Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-wxvwp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-14T04:50:59.469Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rethinking a Great Event: The October Revolution as Memory Project

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Frederick C. Corney
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

What if that discourse about [the French Revolution as] a radical break reflects no more than the illusion of change?…Unless the historian comes to grips with it, he is bound to execrate or to celebrate, both of which are ways of commemorating.

François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution

Insofar as we yield without struggle to an external suggestion, we believe we are free in our thought and feelings. Therefore most social influences we obey usually remain unperceived.

Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory

Even under the increasingly more open conditions of glasnost and after, the October Revolution has proven difficult for Western, Soviet, and post-Soviet historians to reconceptualize. In this essay I shall examine the reasons behind this difficulty and suggest where a reconceptualization of October might fruitfully be sought. Rethinking October from the perspective of recent research into the construction of historical or collective memory, I will argue, affords unique insights into exactly why October has proven so enduring. Focusing on the October Revolution as the crucial element in the primarily Bolshevik efforts to establish and enshrine the legitimacy of the new Soviet state during the first decade after October 1917 problematizes the event in a way that traditional approaches, deeply implicated in this issue of (il)legitimacy, are unable to do.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 22 , Issue 4: Memory and the nation , Winter 1998, pp. 389 - 414
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1998 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Acton, E. (1990) Rethinking the Russian Revolution. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Afonin, A. (1920) “K voprosu ob izuchenii R.K.P. i Oktiabr’skoi Revoliutsii.” Petrogradskaia pravda 240, 26 October: 1.Google Scholar
Baker, K. M. (1990) Inventing the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bartlett, F. C. (1964) Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bastide, R. (1970) “Mémoire collective et sociologie du bricolage.” L’Année sociologique 3rd ser., 21: 65–108.Google Scholar
Bettelheim, C. (1976) Class Struggles in the USSR: First Period, 1917-1923. New York and London: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Bonnell, V. E. (1983) Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bonwetsch, B. (1976) “Oktoberrevolution: Legitimationsprobleme der sowjetischen Geschichtswissenschaft.” Politische Vierteljahresschrift 2:149–85.Google Scholar
Broido, V. (1987) Lenin and the Mensheviks: The Persecution of Socialists under Bolshevism. Aldershot, Eng.: Gower/Maurice Temple Smith.Google Scholar
Brossat, A., and Combe, S., eds. (1990) A l’Est, la mémoire retrouvée. Paris: Editions la Découverte.Google Scholar
Brovkin, V. N. (1987) The Mensheviks after October: Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Bruner, J. (1990) Acts of Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Burgess, W. F. (1981) “The Istpart Commission: The historical department of the Russian Communist Party Central Committee, 1920-1928.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University.Google Scholar
Butenko, A. (1990) “Byl li neizbezhen Oktiabr’?” Pravda 298, 25 October.Google Scholar
Conquest, R. (1990) “I told you so.” Encounter 2: 24–26.Google Scholar
Conquest, R. (1992) “The party in the dock.” Times Literary Supplement, 6 November: 7.Google Scholar
Coquin, F.-X. (1989) “Comments on the current ‘ferment’ and revision of history in the Soviet Union: Stakes, limits, outlook,” in Ito, Takayuki (ed.) Facing Up to the Past: Soviet Historiography under Perestroika. Sapporo, Japan: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University: 21–32.Google Scholar
Corney, F. C. (1997) “Writing October: History, memory, identity, and the construction of the Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1927.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University.Google Scholar
Daniels, R. V. (1967) Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Davies, R. W. (1989) Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Davies, R. W. (1997) Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era. Basingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan.Google Scholar
de Certeau, M. (1986) Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Deviatala konferentsiia RKP(b). Sentiabr’ 1920 goda. Protokoly (1972) Moscow.Google Scholar
