Bibliography of the Russian Revolution and Civil War

This is a select bibliography of post-World War II English language books (including translations) and journal articles about the Revolutionary and Civil War era of Russian (Soviet) history. The sections "General surveys" and "Biographies" contain books; other sections contain both books and journal articles.

The period covered is 1904–1923, beginning approximately with the 1905 Russian Revolution and ending approximately with the death of Lenin. The works on the Revolution and Civil War in the Russian Empire extend to 1926.

Topics covered include the Russian Revolution (1905), the February and October Revolutions in 1917, and the Russian Civil War, as well as closely related events, and biographies of prominent individuals involved in the Revolution and Civil War. A limited number of English translations of significant primary sources are included along with references to larger archival collections. This bibliography does not include newspaper articles (except primary sources and references), fiction or photo collections created during or about the Revolution or Civil War.

For works on the Russo-Japanese War, see Bibliography of the Russo-Japanese War; for works on the Russian involvement in World War I, see Bibliography of Russia during World War I.

This bibliography is restricted to history.

Works listed here are cited in the notes or bibliographies of scholarly sources. Each is published by an academic or major press, written by a recognized expert, or substantially reviewed in scholarly journals; borderline cases are omitted. A selection of primary sources are included. Many of the books below carry their own bibliographies; see the Further reading section for other bibliographies, and the External links section for historical sites, academic sites, and museums.

Citations follow APA style. Book have citations to academic journal or mainstream published reviews when available. For books only partly about the subject, relevant chapter or section titles are provided when useful and available. Translators of the original-language edition are included when possible. In cases where a title or name has appeared with more than one English spelling, the most recent published form is used and a footnote documents any earlier title under which the work appeared.

Overviews of Russian history

General surveys of Soviet history

These works contain significant overviews of the Revolution and Civil War era. Figes, O. (2015). Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991. New York: Metropolitan Books. Heller, M., Nekrich, A. M., & Carlos, P. B. (1986). Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the present. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hosking, G. (1987). The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within (2nd Edition). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kort, M. G. (2019). The Soviet Colossus (8th Edition). London: Routledge. Kenez, P. (2017). A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to its Legacy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lewin, M. (2016). The Soviet Century. (G. Elliot, Ed.). New York: Verso. Malia, M. (1995). Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia 1917-1991. New York: Free Press. McAuley, M. (1992). Soviet Politics 1917-1991. Oxford University Press. McCauley, M. (2007). The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union (Longman History Of Russia). London: Routledge. Nove, A. (1993). An Economic History of the USSR 1917-1991 (3rd Edition). London: Arkana Publishing. Suny, R. G. (1997). The Soviet Experiment: Russia, The USSR, and the Successor States. New York: Oxford University Press. Suny, R. G. (Ed.). (2006). The Cambridge History of Russia: Volume 3, The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Suny, R. G. (2013). The Structure of Soviet History: Essays and Documents (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Period surveys Beevor, A. (2022). Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917—1921. New York: Viking Press. Brenton, T. (2017). Was Revolution Inevitable?: Turning Points of the Russian Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press. Carr, E. H. (1985). A History of Soviet Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923. (3 vols). New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Chamberlin, W. H. (1935/1987). The Russian Revolution 1917-1918, Vol. 1: From the Overthrow of the Tsar to the Assumption of Power by the Bolsheviks. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Daniels, R. V. (1972). The Russian Revolution. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Dowler, W. (2010). Russia in 1913. DeKalb: DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Engelstein, L. (2017). Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914–1921. New York: Oxford University Press. Figes, O. (1997). A People's Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution. New York: Viking Press. Fitzpatrick, S. (2017). The Russian Revolution. (4th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Lee, S. J. (2003). Lenin and Revolutionary Russia. London: Routledge. Kowalski, R. I. (1997). The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921 London: Routledge. Lewin, M. (2005). Lenin's Last Struggle. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Lieven, D. (2016). The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution. New York: Penguin Books. Lincoln, W. B. (1986). Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914-1918. New York: Simon and Schuster. Malone, R. (2004). Analysing the Russian Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marples, D. R. (2014). Lenin's Revolution: Russia, 1917–1921. London: Routledge. McMeekin, S. (2017). The Russian Revolution: A New History. New York: Basic Books. Miéville, C. (2017). October: The Story of the Russian Revolution. New York: Verso. Pipes, R. (1990). The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf. Rabinowich, A. (1991). Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (2007). The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (2017). The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Read, C. (1996). From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. (2013). War and Revolution in Russia, 1914–22. London: Macmillan. Schapiro, L. B. (1984). The Russian Revolutions of 1917: The Origins of Modern Communism. New York: Basic Books. Service, R. W. (1991). The Russian Revolution 1900–1927. London: Macmillan. Smith, S. A. (2017). Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928. New York: Oxford University Press. Smele, J. (2016). The "Russian" Civil Wars, 1916-1926: Ten Years That Shook the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Ulam, A. B. (1965). The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia. New York: Macmillan. Wade, R. A. (1969).The Russian Search For Peace, February - October 1917. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press ———. (2000). The Russian Revolution, 1917. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (2021). Late Tsarist Russia, 1881–1913 (Routledge Studies in the History of Russian and Eastern Europe). New York: Routledge. Zygar, M. (2017). The Empire Must Die: Russia's Revolutionary Collapse, 1900-1917. New York: PublicAffairs.

