My Book Pick: The Russian Revolution: Eight Months of Catastrophe
Aichi Insurance Physicians’ Newspaper
April 5, 2017
Yoshiro Ikeda
Iwanami Shinsho
January 20, 2017
Can a state take away the right to revolution? The parliamentary debate over the proposed “conspiracy law” concerns the future of this country. The French Revolution of 1789 was followed by the restoration of the monarchy under Napoleon, while the Russian Revolution of 1917 also took a circuitous course, eventually leading to attempts to restore the Romanov dynasty. Yet the fact that these revolutions changed the course of human history remains undeniable. One hundred years after the Russian Revolution, this book was published.
As a junior-high-school student, I encountered the Soviet Academy of Sciences through a popular collection of mathematical curiosities. In high school, I studied the materialist conception of history in a comprehensive world-history series. After entering university, I devoured books published by Soviet research institutes, including works on Pavlov, and dreamed of studying at Moscow State University. During the student protests, I became familiar with such opposing terms as Mensheviks versus Bolsheviks and Stalinism versus Trotskyism, although I cannot claim that I had any profound understanding of them.
Before I knew it, the utagoe kissa—coffeehouses where people gathered to sing—had disappeared, and Russian folk songs such as “The Volga Boatmen” were no longer sung. Around the time the Berlin Wall fell, the world began to change dramatically. The socialist countries of Eastern Europe collapsed, and the Russian Revolution seemed to have ended in a miscarriage. Ideas and terms such as conditioned-reflex theory, collective farms (kolkhozes), and state farms (sovkhozes) were all sealed away in the depths of the hearts of those who had once considered themselves democratic youth.
Including vivid portraits of such familiar figures as Alexander Kerensky and Grigory Zinoviev, this book depicts, almost like a historical drama, the eight months from the February Revolution to the October Revolution of 1917. It is fascinating in a way quite different from John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World.
During the First World War, was it really possible for Russia to leap from the serfdom of the Romanov dynasty to a communist revolution without passing through capitalism? The author concludes by saying, “People have no choice but to patiently build institutions in which they can adjust their conflicting interests while making concessions to one another.” Yet even today, there is still no country that has fully achieved such a system.
