Comrades : 1917 - Russia in Revolution by Moynahan, Brian
Comrades : 1917 - Russia in Revolution by Moynahan, Brian
Hardcover, ISBN 9780091773564
Publisher: Hutchinson, 1992
Used - Very Good+. This book is in very good condition. The cover have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. The book is protected with a Cellophane cover. Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied.
Of all the accounts I've read of the Russian Revolution, this book has the best description of how society's total collapse with World War I propelled to power the Bolsheviks, a small and often otherwise insignificant party.
My one criticism would be that author Brian Moynahan may swing the pendulum too far to the other side by dismissing the Communist leadership -- including Lenin and Trotsky -- as incompetents who were shockingly lucky, if only because they were bloodthirsty.
From the book:
"Few things in 1917 were as curious, on the face of it, as the inability of other socialists to realize the fate the Bolsheviks had in store for them. Their reluctance to condemn the Leninists was partly a matter of gross ignorance. Few had read the works in which Lenin made clear that he saw terrorism and dictatorship as essential parts of revolution. His works had been banned before the revolution. After it, events moved too fast for people to have time to work through the back list of his works. All had had access to Pravda, however, from which it was obvious that he regarded socialist as much as capitalist rivals to be candidates for liquidation.
"What saved him -- and it was quite a stroke of luck -- were two strong and intermingled feelings. One was the ideal of solidarity, the other a conviction that the Bolsheviks should not be taken at face value.
"Public respect for revolutionaries had run deep in tsarist Russia. 'Few of the intelligent families of the Russian Empire are without one of two relatives who have undergone imprisonment for their views,' an American correspondent, Basset Digby, had observed before the war. 'For this reason, when the "politicals" have finished their sentences, they are treated kindly by others.' Though the Bolsheviks did not believe in solidarity created by shared persecution, other socialists were happy to extend its courtesies to them. The autocracy had exiled and executed. How could the revolution -- whose bloodless treatment of tsarist officials and the tsar himself remained one of its glories -- persecute its own?
"It was felt, too, that Bolshevik theory would never be put into practice. The totalitarian state -- ruthless, politicized and centralized, destructive of the slightest opposition -- was still taking shape in Lenin's mind. He was predicted world revolution, government without officials, societies without policemen, factories without foremen. To take him seriously was to admit to a belief in the millennium."
