1 M. N. Pokrovskii, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1965- ), II, 586.

2 Among Pokrovskii's numerous works on the Russian Revolution, in addition to those referred to below, one should mention in particular the two-volume collection of essays written by his students and edited, with an introduction to each volume, by Pokrovskii, , Ocherki po istorii Oktiabr'skoi Revoliutsii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1927)Google Scholar. A recent writer calls this “still the best attempt to apply Marxist forms of analysis to the events of 1917“ ( James H., Billington, “Six Views of the Russian Revolution” World Politics, XVIII, No. 3 [April 1966], 462 Google Scholar). “Hard as the acknowledgment is for the Anglo-American mind, which is so heavily opposed to deterministic interpretations, it is difficult to resist the judgment that these works by Pokrovsky and Carr remain the most powerful scholarly accomplishments in the entire glutted field” (ibid., p. 463).

3 Pokrovskii, M. N., Ocherki po istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii XIX i XX w. (Moscow, 1924), p. 7 Google Scholar. According to Paul Aron, H. (“M. N. Pokrovskii and the Impact of the First Five Year Plan on Soviet Historiography,” in Essays in Russian and Soviet History in Honor of Geroid Tanquary Robinson, ed. by Curtiss, John Shelton [New York, 1963], p. 289 Google Scholar), “Pokrovskii, vigorously denying the existence of an historical development peculiar only to Russia, asserted that it had passed through precisely the same social evolution as Western Europe.” Until February 1931 Pokrovskii portrayed “the October Revolution as the direct objective result of a long period of capitalist development. Russian capitalism had to be aged some 350 years to achieve the maturity required for a socialist revolution” (ibid., p. 291). Compare this with Pokrovskii's own statement that “in 1917…a basis was finally found for.. .native, natural, peasant capitalism in Russia” (see below, p. 73, and note 11). In my opinion, Mr. Aron has misunderstood Pokrovskii's historical ideas, and this failure is matched by his lack of familiarity with Marx's concepts of commercial and industrial capital that were employed by Pokrovskii.

4 Ocherki po istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, p. 11.

5 “Revoliutsionnye dvizheniia proshlogo,” Ezhegodnik Kominterna: Spravochnaia kniga na 1923 god (Petrograd and Moscow, 1923), p. 229.

6 Ibid., pp. 229-30.

7 Ibid., p. 230.

8 Ibid., pp. 231-32.

9 “Tsarizm i korni revoliutsii 1917 goda,” ibid., pp. 233-34.

10 Ocherki po istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, pp. 15-16.

11 Ibid., p. 9; see also pp. 7-8 for Lenin's view of peasant landholding as “the basis of Russian capitalism.“

12 T h e first two volumes have been published in an English translation by J. D. Clarkson and M. R. M. Griffiths under the title History of Russia from the Earliest Times to the Rise of Commercial Capitalism (New York, 1931).

13 Published in English under the title Brief History of Russia, trans. D. S. Mirsky (2 vols.; New York, 1933).

14 Pokrovskii, M. N., “Burzhuaziia v Rossii,” Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, Vol. VIII (Moscow, 1927), col. 192Google Scholar; see also cols. 185-94. For a summary of his view of Russian autocracy and the bourgeoisie in 1917, see Roman, Szporluk, “Pokrovsky and Russian History” Survey, No. 53 (Oct. 1964), pp. 110–13Google Scholar and” 114-16.

15 Ocherki po istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, p. 7.

16 “Tsarizm i korni revoliutsii,” p. 240.

17 “Korni bol'shevizma v russkoi pochve,” Pravda, March 14, 1923.

18 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence 1846-1895, trans, and ed. Dona Torr (New York [1937]), pp. 509-11 (Engels's italics).

19 “Korni bol'shevizma.“

20 Ibid. According to Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism (New York, 1965), pp. 263-64, Lenin developed a theory that Russia (like China, India, and other backward countries) was to copy the West's achievements but at the same time to avoid a duplication of “the superstructure of Western capitalist property relations.” Capitalist relations of production did not have to accompany industrialism: while in the West modern industry was built by capitalism (Meyer interprets Lenin), in the so-called backward countries capitalism could be skipped. “We have here,” writes Meyer, “an entirely new theory of development, which … is never expressed as clearly and unequivocally as we express it here, but which most Leninists nonetheless accept tacitly.“

21 Ocherki po istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, p. 101.

22 Ibid., pp. 105-6. See also M. N. Pokrovskii, Tsarizm i revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1918), pp. 3-5.

23 Ocherki po istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, p. 110, 112.

24 Ibid., p. 103.

25 Ibid., pp. 106-7.

26 Ibid., p. 101.

27 Ibid., p. 107.

28 Ibid., pp. 104-5.

29 Ibid., p. 61; see also pp. 60, 62-67, 95-96.

30 M. N. Pokrovskii, Oktiabr'skaia revoliutsiia: Sbornik statei iQij-1927 (Moscow, 1929), p. 36. The quotation is from the article “Lenin v russkoi revoliutsii,” first published in Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii, VII (1924), 7-21.

