Questions for Discussion:

How do historians define the October revolution? Was it a coup d’état, or a manifestation of grassroots unrest? How should we write its history?

Set reading (to be prepared for class discussion):

Source: V. I. Lenin, ‘Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution (April Theses)’. Available online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm

Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Extracts from Chapter 2, ‘1917: The Revolutions of February and October’, pp. 49-67. Scan available here.

Ronald Suny, ‘Toward a Social History of the October Revolution’, The American Historical Review, 88 (1983), pp. 31–52.

Selected further reading:

Film: October, or Ten Days that Shook the World (dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1928): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVuf3T3k-W0&t=5529s

Arthur E. Adams and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik Victory: Visions and Revisions, 3rd Revised edition edition (Lexington, Mass: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), chapters in Part III, ‘October’.

Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2004).

Stephen Kotkin, ‘1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks’, The Journal of Modern History, 70 (1998), 384–425.

John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (London: Penguin, 2007).

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

Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, trans. by Max Eastman (Penguin Classics, 2008). E-book.