20.10.2006
Jonathan Brunstedt is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Oxford University. He previously completed his M.Phil., with distinction, at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and graduated summa cum laude with a BA in history from UCLA. He is currently performing doctoral research in Moscow with the help of a research grant from SRAS. The Russian Revolution and the Postmodern Challenge
By Jonathan Brunstedt History is under attack — or so it seems from the titles of works such as Windschuttle’s The Killing of History or Evans’s In Defence of History. Postmodern theory has forced historians to question previous assumptions about objectivity and the nature of past reality. Many historians at the turn of the 21st century embraced this new shift, adopting the skepticisms of Foucault and Derrida in evaluating and articulating historical sources; others have rejected this intellectual movement altogether, arguing that postmodernism and its proponents are “devilish tempters who claim to offer higher forms of thought and deeper truths and insights — the intellectual equivalent of crack.”[1] Whichever position one takes, there is no doubt that the postmodern challenge has compelled scholars in all fields to conduct a self-conscious reevaluation of existing historical interpretations and a reassessment of long-standing approaches to the study of history. The historiography of the Russian Revolution and subsequent creation of the Soviet state is no exception; it has already been greatly influenced by recent trends in historical thought. A look at the established controversy over 1917 and the competing interpretations over the creation of the Soviet state reveals that plurality and controversy, far from undermining history as a field of study, in fact cultivate a more tempered, balanced assessment of the past. By assessing the value of competing explanations of the revolution, the significance of the postmodern paradigm is put into context. What becomes evident is that a synthesis of radical new intellectual challenges and the well established revisionist work of the past three decades can only enrich the ever-more sophisticated and discursive interpretations of the Russian Revolution. The earliest readings of the revolution as an historical event were highly politicized. The Bolshevik leadership, motivated by its Marxist-Leninist ideology and the need to legitimize its newly achieved power, disseminated the Soviet account. This interpretation asserts that Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, supported by the infallible “scientific” theories of Marx, galvanized the masses against the incompetent Nicholas II, precipitating the inevitable fall of tsardom and autocracy. It was Lenin and his elite corps of professional revolutionaries who, in the name of the lower classes, toppled the Provisional Government and defended the workers’ revolution against the treacherous forces of capitalism during the civil war. The Party went on to establish the first socialist workers’ utopian state – a new egalitarian society, free of capitalist evils. This account, with some changes, was the official Soviet version throughout the USSR’s existence.[2] The first Western interpretation of the event was not the product of historical objectivity but rather of political necessity to refute, in its entirety, the Soviets’ anti-capitalist rhetoric. At the dawn of the Cold War, historians, particularly in the United States, were motivated by a feverish desire to “understand the enemy.” The debate was shaped as Western scholars responded to “Soviet assertions, exposing flaws in the Soviet view, and presenting an account which was diametrically at odds with it.”[3] Western historians concurred with the Soviet interpretation on two points: Russia was a backward nation and Lenin and his party played the central role in bringing about revolution. This is where agreement ended. The idea that the Russian Revolution was the culmination of class struggle was rejected, as was the idea of a set of “scientific” laws governing the course of events. It was, in these historians’ view, “the result of a chain of ghastly accidents.”[4] For instance, WWI might not have broken out at such a delicate moment in Russia’s economic development; the Tsar may have been a competent leader; key Bolshevik figures may have been prevented from returning from exile; or the Provisional Government might have been led by wiser, more able statesmen.[5] The traditional Western account paid little if any attention to the lower classes’ role; they were considered pawns manipulated by Lenin. Once the legitimate government had been overthrown, the Bolshevik party, though opposed by a majority of Russians, relied on its efficient organization to exploit the chaos of the civil war and hold on to power. The authoritarian nature inherent to Bolshevism was quickly revealed during the civil war and subsequent consolidation of power. Though popular discontent forced Lenin to make a temporary economic retreat with the New Economic Policy, Stalin’s brutal dictatorship emerged as a direct result of the 1917 seizure of power.