Triumph and Tragedy
Book Review

http://solidarity-us.org/atc/197/october-song/
Date Written:  2018-11-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2018
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23444

Le Blanc's sympathies with the Bolshevik project are clear, but this is no apologia. On the contrary, grounded in material and intellectual evidence, it is a work that helps us better understand the factors that shaped the choices the revolutionary leaders made and the alternatives paths that might have been open to them.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

October Song:
Bolshevik Triumph, Communist Tragedy, 1917-1924
By Paul Le Blanc
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017, 504 pages, $27.95 paperback.

This study brings his knowledge and excellent writing skills to bear in a wide-ranging analysis of the complex factors that transformed the inspiring Bolshevik triumph of 1917 into the Communist tragedy that culminated with Stalin.

Le Blanc's sympathies with the Bolshevik project are clear, but this is no apologia. On the contrary, grounded in material and intellectual evidence, it is a work that helps us better understand the factors that shaped the choices the revolutionary leaders made and the alternatives paths that might have been open to them....

The basic argument of October Song is that the Bolshevik Party was a force "animated by radical democratic aspirations and dynamics." Well rooted in the urban working class, it most accurately gave expression to the desires of Russia's proletariat in the face of the imperial regime’s military, economic, and political collapse.