Overview of the causes of the October Revolution through the supplemented analysis of Theda Skocpol
Abstract
Starting from the global importance of the October Revolution as a historical event, as well as the complexity of social relations in such circumstances, the objective of this paper is to look as thoroughly as possible into the correlations between the Revolution itself and social circumstances that preceded it. The paper interprets historical data and examines the main arguments within theories of revolutions. The focus is on structural factors and the analysis presented by Theda Skocpol, with an additional emphasis on the role of the proletariat. The basic thesis is that one of the key conditions is the existence of branched networking of the peasant communes and workers’ associations, with sufficiently strong connections within the classes. That is, discontent with the economic situation and the weakening of the central government would not in themselves lead to revolutionary events, just as joint activities of the proletariat and the leaders of opposition parties should not be neglected.
References
Antonić, S. (2010). Class War: Lenin’s Legacy. Sociološki pregled, Vol. XLIV, No. 2, 159–204. DOI: 10.5937/socpreg1002159A [In Serbian]
Arendt, H. (1965). On Revolution. London: Penguin Books.
Bonnell, V. (1983). Roots of Rebellion: Worker’s Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow 1900–1914. London: University of California Press.
Dukes, P. (1979). October and the World: Perspectives on the Russian Revolution. London: The Macmillan Press LTD.
Ferro, M. (1985). The Bolshevik Revolution: A Social History of the Russian Revolution. Oxford: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Goldstone, J. (1997). Methodological Issues in Comparative Macrosociology. Comparative Sociological Research, Vol. 16, 121–32.
Goldstone, J. (2001). Toward a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory. Annual Political Sciences Review, No. 4, 139–187.
Goodwin, J. (2001). No Other Way Out. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mahoney, J. (1999). Nominal, Ordinal, and Narrative Appraisal in Macrocausal Analysis. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 104, No. 4, 1154–1196.
Plamper, J. (2021). Sounds of February, Smells of October: The Russian Revolution as Sensory Experience. The American Historical Review, Vol. 126, 140–165.
Radkey, O. (1990). Russia Goes to the Poles: The Election of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly 1917. London: Cornell University Press.
Robert, D. (1984). Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Boston: Beacon Press.
Sewell, W. (1996). Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology. In The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, 245–280.
Skocpol, T. (1979). States and Social Revolutions. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, S. (2002). The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tilly, C. (1993). European Revolutions 1492–1992. Zagreb: Politička kultura Zagreb i CID Podgorica [In Serbian]