ABSTRACT
S. A. Smith is Professor of History at the University of Oxford. He is one of the leading scholars of the social and cultural history of the Russian Revolution and his book Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–1918 on the development of the labour movement and democratization of the factories remains a classic in the field. During the twentieth century there were few major revolutions that were not precipitated by inter-state warfare. The Iranian revolution, undoubtedly a social revolution, is perhaps the paramount exception. As for the ‘variety of tendencies and factions’ within the Bolshevik party, the author's comment above about Democratic Centralists illustrates the extent to which the exigencies of, and responses to,civil war and economic prostration provoked debate within the party about where the Revolution was going. The short-lived soviet republics in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania at the end of 1918, or the Communist government in Hungary in 1919, exemplify this combination of millenarian expectation and desperation.
