Kevin Murphy teaches Russian history at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory won the 2005 Deutscher Memorial Prize.
Stephen Cohen, who passed away earlier this year, resisted ideological conformity at every turn. The great historian of Nikolai Bukharin and the Russian Revolution left behind a deep body of work that will remain invaluable for generations of socialists to come.
Yuri Slezkine’s portrait of the Soviet elite under Stalin is an eccentric masterwork. But his portrayal of the Bolsheviks as a religious sect is a travesty of history.
Relentless anticommunism defined the late Richard Pipes as more propagandist than historian.
Over the course of 1917, the Petrograd Soviet transformed from a body willing to negotiate with capital to one ready for revolution.
Russian workers went on strike on International Women’s Day 1917. They ended up toppling tsarism.
Historian Robert Conquest was a fierce critic of Stalinist brutality, but Cold War anticommunism hampered his scholarship.