Red Petrograd by S A Smith

Red Petrograd by S A Smith

This book explores the impact of the 1917 Revolution on factory life in the Russian capital. It traces the attempts of workers to take control of their working lives from the February Revolution through to June 1918, when the Bolsheviks nationalised industry. Although not primarily concerned with the political developments of the Revolution, the book demonstrates that the sphere of industrial production was a crucial arena of political as well as economic conflict. Having discussed the structure and composition of the factory workforce in Petrograd prior to 1917 and the wages and conditions of workers under the old regime, Dr Smith shows how workers saw the overthrow of the autocracy as a signal to democratise factory life and to improve their lot. After examining the creation and activities of the factory committees, he analyses the relationship of different groups of workers to the new labour movement, and assesses the extent to which it functioned democratically.

' … The problem of workers' control in Russia is an essential element of the 1917 revolution, and as such has occupied generations of scholars … Smith's book, as a local study based on factory level sources (archives, newspapers, union journals) successfully cuts through the view from the top to describe what workers' control was about in Petrograd factories' Social History
' … a most welcome addition to the rapidly growing list of major works by British and American historians on the real world of Russian during the tumultuous years of the late-imperial era … Red Petrograd is a work of meticulous scholarship and provocative argument. it deserves a wide readership.' Economic History Review
'Smith's painstaking analysis is buttressed by an admirably international and interdisciplinary range of reference.' The Times Higher Education Supplement

S. A. Smith is a historian of modern Russia and China, who was a graduate student at both Moscow State University and at Peking University. He is the author of many books and articles on the Russian and Chinese revolutions, including Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-18 (CUP, 1983)
and Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (CUP, 2008), and is editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (OUP, 2014). He taught for many years at the University of Essex, where he is an emeritus professor, and then at the European University Institute in
Florence, before being elected to a senior research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2012.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780521316187
ISBN 10	0521316189
Title	Red Petrograd
Author	S A Smith
Series	Cambridge Russian Soviet And Post-Soviet Studies
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	1985-03-14
Number of pages	360
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.