Sean McMeekin is the author of the new book The Russian Revolution: A New History. His other books include The Ottoman Endgame and July 1914. He is a professor of history at Bard College, and he lives in Red Hook, New York.
Q: You write, "An event as consequential as the Russian
Revolution will always be used and abused in political argument..." Why
did you decide to write this new history of the Russian Revolution, and what
are some of the most common ways the Russian Revolution has been used in
arguments over the past 100 years?
Q: The most obvious "uses" of the revolution in
political arguments took place in the Cold War years, when a historian's views
on the events of 1917 were difficult to disentangle from one's views of Soviet
Communism more generally.
Fairly or unfairly, those taking a critical line on Lenin
and the Bolsheviks in 1917 were often dismissed as "Cold Warriors,"
while those who defended their actions were often criticized or lumped together
as "Soviet sympathizers."
To give a specific example, the issue of German financial
support for Lenin in 1917, which was given new life when captured German
documents were discovered and published in the 1960s, became thoroughly
politicized, in drearily predictable ways.
It would be naive to think that it is possible to write an
entirely dispassionate, "apolitical" history of the something as
controversial as the Russian Revolution.
Nonetheless, I do think it is possible today, more than a
quarter-century after end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union,
to examine the events of 1917 on their own terms.
Historians have now had more than two decades to investigate
and evaluate new material from the Russian archives opened in 1991. It
seemed to me that the time was ripe for a new synthesis of the available
evidence.
Q: How do you think your book differs from past
interpretations of the Revolution?
A: The main leitmotif of my book is the battle for the soul
of the army during a year when, after all, Russia found herself in the middle
of a world war, with more than seven million active-duty soldiers at the front
and several million more in the rear.
Because the revolution became so politicized, and western
historians were denied access to original documentation for so long, the war
tended to fade over the decades into the background in historical discussions
of 1917, which centered instead around more structural themes such as Russia's
late industrialization and economic "backwardness," the Russian labor
movement, the ideological divide between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, and so
on.
The main revelation from the archives has been a very simple
reminder that Russia was fully mobilized for war in 1917, and this fact
dominated everything else, from the critical debates over war aims which
destroyed the liberal coalition of the first Provisional Government, to the
laser-like focus of much Bolshevik propaganda on the army and navy.
When it comes to hot-button topics, such as German support
for Lenin, I have uncovered critical new evidence, in the form of witness
depositions taken by Provisional Government investigators after the failed
Bolshevik putsch in the "July Days."
My book also adds the crucial evidence of how and when
Bolshevik agitators and propagandists penetrated particular fronts and military
units, and with what effect.
So, while I do come down on the "side" of those
who have played up German support for Lenin (as opposed to those who dismiss
this as unproven or insignificant, etc.), I also credit the Bolsheviks for
their genuine achievement in winning over critical support in the army.
Q: How did you research the book, and was there anything
that especially surprised you in the course of your research?
A: There are some topics, such as the German connection to
Lenin and the Bolsheviks, which I have been working on for years, in German,
Swedish, and Russian archives.
Until the final stretch run for this book, however, I had
not found the final connecting tissue, so to speak: we have known since the
1960s that the Germans appropriated huge sums to subsidize the Bolsheviks, but
it was never clear how the money reached them in Russia via Berlin and
Stockholm.
However, I can't take full credit for the discovery of the
witness depositions in Moscow (at an archive called RGASPI). They were
basically given to me by a notoriously moody archivist who, because I have
always listened patiently to his sometimes aggressive, unsolicited advice,
tends to know what kinds of materials will interest me.
My main research objective in Russia, though, was to get to
the bottom of the problem of army and navy morale in 1917 in the archives of
the Imperial Army (RGVIA in Moscow) and Navy (RGAVMF, in St. Petersburg).
In view of the growing tensions in Russian-American
relations and rumors of restricted Russian archival access in this newly tense
time, I had some trepidation about gaining access to what I assumed were fairly
sensitive materials.
It turns out, however, that Russian sensitivities still
mostly surround World War II (which is known in Russia as the "Great
Patriotic War"). 1917 is pretty far off the radar of the Putin government,
and there were no real restrictions. So that was a pleasant surprise.
Q: One hundred years later, what do you see as the legacy of
the Russian Revolution?
A: I am tempted to say that extreme political polarization
in the West is the main legacy, but we can hardly ascribe all of this to
1917.
It was the French Revolution, after all, which gave us the
concept of "Left" and "Right" (in the seating arrangements
of the National Convention)--the basic idea of a political spectrum between
those believing in projects of human improvement, what is today called
liberalism or progressivism, and those wary of or opposed to radical change,
usually called conservatives.
Certainly the Russian Revolution ratcheted up this divide
further, by giving a huge global platform to Marxist socialism (in its Leninist
form, i.e. Marxist-Leninism or "Communism") -- along with those
passionately opposed to it.
Some of this polarization endures today, although it is
mercifully less heated (and less dangerous) than during the Cold War.
In a more indirect sense, I think that a curious inversion
has taken place, at least since the fall of Soviet Communism in 1991.
One of the many ironies of Communism, as practiced in Russia
and Eastern Europe at least, is that, by strictly regulating economic activity
and tightly restricting foreign access to local markets, the long-term effect
in those countries may have been to slow down the social and cultural changes
wrought by capitalism and "globalization."
Political and cultural debates seem to have shifted far to
the "right" in many ex-Communist countries, even as the western
mainstream trended left on most social and cultural issues, if not necessarily
on the big economic questions (at least until the recent populist reaction).
This could be simply a hangover effect, as countries with
experience of Communist central planning decide they won't go there
again. Still, it is noticeable, and very interesting.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have been studying the First World War and its legacies
for so long that I finally decided to try something new, and tackle the Second
World War on the eastern front.
In a way, it is not really a new subject for me. It's
more like returning to an old love, as the "Great Patriotic War" was
the subject of my first substantial historical research project, prompted by an
NEH grant I won during my senior year in high school way back in 1992 (the year
of an exciting "Revelations from the Russian Archives" exhibit at the
Library of Congress).
I didn't know Russian then, so there were limits to what I
could do. But I still remember interviewing six Red Army veterans who,
mysteriously, had ended up in a retirement home in my home town of Rochester, N.Y.:
they were all missing at least a limb, some more than one. It blew
me away to hear their stories.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I had great fun writing this book, and I hope your
readers will enjoy reading it!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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