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Our special spring issue is out now. Get a discounted subscription to our print magazine today. Your support keeps us publishing!November 07, 2017RussiaHistoryParty PoliticsWar and ImperialismFacebook IconTwitter IconEmail IconPrint IconHow the Bolsheviks WonByAlexander RabinowitchThe Bolsheviks' rise to power, one hundred years ago today, revisited.July 4, 1917. Street demonstration on Nevsky Prospekt in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) just after troops of the Provisional Government opened fire with machine guns.Viktor Bulla / WikimediaRead our spring issue in print. Get a discounted subscription to our print magazine today.Israel’s Young Settler VanguardE. A. HaleviThe Making of the TeenagerLauren FadimanZohran Needs to Create Popular AssembliesGabriel HetlandBhaskar SunkaraA Half-Century of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly CapitalSophina ClarkDaniel JudtIn my contribution, I want to revisit the main conclusions of my writings on 1917, especially as they relate to the thorny, still deeply politicized question of how the Bolsheviks won out in the struggle for power in 1917 Petrograd. However, let me start with a few words about the views of earlier historians on this issue.To Soviet historians, the October 1917 revolution was the legitimate expression of the will of the revolutionary Petrograd masses — a popular armed uprising in support of Bolshevik power led by a highly disciplined vanguard party, brilliantly directed by V. I. Lenin. Western historians, on the other hand, have tended to view the Bolsheviks’ success as the consequence of the Provisional Government’s softness toward the radical left; a historical accident or, most frequently, the result of a well-executed military coup, lacking significant popular support, carried out by a small, united, highly authoritarian and conspiratorial organization controlled by Lenin and subsidized by enemy Germany. To historians holding the latter view — which now includes many historians in Russia today — the structure and practices of the Bolshevik party in 1917 were the inevitable progenitor of Soviet authoritarianism.The conclusions of my research work on 1917 departed in significant ways from these common interpretations. To illustrate this point, let me take note of a few important, still often overlooked moments during the crucial summer and fall of 1917 which seemed me to be of special importance in understanding the character and course of the “October Revolution” in Petrograd. I will then summarize how “Red October” looks to me today.The July UprisingThe first of the moments to which I want to turn is the abortive “July uprising,” which appeared to many at the time, and to most Western historians since, as an unsuccessful attempt by Lenin to seize power and as a dress rehearsal for “Red October.”In my book, Prelude to Revolution, I concluded that the chaotic, bloody, ultimately unsuccessful July uprising was an accurate reflection of unwillingness on the part of soldiers in the war-inflated Petrograd garrison to accept shipment to the front in support of the July 1917 Russian offensive, and of genuine, widespread, spiraling impatience and dissatisfaction on the part of the large mass of Petrograd factory workers, soldiers, and Baltic fleet sailors with the continued maintenance of the war effort and the meager social and economic results of the February 1917 revolution. With regard to the Bolshevik role in the preparation and organization of the July uprising, I concluded that the eruption was partly the outgrowth of four months of steady Bolshevik propaganda and agitation; that factory and unit-level, rank-and-file Bolsheviks played leading roles in starting it; and that extremist leaders of two major auxiliary arms of the party, the Bolshevik Military Organization and the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee, responsive to their new, impatient constituencies, encouraged it against the wishes of Lenin and a majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee.I also ventured several broader generalizations with important implications for subsequent events from my study of the July uprising. One set of generalizations concerned mass attitudes in Petrograd toward the Provisional Government, soviets, and the Bolsheviks at that time. Studying the evolution of popular opinion between February and July, I concluded that among Petrograd workers, soldiers, and sailors who acted politically in any way, the Provisional Government was already then — that is, by midsummer of 1917 — widely perceived as an organ of the propertied classes, opposed to fundamental political and social change, and cold to popular needs. On the other hand, although the lower strata of the Petrograd population subjected the moderate socialists to increasing criticism for their support of the Provisional Government and the continuing war effort, it nonetheless viewed soviets at all levels as genuinely democratic institutions of popular self-rule. Hence, the enormous and ever growing popular attraction of ...