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Russian History from the February Revolution to the Great Patriotic War
is a survey of the principal political,
socioeconomic, intellectual and cultural developments from the fall of the Russian monarchy in 1917 to the
unprovoked German invasion that brought the USSR into World War II. The text and its companion,
Russian
History from the Great Patriotic War to the New Russia (2003), provide a comprehensive survey of twentieth
century Russia during and after the Revolution. The previously unpublished state papers, memoirs, and
correspondence shed new light on the dissatisfaction with Bolshevism at the close of the civil war, the
attitude of the population toward the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, and the tragic suffering of the
peasants during collectivization.
The previously unpublished documents clearly show the peasants' poverty and their anger over the
forced grain requisitions of war communism. A letter from Vologda peasants complained of losing nearly
all of their grain, cheese, cattle and hay. The official report corroborates the account, accusing the
grain requisition detachments of ignoring local conditions and perpetrating acts of violence against the
peasants. These documents suggest that the decision to replace the forced grain requisitions with a fixed
tax in kind and adopt NEP must be attributed to the Little Civil War as well as the Kronshtadt rebellion of
February 1921.
The letters from the 1920s quoted in Chapter Three show many "bourgeois specialists" employed by
Lenin to restore the economy during NEP did not fully understand its temporary nature. Since the Russian
State had always controlled large sectors of the economy, the nationalization of the "commanding heights"
did not concern them. The restoration of the smaller firms to their former owners proved the state's
recognition of the limits of nationalization.
The letters quoted in Chapter Four show the rank-and-file party members' determination to eliminate the
middle class experts and proceed with the building of communism. The Party Central Committee was receiving
complaints about NEP's incompatibility with Communist ethics more than three years before Stalin's Great
Transformation. One letter (August 1926) advised the party to "write off NEP" and stop the "cheating" of
the workers and peasants. Another (December 1926) condemned the bourgeois experts and demanded "work,
bread, and justice."
The previously unpublished documents trace the tragic suffering of the peasantry during collectivization.
Although the wealthy kulaks withholding grain were the official target, the term was extended to cover any
farmer who opposed collectivized agriculture. A poignant letter from some middle and lower income peasants
to the Soviet head of state, M.I. Kalinin, describes their suffering: After being evicted from their homes,
the peasants were driven into the steppe, where they could barely subsist without food or shelter.
The economist A.G. Soloviev's diary records the trial of the Anikeev brothers for trying to help peasants
unjustly called kulaks.
 Danilov, Aleksandr Anatolevich
(1954–) Author of From the Great Patriotic War to the New
Russia. Doctor of History, Professor and Head of the History Department, Moscow State Pedagogical
University. Academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. Active member of the New York Academy
of Sciences. Academician and Secretary of the Division of History of the International Academy of
Pedagogical Sciences. Author of 260 scholarly works and textbooks with more than five million copies
published (including publications in the United States, Great Britain, and Lithuania). Dr. Danilov has
trained twenty-eight Doctors of History and twenty-eight Ph.D.s in History. Chairman of the Dissertation
Council for the Defense of Doctoral Dissertations, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Historians of the
Higher Certification Commission of the Russian Federation. He has participated in international conferences
in Moscow, Khabarovsk, Warsaw, Paris, Rome, New York, Boston, Nanking, Athens, Barcelona, and Helsinki.
 Souzdaltsev, Igor Nikolaevich
(1962–) Co-author of From the Great Patriotic War to the New
Russia. Chairman of the Institute of Natiology (Moscow), Ph.D. Member of the Russian Academy of
Social Sciences, member of New York Academy of Sciences. Author of Natiology:
Social Science for the Third Millennium (1999) and other books and articles on the theoretical
origins and development of nations published in the United States and Russia. Dr. Souzdaltsev has been a
participant in international academic conferences in New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta and Moscow.
He has also appeared as an expert on the leading Russian television channels Vremena
and Sloboda Slova.
Hammond, Vincent Elwood (1947–) Ph.D. in Russian, British, and
Modern European History, University of Illinois. Associate Professor of History, University of Central
Arkansas. In addition to Russia from the Rise of Moscow to the Revolution of 1917
(2003), author of One
World (2003) and State Service in Sixteenth Century Novgorod: The First
Century of the Pomestie System
(forthcoming). Translator and editor of A.A. Danilov and A.N. Souzdaltsev's From
the Great Patriotic War to the New Russia (2003) and A.A. Danilov's History
of Russia: The Twentieth Century (1996). Other edited
and annotated translations include A.F. Kiselev's The Trade Unions and the
Soviet State (2001) and A.V. Lubkov's War, Revolution and the Cooperative (2002).
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