dimension illuminates various effects which still influence Russian life. Some of these effects lie buried and may yet erupt at a future time.
Fitzpatrick admits to a bias. Hers is that the social dimension of the war was very important. Her basic question is why the revolutionary regime survived. She states that no revolution is completely successful (161), as the fervent revolutionary zeal always dies. Her curiosity leads her to determine the aspects of the regime that assumed enduring form and why. She examines the social demands and promises of the revolution that seemed to contribute to rather lasting results.
The social aspects, in Fitzpatrick's view, have been rather ignored by traditional historians. Trotsky interpreted the revolutionary gains as political, a dictatorship resting on the foundation of an essentially bourgeois bureaucracy. Western scholars have emphasized the ideological aspects over the social ones. This type of scholarship views Stalin's dictatorship, Lenin's writings, and the Bolshevik's coup as efforts toward power rather than social reorganization. Both Stalin and Lenin are routinely described as totalitarian dictators, a view that Fitzpatrick does not embrace (4).
This social treatment of the Russian Revolution hints that previous views were somewhat prejudiced and perhaps influenced by a Cold War mentality that pervaded the U.S. during the formative years of American Soviet studies. Fitzpatrick emphasizes that the war was more about class struggle, modernization, and upward mobility (8).
The scholarship of Fitzpatrick's approach is thorough, orderly, and convincing. Step by step, she traces the phases of the Revolution through the Brinton stages, organizing the chapters around each stage. She has conclusively done her work. Scholarly references to previously held historical views (E.H. Carr, Adam Ulman, Barrington Moore, and Stephen F. Cohen, as well as numerous others) squarely p...