The Russian Revolution was undoubtedly one of the most significant developments of modern times. This gave rise to an ideology that inspired both hatred and hope across the world, and which profoundly shaped international politics for more than seventy years. Although the significance of the revolution is not a point of contention, the question of why it happened and its motivations is. With the origin of the revolution hotly contested, there is a vast array of books, memoirs and documents, offering their own take on the events that took place in 1917, an unsurprising fact given the importance of the Revolution . By the late 1980s, multiple schools of thought or major traditions had emerged, including the Soviet, liberal, and revisionist perspectives. The interpretations of many writers fit perfectly into these trends. The most important historians, Richard Pipes discussing the liberal perspective, Sheila Fitzpatrick the revisionist and Christopher Hill describing a Western view of the Soviet vision. By 1917, the link between the Tsar and the majority of the Russian people was severed. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essayThe Soviet interpretation is at odds with itself. It was primarily created and supported by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Despite this, the Soviet Union produced little or nothing of what we consider to be a real story. Many valuable contributions to history were produced in the form of primary sources, during the first decade of Soviet rule, such as memoirs and collections of documents. Soviet historians because of the wealth of documentation intended to initiate ambitious research projects; believing that they would be the first Marxists to tell the story in a serious way, with the mission of supporting the newly created state and the abundance of recently opened state archives. However, this was only a pipe dream once Stalinism emerged, curbing the resurgence of Stalinism. of any real historical study. Under the Stalinist state, historians were either intimidated or forced to align their studies with the party line, or even rewrite their work entirely; this was the case at the beginning when it came to the Soviet revolution, by correctly recounting the partisan struggles which had preceded it, and in particular within the Bolshevik Party. All this had to be handled in such a way as to justify Stalin as the all-powerful ruler of Bolshevik Russia.0 The desire by which historians had thrown themselves into the archives found a mortal enemy in secrecy, which forbade all access to the documentation . Historians could not have access to investigate because free inquiry was incompatible with falsification. Ultimately, all chronicles of the party and the revolution, even those written in the Stalinist spirit, were banned at all levels of education, from rural party talks to university seminars. Students were allowed to draw from a single source, the CPSU History Short Course, an unusual assortment of Stalinist myths and constructs, written or inspired by the man himself. Carr, despite being a Western historian, made a concerted effort to fill in these gaps. a knowledge vacuum that a Soviet status lacks; In doing so, he also provided a fascinating insight into the revolution itself. Carr was alive in 1917; not only did he consider the events in Russia from a point of viewcontemporary, but as a socialist he saw them in a very positive light. In the context of his own research on the revolution, he was in no way in a “commanding position… On the contrary, the historian was in procession with everyone”1. When it came to his own lines of inquiry and the narratives he constructed through his research, Carr focused heavily on the state, not the nation and society that underpinned it. is primarily focused on the top of the state hierarchy, going so far as to say that his History of the Soviet Union is primarily a history of its ruling group. This is partly due to its rather basic approach. Each time he talks about the evolution of the social context, he is accompanied by an analysis of what is also happening within the ruling group. He tends to view society as the object of policies developed and decreed from above. This leads one to think that he sees the state as the creator of society rather than society as the creator of the state. Such an approach surely posed some difficulties for him as a historian of a revolution, because a revolution is the collapse of the State and demonstrates that in the last resort it is society which makes the State, and not the opposite. He approaches revolutionary upheaval with the spirit of a scholar interested in constitutional designs and governmental mechanisms. In line with his top-down perspective, Carr would have been openly greatly distressed by the role of Leninism. This is particularly notable in his presentation of the figure of Lenin dominating and eclipsing not only that of the Revolution, but that of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet state as a whole: "it was Lenin who "broke the framework [accepted ] »2. Carr's blind affliction does not end there: in his work he focuses on Lenin who built a state that aroused his admiration, not on one who overthrew a state. Carr saw the story of Lenin the Revolutionary as the necessary prelude to Lenin the Statesman, and he merely touches ironically on the fact that Lenin, at the height of his power, still desired the brutal vision of a society without classes. He often quotes Lenin's speeches and writings, ignoring statements that clearly indicated Lenin's resentment toward the masses, including the peasantry and workers. Carr's view was therefore somewhat contradictory: while emphasizing the inevitability of revolution, he focused above all on the power of Lenin's personality, unable to resist the attraction and magnetism of Lenin, who blinded his socialist principles which should have helped him reach a conclusion. as to the true cause of the Revolution. Basically, the interpretation approach is that the people were spurred into action by a party leader who showed them how to reclaim what was rightfully theirs. This is consistent with what the future regime wanted as an image of its origins. The reputation of the Bolshevik Party would be better preserved by presenting it as a strong party, in control and ready to act. On the other hand, his actions had to be emphasized as defensive, otherwise the Bolsheviks might have the opportunity to attempt to overthrow the February People's Revolution. It would be more effective, in this case, to present the bourgeoisie as the aggressors and the Bolsheviks as taking rapid defensive action thanks to a bold strategy initiated by Lenin. This too had to be emphasized, because the Soviet state needed a eulogy from its founder. The official Soviet biography therefore makes much of his genius as a leader of the masses and his skills as a wise and intrepid strategist. From the 1940s to the early 1960s, mostWestern historians of the Russian