The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class And Nationality In The Russian Revolution
by Ronald Grigor Suny /
1972 / English / PDF
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The historiography of the Russian Revolution in Western countries, for all its peculiar advantages of objective distance from the events, has produced a distorted view of the vast canvas of 1917-1918 by its almost exclusive concentration on the central cities, Petrograd and Moscow. Despite some interesting studies on the national regions during the revolution, important industrial centers have been overlooked, centers in which the revolution ran a course distinctly different from the pattern evident in Petrograd. This study endeavors to redress the balance somewhat by presenting a close look at the first year and a half of the revolution in the Caspian seaport and oil capital of the Russian empire, Baku. The very uniqueness of Baku, where class and national struggles were intertwined, offers a useful corrective to generalizations based on the better-known case of central Russia.
