When did the Russian Revolution end?

Before you can even begin to answer this question, of course, you need to think what we mean by ‘revolution’.  Is it just the overthrow of the government (in which case both Russian Revolutions lasted little more than a couple of days)?  the period of violence?  the making of new laws?  changes in people’s culture and thinking (which was how Lenin defined it)?  And at what point do you detach the consequences of the revolution from being part of the revolution? 

Melissa Stockdale, writing in 2020, wonders, also, how you define ‘end’. 

“By ‘end’ do we mean the termination of internal, armed opposition…  Perhaps ‘end’ refers to the accomplishment of the Revolution’s major goals?  Or does it signify a stop on further revolutionary change?”

The result of this lack of precision in the question is a plethora of different answers, and historians arguing before they have sorted out what they are arguing about. 

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On the Internet, the earliest date is suggested by enotes, which summarises:

“Technically speaking, the Russian Revolution ended in November 1917, when the Bolsheviks took power.”

but then goes on to say:

“But one could say that it really ended in January 1918, when the Bolsheviks forcibly dissolved the newly-elected Constituent Assembly at gunpoint

This is a popular proposal.  In his Beginner’s Guide to the Revolution, Abraham Ascher (2014) explains:

“Some historians have argued that the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly marked the end of the revolution because the Bolsheviks had now shown that they had no intention of giving up power.”

John Rees, writing for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism (1991), comments rather on how “the dialectical relationship between the Bolsheviks and the working class was broken”, and freedom of debate became simply a dispute amongst the leaders of the party. 

In the period of Gorbachev’s perestroika many Soviet historians portrayed February as the ‘real’ revolution, October as merely a ‘coup’, and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly as the turning point in the history of Russia. 

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If it came to a vote, however, I think 1921 might win. 

In 2002, Peter Holquist coined the term “continuum of crisis”, to describe the period; for him, the ‘revolution’ started in 1914 and did not end until the end of the Civil War in 1921. 

Jack Barkstrom (1998) chooses 1921 for different reasons:

“The Russian Civil War and the revolution would not be over until 1921 – it took that long for the Bolsheviks to achieve victory and to gain control of Russia.  In another sense, the Bolsheviks achieved legitimacy on November 2, 1917, when the Provisional Government ordered its forces to lay down their arms and surrender the Kremlin.  What occurred between 1917 and 1921 was the reaction of a government which had already achieved power.”

Other historians have chosen 1921 for other reasons: 

Writing in 1947, the anarchist historian Vsevolod Eikhenbaum (pen-name ‘Voline’) saw the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising as “the final straw” in a failing revolution:

“While the revolution had been pushed in an authoritarian direction since early 1918, the crushing of this revolt marked the end of the revolution – this was the point when the new class secured its final victory over the Unknown [i.e. popular] Revolution.”

Meanwhile, Leonard Schapiro (1955) saw the end of the Revolution as being the 10th Party Congress in March 1921 – surprisingly, not because the NEP was a betrayal of the Bolsheviks’ original principles, but because it was when “the foundation of the future state structure was laid”

Mark Steinberg (2016), whose book explores the feelings and experiences of Russians during the revolution, ends his book in 1921, because in terms of experiences the end of the civil war changed things for everyone … but it is worth noting that he called his final chapter: ‘the Unfinished Revolution’. 

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A number of historians are prepared to chart the revolution beyond 1921 but, again, for different reasons:

Martin Aust (2017) notes the entry of the USSR into international politics in the 1920s. 

Stephen Smith sees the NEP as the period when revolutionary society and culture emerged. 

Elizabeth Wiskemann (2002) cites the Fifth Comintern Congress of 1924 when – after the defeat of ‘world revolution’ in Germany, Italy, Hungary and the Baltic States – “the Soviets were obliged to recognize that the tide had ebbed”. 

And Orlando Figes, who sees the Revolution as ‘A People’s Tragedy’ ends his book with the catastrophic famine of 1922, and the deaths of many of the main personalities of 1914-17, including Lenin himself.  Figes’ revolution peters out in despair in 1924. 

Robert Service (1986) identified 1927 (‘Socialism in one country’, the end of the NEP, and the coming of Stalin to power) as the ‘landmark’ year which “divided the unstable edifice of the first post-revolutionary decade from the years when a firm structure of state and society was erected” – i.e. the end of the revolution was not when it failed, but when it finally stabilised. 

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There are many historians who are prepared to see the “monstrous disaster” of Stalinism as the end of the Revolution: 

Trotsky, in exile, called it the ‘Revolution Betrayed’ (1936).  Émigré sociologist Nicholas Timasheff labelled the 1930s ‘The Great Retreat’ (1946).  Russian-born historian Yuri Slezkini (2017) wrote about the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ who disappeared in significant numbers for prison, Gulag, and execution. 

Some historians (not least the AQA exam board) end the Revolution with the Great Patriotic War, 1941-45, arguing that it was an 'Armageddon' moment which threatened the revolution, and which the country united to prevent.

And historian Richard Pipes, an “intensely ideological” former US National Security Council member who hated Communism, declared (1991) that the NEP had only “postponed” the Revolution:

“The Revolution was resumed in 1927-28 and consummated ten years later after frightful upheavals that claimed millions of lives.  It may be said to have run its course only with the death of Stalin in 1953, when his successors carried out a counterrevolution from above.”

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And what about the years after Stalin? 

You may have read that EH Carr believed that the Russian Revolution ended in 1929 with ‘Stalin’s Revolution’.  But that was just when he ended his six-volume study.  In volume 2, he identified a series of sub-periods “with markedly different characteristics”, the first one being “the revolution itself”, which he presented as ending in March 1918.  Later, in his summary volume of 1979, he again represented the Revolution as transitioning over time, concluding:

“The Russian revolution of 1917 fell far short of the aims which it set itself.  But … the revolution presented a challenge to the capitalist Powers, the potency of which is not yet exhausted.” (my italics)

Similarly, Martin Malia (2008) argued that the revolution became a “permanent revolution” which was “frozen in place” until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

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The most refreshing account of this issue is given in a 2008 lecture by Sheila Fitzpatrick, a specialist in Soviet history. 

Her first work on the Revolutionary period, she tells us, ended in 1921, because she had too much material to go up to 1929.  Tasked in 1982 to decide an end-date for her book on the Russian Revolution proper, she describes the to-ing and fro-ing by which she considered first the early 1920s, then 1929, before plumping for the mid-1930s … when events seemed to have stabilised, but before the Great Purges (which she considered ‘a monstrous postscript’ of the revolution).  And that, she felt at the time, would allow her to end her book on a positive, dispassionate note. 

By 1994, we hear, she had changed her mind.  The Great Purges were IN the revised edition, and with them a “poignant” ending which represented Russia as falling back “into its old posture of recumbent backwardness.”

She writes, and it is an appropriate conclusion for this essay:

“Sometime in the 1980s and 1990s, historians lost confidence in the idea that it was possible to get history 'right', as if it were natural science, and embraced the notion that what we are doing is not finding things out and answering questions but rather telling stories…

“The Russian Revolution, in short, was not a meteorite whose arrival on the earth could be precisely dated; rather, 'revolution' was an idea that might, according to who was thinking, be attached to different sets of phenomena. 

“The story of the revolution must have a beginning and end, but it’s up to the story-teller to decide what they are; and their choices depend on what they think the meaning and moral of their story are.”