The Bolsheviks Survive: Petrograd 1919
Author(s): Alexander Rabinowitch (Author)
- Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
- Publication Date: April 28, 2026
- Language: English
- Print length: 384 pages
- ISBN-10: 082296791X
- ISBN-13: 9780822967910
Book Description
Petrograd, the imperial capital and the urban stage upon which virtually the entire Russian Revolution was enacted, in 1919 struggled through a year of civil war, hunger, social upheaval, and political and economic challenges. Based on exhaustive research in previously closed Russian archives, Alexander Rabinowitch authoritatively presents an in depth look at how Petrograd’s local Soviet government and Bolshevik Party organizations struggled to implement the Bolshevik Party program, fight domestic and foreign counterrevolutionaries, quiet labor unrest, and provide food, fuel, and education to the local population. The methods and strategies used by the government and party organizations to organize public life and fight enemies, domestic and foreign, not only preserved the infant Soviet regime but proved to be the first manifestation of what would become the one-party authoritarian Soviet political system.
Editorial Reviews
Review
A lifetime of curiosity, research, and reflection propel this highly readable journey through ‘Red Petrograd,’ the former Russian imperial capital that became the launchpad for Vladimir Lenin’s epoch-defining revolution. I cannot think of a more reliable guide to the twists and turns of Bolshevik power than the eminent Alexander Rabinowitch. — Benjamin Nathans, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
Taking power in a revolution is one thing, but hanging on and establishing a functioning government is quite another. In the fourth of his meticulously documented histories of the Bolshevik Party in Petrograd, doyen of US historians of the Russian Revolution Alexander Rabinowitch sets out the formidable problems and costs of revolutionary survival as democratic instincts withered in the face of economic crisis and military threat. — Sheila Fitzpatrick, distinguished service professor emerita, University of Chicago
Alexander Rabinowitch has likely done more than any other historian to overturn entrenched postrevolutionary and Cold War interpretations of the Russian Revolution. In this concluding volume of his landmark tetralogy on Red Petrograd, he shows how the crucible of civil war not only eroded the city’s once-central role in national and international politics but also corroded the Communist Party’s egalitarian ideals and the flexible political practices of 1917 and 1918―features so vital to Lenin’s rise to power. Essential reading for students of the Revolution and for anyone seeking to understand the origins of Stalinist governance. — Donald J. Raleigh, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
In this beautifully written, meticulously researched book, the leading historian of the Russian Revolution examines the challenges the Bolsheviks faced during the Civil War. Alexander Rabinowitch brilliantly demonstrates how the Bolsheviks moved ever closer to strict centralization and single-party domination in their fierce fight for survival against advancing White Armies, foreign intervention, fuel shortages, hunger, and strikes. For anyone who ever wondered how and why Stalinist repression replaced the direct democracy of the soviets, this powerful history provides an answer. — Wendy Z. Goldman, Carnegie Mellon University
Alexander Rabinowitch is the historian par excellence of the Bolshevik struggle for power in the first years of the revolution. In this final volume of his foundational work on party politics and leadership struggles, he tells the bleak story of the besieged regime and its desperate efforts in the revolutionary capital Petrograd when White Armies advanced on the city. He details the tragedy of how war, food shortages, and enemies within and without led the revolution from democratic euphoria in 1917 slowly toward centralization of state power, emasculation of workers’ real power, the reluctant deployment of terror as a tool of governance, and a steady drift toward dictatorship. — Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan
Book Description
In This Capstone Work, an Esteemed Historian of the Russian Revolution Explores the Dynamics of the Upheaval in Petrograd That Changed World History
About the Author
Alexander Rabinowitch is emeritus professor of history at Indiana University. He is also an affiliated research scholar for the Saint Petersburg Institute of History and Russian Academy of Sciences.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Extract from the Preface of The Bolsheviks Survive
The Russian revolutions of 1917, together with the ensuing long, devastating Russian civil war and foreign interventions, were seminal events in modern world history. The initial February 1917 revolution in the Russian capital city, Petrograd (former-ly St. Petersburg) ended three hundred years of Romanov rule and replaced the incumbent emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, with a Western-oriented, predominantly middle-class Provisional Gov-ernment. This temporary governing body, composed initially of Westernized liberals―and, after April 1917, also of moderate so-cialists―was projected to hold power until a representative em-pire-wide elective Constituent Assembly designed a permanent democratic political system for a new and free Russian republic. The October 1917 revolution that upended the Provisional Gov-ernment and brought Lenin and the Bolsheviks (or Communists) to power derailed this alternative and, together with the brutal civil war that followed, set a path toward the formation of the ma-ture, ultra-authoritarian Soviet political system that lasted for the better part of the twentieth century. Beyond this, it can be argued that the failure to establish the basis for some sort of moderate Russian democratic political and social system in 1917 following the implosion of the tsarist regime haunts the world to this day.
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