ABSTRACT
There is Agreement in the Academy and the 'Street' Alike on the Triple significance of the Russian Revolutions, especially that of October, as pivot, hammer and force-field. For Trotsky, in his history of The Russian Revolution of the early 1930s, the central problem of the February Revolution was why 'those socialists who stood at the head of the soviet took it for granted that the to pass to the bourgeoisie'. The work of Smith, Koenker and Rosenberg, among others, offers convincing arguments against an important current in Western historiography that preferred to regard the October Revolution as a coup. What emerges from their investigations is a depiction of October as part of a vast social upheaval over which the Bolsheviks had, in fact, very little control. In the classic western interpretation of the Bolshevik victory and the subsequent authoritarian strain in Soviet history, the deux ex machina has been regarded as the Bolsheviks' secret weapons of party organization and discipline.