[6] A third early interpretation, the libertarian view, was established by various socialists who were forced out of Russia by the Bolsheviks. Though it is a disparate group, libertarian writers share a common anti-Bolshevik thread. They believe that the two revolutions of 1917 were genuine popular revolutions in which the masses, long repressed under tsardom, attempted to finally take control of their fate. Workers and soldiers took seriously the slogan “all power to the Soviets,” and factory committees controlled by workers appeared after February, signaling the start of a successful transition of power to the people.[7] The popular October overthrow of the Provisional Government was “hijacked” by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Power was then taken away from the workers and put in the hands of state bureaucrats who suppressed the democratic aspirations of the masses. The Bolsheviks were the antithesis of popular revolution, and once in power exploited their subjects in much the same way that the tsarist administration had.[8] Trotsky, writing in 1937, took a similar stance. He claimed that October was a genuine popular movement and that Lenin and the Bolsheviks articulated mass aspirations, but that Stalin “betrayed” Lenin’s revolution and introduced systematic terror and authoritarianism into the Soviet system. This suggestion foreshadowed the view of many later scholars who would cite a clear discontinuity between Lenin’s belief “that the future social order would be based on…the empowerment of the working people” and Stalin’s creation of “one of the most vicious and oppressive states in modern history.”[9] Libertarians and individuals like Trotsky paid greater attention to the masses of ordinary people; however, their influence on historical thought was negligible and they were never able to offset the dominant Soviet and Western interpretations that centered on main political groups and actors such as Lenin, Kerensky, and Nicholas II. Beginning in the 1960s, a dramatic alternative to the history of high politics and elites was introduced by scholars who, in an attempt to broaden the historical spectrum and “open up new areas of research,” shifted their attention to those groups and individuals previously neglected—ordinary people; the common soldier, worker, or peasant and the role that the overwhelming majority of the population played in determining the course of past events.[10] “History from above” now had to compete with “history from below.” This social approach to history emerged through the influence of the French Annales school and British Marxist historians, who were determined to “explore the historical experiences of those men and women whose existence is so often ignored.”[11] Thompson articulated this point in 1963: “I am seeking to rescue the [average man or woman] from the enormous condescension of posterity.”[12] What united these “revisionist” historians was not a single approach or methodology, but a desire to examine “some notion of social determination, conceptualized on the ground of material life, whether in demographic, political-economic, labor-process, class-sociological, or class-cultural.”[13] Thus, a new generation of social historians began to tear down the old Rankean paradigm, casting light on the anonymous “masses” and discrediting the assertion that, “History is past politics: politics is present history.”[14] The impact that revisionism had was immense. This movement occurred at a time when greater access to state and regional archives was being granted by Soviet authorities. Scholars could now work with many untapped historical sources and could explore the role that society played much more thoroughly than their libertarian predecessors. Indeed, these new historians of the revolution were characterized, as Acton shows, “by their recognition of the extent to which [the traditional Western interpretation] was inspired by Cold War hatred of all things ‘left’…rather than by historical analysis.” Revisionist historians adopted techniques of other social sciences, particularly those of sociology, and applied quantitative methods to the study of history in order to provide a better sense of the material condition of the typical worker, soldier, sailor, and peasant. As the masses were brought back into the story, a revisionist multi-causal interpretation crystallized. Suny writes, “The revisionist historiography argued that a deep and deepening social polarization between the top and bottom of Russian society undermined the Provisional Government…”[15] Workers and soldiers played an active role; workers expressed “their own concept of autonomy and lawfulness at the factory level, while peasant soldiers developed a keen sense of what kind of war (and for what regime) they were willing to fight.”