Social history Anweiler, O. (1975). The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921. New York: Pantheon Books. Argenbright, R. (1998). The Soviet Agitational Vehicle: State Power on the Social Frontier. Political Geography, 17(3), 253–272. Badcock, S. (2007). Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bettelheim, C., & Pearce, B. (1976). Class Struggles in the USSR: First Period 1917-1923. New York: Monthly Review Press. Borrero, M. (2003). Hungry Moscow: Scarcity and Urban Society in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1921. New York: Peter Lang. Brovkin, V. N. (1994). Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. (1997). The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and the Civil Wars. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chary, F. (1975). The Russian Masses in the October Revolution 1917. European Labor and Working Class History, 7 (6–7). Engel, B. (1997). Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I. The Journal of Modern History, 69(4), 696–721. Fitzpatrick, S. (1971). The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts Under Lunacharsky, October 1917-1921. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (1992). The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. (1988). The Bolsheviks' Dilemma: Class, Culture, and Politics in the Early Soviet Years. Slavic Review, 47(4), 599–613. Fitzpatrick, S., Rabinowich, A., & Stites, R. (1995). Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Frame, M., Kolonit︠s︡kiĭ, B. I., Marks, S. G., & Stockdale, M. K. (2014). Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–1922. Vol 1: Popular Culture, the Arts, and Institutions/Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–1922. Vol. 2: Political Culture, Identities, Mentalities, and Memory. Bloomington: Slavica Publishers. Gleason, A. (1989). Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Galmarini, M. (2016). The Right to Be Helped: Deviance, Entitlement, and the Soviet Moral Order (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies). DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Keep, J. L. H. (1976). The Russian Revolution. A Study in Mass Mobilization. New York: Norton. Koenker, D. (1985). Urbanization and Deurbanization in the Russian Revolution and Civil War. The Journal of Modern History, 57(3), 424–450. Koenker, D., Rosenberg, W. G., & Suny, R. G. (1989). Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lih, L. T. (1990). Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lorimer, F. (1979). The Population of the Soviet Union: History and Prospects. New York: AMS Press. Marot, J. E. (1994). Class Conflict, Political Competition and Social Transformation: Critical Perspectives on the Social History of the Russian Revolution. Revolutionary Russia, 7(2), 111–163. Mawdsley, E., & White, S. (2004). The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee and Its Members, 1917-1991. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Palat, M. V. K. (2001). Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Raleigh, D. (1999). Co-optation Amid Repression: The Revolutionary Communists in Saratov Province 1918-1920. Cahiers Du Monde Russe, 40(4), 625–656. Rosenberg, W. G. (1988). Identities, Power, and Social Interactions in Revolutionary Russia. Slavic Review, 47(1), 21–28. ———. (1990). Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Sanborn, J. (2005). Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during World War I. The Journal of Modern History, 77(2), 290–324. Service, R. W. (1999). Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution. New York: Macmillan. Siegelbaum, L. H. (1994). Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 1918-1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stites, R. (1992). Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, D. (1983). Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy. New York: Picador Macmillan. Steinberg, M. D. (2018). Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.