Three Who Made a Revolution

A study of the events leading to the Russian revolution through a biography of its three main leaders: Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. Bertram Wolfe wrote this book in 1948. He didn't have the access to official documents that today historians of the Russian revolution have. But as one of the founders of the US Communist party, he knew some of the Soviet leaders himself (including Stalin) and he did a thorough job looking at the Soviet press, the Soviet propaganda, the autobiographies of the exiled leaders (Trotsky and the Georgian Mensheviks were particularly useful in this regard). Through this "archaeological" work (his own term), seeing how different accounts confirmed or contradicted each other, he was able to find a lot about the beginnings of the Russian revolution. Only in writing about the early life of Stalin he made some mistakes, since the Soviet leader himself try to disguise a lot of his early life through the official hagiographies (Wolfe, for example, states that he was born in 1879, not 1878, that his father died in 1890 and not some two decades later, and he downplays his early role as a revolutionary in the Caucasus, following Trotsky). Wolfe's viewpoint is very interesting, and original at the time it was written, that of a disillusioned believer. Many of the things he charged the Soviets were learned some years later to be true, following Khrushchev's secret speech. Overall, a very good work that has stood the test of time.

I've lamented in other reviews about good books that have gone out of print. Therefore what a pleasure it is to find that Betram D. Wolfe's "Three Who Made a Revolution" is back on the shelves. I read it first when I was in school -- one of the first serious or challenging "adult" books that I read with pleasure. I'm a little chagrined to recall some of my own responses. On the one hand, I remember entertaining the uneasy sense that the book was probably too much fun to be "real scholarship." Maybe a little -- but in retrospect, I think most of the fun comes not from mere clowning, but from Wolfe's real engagement with the humanity of his subjects. On the other hand, I remember writing in a term paper something along the lines of how the book would probably put a damper on further research. I think I knew as I wrote it that this was a pretty fatuous remark, but hey, I was on a deadline. Anyway, it is nice to be able to recognize in retrospect that (a) it of course certainly did nothing at all to dampen further reserach; but (b) despite the torrent of further research, it still repays rereading.Wolfe wrote at a time when the left was still pretty gullible about Communism. There was, of course, an anti-communist opposition: in the long run the antis have proved to be more right than the apologists, but it is not so clear how much this is the result of careful research, how much of lucky accident. At any rate, giving a few points for hindsight, Wolfe's moral clarity is in retrospect pretty clear. And whatever his imperfections, he probably motivated me to read a lot of stuff I might otherwise never have come to: I remember particularly Trotsky's own autobiography, Adam Ulam's "Unfinished Revolution,", and Robert V. Daniels' "Documentary History of Communism," all of which I read in the weeks after I had finished Wolfe, and while I was still operating in his wake -- to say nothing of whatever I have picked up in the generation or more since. Any book that can stimulate that kind of inquiry has justified itself, no matter what its intrinsic merits -- and in this case, the intrinsic merits are pretty strong, also.