| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Frederick C. Corney. Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2004. Pp. xvi, 301. Cloth $49.95, paper $22.50.

The Bolshevik Revolution has fallen on hard times of late, some fifteen years after the collapse of the USSR, amid its reappraisal by publicists and historians as the foundational event of the Soviet experiment. Archival findings have taught us the truths about V. I. Lenin's violent methods and Joseph Stalin's many crimes; historians have recounted anew the "black" deeds and "tragic" consequences of Russian Communism. Frederick C. Corney sets as his task to reevaluate and revive the Bolshevik Revolution, now that its values have been dramatically called into question. His book offers a historical study of the varied readings and representations of the Bolshevik Revolution in the decade between 1917 and 1927: by participants and observers, by friends and enemies, and even by the author himself. It is a story of a story, a memoir of memoirs of sorts. Corney forthrightly positions his own voice, and the readers' own judgments, squarely within the historical debate. His discursive methods are guided by some leading texts on social memory from literary theory and intellectual history, with all the terminology and logic to match. He translates the conventional categories of ideology and propaganda into the new poetics and hermeneutics of storytelling. He unravels the layers of meaning around the Bolshevik Revolution, from the attacks by partisan opponents to its sacralization by state advocates.

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