."10
Despite the strong public criticism of Prelude to Revolution by Soviet historians and renewed strictures on historical research during the Brezhnev era my access to the huge trove of contemporary newspapers and rare published documents and memoirs necessary for the completion of my research in the Soviet Union for my next project on October itself, presented in The Bolsheviks Come to Power, was essentially unimpeded.n In conducting this research, I utilized the analytical framework relating to the character, structure, and operation of the Bolshevik Party, and its relationship to popular political behavior, that had proven to be so fruitful in clarifying the development of the July uprising. Much of my research for the book was carried out in major Moscow and Leningrad libraries during the late 1960s and early 1970s. A year as a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, Princeton, provided the time necessary to finish writing it. Initially published in the United States in 1976, it has since been republished in multiple English and foreign-language editions. Moreover, in addition to this new Haymarket Books edition, centennial French and Italian editions of the book have been or are about to be published.
As readers will see, my findings in The Bolsheviks Come to Power clashed with earlier Western views of the October revolution as no more than a classic military coup d'etat, directed by Lenin and Trotsky and carried out by a small, disciplined band of revolutionary fanatics without significant popular support. Yet most non-Soviet reviewers seemed persuaded by my depiction of the October revolution as the outgrowth of skyrocketing popular dissatisfaction with the conservative, if not openly counterrevolutionary, policies of the Provisional Government and, concomitantly, of the immense and expanding attraction of the Bolshevik political platform, which called for immediate peace, the elimination of food shortages, fundamental land reform, and transfer of all governmental power to democratic, multiparty soviets pending timely convocation of an elective, representative Constituent Assembly. Most Western reviewers also accepted my view, foreshadowed in Prelude to Revolution, of the Bolshevik Party in 1917 as a mass, relatively democratically structured and operated political organization, with close interactive ties to factory workers, soldiers, and sailors, and tolerant of diversity within its top leadership. Moreover, they found compelling my depiction of "Red October" as less a classic armed uprising or coup d'etat masterminded by Lenin and led by Trotsky—although, to repeat, their leadership at critical moments was absolutely essential—than the successful outcome of a cleverly developed political and strictly limited military operation that succeeded because of its responsiveness to the prevailing popular mood and existing correlation of forces. Prominent literary and social critic Irving Howe characterized The Bolsheviks Come to Power as "the best volume on the Russian Revolution in years." "What is so valuable about the book," he explained, "is that it undoes both rigid stereotypes: that of Leninism as inherently 'correct,' pointing straight toward revolutionary triumph, and of Leninism as always rigidly authoritarian, pointing straight toward dictatorship."^ Reviewing The Bolsheviks Come to Power for the New Republic, Robert Rosenstone, the noted writer, filmmaker, and specialist on the relationship between film and history, pointed to the book's narrative power. As he put it, "Rabinowitch explains in great detail the inner workings of the Bolshevik party. . . . We enter the rooms where the Central Committee heatedly debates alternative positions, then watch party members in other settings, at local soviets, in factories, at meetings of the Duma, at diverse convocations of political groups. . . . [T]he overall effect is exciting, moving, alive with the realization that more than a clash between arms, the Revolution was a battle among words, ideas, beliefs."13 The well-known contemporary American political scientist and historian Stephen F. Cohen praised The Bolsheviks Come to Power as "revisionist scholarship in the best and truest sense." "Both political and social history," he continued, "it greatly expands our detailed knowledge of the turbulent events of 1917, while deepening and revising our understanding of the Bolshevik party and the social factors that brought it to power.'44 Concluding a review of The Bolsheviks Come to Power, the late Allan Wildman, the leading Western scholar of the revolutionary process in the Russian army, wrote that "It is my estimate that [Rabinowitch] has permanently and fundamentally altered our perception of Bolshevism in 1917, something which has been long overdue."i5 According to a writer in the Economist, "[Rabinowitch] sets out to establish exactly what happened . . . and it could hardly have been better done.'46 In a letter to me, written on November 9, 1976, not long after the publication of The Bolsheviks Come to Power, the distinguished diplomat and historian George F. Kennan wrote that the book "is clearly the finest and most comprehensive history of the November revolution and its background to have appeared in any language," and expressed certainty that one day "it will make a profound and beneficial impression in Russia." "It is a striking fact that Russians who in the future want to learn about the early history of Soviet power in their country," he went on, "are going to have to turn to Americans—to yourself, Steve Cohen, Moshe Lewin, and others—for their instruction."!7 In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's implosion a quarter century later, Kennan's prophesy turned out to be remarkably accurate. For the time being, however, hostility toward my work, as nearly as could be discerned, remained unchanged; the appearance of The Bolsheviks Come to Power triggered intensified attacks.