Scripting the Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution witnessed competing and overlapping scripts that contained fundamentally divergent projections of revolutionary change. This chapter outlines the main scripts within the liberal, moderate socialist, extreme left, national, and popular traditions. Historians usually prioritize intellectuals and their visions as driving the agenda of the Russian revolution. It is clear, however, that it was the radical consequences of the people's program of, for example, land distribution from below that pushed Russian politics to the far left, affecting each of the major scripts. It was precisely a peculiar intersection of peasant aspirations and extreme left discourse that produced a triumphant Bolshevik outcome. This hybrid script was riddled with contradictions that isolated and undermined Soviet communism.