Sample outline of a historiographic essay
Historiography on the 1917 Revolution in Provincial Russia
~In historiography of major revolutions, serious scholarly study of events in the provinces was linked to evolution of social history; before the advent of social historical analysis, local studies were the bailiwick of antiquarians.
~This was also true in the case of the Russian Revolution, although
a) political histories had not completely ignored events in the provinces,
b) historians in the USSR had produced shelves of studies of the provinces, almost all of which had been tailored to fit the moment's Party line
c) restrictions upon research in the USSR delayed the development of provincial studies for nearly two decades after the publication of the first important social histories of 1917
[cite Chamberlin's 1930 study; various Soviet works from the 1950s and 1960s on the "Triumphal March of Soviet Power"; Rabinowitch's Prelude to Revolution (1967) and The Bolsheviks Come to Power (1976); Raleigh's Revolution on the Volga (1986)]
~During the Cold War and until the mid-1990s, western-language studies of the provinces were almost entirely the province of "leftist" social historians, whose work neatly fit the "social polarization" paradigm developed in path setting works on Russia's capital cities.
[cite Keep, Russian Revolution (1976); Koenker, Moscow Workers (1981); Smith, Red Petrograd (1983) Wade, Red Guards (1984;) Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga (1986); Figes, Peasant Russia (1989); Hickey, Revolutionary Smolensk (1993)]
~By the mid-1990s the Cold War inflected debates that had dominated historiography of the Russian Revolution had more or less faded away. Recent archive-based western language studies of the provinces (and a few of the best Russian language studies) have endeavored to use provincial history to fit 1917 into the context of the broader wartime crisis of 1914-1922, to examine trans-national routines of the modern state, to apply elements of cultural-historical discourse analysis to understanding revolutionary identities and politics; and to examine 1917 from the perspective of post-colonial peasant studies. They have added these new methods to a framework that still draws on, but largely revises earlier social historians' focus on social polarization.
[Cite Hickey articles, 1996-2001; Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution (2002); Retish 2003 dissertation; Badcock 2003 dissertation).
II. Body Paragraphs
1st section: Works published before 1967. Main point: Soviet studies all locked into "triumphal march" paradigm, western studies all locked into "conspiracy of Bolshevik minority who spread the revolution by decree" paradigm. Two views really mirror images of one another (both based on top down conception of revolution).
~Paragraph that examines arguments in typical western scholarship, e.g., small sections in books by Bernard Pares, Leonard Shapiro, etc., that discuss the provinces.
[Pares 1930 book; Schapiro's 1953 book, etc.)
~Paragraph that examines Soviet scholarship, particularly early post-Stalin works under guidance of Mints in 1950s and early 1960s
[Mints' 1957 volume; the 2 volume Triumphal'noe shestve Sovetskoi vlasti;a few local publications, etc]
~Paragraph on the exception: chapters in Chamberlin's 1930 study, which considered the social basis of support for the revolution in the provinces.
2nd section: the social historians and their critics in the 1960s-1980s. Main point: The tension between the social historians and their "social polarization paradigm" and their "liberal" and "conservative" critics reflected basic Cold War divisions in the western body politic. With very few exceptions, these works spent little time on the provinces. The breakthrough was Raleigh's Revolution on the Volga.
~Paragraphs on the social polarization paradigm most important social histories of Petrograd and Moscow that set mold for later studies of the provinces.
[Haimson's 1963-64 articles; Rabinowitch's 1967 and 1976 book; Ferro's 1978 and 1981 books; Koenker's 1981 book; Smith's 1983 book; Wade's 1984 b