Revolution have adhered to the "liberal" perspective. . Cold War politics and the ideals of American political science played a fundamental role in shaping the liberal vision. He is politically conservative and fundamentally hostile to Marxist theory. They see politics rather than class conflict as a means of providing answers. The argument that "identifiable men pursuing their own advantages built the Russian revolution"3 not only highlights liberals' observation of Marxist theory and the motivations behind it, but dissects the true motivations behind the movement's most prolific figures. This view can be further simplified by describing history “from above”. The erroneous decisions of Tsar Nicholas II and Kerensky, alongside the fierce determination of Lenin, lie the foundations of the liberal argument; rather than Marxist notions of class and social conflict. Richard Pipes argues: “…the “masses” neither needed nor wanted a revolution; the only interested group was the intelligentsia. The emphasis on so-called popular discontent and class conflict stems more from ideological preconceptions than from concrete facts – namely from the discredited Marxist theory that political developments are always and everywhere driven by class conflict. in their actions and their demands. They passively ignored the true nature of the revolution and blindly followed the Bolsheviks. Building on this point, John Keep argued that the October “Revolution” was essentially the skillful exploitation of anarchy by the Bolsheviks for their own ends. Although Keep offers more of an exploration of the aspirations of the lower classes than more traditional liberal accounts, it indicates that the masses were in fact "caught up in great events over which they had no control." In Pipes's book, The Concise History of the Russian Revolution, his main argument is that the October Revolution was a "classic coup d'état, the seizure of governmental authority by a small group, carried out, out of respect for democratic professions of the time, with a demonstration of mass participation but with virtually no mass involvement. But to deconstruct this rather radical statement, he divides his story into three different sections. The first, “The Agony of the Ancien Régime,” offers a description of Russia under the Tsar and the people fighting for change. Basically, the section focused on the anachronism of the Tsar, its inherent traditions and values, and its all-powerful autocratic hold. He goes further to argue that the monarchy that ruled Russia for centuries had run its course and was no longer capable of coping with the pressures of modernism. It failed because it was unable to establish a system in which the peasants and the intelligentsia could play a role. The peasantry made up the majority of the Russian population, but, for the most part, they were unfamiliar with and remained largely detached from the state, while the Intelligentsia took an approach of rigorous opposition and discontent towards the monarchical rulers of the Russia and the reforms they introduced. to serve as peaceful solutions. The second argument Pipes made was "The Bolsheviks Conquer Russia", which recounted the rise of Lenin and described the coup itself. He continues to describe the Bolshevik Party as a creation of Lenin, who "designed it in his own image and, overcoming all opposition from within and without, kept it on the path he had charted . »6 Despite the arguments of some of itsfellow historians who view revolution as a democratic movement representing the interests of the people, Pipes strongly argued otherwise, writing: "The events which led to the overthrow of the Provisional Government were not spontaneous but carefully planned and staged by a tightly organized conspiracy. »7 His argument is: supported by Lenin's seizure of power and his control of Russia with very little resistance. Revisionist Following the Vietnam War, the New Left came into fruition. The movement brought to life new perspectives, different from the Western thought so synonymous within our society. The libertarian perspective adopted by historians such as Edward Acton seemed to move beyond Soviet and liberal interpretations of the October Revolution and focused instead on the role of the masses; Acton writes: “The goals for which they (the masses) fought were their own.” Although many of the assumptions made by some libertarian historians were based on circumstantial evidence that were later rejected by liberal and Soviet historians, libertarians focused on the sociological impact played by the masses.laying the foundation on which the revisionist argument imposed itself. The revisionist school of thought is divided into two distinct currents. First, the Bolsheviks were much more in tune with their popular demands than previously thought. Second, their organization was much less structured and efficient. Revisionists emphasize reconsidering the way political power functions. They refer to the idea that historians like Carr argue that power is a process exercised downward by leaders, like Lenin, of his Bolshevik party; Revisionists argue that the Bolsheviks were largely subject to influence and pressure from below. The practical effect of this new perspective was that the Bolsheviks were now seen as being much more in line with the more immediate wishes of a large part of the population. Instead of forcing the pace of the revolution by exploiting popular demands, they adapted their policies to allow them to advance with an already existing revolutionary current. The people therefore had a vital influence on revolutionary events. “The strength of the Bolsheviks lay in the fact that they were the only party uncompromising through association with the bourgeoisie and the February regime, and the party most firmly identified with the ideas of power and workers' power. armed uprising. Fitzpatrick here reflects his disagreement with the traditional Western/liberal perspective, which often attributes great weight to the organizational strength and internal discipline of the Bolshevik party, constituting one of the main reasons for the victory of the revolution. Fitzpatrick counters instead that Lenin's insistence on disavowing the Provisional Government and his decision to embrace "an uncompromising radicalism on the extreme left of the political spectrum" meant that the Bolsheviks would ultimately be seen by the population as the only party not corrupted. by the “politics of coalition and compromise”. Moreover, there was little party discipline at the time when most Bolsheviks were in exile, in prison, or keeping a low profile in Petrograd. Fitzpatrick claimed that the Bolsheviks benefited from remaining in the streets with the "irresponsible and bellicose partisans." revolutionary crowd,” leaving the party in an ideal position when the opportunity later presented itself to Lenin and his supporters. The lack of organization did not matter since the Bolsheviks were in a stronger position than their rivals,.