Analysis Of The Russian Revolution By Sheila Fitzpatrick

If one were to have asked a Russian peasant what revolution means to them, they might answer samovol’shchina, or, translated “doing what you want.” In Sheila Fitzpatrick’s book The Russian Revolution she traces three broad themes through the course of the revolution that existed before 1917 and would continue until about the time of 1934. She examines the class struggle that was an important part of the revolution as well as the leadership that lead the Russian citizens through these tumuloous decades and she also examines the modernization that Russia experienced. Fitzpatrick breaks her book down in a chronological order in which she spends her introduction writing about the immediate events that happened prior to the outbreak of the revolution so that the reader, whether an undergraduate student, graduate student or just a fan of Russian history, can gain a true understanding of the air of change that was happening in …show more content…
Focusing on this working class who helped establish Soviet power, she argues that though the workers did not rule as a class and actually suffered losses in their lives, in the end they actually were able to move upward. Fitzpatrick then writes that the leaders used the working class until the goals had been achieved, it was at this time that Stalin began to change the feeling toward the working class and everything changed. “Yet he stamped out any residual emanicpatory impulses, presiding over the consolidation of a leviathan state in which a ruling elite enjoyed power and privilege at the expense of the mass of the people, and in which forms of patriarchy and Russian chauvinism were