RESEARCH General History

REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY
Book documents ordinary Russians' feelings during 1917 uprising

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

3/1/2002

Photo by Bill Wiegand Author-compiler Mark Steinberg, a historian at the University of Illinois, has scoured hundreds of sources to extract the actual words of Russian workers, peasants and soldiers.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Rarely in history has the dissent of the lower classes been more vocal than in Russia in 1917. Yet that outrage has remained silent and inaccessible to successive generations.

Now, through letters and telegrams, resolutions and appeals and even poetry, a new book gives voice to the experiences, thoughts and feelings of ordinary Russian people during the vast political, social and economic upheavals of 1917.

Author-compiler Mark Steinberg, a historian at the University of Illinois, has scoured hundreds of sources to extract the actual words of Russian workers, peasants and soldiers. Culled from the State Archive of the Russian Federation, and arranged chronologically in three parts, most of the texts are published for the first time. Adding to the value of the book, all of the original Russian texts of these documents are available online at http://www.yale.edu/annals/Steinberg/golosa.htm.

Steinberg claims that the texts he collected for "Voices of Revolution, 1917" (Yale University Press) were "chosen to take readers deeper into the discursive world of the revolution, to encourage readers to ponder the uses and meanings of words and what they reveal about what the revolution signified to the millions of ordinary Russians who experienced it and, in various ways, took part in making it."

Thus, according to Steinberg, his book, becomes "a window onto what the revolution meant to ordinary Russians, rather than as another account of what happened." Some examples from the book:

Letter to the Central Executive Committee of Soviets from a soldier at the front, Aug. 9:

"… you, the bourgeois, pretended to be populists. You want to turn the country into a wasteland. You're taking the bread away from our wives, the bread they earned with their tears. You are enemies of the people! Down with all of you! I am a soldier, and I love my God and my homeland. You are traitors to Russia. You have betrayed Russia to England and France."

Stanza from "Song of Freedom" by Pyotr Oreshin, a "worker-poet," published in the Socialist Revolutionary paper Delo naroda, Sept. 17:

"No! Neither slaves are we nor bondsmen, / The children of freedom are we … / Leading down pathways of scarlet, / All the peoples of our land to be free."

Letter to Lenin from "a former Bolshevik," Dec. 19: "At first I believed in you because you promised good things for us – real peace, bread and freedom. I thought you wouldn't destroy the homeland. But instead of what you promised, you sold Russia out, and established a Nicholas kind of freedom. May you be thrice cursed and know that the wave of popular vengeance will reach you."

Stanza from Oreshin's "What Chasms to Us Have Opened," published in Delo naroda, Dec. 24:

"Our joyful death will unloose the ties / That bind my soul where torments teem, / And the earth beneath the heavens' skies, / The earth's firmament, will be a dream."