In this massively researched study, Jay Bergman shows that ideas about the French revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871 profoundly influenced the conceptions and practices of Russia's revolutionary intelligentsia before 1917 and of the Soviet leadership and its non-Bolshevik socialist critics thereafter. The volume is divided into four parts, respectively devoted to those four revolutionary upheavals and each systematically surveying interpretations, from conservatives and liberals to Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik socialists, before, during, and after the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The fifteen chapters, each chronologically organized, focus primarily on debates of Russian socialists about the French revolutions and their applicability as models, inspiration, practical guidance, and justification for action in various Russian revolutionary contexts. Bergman suggests that, because Marxism did not adequately account for unfolding revolutionary events, the French revolutionary tradition, with its cascade of dramatic incidents, personages, stages, and narratives, effectively supplemented and extended the Marxist vision for Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik socialists.

Among questions incessantly debated were: did the Jacobins come to power prematurely? Was their reign of terror justified? Was it necessary? Could a harsher application have insured greater success? Should one learn from their mistakes or take inspiration from their triumphs? What social class or classes, and in what configuration, drove these revolutions? Which exerted greater weight, impersonal historical forces or individual leadership and initiative? Would a future Russian Revolution surpass the revolutions of France, and how could this best be achieved?

The French Revolution also provided rhetorical weapons in “the internecine rhetorical wars Russian socialists waged among themselves prior to the October revolution” (79). For Vladimir Lenin, it justified labeling socialists who disagreed with him as “Girondins” and “traitors.” Much of the debate was extraordinarily abstract and speculative, as the four French revolutions were related from diverse angles to those in Russia of 1905 and 1917, and as the activists distinguished between concepts like Jacobinism and Blanquism. After October, “the French Revolution provided a useful template for what the Bolsheviks should do to remain in power” (137), or so they imagined. Likewise, battleships, streets, and babies were named after French revolutionary personages and events; hundreds of sculptures were erected in their honor; and thousands of commemorative performances were put on, some involving thousands of actors and tens of thousands of spectators.

For the next several years, the Bolshevik leaders and their liberal and socialist opponents debated endlessly whether Thermidor and Bonapartism threatened Bolshevik Russia. Gallons of ink were spilled defining those terms. Iosif Stalin put an end to such speculation, at least within the Soviet Union when, in 1931, he vehemently denounced the very idea of a Soviet Thermidor, provoking a “groveling response” (211) from the targets of his ire. A few years later anyone having made such an accusation risked being shot. Stalin was not going to repeat the mistake of the Jacobins who, he believed, “killed ineffectively and insufficiently” (279).

After Stalin's death, historians still studied the French revolutions, and important events related to it were publicly commemorated, but among his successors only Yuri Andropov “knew enough about the revolution to have an opinion of it” (301). Mikhail Gorbachev returned to the French Revolution as, to some extent, the inspiration for perestroika, which, he believed, would perfect the October Revolution just as the latter had perfected the events of 1789–1973. Yet glasnost permitted historians and other intellectuals to cast moral doubt on the revolutionary tradition as a whole, with one historian arguing that the Jacobin terror “was nothing less than the older brother” (334) of Stalin's Great Terror.

Bergman sheds similar light on the debates about the other three French revolutions, persuasively defining this obsession as a means to rationalize developments resistant to Marxist interpretation. His speculative suggestion that the Bolsheviks “would have been better off had they known nothing” (498) of the French revolutions is less convincing, however, for it implies that the Bolsheviks’ Marxist project was feasible on its own merits, an assumption the author himself denies.

At times it is difficult to distinguish what the author believes from what the author is presenting only as the beliefs of his protagonists. Does he really think that there is such a thing as Bonapartism as an essentialized political type? Did the French Revolution really end “feudalism while simultaneously inaugurating in Europe an age of industrial capitalism” (212)? One also wonders about the depth of understanding of the French revolutions among party members, given their low literacy rates in the early Bolshevik years.

Overall, the book is a goldmine of detail about a formative influence on the Bolshevik leadership.