Reconsidering the Russian Revolution a century later Reflecting on the fate of the Russian Revolution one hundred years after October, Ronald Grigor Suny—one of the world’s leading historians of the period—explores the historiographical controversies over 1917, Stalinism, and the end of “Communism” and provides an assessment of the achievements, costs, losses and legacies of the choices made by Soviet leaders. While a quarter century after the disintegration of the USSR, the story usually told is one of failure and inevitable collapse, Suny reevaluates the promises, missed opportunities, achievements, and colossal costs of trying to build a kind of “socialism” in the inhospitable environment of peasant Russia. He ponders what lessons 1917 provides for Marxism and the alternatives to capitalism and bourgeois democracy.
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Ronald Grigor Suny. Red Flag Unfurled
Red Flag Unfurled
Contents
Introduction: Making History and the Historian
CHAPTER ONE. Back and Beyond: Reversing the Cultural Turn?
CHAPTER TWO. Reading Russia and the Soviet Union in the Twentieth Century: How the “West” Wrote Its History of the USSR
CHAPTER THREE. The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, “National” Identity, and Theories of Empire
CHAPTER FOUR. Toward a Social History of the October Revolution
CHAPTER FIVE. Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics
CHAPTER SIX. Breaking Eggs, Making Omelets: Violence and Terror in Russia’s Civil Wars, 1918–1922
Notes
Index
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History, Historians,and the Russian Revolution
RONALD GRIGOR SUNY
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Sixth, the cultural turn exposed the art and artifice of historical metanarratives, with their usual starting point in the Enlightenment and their grand tours from tradition to modernity. The problem was not so much that the grand narratives were right or wrong but that they had been taken as true, as accurate reflections of an actual past, and as bases of analysis and further elaboration, rather than as highly selective and convenient frames for understanding. The cultural turn saw all social scientific accounts as constructed narratives, selected from available evidence, akin to other fictions, and told by narrators situated in specific time and place.42
Stories are necessary to make sense out of the raw material of lived experience. Gone is the omniscient, objective observer, and in his place is a weaver of a new historical or ethnographic web woven with the threads and according to the conventions of particular disciplines. The great stories of the past—the rise of the bourgeoisie or the working class, the struggle of nations toward consciousness and freedom, the progressive emancipation of humankind from ignorance and superstition—were now seen precisely to be stories more or less plausible and resonant in so far as they played by the rules of disciplinary games and appealed to disciplinary communities. As Margaret R. Somers puts it, “Within a knowledge culture, narratives … not only convey information but serve epistemological purposes. They do so by establishing veracity through the integrity of their storied form. This suggests that in the first instance the success or failure of truth claims embedded in narratives depends less on empirical verification and more on the logic and rhetorical persuasiveness of the narrative.”43
