Competing Voices from the Russian Revolution: Fighting Words: Fighting Words

This new collection of documents helps students understand the complex texture of Russian public rhetoric and popular debate during World War I and the 1917 Revolution.

How better to understand history than through the words of those who lived it? Competing Voices from the Russian Revolution: Fighting Words presents documents that underscore the extraordinary richness of public discussion about key events and issues during the 1917 Russian Revolution, one of the pivotal events in modern history. Carefully edited and annotated, the documents help clarify the issues while revealing the broad range of ways in which Russians understood the events unfolding around them.

Focusing on public rhetoric and debate in Russia from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 through the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, the documents present the views not only of key political figures, but also of ordinary men and women—mothers, soldiers, factory workers, peasants, students, businesspeople, and educated professionals.

• More than 300 original documents from the national and local press and from unpublished provincial archival materials, all carefully edited and annotated and either translated into English for the first time or presented in new translations
• A chronology of major events in Russia for the period from summer 1914 to mid-January 1918
• Cartoons that appeared in the national and local press in 1917
• A map of Russia in 1917 showing the locations of important cities and geographical features