ABSTRACT
Russian history in 1917. This is best expressed by two of the leading protagonists in the struggle for power-Trotsky and Kerensky. At one extreme Bolshevik success is seen as part of the dialectical process, and as the completion of a movement towards a higher form of State. Trotsky, for example, argued that it represented ‘the transfer of power from one class to another’.1 The other main view is that the October Revolution was a freak occurrence, a perversion of Russia’s historical trends. A well-organized minority group took advantage of administrative and social chaos to force Russian history into one of several alternative channels, and not even the widest one at that. Kerensky believed that the Bolsheviks succeeded ‘only by way of conspiracy, only by way of a treacherous and armed struggle’.2 These two views have since been echoed by Soviet and Western historians who have been separated by the gap between the ideologies which influence their approach.
