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The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation 1917–1941. Ed. Lara Douds, James Harris, and Peter Whitewood. Library of Modern Russia. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. x, 319 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95, paper.
Three generations of historians examine the interplay of revolutionary violence and coercion, state-building, and efforts to incorporate the masses in creating the Soviet person, culture, and society. The collection of sixteen chapters introduces new voices and approaches, and has much to offer to a broad readership (including students), and to specialists and general readers alike.
In the opening section, Lars Lih traces the liberal origins of the ubiquitous Soviet mass campaigns among the nineteenth century European and Russian social democrats, who championed freedom of expression and assembly as essential to political outreach. Under state sponsorship, campaignism mobilized the masses without freedoms. In a subsequent section, Yiannis Kokosalakis argues that the campaign for the Stalin constitution harkened back to the experimentalism of the revolutionary era and to the Marxist-Leninist goal of a classless society. Eric Van Ree locates the kernel of coercion in Lenin's State and Revolution (1917). Inspired by the participatory Paris Commune and by Russia's popular mass movements, the pamphlet envisioned workers engaging in governance, monitoring the running of enterprises, and protecting the revolution through grassroots organizations. But for Vladimir Lenin, the vanguard party would usurp power to establish a coercive, centralized state that would exclude the former ruling classes and supplant the soviets, factory committees, and militias as the locus of power. In a later section on the Stalin era, J. Arch Getty finds the origins of coercion not in ideology, as Van Ree argues, but...