Enteen, G. M. (1989a) “Problems of CPSU historiography.” Problems of Communism 5: 72–80.Google Scholar
Enteen, G. M. (1989b) “The Stalinist conception of Communist Party history.” Studies in Soviet Thought 37: 259–74.Google Scholar
Fitzpatrick, S. (1993) “Ascribing class: The construction of social identity in Soviet Russia.” Journal of Modern History 65: 745–70.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Frankel, I. J. (1992) “1917: The problem of alternatives,” in Frankel, Edith Rogovin, Frankel, Jonathan, and Knei-Paz, Baruch (eds.) Revolutionary Russia: Reassessments of 1917. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 3–13.Google Scholar
Furet, F. (1981) Interpreting the French Revolution. Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.Google Scholar
Gill, G. J. (1979) Peasants and Government in the Russian Revolution. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Haimson, L. (1964) “The problem of social stability in urban Russia, 1905-1917.” Slavic Review 4: 619–42.Google Scholar
Haimson, L. (1965) “The problem of social stability in urban Russia, 1905-1917.” Slavic Review 1:1–22.Google Scholar
Haimson, L. (1988) “The problem of social identities in early twentieth century Russia.” Slavic Review 1:1–20.Google Scholar
Halbwachs, M. (1925) Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Librairie Félix Alean.Google Scholar
Halbwachs, M. (1980) The Collective Memory. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Hall, S. (1982) “The rediscovery of ‘ideology’: Return of the repressed in media studies,” in Gurevitch, Michael, Bennett, Tony, Curran, James, and Woollacott, Janet (eds.) Culture, Society and the Media. London and New York: Methuen: 56–90.Google Scholar
Handler, R. (1994) “Is ‘identity’ a useful cross-cultural concept?” in Gillis, John R. (ed.) Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 27–40.Google Scholar
Harlan, D. (1989) “Intellectual history and the return of literature.” American Historical Review 3: 581–609.Google Scholar
Holmes, L. E., and Burgess, W. (1982) “Scholarly voice or political echo?: Soviet party history in the 1920s.” Russian History/Histoire Russe 9, parts 2–3: 378–98.Google Scholar
Hosking, G. A. (1989) “Memory in a totalitarian society: The case of the Soviet Union,” in Butler, Thomas (ed.) Memory: History, Culture and the Mind. Oxford: Basil Blackwell: 115–30.Google Scholar
Hunt, L. (1984) Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Iotov, I. (1987) “Vernost’ Oktiabriu, vernost’ proletarskomu internatsionalizmu.” Voprosy istorii KPSS 11:12–25.Google Scholar
“Istoricheskaia nauka v 20–30-e gody” (1990) Istoriia i istoriki. Moscow: Nauka.Google Scholar
Iz epokhi “Zvezdy” i “Pravdy” (1911–1914 gg.) (1921) Moscow.Google Scholar
“Izuchenie istorii velikogo oktiabria. Itogi i perspectivy” (1987) Voprosy istorii 6: 51–72.Google Scholar
Joravsky, D. (1994) “Communism in historical perspective.” American Historical Review 3: 837–57.Google Scholar
Kaiser, D. H., ed. (1987) The Workers’ Revolution in Russia, 1917: The View from Below. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kenez, P. (1991) “The prosecution of Soviet history: A critique of Richard Pipes’ The Russian Revolution.” Russian Review 3: 345–51.Google Scholar
Kenez, P. (1995) “The prosecution of Soviet history, volume 2.” Russian Review 2: 265–69.Google Scholar
Koenker, D. (1981) Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kotkin, S. (1991) “One hand clapping: Russian workers and 1917.” Labor History 4: 604–20.Google Scholar
Kotkin, S. (1995) Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ko vsem chlenam partii (1920) Moscow.Google Scholar
Kozicki, H., and Canary, R. H., eds. (1978) The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Lane, D. (1969) The Roots of Russian Communism: A Social and Historical Study of Russian Social Democracy, 1898-1907. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum & Comp.Google Scholar
Lass, A. (1994) “From memory to history: The events of November 17 dis/membered,” in Watson, Rubie S. (ed.) Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press: 87–104.Google Scholar
Malia, M. (1991) “The hunt for the true October.” Commentary 4: 24–25.Google Scholar
Malia, M. (1992) “Why Amalrik was right.” Times Literary Supplement, 6 November.Google Scholar
Malia, M. (1994) The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991. New York: Free Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Mandel, D. (1983) The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime. Basingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Mandel, D. (1984) The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power. Basingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Marsh, R. (1995) History and Literature in Contemporary Russia. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Mel’gunov, S. P. (1953) Kak bol’sheviki zakhvatili vlast’: Oktiabr’skii perevorot 1917 goda. Paris: Editions “La Renaissance.”Google Scholar
