Questions for Discussion:

How can we account for the overthrow of Tsarism in February 1917? What impact did World War I have on this process?

Set reading (to be prepared for class discussion):

Mark D. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Introduction, ‘The Languages of Popular Revolution’, pp. 1-35.

Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). Chapter 1, ‘The Desacralization of the Monarchy’, pp. 9-29. Scan available here.

Selected further reading:

Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution (London: Edward Arnold, 1990).

Murray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven G. Marks, and Melissa K. Stockdale, eds., Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914-22: Book 1. Popular Culture, the Arts, and Institutions (Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Pub, 2014).

Murray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven G. Marks, and Melissa K. Stockdale, eds., Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914-22: Book 2. Political Culture, Identities, Mentalities, and Memory (Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Pub, 2014).

Boris I. Kolonitskii, ‘Antibourgeois Propaganda and Anti-“Burzhui” Consciousness in 1917’, The Russian Review, 53 (1994), 183–96.

Eric Lohr, Vera Tolz, Alexander Semyonov, and Mark von Hagen, eds., The Empire and Nationalism at War (Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Pub, 2014).

S. A. Smith, Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 (OUP Oxford, 2017).