[16] The Bolshevik party seemed to meet popular aspirations by calling for a government controlled by the lower classes and an end to the war. “The Bolshevik program resulted in elected Leninist majorities in the soviets of both Petrograd and Moscow and the strategic support of soldiers on the northern and western fronts,” paving the way for a relatively easy seizure of power.[17] Lenin’s party, never having achieved popular support in the countryside and facing economic collapse, ethnic revolts, and civil war, centralized the economy and reverted to the use of violent coercion and terror against opposition in order to maintain control.[18] The revisionist work not only cast light on the role the masses played in the revolution, but revealed many weaknesses in the traditional Western and Soviet views. Rather than crediting Lenin’s brilliance or the tight organization of the Party, new research suggested that it was lower class support that allowed the October seizure of power to occur. The mass appeal of Lenin’s party was not, as the traditional Western view asserts, the result of brainwashing through propaganda, but, as Acton shows, “Bolshevism embraced a variety of competing ideological currents,” and the move towards it was “part of a massive leftward shift clearly registered even among those who continued to support the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries.”[19] Particularly important were revisionist findings about how the Bolsheviks were fundamentally altered during the civil war. The affect that this “struggle for survival” had on party leadership seems to be a key factor in the authoritarian manner in which the party and subsequent Soviet government evolved. Unlike the traditional Western view, which suggests that there is a direct tyrannical link between October and Stalin’s terror and that Lenin’s party was from inception inherently despotic and repressive, revisionists accentuated a shift that took place in the party’s attitude during its dramatic and violent fight to maintain power and to secure, at all costs, victory in the civil war. Moreover, the effectiveness of the lower classes, so evident during the February overthrow of the Tsar and the October removal of the Provisional Government from power, was, revisionism showed, severely curtailed because of the civil war as “they were divided, atomized and economically devastated” and because “of the disintegration of collective identities.”[20] The masses, therefore, could not “prevent the emergence of a highly centralized, bureaucratized and authoritarian regime.”[21] The painstaking revisionist work on the revolution soon overshadowed traditionalist views as most scholars in the West, and even some Soviet historians, began to accept revisionist suppositions about 1917. But in the words of Edward Acton, “Old myths die hard.”[22] The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in archives being opened to Western and Soviet scholars alike. Political passions, however, once again crept into the agendas of many of those anxious to interpret the meaning of recent events. The dismemberment of the CPSU and the sudden ability of former Soviet historians to write free from political constraints not only eliminated the orthodox Soviet interpretation from the debate, but in a repudiation of “all things Soviet,” saw the embrace by many Russian scholars of the more extreme anti-Soviet traditional Western account. In the West, with their ideological foes vanquished, many historians who had stubbornly resisted the revisionist movement, and instead had continued to espouse the traditional interpretation, felt that the USSR’s demise vindicated their efforts. This Western antirevisionist minority was partly fueled by “a period of right-wing political and intellectual ascendancy which had been epitomized by the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.”[23] In a triumphal manner, these scholars “revived older approaches and methodologies, again bringing politics back to center stage…and subjecting social history to a savage critique.”[24] In their opinion, since the revolution “depended on one man [Lenin]…the attempt to look for social explanations and class analyses is not very helpful. It can show us whether the preconditions for a revolution existed, but not why it took place.”[25] This assessment concludes that social historians, for all their efforts, practiced a sort of bias against politics and, therefore, failed at the important task of uniting the political and social explanations of the revolution into a coherent synthesis.[26] Richard Pipes, the most notable of the antirevisionists, in his works The Russian Revolution and Russia under the Bolshevik Regime epitomized the resurrection of the traditional Western account. He asserts that the revolution “was the result not of insufferable conditions but of irreconcilable attitudes…attitudes rather than institutions or ‘objective’ economic and social realities determine the course of politics.”[27] In this view, the events of 1917 were “made neither by the forces of nature nor by anonymous masses but by identifiable men pursuing their own advantages.”