ABSTRACT
This essay reflects several important issues in the writing of the history of the Russian Revolution. It illustrates the continued importance of political history (despite what we have said about new approaches such as social history and language) and of the study of the Bolshevik Party including, but not only, Lenin. It also demonstrates that within a political approach, the old focus on Lenin as the unquestioned leader of a unified party and organizer and director of a coup d’etat misses the point of what happened. Alexander Rabinowitch had much earlier demolished the myth of a tightly unified Bolshevik Party, but the nature of Lenin’s leadership role in the October Revolution was not really questioned. Similarly, although Robert V. Daniels asked important questions about the nature of the October Revolution as early as 1967, historians generally failed to follow through with new research on the October Revolution itself. Surprisingly, given its importance, the October Revolution has remained one of the least examined and most poorly understood aspects of 1917.
