Rethinking the Russian Revolution As Historical Divide

Matthias Neumann, Andy Willimott

"The widely accepted view of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is that it was a complete break with the past, with everything which had gone before swept away, and all aspects of politics, economy and society reformed and made new. Recently, however, historians have increasingly come to question this view, discovering that Tsarist Russia was much more reform-minded, and that the new regime contained much more continuity than has previously been acknowledged. This book presents new research findings on a range of different aspects of Russian society, both showing how there was much reform before 1917, and much continuity afterwards; and also going beyond this to show that the new Soviet regime established in the 1920s, with its vision of the New Soviet Person, was in fact based on a complicated mixture of new Soviet thinking and ideas developed before 1917 by a variety of non-Bolshevik...