From February to October
In the standard account, February was the good revolution and October was the extremist one. But events in Russia were far more complex than that.
In her book Inside the Russian Revolution, Rheta Childe Dorr described her first impression in Russia:
About the first thing I saw on the morning of my arrival in Petrograd . . . was a group of young men, about twenty in number, I should think, marching through the street in front of my hotel, carrying a scarlet banner with an inscription in large white letters.
“What does that banner say?” I asked the hotel commissionaire who stood beside me.
“It says ‘All the Power to the Soviet’,” was the answer.
“What is the soviet?” I asked, and he replied briefly:
“It is the only government we have in Russia now.”
Judging from this passage, most of us would assume that Dorr arrived in Russia after the October Revolution, since only then did the soviets overthrow the Provisional Government. But Dorr came to Russia in late May 1917 and left the country by the end of August. Her book was sent to press before the October Revolution and thus gives us an invaluable look at what was happening in 1917, free of hindsight.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.