The dissertation represents a study of the anarchist movement which arose in Russia immediately prior to the revolution of 1905, and concerns itself with the period from 1905 until the spring of 1918, when the first mass arrests of anarchists occurred under Soviet rule. In essence, the aims of the study are to trace the influence and support of the anarchist movement during both revolutionary upheavals in Russia, 1905 and 1917. The main thrust of the thesis is an attempt to demonstrate that the Russian anarchist movement, though small in numbers, asserted a disproportionately large degree of influence amongst specific sections of the population. Further, it is argued that this influence would have been still greater, particularly in 1917, had the anarchists been able to capitalise on their support and unite their forces around some form of organisational structure. Their failure in this respect is seen as the main cause of their swift disappearance from the revolutionary scene after 1917, an easy prey for Bolshevik suppression. The dissertation opens with a brief introduction reviewing the current state of Western and Soviet academic research on the Russian anarchist movement, and notes the inherent problems encountered in the search for primary source materials. Chapter I discusses the main tenets of the ideology espoused by the Russian anarchists in the period under study. There then follows an analysis of the role and influence of the anarchists in the 1905 revolution, together with a discussion of the reasons for their failure to make more of their early successes. Chapter IV looks in detail at the anarchist movement in emigration in the West in the period between the two revolutions, 1907 - 1917. Finally Chapters V and VI concern themselves with the anarchist movement in the 1917 revolution, split into the period February-October, 1917, and the early months of Soviet power, October, 1917 - April, 1918. A concluding chapter brings together the main themes of the dissertation and reasserts the reasons for the need for a study of the Russian anarchists.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:591039 |
| Date | January 1981 |
| Creators | Gooderham, P. |
| Publisher | University of Bristol |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1983/b2851c96-4c61-456d-a528-44b6d82cc378 |
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