ABSTRACT
The national political story of the revolution has been told many times. In most accounts it is usually Petrograd that leads and the country that follows. The deeply symbolic nature of the Russian revolution, its almost theological aspect as the supposed model of Marxist, or at least Marxist-Leninist, revolution, has underlined this. Leninist historians concentrate on Petrograd in order to emphasize the heroic role of the Bolshevik party and its leader. Ironically, historians completely out of sympathy with Lenin, Marxism and Bolshevism have usually put their emphasis on the capital too, but for precisely the opposite reasons—in order to attribute the negative aspects of the revolution to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. So far there has been no sizeable third way, an interpretation in which the Bolsheviks would not be quite so emphatically in control of history but would themselves be, in large part, shaped by the historical forces of the time. The standard, Petrograd-centred interpretation is not false, but it can be misleading since it is only a part of the picture. It is not the whole revolution. None the less, the contours of national politics have to be examined, if only to put them into context.