Merridale, C. (1996) “Death and memory in modern Russia.” History Workshop Journal 42:1–18.Google Scholar
MogiPnitskii, B. G. (1989) “Al’ternativnost’ v istorii sovetskogo obshchestva.” Voprosy istorii 11: 3–16.Google Scholar
Nove, A. (1989) Glasnost’ in Action: Cultural Renaissance in Russia. Boston: Unwin Hyman.Google Scholar
“Oktiabr’ i perestroika: Revoliutsiia prodolzhaetsia” (1987) Kommunist 17: 3–40.Google Scholar
Orlovsky, D. T. (1990) “The new Soviet history.” Journal of Modern History 62: 831–50.Google Scholar
Pamiat’. Istoricheskii sbornik (1976) Vol. 1. Moscow. New York: Khronika Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Pethybridge, R. (1964) Witnesses to the Russian Revolution. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Pethybridge, R. (1972) The Spread of the Russian Revolution: Essays on 1917. London: St. Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Pipes, R. (1990) The Russian Revolution. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Pipes, R. (1992) “Seventy-five years on: The Great October Revolution as a clandestine coup d’état.” Times Literary Supplement, 6 November: 3–4.Google Scholar
Pipes, R. (1993) Russia under the Bolshevik Regime. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Pipes, R. (1994) “Did the Russian Revolution have to happen?” American Scholar: 215–38.Google Scholar
Protokoly X S”ezda RKP(b) (1933) Moscow.Google Scholar
Rabinowitch, A. (1968) Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Rabinowitch, A. (1978) The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Radkey, O. (1958) The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Radkey, O. (1961) The Sickle under the Hammer: The Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the First Months of Soviet Rule. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Raleigh, D. J., ed. (1989) Soviet Historians and Perestroika: The First Phase. London: M. E. Sharpe.Google Scholar
Rogovin, V (1992) Byla li alternativa?: “Trotskizm”: Vzgliad cherez gody. Moscow: Terra.Google Scholar
Sakharov, A. N. (1993) “Soviet historiography: Modern trends,” in Kozicki, Henry (ed.) Western and Russian Historiography: Recent Views. New York: St. Martin’s Press: 191–205.Google Scholar
Schapiro, L. (1970) The Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Norfolk, Eng.: University Paperbacks.Google Scholar
Schapiro, L. (1977) The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase, 1917-1922. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Service, R. (1979) The Bolshevik Party in Revolution, 1917–1923: A Study in Organizational Change. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Shister, G. A. (1990) “Byla li al’ternativa vooruzhennomu vosstaniiu?” Istoriia SSSR 4: 134–45.Google Scholar
Slonimskii, M. (1919) “Materialy dlia istorii russkoi revoliutsii.” Zhizn’ iskusstva 291, 13 November: 1.Google Scholar
Smith, S. A. (1983) Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Startsev, V. I. (1987) “Vopros o vlasti v oktiabr’skie dni 1917 goda.” Istoriia SSSR 5: 36–55.Google Scholar
Suny, R. G. (1972) The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Suny, R. G. (1983) “Toward a social history of the October Revolution.” American Historical Review 1: 31–52.Google Scholar
Suny, R. G. (1994) “Revision and retreat in the historiography of 1917: Social history and its critics.” Russian Review 2:165–82.Google Scholar
Toews, J. (1987) “Intellectual history after the linguistic turn: The autonomy of meaning and the irreducibility of experience.” American Historical Review 4: 879–907.Google Scholar
Tonkin, E. (1992) Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Trouillot, M.-R. (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Volobuev, P. (1995) “Chetyre professora reshili otmenit’ revoliutsiiu.” Pravda 47, 15 March.Google Scholar
Von Geldern, J. (1993) Bolshevik Festivals, 1917-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Von Hagen, M. (1992) “The Stalin debate and the reformulation of the Soviet past.” Harriman Institute Forum 7: 1–12.Google Scholar
Von Hagen, M. (1993) “The archival gold rush and historical agendas in the post-Soviet era.” Slavic Review 1: 96–100.Google Scholar
Watson, R. S., ed. (1994) “An introduction,” in Watson, Rubie S. (ed.) Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press: 1–20.Google Scholar
White, H. (1987) The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Wildman, A. K. (1967) The Making of a Workers’ Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891-1903. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Williams, A. R. (1921) Through the Russian Revolution. New York: Boni and Liveright.Google Scholar
Wolfe, B. D. (1961) Three Who Made a Revolution. New York: Dial Press.Google Scholar