Revolution and Survival: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1917-18. by Richard K. DeboReview by: Arthur E. AdamsSlavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Jun., 1980), pp. 307-308Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2496800 .

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Reviews 307

after the party's prohibition of "factionalism'" consigned her to a troubled silence as a Soviet ambassador, powerless to halt the Stalinist repression she deplored.

Nevertheless, Professor Clements's book remains a valuable addition to the growing corpus of works on women in Russian history. The footnotes and bibliography are exemplary and constitute an excellent source for scholars who wish to investigate further the many facets of Alexandra Kollontai's career.

JAY BERGMAN University of Miami

REVOLUTION AND SURVIVAL: THE FOREIGN POLICY OF SOVIET RUSSIA, 1917-18. By Richard K. Debo. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1979. xiv, 462 pp. $25.00.

In the first year of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin hammered out the essential principles that were to govern Soviet foreign policy, with very few exceptions, down to the present. The processes of conflict and creative effort that produced the new foreign policy in the cauldron of world war and civil war, political and economic chaos, and military intervention have long compelled many political and scholarly minds to return to this period with almost obsessive fascination. With this study, Richard Debo joins ranks with E. H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, George Kennan, and Adam Ulam. He has taken the works of these perceptive scholars into account, not always with full approval but certainly with discernment, and has added depth and discrete new insights of his own.

Debo's Lenin is the theorist-cum-pragmatist who never gave up his dedication to revolution, but who, almost without ever having intended to do so, found himself defending a nation and his right to rule it. Consciously rejecting the Trotskyesque dream of immediate and permanent revolution, Lenin sought realistic ways to main- tain Bolshevik power. In this impossibly difficult period of overwhelming external and internal danger, when even the majority of the party dreamed, suicidally, of revolutionary war, Lenin's political and theoretical genius reached its apogee. He alone had the insight, the will, and the temerity to trace out the tortuous, quasi- rightist path of compromise and concessions to the Germans, the British, and others, to give up vast areas of the nation in order to hang on to the rest, to bow before Trotsky's impassioned blasts of revolutionism and bend to the party's Will-all so that he could work out and implement the complex formulas that would save Bolshevik power. His penetrating and courageous "Theses on the Question of the Immediate Conclusion of a Separate and Annexationist Peace" constitutes, as Debo says, "one of the most important documents of his political career" (p. 75). It established, once and for all, the recognition of the need to stay in power and maintain diplomatic relations with other national states. It provided the basis of what was called, under Stalin, the "Theory of Socialism in One Country," and of such postures as those Marshall Shulman perceived when he studied Stalin's policy changes during the years from 1949 to 1952.

It might be argued that any talented leader finding himself suddenly responsible for a nation and millions of his countrymen would sooner or later have stumbled upon the principles Lenin discovered during this first terrible year. Lenin's genius is that he created the policy in the white heat of battle, with his colleagues as well as his enemies.

Professor Debo writes with grace, clarity, and wit, sharing with the reader the best analyses of the leaders of the several nations involved. He has performed a herculean task of research, and his use of sources and memoirs displays both keen understanding of the international situation in 1917-18 and deep sympathy for the

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308 Slavic Review

variegated actors. Particularly useful are the chapters analyzing Lenin's relations with Trotsky and evaluating the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

This is a valuable addition to our analyses and understanding of Soviet foreign policy.

ARTHUR E. ADAMS Ohio State University

LENIN'S GOVERNMENT: SOVNARKOM 1917-1922. By T. H. Rigby. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1979. xvi, 320 pp. + 4 pp. plates. $34.50.

A presumption shared by both Soviet and outside interpretations of the Russian Revolution is that of a straight line of development implementing the Marxist- Leninist doctrine of proletarian dictatorship and one-party rule. Do not all the seeds of Soviet totalitarianism appear in What is to Be Done? and Lenin's other pre- Revolutionary programmatic statements ? Unfortunately for* logical simplicity, the historical details do not always support the direct correspondence of doctrinal in- tention and Revolutionary result. This reservation partioularly holds for the early years of the Soviet regime, which close examination shows to be a period of hand- to-mouth, trial-and-error expediency, with little conscious awareness of the unique pattern of rule by the Communist Party "apparatus" that was to emerge from this epoch of desperate struggle.

Only a few Western scholars have probed the impact of circumstances on the actual operation of the new Soviet government during the period of civil war and war communism. Three who come to mind are Oskar Anweiler on the soviets (Die Ritebewegung in Russland, 1905-1921 [Leiden, 19581 and Thte Soviets: The Russian Workers', Peasants', and Soldiers' Councils, 1905-1921 [New York, 1975]), E. H. Carr on economic policy and industrial administration (The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, vol. 2 [New York, 1952]), and, more recently, WAalter Pietsch (Revolution und Staat: Institutionen als Triger der Macht in Sow jet-russland, 1917-1922 [Cologne, 1969]). Some Soviet scholars, beginning with Ie. N. Gorodetskii (Rozhdenie sovet- skogo gosudarstva 1917-1918 gg. [Moscow, 1957]) and continuing notably with M. P. Iroshnikov (Sozdanie sovetskogo tsentral'nogo gosudarstvennogo apparata: Sovet narodnyleh komnissarov i narodnye kornissariaty [okt. 1917 g.-ian. 1918 g.] [Moscow and Leningrad, 1966]), have helped break the ground for a detailed cul- tivation of these questions. But a major step in the factual understanding of how the Soviet system of rule took shape, unburdened with preconceptions about Marxist destiny ol the Leninist monolith, is represented by the fine example of monographic study reviewed here.

This short but thorough work by Australia's best-known Sovietologist (Pro- fessor Rigby teaches political science at Australian National University in Canberra) focuses on the uppermost government institution in Russia, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), from its inception amid the tumult of the October Revo- lution to its eclipse by the organs of the party while Lenin lay dying in 1923. In three major sections, Professor Rigby details the creation of the Sovnarkom and its imposition of control over the old administration in Petrograd, the transfer of the seat of government to Moscow and the development there of its machinery of policy decision and execution, and the personalities of Sovnarkom's members and their relations with Lenin as Russia's government institutions evolved and then deteriorated under the stresses of civil war and one-party rule.

With impeccable scholarship, Rigby weaves a number of theses into a com- pelling revisionist picture not only of the specific institutions of government decision

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