The October Revolution of 1917 and Its Social Base: The Scientific Insolvency of Some Traditional Historiographic Mythologems

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 1990s, in many school and university textbooks, teaching aids, as well as research papers published in the post-Soviet space, in describing the events of October 1917, their definition as a revolution has become abundantly replaced by the notion of «coup». And very often, explicitly or implicitly there were connotations and meanings similar to populist texts, where various speculations about the «conspiracy of world Jewry» or «how the Bolsheviks sold out to Kaiser Germany for thirty silver pieces» are put forward. In this article, an attempt is made to show the scientific inconsistency of these conspiracy myths, as well as to offer arguments why October 1917 was precisely a revolution, and not a coup. Here, a persistent stereotype of Soviet historiography is criticized, which, by inertia, passed into modern journalism, namely the myth that the social base of the October Revolution was the working class in its alliance with the peasantry. In this connection, the article analyzes the social structure of the Russian Empire on the eve of the revolution, shows that the most dominant strata of the pre-revolutionary society were the vast marginal layers and marginal masses of the population. It was their element that propelled the October 1917. In addition, the article shows why the October events in Kazakhstan had the character of a «city revolution», why the aul and the village of the Krai passively took them. These moments are investigated through analysis of the characteristics of agrariantraditional mass consciousness. We would like to hope that this article will make a definite contribution to the
debunking of the myth-making and profanation of science that have recently leaped in historical journalism. It seems that the materials of the article can be integrated into university textbooks, teaching aids, school lessons and lecture courses on the history of Kazakhstan and world history, read in higher educational institutions of the republic.