[28] This “flies in the face of the most meticulous and detailed specialist research; the overall picture painted is a mere caricature of the momentous social drama which that research is gradually recovering.”[29] Though this view remains a minority within the academic community, its proponents initially found broad support in the press and among general readers. The important social historical work of the previous decades could hardly be cast aside by Pipes and the reemergence of the traditional view. New research continues to support the significant role that society played. Christopher Read, writing in 1996, asserts, …The revolution was constantly driven forward by the often spontaneous impulse given to it from the grass roots. In the course of their struggle peasants, workers and perhaps most important in the short term, soldiers and sailors thought out their programs and developed tactics to achieve them locally and regionally.[30]
Indeed, most historians are critical of Pipes. As Suny shows, “his account prevents an understanding of the complex relationship between the lower classes, which favored…a broadly democratic political order and the Bolsheviks, who eventually turned that order into a one-party dictatorship.”[31] Some scholars, like Edward Acton, dismiss Pipes’ perspective altogether. Debate, however, has a tendency of forcing both sides to reexamine their arguments and many of the criticisms put forth by antirevisionists were taken seriously by social historians. A shift in mindset occurred in response to the traditionalist accusations that social history maintained a sort of bias against political explanations. More significantly, though, this reevaluation was due to the introduction in other fields and other historiographies of French poststructuralist theory. Postmodern insights have helped to reveal that “neither the older political history nor the social determinism of many social historians has proven adequate in dealing with central issues of social categories and transformations.”[32] The challenge of postmodernism and the way that it could potentially transform the historiography of 1917, and the history profession in general, could no longer be ignored by revisionist historians. A brief examination of postmodernism is vital for understanding its broader historical significance. Do historians write about the past, or do they write their own subjective version of what someone else wrote about the past? Indeed, documents are a main source of information for scholars of the Russian Revolution. These documents use language to describe reality. However, the language used does not actually describe reality, only someone’s interpretation of reality. The structuralist Saussure pointed out that words cannot reflect an objective reality because words can be interpreted differently by different people. A word may be a symbol for a physical object, for example, but words alone fail to capture every nuance of the reality they describe. John Warren offers a good example, that of the word “sheep.” The word “conveys a particular meaning to the British: to the French, the word ‘mouton,’ although clearly describing the same animal, has a subtly different meaning.”[33] Historians, postmodernists argue, read documents and attempt to translate meaning and recreate some type of “reality” from them. But if words contain slight variation in meaning, no objective understanding of the past can be derived from them. Just as Saussure argues that words are not objective transmitters of information, Derrida and Foucault elaborate the idea that history as a discipline is incapable of discerning past reality. Derrida sees the deconstruction of texts as essential to understanding how language hinders the historian’s search for truth. Texts, he claims, consist of persuasive rhetoric that does not objectively portray an idea, but rather tries to convince the reader that an idea is truth. Literary deconstruction reveals this to be the case with all texts, including primary source documents. Historians are, therefore, not simply interpreting information; they are being influenced by the information, itself a subjective creation. Scholars who rely on texts for a method of objectively understanding and articulating past events, according to this logic, are dangerously misguided.[34] This view is echoed by Foucault, whose work focuses on the relationship between language and structures of power within society. This does not refer to the power of policy makers or political elites, but rather to the power distribution of “‘the most unpromising places’ – in the operations of feelings, love, conscience, instinct…and far-reaching changes in disciplines such as biology and linguistics.”[35] Power, therefore, is represented in the language of dominant historical trends which, through consensus, falsely claim to represent “truth.” Historical truth is, in this way, constructed through “systems of power,” and is not the product of objective historical inquiry.