Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime

Russia under the Bolshevik Regime continues and concludes The Russian Revolution; in a sense, it also completes the trilogy begun twenty years ago with the publication of Russia under the Old Regime. The present work, however, is meant to stand on its own. It deals with the attempts of the Bolsheviks to defend and expand their authority from the Great Russian base which they had conquered in the winter of 1917–18 to the borderlands of the defunct Russian Empire and beyond, to the rest of the world. By the fall of 1920 it had become apparent that these efforts would not succeed, and that the new regime had to concentrate on building a Communist state at home. The closing part of the book deals with the problems and crises this unexpected development caused Russia’s new rulers. In addition, I discuss Communist cultural and religious policies. By treating these and other topics usually ignored in general histories, I seek to fulfill the promise given in the introduction to The Russian Revolution to provide a more comprehensive account of the subject than hitherto available: that is, to look beyond the struggle for power which is commonly seen as the quintessence of the Revolution to its makers’ designs and uses of that power. The book concludes with the death of Lenin in January 1924, by which time all the institutions and nearly all the practices of the future Stalinism were in place.