Russia in Revolution

CHOICE Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries.

Anton Fedyashin, European History Quarterly, Vol. 47 Saturated with statistics and comparisons with the Chinese experience, Smiths volume is an excellent summary of the deep cultural and socio-economic causes and continuities of the revolutions of 1917.

James D. White, SEER Smith's book is an ideal introduction to the history of the Russian Revolution, but it is more than that. A century after the events it describes, it is an indication that scholarship on the subject has matured, and that the Russia Revolution can be studied as objectively as any other episode in modern European history. The significance of Smith's work ought to be that it sets the tone for all future writing on the subject.

Roy Foster, University of Oxford Smith's Russia in Revolution is an authoritative view of a seismic event, but also much more. By covering nearly thirty years from 1890, he illuminates what Franco Venturi called the roots of revolution, profiling the creation of a revolutionary generation as well as the fall-out of the 1920s: he also deals in detail with the civil wars that followed 1917. The result is a panoramic view of an upheaval which was cultural and economic as well as political; like Raymond Carrs history of modern Spain, it far transcends the limitations of a 'general history.' Above all it shows, impartially and decisively, both why the revolution failed to deliver its promises, and why it happened in the first place.

James Gallen, Roads to the Great War A thorough study.

Mark Edele, Australian Book Review Among the best one-volume introductions to not only the history of the revolution but also of late tsarism, the Civil War (1918-21), and the years of the New Economic Policy.

Ivan Sablin, History ...a major milestone in the international debates on the revolution... Smith's brilliant work will be invaluable for students of history, both in Russia and abroad, and for all those interested in global history in general and the Russian Revolution in particular.

James Gallen, Roads to the Great War A thorough study.

JP O'Malley, Irish Examiner Well-researched, extremely balanced, nicely nuanced, and very readable.

Robert Levgold, Foreign Affairs The most expansive history of the 1917 revolution available... Smith fairly and intelligently arbitrates the great debates among historians over how to interpret the revolution.

Tony Barber, Financial Times In what is the most assured general history yet to appear, Smith uses his deep knowledge of 20th-century Russia to place the upheavals in their larger social and historical contexts.

Sean Sheehan, Dublin Review of Books Laudable.

Socialist Review A useful overview... fair and balanced... Book of the month.

Dominic Lieven, Financial Times I can think of no better overview of the period written in recent years ... No one in Britain is better equippe...

S. A. Smith is a historian of modern Russia and China, who was a graduate student at both Moscow State University and at Peking University. He is the author of many books and articles on the Russian and Chinese revolutions, including Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-18 (CUP, 1983) and Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (CUP, 2008), and is editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (OUP, 2014). He taught for many years at the University of Essex, where he is an emeritus professor, and then at the European University Institute in Florence, before being elected to a senior research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2012.

Introduction 1: Roots of Revolution, 1880s-1905 2: From Reform to War, 1906-17 3: From February to October 1917 4: Civil War and Bolshevik Power 5: War Communism 6: The New Economic Policy: Politics and the Economy 7: The New Economic Policy: Society and CultureConclusionNotes