[36] Similarly crucial are historians themselves – how scholars face choices when writing history; how and why they accept certain sources or assumptions while rejecting others. In the words of Scott Moore, “Foucault is interested in asking, ‘from where do the criteria for such decisions come?’…Toward what end do we tell our stories? For Foucault… ‘making history’ is something which historians--and not just the people they study – do.”[37] Foucault himself famously declared: “I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions.”[38] Moreover, Hayden White shows how the writing of history is inevitably limited by “emplotment.” The historian, in order to make sense of historical facts, must give them structure, must create a narrative from which to interpret and explain the raw data. The form used to present historical arguments is one that is “innate to the Western literary culture with which we are all familiar;”[39] it consists of a “plot” with heroes and villains. This is what makes the information comprehensible. However, the narrative construction of history, White writes, allows for stylization that represents the author more clearly than the event itself.[40] According to this view, the very narrative structure that makes historical data discernable is what causes historical “reality” to become lost in the subjective imagination of the historian. Warren writes, “There is no reality beyond the text to which one can appeal” however, it is the text that is blurring the line between reality and fiction.[41] Though the most extreme aspects of postmodernism suggest that truth is, in fact, out of our reach, it is by no means a unified movement, and many, despite its rejection of modernist notions about “truth” and “objectivity,” perceive it as a necessary step in the evolution of historical study. Indeed, Foucault was himself an historian, and has published important historical analyses of social institutions and rituals.[42] The idea that postmodern theories are in direct opposition to the history profession is an inaccurate one. It is better, then, to view the postmodern debate not as a dispute between historians and postmodern intellectuals, but rather as a controversy within the field of history itself; between historians who have been influenced by and have accepted certain postmodern assumptions, and those who continue to insist that postmodernism presents a grave threat to our understanding of the past. There has not yet emerged a distinct postmodernist interpretation of 1917; however, it is crucial to examine the implications that the theory might have for the revolution’s historiography. Clearly, a shift in focus can already be identified as a new generation moves away from social-oriented topics such as class or Marxism to those of culture (in the anthropological sense) and the construction of identities. There is an emphasis on cultural relativism: the idea that historians’ perceptions about the past are culturally constructed and “subject to variation over time as well as space.”[43] Contemporary approaches, generally associated with what is labeled the cultural or linguistic turn, are centered, in the words of Lynn Hunt, “on close examination—of texts, of pictures, and of actions—and on open-mindedness to what those examinations will reveal.”[44] Moreover, this cultural shift encourages contemporary scholars to “approach with greater care the complex ways in which the various discourses of the historical subjects they study affected how those subjects understood and reacted to the world around them.”[45] This, in a sense, presents a direct challenge to revisionist methods. Social history’s concern is for the “everyday experience” of “ordinary people,” but, Eley writes, “as long as the cultural construction of these processes is ignored (and categories such as ‘everyday experience’ and ‘ordinary people’ not put into question), the formulation will continue to dissatisfy.”[46] In many ways, therefore, postmodernism’s impact on the study of history has resulted not so much in the complete rejection of older social categories, but rather in a shift from classic materialist explanations to an exploration of “language, culture and the available repertoire of ideas.”[47] Historians of the Russian Revolution have only recently begun to reflect this new intellectual shift, and many remain skeptical of its implications. While an extreme element rejects the linguistic turn as a “hedonistic descent into a plurality of discourses that decenter the world in a chaotic denial of any acknowledgment of tangible structures of power and comprehensions of meaning,” most—Edward Acton for instance—delineate a more judicious concern for the movement’s potential danger.[48] Acton admits that postmodernism is “refining the insights from earlier work” but points out that this shift may, in many ways, reinforce the older traditional Western view more so than the substantial work of revisionists.