The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation, 1917-41 [Hardcover]

How did a regime that promised utopian-style freedom end up delivering terror and tyranny? For some, the Bolsheviks were totalitarian and the descent was inevitable; for others, Stalin was responsible; for others still, this period in Russian history was a microcosm of the Cold War.

The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolutionreasons that these arguments are too simplistic. Rather, the journey from Bolshevik liberation to totalitarianism was riddled with unsuccessful experiments, compromises, confusion, panic, self-interest and over-optimism. As this book reveals, the emergence (and persistence) of the Bolshevik dictatorship was, in fact, the complicated product of a failed democratic transition.

Drawing on long-ignored archival sources and original research, this fascinating volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to reconsider one of the most important and controversial questions of 20th-century history: how to explain the rise of the repressive Stalinist dictatorship.

Lara Doudsis Vice-Chancellor's Fellow in History at Northumbria University, UK. She is the author ofInside Lenin's Government: Power, Ideology and Practice in the Early Soviet State(Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

James Harrisis Professor of Modern European History at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the Author ofThe Great Fear: Stalin's Terror of the 1930s(2016) andThe Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System(1999). He has edited multiple volumes on Soviet History, includingThe Anatomy of Terror: Political Violence under Stalin(2013) andStalin's World: Dictating the Soviet Order(2014, co-edited with Sarah Davies).

Peter Whitewoodis Senior Lecturer of History at York St. John University, UK. He is the author ofThe Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military(2015).

[An] excellent volume that cohesively balances a wide range oflÓv