Revising The Revolution: The Unmaking of Russia’s Official History of 1917 by Larry E. Holmes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Revising The Revolution: The Unmaking of Russia’s Official History of 1917 by Larry E. Holmes Roger D. Markwick Holmes, Larry E. Revising The Revolution: The Unmaking of Russia’s Official History of 1917. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 2021. xix + 195 pp. Illustrations. Timeline. Notes. Glossary. Selected bibliography. Index. $75.00; $28.00; $27.99 (e-book). Nothing illustrates the folly of assuming historical objectivity more than the historiography of revolution. Almost from the very beginning, the historiography of the Great French Revolution was as polarized as the revolution itself. The same can certainly be said of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, whose victors, the Bolshevik Party, moved quickly to document, interpret and celebrate that epoch-making event. Given the Bolsheviks’ adherence to the Marxist materialist conception of history, historiography was inevitably embedded in the revolution, under the aegis of Istpart — the Commission for the Collection, Study and Publication of Materials on the October Revolution and History of the Communist Party — established in 1920. From its inception, Istpart’s role was intensely political. Established by the Council of People’s Commissars under the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros), a year later it was brought directly under the party Central Committee. In the following ten years during Stalin’s rise, careers, historical and political, could be made or broken according to the increasingly imposed official Communist Party interpretation of 1917. Within another ten, historical orthodoxy or revisionism, especially concerning Stalin’s role in 1917, could be a matter of life or death. In his concise, well-written, meticulously researched study of the making and ‘unmaking of Russia’s official history’, Larry Holmes brings his distinctive eye to this question: not just on contested views of the revolution, but how this contest played out between Moscow Istpart historians and their regional counterparts in Viatka. Thus, Holmes positions his book not only as a study of the politics of Soviet history but also of centre-periphery relations in the volatile infant state. What we learn is hardly surprising. As tensions rose about the centre’s authoritarian political imperative to control the historical ‘grand narrative’ of the revolution (p. 44), so regional Viatka’s beleaguered, under-resourced historians were brought to heel, despite their scholarly aspirations. Initially, Istpart’s ‘chief mission’ (p. 15) was to generate a scholarly record, narration and interpretation of the 1917 Revolution and its genesis. Scholarship, however, soon became embroiled in internecine Party politics, triggered by Trotskii’s 1924 ‘Lessons of October’ which provocatively wrote Stalin out of 1917. With the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 Revolution and even more so the tenth of 1917 looming, Viatka’s Istpart soon ran up against Moscow’s ‘grand narrative’ that the Bolshevik party, its assumed proletarian adherents, and increasingly Stalin, would occupy centre stage in the February-October 1917 historical script. In fact, unlike Petrograd and Moscow, during 1917 regional [End Page 384] Viatka’s few Bolsheviks were overshadowed by Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. Istpart central, however, was determined to legitimate the Party’s increasingly authoritarian political monopoly, depicting it as the demiurge of the Russian Revolution writ large, in the regions as well as the metropoles. Stripped of material and human resources, as Holmes details, Viatka had to fall in line. By 1928 Istpart Union-wide had been merged with the well-resourced Lenin Institute in Moscow, effectively Istpart’s death-knell. A year later, Viatka’s Istpart was gone. En route, there were numerous skirmishes about historical methodology, sources and representation. Objectivity versus political perspectives, memoirs versus documents, and the nature of museum exhibitions, were all in fierce contention. Until they were not. Stalin’s menacing ascendancy, the vanquishing of Trotskii’s Left Opposition in 1927, and the victory of bellicose ‘class and party’ politics over scholarly ‘academicism’ (pp. 105–06) at Istpart’s Fourth, and final, Conference that same year, quickened the pace. Istpart head office celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution by homogenizing the Revolution in the regions and erasing ‘the distinction between the historical past and the political present’ (p. 112), as Holmes incisively puts it. All of this was a prelude to Stalin’s dramatic direct intervention in historiography: his notorious letter...