Sheila Fitzpatrick Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution, and subsequent civil war, was one of the most brutal and destructive power struggles in modern history. Recently, historians have started to reconsider the intent of the Bolsheviks leaders who led the revolution. Sheila Fitzpatrick, a respected modern Russian historian, formulates an argument that soon after the revolution started Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party led the revolution astray to benefit themselves. Much of the decisions the party undertook were once believed to be vehicles of the proletariat revolution, but Fitzpatrick contends that the Bolshevik Party was power hungry and used the popular uprising as an opportunity to claim power. In her book The Russian Revolution, Sheila Fitzpatrick displays how

As Fitzpatrick states, “Lenin differed from many other Russian Marxists in seeming actively to desire a proletarian revolution rather than simply predicting that one would ultimately occur.” Lenin was confident that a proletariat revolution would happen, but he believed it would need to have revolutionary leaders and would never happen organically. Consequently, Fitzpatrick asserts that Lenin “saw the party not only as the vanguard of proletarian revolution but also in a sense as its creator.” In a sense, revolutionary leaders forming the party core sounds like a great way to mobilize a revolution, but Fitzpatrick shows how the limited party membership offers a bleak foreshadow into the future of the revolution. Despite making a proletariat revolution more likely, the Bolshevik Vanguard Party became a center for corruption and power hunger. Thus, Sheila Fitzpatrick indicates that Lenin’s party structure and the party’s ideals foreshadow the Bolshevik’s future missteps and focus on maintaining

Realistically, the Bolsheviks needed to get food for their citizens and the Red Army, but the method they chose to collect food was a terrible approach. Fitzpatrick asserts, “The Bolsheviks adopted a policy of grain requisitioning, sending workers’ and soldiers’ brigades—usually armed, and if possible provided with goods for barter—to get the hoarded grain out of peasants’ barns.” Perhaps the most intriguing part of the requisitioning is the lack of regular repayment to the peasants. With the policy of grain requisitioning, the Bolsheviks display the behavior of a government that has little regard for the well-being of their citizens and that is focused on defending its