Not until close to the end of the two-decades-long Brezhnev era did bold and progressive younger Soviet historians in Moscow and Leningrad begin to distinguish openly between Western historians who remained wedded to traditional Cold War stereotypes of the October revolution and an emerging group of "revisionist" historians like myself who, in their view, were earnestly attempting to be thorough and politically detached in their studies. With the advent of perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev, this tentative, limited acceptance of divergent interpretations of the revolution went significantly further. In October 1989, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, in a Russian translation, became the first Western study of the October revolution to be published in the Soviet Union.!8
I remember the day that the first Russian edition was officially launched in a packed auditorium at the Progress publishing house in central Moscow as one of the most satisfying of my life. Present for the occasion were surviving old Bolsheviks and their families, including the wife and children of Nikolai Bukharin, a sprinkling of dissidents and journalists, and many Soviet historians. Previously, I had wrapped copies of my books in plain brown envelopes and buried them at the very bottom of my suitcase in the hope of getting a few of them past Soviet border guards and into the hands of Russian colleagues with only very mixed success. Now a hundred thousand copies were about to go on sale to readers in the Soviet Union—the very audience I most wanted to reach. I later learned that this first Russian-language edition of The Bolsheviks Come to Power sold out in a few weeks. In recent years, I have frequently been told by colleagues in Russia that The Bolsheviks Come to Power is required reading for Russian intellectuals seriously interested in the history of the revolution.19
Another especially memorable moment in my professional life occurred in June 1991, when the heretofore undreamed of happened, and I was unexpectedly given permission to work in Soviet historical archives. This was all the more fortuitous because at that time I had reached a premature dead end on the book project I had been working on since the publication of The Bolsheviks Come to Power—a study of the earliest development of the authoritarian, one-party controlled Soviet political system. My fundamental problem in completing research for that book stemmed from the fact that the multiplicity of published sources that had proven to be so important for my work on 1917 simply didn't exist for 1918. Apart from the fact that all but the official, carefully controlled Soviet and Communist press was essentially shut down by early that year, it was such a difficult and depressing time for the ruling Communists that relatively very few memoir or documentary accounts relating to it were prepared, let alone published. Moreover, toward the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, some ambitious and highly relevant archival publication projects begun in the mid-1920s were stopped before seeing the light of day. The opportunity to work in Soviet historical archives, then, came as a godsend! Now at my disposal were mountains of fascinating, essentially never-before-examined primary sources, including internal records of the government, party, secret police, and Red Army and Red Fleet, as well as trade unions and factories. However, these new, unforeseen possibilities also posed a dilemma for me. Should I now suspend my research on the emergence of the Soviet political system and update my book on the October revolution based on the archival sources suddenly available? As prophetically suggested by John Keep in his review of Prelude to Revolution, after studying a representative sample of archival documents, I concluded that although they would provide fresh information, they would not alter my basic findings. Therefore, I resumed my research on the post-October period. The first product of this newer research, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd, appeared simultaneously in the United States and Russia in 2007.20 I am now completing the final volume in this series, tentatively titled The Bolsheviks Survive: Government and Crises in Civil War Petrograd.