The Russian Revolution revisited

Russian peasants
 

This is a thought provoking review of what seems to be a very important book about the Russian Revolution. The review was published in Insurgent Notes no 8. As it points out, Marot's these, if true, that Russian was still an agrarian, peasant economy despite significant but small pockets of industry in urban centres, is not only controversial but all orthodox views from both left and right.Its significance for the years after the revolution is equally important, Marot also carefully examines the role of Trotsky and the Trotskyist opposition and finds it wanting. This is not a new view but it is worth going over again and again as an antidote to the continuing idiocies of the dwindling bands of Trotskyists. A PDF of an article by Marot that covers similar ground to this can be found here and is well worth reading.
Overall, the review makes the book seem unmissable.

 John Eric Marot, The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect: Interventions in Russian and Soviet History (2012)


This is a very important book, one of the very few books published since 1991 on the “Russian Question” that will compel people (this reviewer included), long wedded to different characterizations of the post-1917 or post-1929 Soviet regime, to think through their commitments.
Those people most set for a rethink are those (not including this reviewer) committed to variants of “orthodox Trotskyism.” John Marot upends a lot of views long held to be commonplace. Among the most important are Marx's and Lenin's respective assertions (Marx ca. 1880, Lenin in his 1899 Development of Capitalism in Russia), that Tsarist Russia was irreversibly capitalist. Marot, to the contrary, argues that Russia up to 1917 was feudal, and thereafter, up to Stalin's 1929 assault on the peasantry, it was a petty-producer economy with a household agriculture (where 85 percent of the population was employed) working not for a market but for private domestic consumption.