A full bibliography listing the sources upon which The Bolsheviks Come to Power is based can be found at the end of this book. Western and Soviet/Russian historical research since its initial publication has contributed significantly to our knowledge of understudied aspects of the 1917 revolutions in Russia. Among important scholarly works published during this period are studies of the State Duma by A. V. Nikolaev;21 factory workers by Diane P. Koenker, S. A. Smith, David Mandel, Rex A. Wade, and Gennady Shkliarevsky;22 soldiers at the front by Allan K. Wildman, the army and Russian society generally by Joshua A. Sanborn, and Baltic Fleet sailors by Evan Mawdsley and Israel Getzler;23 the intelligentsia by O. N. Znamenskii;24 Bolshevik women by Barbara Evans Cle- ments;25 the revolution in the Russian Orthodox church by M. A. Babkin and P. G. Rogoznyi;26 the revolution outside Petrograd by Donald J. Raleigh, Orlando Figes, N. N. Kabutova, I. V. Narskii, Peter Holquist, Sarah Badcock, Aaron Re- tish, and V. P. Sapon;27 non-Bolshevik parties and groups by Lutz Hafner, Ziva Galili, S. V. Tiutiukin; and Michael S. Melancon;2® the Constituent Assembly by Oliver H. Radkey and L. G. Protasov;29 and key figures such as Leon Trotsky by Irving Howe, Baruch Knei Paz, and Pierre Broue; Aleksandr Shliapnikov by Barbara Allen; Alexander Kerensky by Richard Abraham, V. P. Fediuk, and S. V. Tiutiukin; General Lavr Kornilov by G. Z. Ioffe; and Paul Miliukov by Melissa Kirschke Stockdale.30
Interesting works applying cultural approaches to the revolutionary era include studies by Richard Stites, Frederick C. Corney, Boris Kolonitskii, and Orlando Figes coauthored with Boris Kolonitskii.31 Among especially valuable historiographical, bibliographical, and general studies are those by Edward Acton, Jonathan D. Smele, Marc Ferro, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, V. I. Startsev, Manfred Hildermeir, Christopher Read, S. V. Leonov, V. P. Buldakov, Rex A. Wade, D. Lieven, Joshua Sanborn, and Mark D. Steinberg.^ Since the implosion of the Soviet Union, many of the most valuable works relating to 1917 published in Russia have been comprehensive document collections and enormously useful reference works.33 An illuminating collection of documents relating to 1917 at a popular level is Mark D. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917.34 Beginning in 1988, a British scholarly journal, Revolutionary Russia, has been publishing important fresh research on the revolutionary era (especially the work of younger scholars).
The opening of Soviet archives beginning in 1990 and the implosion of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 led to the expectation of a flowering of illuminating scholarly studies related to the October revolution by historians in Russia stimulated by the sudden opportunity to carry out fresh basic research unhindered by ideological constraints and enlivened by meaningful collaboration with their Western colleagues. A promising first step in this direction was reflected in the convocation in January 1993, in St. Petersburg, of a large international scholarly conference to discuss central, controversial issues relating to the February and October 1917 Russian revolutions. Participating in this truly remarkable gathering were leading senior and younger Russian specialists on the revolutions, some sixty-one in all, and eighteen of their counterparts from the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Finland. As the conference proceedings show, free and lively discussions took place at all of the conference sessions.35
An important by-product of the contacts furthered by this conference was the preparation of the pioneering Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914—1921.36 Modeled after the Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution by Franfois Furet and Mona Ozouf,37 this volume consists of sixty-five essays on key aspects of the Russian revolutionary era by forty-seven authoritative scholars from Russia, the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, and Scotland, many of whom had participated in the 1993 conference in St. Petersburg. Together, the Petersburg conference and Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution helped stimulate a variety of collaborative international conferences and colloquia, collaborative publication projects, and close personal and fruitful professional associations that continue to flourish today. It is no exaggeration to say that at this point, relations between foreign and Russian scholars have been normalized. It is also difficult to overstate the immense scholarly importance and achievement embodied in the documents and reference works already mentioned.
However, with some important exceptions, the expectation that access to archives and the end of the Soviet era would stimulate a quick outpouring of meaningful scholarly research on the revolution by historians in Russia was not realized. Rather, in immediate post-Soviet Russia fundamental research on the subject was stunted by distaste for a subject that was and remains deeply politicized. Russian audiences were treated to a cascade of semi-fictional, sensationalist "exposes" of Bolsheviks and Bolshevism by journalists and popular writers rather than fresh professional scholarly studies. As reflected in the listing below of important scholarly monographs on the Russian revolutions that have appeared since the initial publication of The Bolsheviks Come to Power, this situation has begun to change. A particularly significant sign of this shift was an international colloquium organized in connection with the 1917 centenary in St. Petersburg in June 2016. Held at the European University in St. Petersburg, this important scholarly forum brought together Russian and Western historians of the Russian Revolution for the presentation and discussion of new, largely archival research on the general theme "The Epoch of War and Revolution (1914-1922)." Other international centenary symposia and conferences are being planned for St. Petersburg as well as Moscow and other leading Russian centers of learning. However, increased emphasis in contemporary Russia on stability, orthodoxy, nationalism, and authoritarianism militate against the possibility that the centenary will witness the explosion of fundamental scholarly research on the Russian revolutions of 1917 that might otherwise be expected.
In the West, to conservative Western historians like Harvard's Richard Pipes, the implosion of the Soviet system served to confirm the illegitimacy of its birth. In 1976, in a New York Times essay partly devoted to a review of The Bolsheviks Come to Power, Pipes had not attached any particular significance to the book, writing simply that it was "a scholarly work, based on professional research." Pipes continued: "The author concludes (rightly in my opinion) that a principal source of the Bolsheviks' success lay in their political flexibility that enabled them to respond to the rapidly changing moods of the masses," adding that "the book represents the fullest available account of the strategy and tactics which the Bolsheviks pursued in the capital city between July and October 1917 but at the same time . . . it does not significantly alter the view prevailing in Western works of how the power seizure was engineered or why it succeeded.'^8 Twenty-five years later, at the height of the American triumphalism that followed the demise of the Soviet Union, in an article titled "1917 and the Revisionists," Pipes moved swiftly to settle scores with Western historians like me. His article was one of a group of essays on the "Sins of the Scholars" in a special issue of the conservative magazine the National Interest devoted to an "autopsy" on "The Strange Death of Soviet Communism." In it, I was identified as "the true revisionist expert" and The Bolsheviks Come to Power was characterized as "no more than a rehash of the interpretation inflicted on the Soviet historical profession by the Communist party."39 Yet the prevailing triumphalist spirit did not lead to the repudiation of "revisionism" and/or the preparation of archival-based studies bolstering the traditional "consensus" that Pipes had confidently envisioned.