[49] Postmodern skepticism, Acton writes, “doubts our ability to know anything; it has no use for origins, causality or synthesis, and refuses to accept that one explanation is superior to another… [it is] ultimately incompatible with the writing of history.”[50] The danger, therefore, is that postmodernism’s rejection of “our ability to know anything” or to discern causation will reduce the Russian Revolution, and every historical event for that matter, to little more than a chance event. This flies in the face of social history which depends on the actions and trends of “social groups” and “common economic interests,” as these are themselves, according to postmodernists, artificial constructs. Moreover, the postmodern view that “human action and social change are to be explained in terms of the ideas, the values and mental images that people happen to have” seems to be associated more closely with the traditional Western view.[51] Acton is concerned, therefore, that the shift postmodernism is facilitating may, in the end, actually give credence to the Pipesian interpretation of the revolution and this, by eliminating any examination of the material conditions of society, would be detrimental to our understanding of the event. Acton’s concern is valid, but it seems to presuppose that there will be no dissenting voices within the historical community to keep the more extreme aspects of postmodern theory at bay. Nevertheless, scholars of 1917, particularly in the United States, are increasingly finding that social history in the strictly materialist sense may have taken us as far as it can.[52] What needs to happen next—and the influence of postmodernism is certainly a part of this—is to expand the limits of social history, or perhaps eliminate its boundaries altogether, to include “the larger, competitive discursive universe” in which the lower classes existed.[53] We now have some sense of the objective material conditions of workers and peasants but this is not the whole picture. As Suny shows, these “men and women might have thought of their miserable lot as something ordained by nature or birth and accepted it…or they might have thought…that they were the undeserving victims of ruthless capitalists who had only their ‘bourgeois’ interests at heart.”[54] Such an insight would, obviously, be invaluable to scholars’ understanding of 1917. The cultural shift has also started to shed light on important themes such as the construction of identities and the “internal codes and discourses” of social practices. This, Suny argues, could provide a possible avenue for bringing “politics and society back together” by analyzing “the hidden ways in which people understand what they are doing and who they are.”[55] Even amidst its critics, postmodernism is changing the way that scholars are looking at the past. For better or worse, the historians of the Russian Revolution are beginning to look beyond the strictly social into a much broader world where the social, cultural, and political are rapidly colliding. There are those who continue to turn a blind eye to postmodernism and proceed “in their hard-won” materialist methods of the 1970s, and there are still those who radically embrace structuralist and poststructuralist theory and espouse the gross inadequacy of all previous historical practices. However, a majority, as is typical of historical debate, find themselves somewhere in the middle, willing to accept certain postmodern postulates but unable to dismiss the crucial social historical work of revisionist historians.[56] With this in mind, it would be misleading to describe the impact of postmodernism as an attack on history. Indeed, the discipline has evolved and become what it is today because of debate and criticism. Challenges, controversy, debate, and plurality are, as this examination of the historiography of 1917 shows, what refine and improve historical consensus; they are what move our understanding forward. Postmodernism is the latest such challenge, and while it is seen as a threat by some, its significance can best be understood in the context of previous competing historical viewpoints. Just as the traditional Western view established itself in opposition to the orthodox Soviet account, and just as the revisionists directly challenged the older, traditional view, postmodernism challenges the classic materialist approach of social historians. But it is the historical community’s array of differing voices and opinions and its ability to adapt that makes history such a powerful tool for understanding not only our past, but our present or, as Joyce Appleby notes, “for dealing with the world and preparing for the future.”[57] Extreme interpretations of the Russian Revolution will persist, and this is a good thing, for it helps to create a vast middle ground within which sound, well-balanced syntheses of competing paradigms and new intellectual currents can emerge. Bibliography Acton, E. Cherniaev, V.I.. Rosenberg, W.G. (eds). Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution: 1914-1921 (Arnold, 1997). Acton, Edward. Rethinking the Russian Revolution (Arnold, 1990). Appleby, Joyce. Hunt, Lynn. Jacob, Margaret. Telling the Truth about History (Norton, 1995). Burke, Peter (ed.). New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Polity Press, 2001). Eley, G. “Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later,” in T. McDonald (ed), The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (UMP, 1996). Elton, G.R. Return to Essentials (Cambridge University Press, 1991). Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (Harvester, 1980). Hunt, Lynn (ed.). The New Cultural History (University of California Press, 1989). Moore, Scott. “Christian History, Providence, and Michel Foucault,” 12 Oct. 1996, <www3.baylor.edu/~Scott_Moore/essays/Foucault.html#note5#note5> (5 March 2004). Read, Christopher. From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and their Revolution, 1917-1921 (Oxford, 1996). Sharpe, J. “History From Below,” in P. Burke (ed), New Perspectives in Historical Writing, (Polity Press, 2000). Suny, Ronald Grigor. “Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics,” Russian Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (April, 1994). Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Soviet Experiment:Russia, the USSR and the Successor States (Oxford, 1998). Warren, John. History and the Historians (Hodder and Stoughton, 1999). White, Hayden. “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth”, in Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazisim and the “Final Solution”, (Harvard University Press, 1992). Footnotes
[1] G.R. Elton, Return to Essentials (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.43. [2] E. Acton, V.I. Cherniaev, W.G. Rosenberg (eds), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution: 1914-1921 (Arnold, 1997), p.6-7. [7] Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution (Arnold, 1990), p.178. [9] Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment:Russia, the USSR and the Successor States (Oxford, 1998), p.xiv. [10] J. Sharpe, “History From Below,” in P. Burke (ed), New Perspectives in Historical Writing, (Polity Press, 2000), pg.26. [11] Edward Thompson, quoted in P. Burke (ed), New Perspectives… pg.26. [13] G. Eley, “Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later,” in T. McDonald (ed), The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (UMP, 1996), pg.194. [14] Sir John Seeley, quoted in P. Burke (ed), New Perspectives… pg.3. [15] Ronald Grigor Suny, “Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics,” Russian Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (April, 1994), pg.167 [19] E. Acton, V.I. Cherniaev, W.G. Rosenberg, Critical Companion… p.9, 11. [22] Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution… p.209. [23] E. Acton, V.I. Cherniaev, W.G. Rosenberg, Critical Companion… p.12. [24] Ronald Grigor Suny, “Revision and Retreat…”, p.169. [25] Walter Lacquer, quoted in Ronald Grigor Suny, “Revision and Retreat…”, p.169. [26] Ronald Grigor Suny, “Revision and Retreat…”, p.169. [27] Richard Pipes, quoted in E. Acton, V.I. Cherniaev, W.G. Rosenberg, Critical Companion… p.13. [28] Ronald Grigor Suny, “Revision and Retreat…”, p.171. [29] E. Acton, V.I. Cherniaev, W.G. Rosenberg, Critical Companion… p.13. [30] Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and their Revolution, 1917-1921 (Oxford, 1996), p.5. [31] Ronald Grigor Suny, “Revision and Retreat…”, p.177. [33] John Warren, History and the Historians (Hodder and Stoughton, 1999), p.117. [35] Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (University of California Press, 1989), p.9. [36] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (Harvester, 1980), pp.131-3. [37] Scott Moore, “Christian History, Providence, and Michel Foucault,” 12 Oct. 1996, <www3.baylor.edu/~Scott_Moore/essays/Foucault.html#note5#note5> (5 March 2004). [38] Michel Foucault, quoted in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (University of California Press, 1989), p.8. [39] John Warren, History and the Historians, p.120. [40] Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth”, in Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazisim and the “Final Solution”, (Harvard University Press, 1992), p.44. [41] John Warren, History and the Historians, p.120. [42] Scott Moore, “Christian History…” [43] Peter Burke, New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Polity Press, 2001), p.3. [44] Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (University of California Press, 1989), p.22. [45]Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution… p.13. [46] G. Eley, “Is All the World a Text? p.198. [47] Ronald Grigor Suny, “Revision and Retreat…”, p.178. [48] Bryan Palmer, quoted in G. Eley, “Is All the World a Text? p.225. [49] Edward Acton, Rethinking… p.14. [52] Ronald Grigor Suny, “Revision and Retreat…”, p.181. [56] G. Eley, “Is All the World a Text? p.224. [57] Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (Norton, 1995), p.236.
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