31 Ocherki po istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, p. 62.

32 Oktiabr'skaia revoliutsiia, p. 36.

33 Ocherki po istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, p. 64 (Pokrovskii's italics).

34 Ibid., p. 62.

35 Ibid„ p. 65.

36 Oktiabr'skaia revoliutsiia, p. 37. See George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York, 1962), p. 366 n.: “It is now widely recognized that the characteristic Bolshevik synthesis of revolutionary and authoritarian beliefs was prefigured within the radical wing of the nineteenth-century Populist movement. Totalitarianism and elite-worship both have their source in the conspiratorial sects of the radical intelligentsia; one may even suspect diat there was a direct filiation between the most intransigent of these groups and the Bolsheviks.“

37 The historical inevitability which produced “Bolshevism” in Russia long before Lenin or Marx saw to it that the right side won in 1917. Billington (pp. 462-63) thus interprets the inevitability of the Bolshevik victory as understood by Pokrovskii: “This was inevitable … because Bolshevik leadership was, objectively speaking, the only way to avoid ‘the colonization of Russia by Anglo-American capital,’ which presumably would have occurred under any of the rival forms of modernizing, reformist leadership.” (The words cited from Pokrovskii in this quotation appear in M. N. Pokrovskii, ed., Ocherki po istorii Oktiabr'skoi Revoliutsii, II, 448.)

38 M. N. Pokrovskii, “Leninizm i russkaia istoriia,” in Istoricheskaia nauka i bor'ba klassov (Moscow and Leningrad, 1933), II, 269. Pokrovskii said this at the All-Union Conference of Marxist Historians, held in Moscow December 1928-January 1929.

39 See ibid., p. 268, for reference to Pokrovskii's economic materialism as a “painful survival of this nondialectical, albeit materialist, interpretation.“

40 Ibid., pp. 268-69.

41 Ocherhi po istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, p. 8.

42 Ibid., p. 102.

43 Ibid., p. 10.

44 M. N. Pokrovskii, “Obshchestvennye nauki v SSSR za 10 let,” Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii, XXVI (No. 2, 1928), 15.

45 E. Preobrazhenskii, The New Economics, trans. Brian Pearce (Oxford, 1965), p. 83; see also p. 84: “By socialist accumulation we mean the addition to the functioning means of production of a surplus product which has been created within the constituted socialist economy and which does not find its way into supplementary distribution among the agents of socialist production and the socialist state, but serves for expanded reproduction. Primitive socialist accumulation, on the other hand, means accumulation in the hands of the state of material resources mainly or partly from sources lying outside the complex of state economy. This accumulation must play an extremely important part in a backward peasant country, hastening to a very great extent the arrival of the moment when the technical and scientific reconstruction of the state economy begins and when this economy at last achieves [clear] economic superiority over capitalism.“

46 See Preobrazhenskii, pp. 232-33, for an expression of his own position: “The more sue cessfully our state economy develops, the more vigorously it draws towards itself all the country's private economy, and the more successfully the process goes forward of subordinating the presocialist economic forms, adapting them to it, and eventually absorbing them into it. Naturally, for Russia this process will be incredibly prolonged and slow; it will take place at different rates and different periods, with breaks, with stoppages, with fresh advances.“

47 Alfred Evenitsky, “Preobrazhensky and the Political Economy of Backwardness,” Science and Society, XXX, No. 1 (Winter 1966), p. 60.

48 Preobrazhenskii, p. 85.

49 Ibid., p. 87; see also passim, esp. pp. 85-86. For the original version see E. A. Preobrazhenskii, “Osnovnoi zakon sotsialisticheskogo hakopleniia,” Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii, VIII (1924), 47-116.

50 See G. V. Plekhanov, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1926), XX, 13.

51 Pokrovskii, “Bor'ba klassov i russkaia istoricheskaia literatura,” in Istoricheskaia nauka, I, 91-92. D. Riazanov stated that he was the first to have raised the question (in 1915) “whether Plekhanov's war stand represents a renunciation of his old theoretical views“ (“Predislovie redaktora,” in Plekhanov, Sochineniia, XX, xiii).

52 Pokrovskii, “Bor'ba klassov,” pp. 93 and 98. It would be easy to dismiss this as another instance of Pokrovskii's (reputed) naive determinism: Plekhanov, the former engineering student at St. Petersburg, becomes an ideologist of the captains of industry. But Pokrovskii did not say this. And the suggestion mat a deterministic and revolutionary ideology may in certain historical circumstances be acceptable to the industrial managers is not so absurd as it might seem at first sight. See Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 23-25 arid 191, for the role played by the ideas of Saint-Simon, Friedrich List, and Karl Marx in the capitalist industrialization of France, Germany, and Russia” respectively:

53 Pokrovskii, “Bor'ba klassov,” pp. 99-100. After 1924 Pokrovskii no longer expressed such opinions. He regarded the October 1917 upheaval as a “full and final victory of the working class.” See “Istoricheskoe znachenie Oktiabr'skoi revoliutsii,” Kommunisticheskaia revoliutsiia, No. 20 (Oct.), 1927, pp. 3-13.

54 N. Bukharin, Teoriia istoricheskogo materializma (5th ed., Moscow, 1928), pp. 354-55 (Bukharin's italics).