ABSTRACT
Michael Hickey shifts our attention to the provinces, a focus of study long neglected but now increasingly popular as a means to better comprehend Russian history. In doing so, he brings together many important issues, especially the complex role of politics and class rhetoric, the role of everyday life (not just major factory conflict), the moderate versus radical socialists division, shifting popular allegiances, and the fundamental dilemma and weakness of the moderate socialists. If Michael Melancon looks at the SR party and its suspicious attitude toward the Provisional Government, Hickey traces the process of the rise and fall of the moderate socialists – the SRs and Mensheviks – in power. This – why did the moderates fail? – is the reverse side of the question: why were the Bolsheviks successful? The moderate socialists, he argues, politicized the problems of daily life and framed them within a politics of class that initially won mass support. They then, however, failed to solve the very economic, crime, and other daily life issues that they had politicized. At the same time they became defenders of the new state structure and political system. The combination undermined their support as those very workers, soldiers, and lower-class elements they had helped politicize turned to the radical left for leadership. A similar trajectory of moderate socialist rise and fall was found in most cities of Russia, and thus Hickey’s discussion is of a nationwide, not merely local Smolensk, process. His account also illustrates the role of a radical left bloc, not just Bolsheviks, in the rise of the radical left in the name of power to the soviets. At the same time, by pursuing this in a provincial setting such as Smolensk, freed from the national politics in Petrograd, many of the important issues can be seen more clearly.
