Impersonal History

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1917-1921, Vols. I and II -- William Henry Chamberlin--Macmillan ($10).

Sixteen years ago a U. S. newspaperman, John Reed, wrote the first eyewitness account in English of Russia's Bolshevik revolution, in Ten Days that Shook the World. Brief, brisk, emphatically pro-Bolshevik, Reed's account won Lenin's approval, earned its author burial space in Moscow's place of honor in the Red Square, has served as a valuable source book for historians ever since. Last week another U. S. newspaperman, William Henry Chamberlin, for ten years Russian correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, offered the first definitive history of the turbulent period, including the Ten Days, from the fall of the Romanov Dynasty in March 1917, to the introduction of the New Economic Policy in March 1921. Neither brief nor pro-Bolshevik, Author Chamberlin's two-volume The Russian Revolution will probably not win its creator burial in the Kremlin, is nevertheless the clearest and most detailed account of "the greatest social revolutionary movement in history" yet offered U. S. readers. Written in a methodical narrative style, with patient concentration on day-to-day, almost hour-to-hour shifts in the forces favoring or opposing the revolution, The Russian Revolution 1917-1921 is faithful to its author's desire "to place the establishment of the facts in the foreground and to offer only as much personal interpretation as seemed quite indispensable."

In Russia's geographic position Author Chamberlin finds the first reasons for the inflexibility of the Tsarist government and the desperation of the revolutionary upheaval. Poised between Europe and Asia, serving for centuries as a barrier between European civilization and Asiatic barbarism, Russia drew her ideas of Western progress and enlightenment from Europe, her form of government from the East. The dilemma of Peter the Great, who tried to evoke initiative by force, who "desired that the slave, remaining a slave, should act consciously and freely," remained to haunt the later Tsars, who dared not concede an inch of freedom lest their subjects demand a mile.

As far back as the Crimean and Japanese Wars the government had lost prestige at home and abroad, but demands for reform were met with more systematic repression, until by 1917 the Tsar could scarcely find support outside the ranks of the nobility. The livest sections of Author Chamberlin's history are to be found in his descriptions of the collapse of the Romanov autocracy, "one of the most leaderless, spontaneous, anonymous revolutions of all time," and of the hourly dissolution of the monarchy that suddenly fell apart like a gigantic One-Hoss Shay. Again & again Author Chamberlin introduces incidents and documents to prove how little the ruling class understood what was happening, and to suggest the excitement and good nature of the revolution. Only after the overthrow of Kerensky's Provisional Government and the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks does the narrative darken, become more ominous. Then casualty lists, accounts of atrocities replace the accounts of the first enthusiastic confusion. Maintaining an unflinching detachment, Author Chamberlin holds no person or party responsible, betrays indignation only when writing of the Red and White Terror and the execution of the Tsar and his family.

In a work that deals principally with the changing moods and movements of nine million soldiers, unknown millions of peasants, hundreds of thousands of industrial workers, individuals can be given little space. Yet Author Chamberlin turns again & again to the enigmatic figure of Lenin, writes of him with an historian's objectivity rather than with a newshawk's interest in a spectacular figure. He insists on Lenin's cold colorlessness, even while relating how Lenin plotted to disguise himself as a deaf-&-dumb Swede in order to return to Russia; how he escaped arrest by hiding successively in a loft, a hut in a hayfield, a railway locomotive; how still in hiding, he began a theoretical work on the State just as the revolution approached its climax.

The Russian Revolution 1917-1921 is likely to have a sobering effect on those who speak glibly of revolution, since Author Chamberlin is at pains to show how much explosive resentment had been stored up in the masses before it took place, how much agony followed it. His last chapters become a cumulative catalog of miseries as he writes of the civil war, when Reds fought Whites on a great fluctuating battle-line that stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific, from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea, while famine and typhus were triumphing behind the lines. Unpopular though the Bolsheviks undoubtedly were in many sections, they could always count on more support among the common people than the Whites, who were everywhere identified with a return of the monarchy. "The alternative to Bolshevism, had it failed to survive the ordeal of civil war, would not have been ... a Constituent Assembly, elected according to the most modern rules of equal suffrage and proportional representation, but a military dictator, a Kolchak or a Denikin, riding into Moscow on a white horse to the accompaniment of the clanging bells of the old capital's hundreds of churches."

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