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This chapter focuses on the 1918 Bolshevik default—the largest in history—and the continuation of the financial struggle by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution from the perspective of both bankers and Bolsheviks. In exploring the drivers of the Bolshevik decision to default, the chapter reveals that the decision was rooted partly in Bolshevik ideology but also shaped by practicalities. Considering the very possible counterfactual scenario that the Bolshevik coup in early November 1917 had failed, it is difficult to imagine a situation whereby the Provisional Government or any successor would have been able to avoid at least a fairly significant default. In this sense, investors holding on to Russian debt before, during, and after the Bolshevik Revolution not only failed to account for political factors, but also failed to remain true to the narrow financial analysis that would have dictated caution even in the absence of a Bolshevik takeover. On the Bolshevik side, the decision to default was not just consistent with the Bolsheviks' previously articulated policies, but—from both a political and economic standpoint—rational.

This chapter analyses the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the Bolshevik Revolution to throw light on the theoretical factors relating to their social and political dynamics in effecting a transfer of power. This covers not just the weakness of the ancien régime in resisting the forces of revolution, but also that of the revolutionary forces in determining the optimal machinery of government for the post‐revolutionary state. This latter weakness can produce undesirable institutional legacies requiring decades to be dismantled.

The epilogue considers the legacy of musical metaphysics among educated Russians both in the Soviet Union and among the Russian émigré community. While the utopian vision of musical metaphysics continued to underpin Soviet experimentation in music throughout the 1920s, many of Nietzsche’s orphans gradually lost faith in music’s ability to transform society; instead, music was commonly evoked as a means through which to elicit memory of an idealized Russian past.

This chapter describes Mackinder's imperialist adventure in the Heartland itself. In 1919, the British government sent him to South Russia, the very area he had identified as pivotal for the future of Britain, to help coordinate the military and political campaigns against the Bolshevik Revolution.

The subject matter of this chapter is socialist thought in France from the Revolution of 1789 to the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism. Beginning with a discussion of the Comtean concerns with the condition of the workers, it next looks at the insurrectionary tradition associated with Jacobinism and Babeuf. It continues this discussion with an examination of the utopianism of Cabet, the state socialism of Louis Blanc, and the introduction of Marxism in France. The chapter then analyses the writings of socialists who tended to be hostile to reliance upon the State as a mechanism of working-class emancipation. This discussion looks at the work of Fourier and those of his disciples such as Considérant, Proudhon, and the later anarcho-syndicalist movement associated with the ideas of Georges Sorel. It concludes by assessing the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution and the ‘Soviet myth’ upon socialism in France

This concluding chapter explains that both the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent default were intertwined and historically contingent. They emerged from a particular set of historical circumstances, processes, and turning points. The events and the processes that produced them were linked by the explicitly financial character of the war the Bolsheviks waged against their opponents—be they the ancien régime, the Provisional Government, domestic class enemies, or foreign powers. Indeed, by 1917 and well before the Bolshevik takeover, a default in Russia—whether in the form of an outright cancellation of debts or a “restructuring”—had become inevitable. Three years of war had seen the Russian Empire lose critical parts of its economy to the enemy, while the strategy of relying on domestic debt markets had seen diminishing returns, forcing the government to resort to the printing press. Even by employing the latter method, the government could not keep up. Under such circumstances, even counterfeiters could not keep pace with the rate at which currency was being issued.

This chapter describes various events in the history of Soviet theater and arts from 1917 to 1919. It shows that the Bolshevik Party and Soviet government sought to make the Russian cultural legacy available to a proletarian audience and allow the disinherited to take possession of what had been withheld from them. In 1919, the eighth Party Congress adopted a program indicating that it was necessary to offer and render accessible to workers all the art treasures that emerged from the exploitation of their work and that heretofore have been at the exclusive disposal of the exploiters. The concern with preserving the theater as a medium of traditional culture is evident in the founding of the Bol'shoy Dramatic Theater in 1919. Its founders meant it to be a temple of high culture and traditional drama.

How do we account for the vision of international order the American delegation pursued at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, manifested most concretely in the Covenant of the League of Nations that was written by avowed liberal internationalist Woodrow Wilson? The dominant inclusive narrative of order construction in 1919 emphasizes America’s liberal institutions at home coupled with its president’s progressive ideals and sense of ideological mission in world affairs. By contrast, chapter 6 (“The Wilsonian Order Project”) argues that the new ideological threat posed by radical socialism after the Bolshevik Revolution in late 1917 actually played the most critical role in shaping the order preferences of Wilson and his principal advisers both before and during the Paris Peace Conference.

This chapter examines the role of secret negotiations in Mikaszewicze on the outcome of the Polish-Bolshevik War. It suggests that Polish leader Josef Pilsudski's decision to negotiate with Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin was based on his belief that the Bolshevik Revolution caused the weakening of Russia and that he considered the possible overthrow of Bolshevism by the counterrevolution as a potential strengthening of Russia. It also considers some of the secrets to the Riga Treaty.

This chapter begins with a description of the failed June Offensive of 1917, which brought the first period of the revolution to a close and ended any hope of a military solution to the problem of war and revolution. The failed offensive led to a shift of strategy for many nationalist activists, who now increasingly contemplated independence rather than autonomy. At the same time, the processes of social and state collapse became acute. This was made manifest in the emergence of warlord-ism by men like General Kornilov and in ever more radical political options becoming viable. The Bolshevik Revolution is discussed in this context. The chapter ends with a treatment of the end of the Russian war effort against the Central Powers and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

This chapter examines how the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia contributed to the rise of the Red Scare. On November 7, 1917, revolutionaries from the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party seized power in Petrograd and proclaimed the world's first socialist government. The Bolsheviks endorsed violent, class-based insurrection and policies of land and resource nationalization. News of the Bolshevik uprising intensified the wartime atmosphere in the United States, in which fear of treachery was rampant. This chapter first considers American intervention in Russia during the period 1917–1920 before discussing the emergence of the Red Scare in 1919–1920 and of anticommunism in the labor movement. It also looks at the strikes, bombings, and deportations in 1919 that offset whatever prestige the American Federation of Labor (AFL) accrued during the First World War. Finally, it describes the end of the Red Scare following US attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer's fall and the release of the National Popular Government League report.

This chapter covers the period from the Bolshevik Revolution and repudiation of the tsarist debt through the Genoa Conference of 1922, the last serious chance for the bondholders to receive any succor. Once the end of the war was in sight, the practical and theoretical implications of the Bolshevik refusal to recognize the pre-war and wartime debts accrued by their predecessors dominated Russia’s relationship with the West. The Russian refusal to pay, the French insistence that until the Russians agreed to pay they could not rejoin the community of nations in any capacity, the British vacillation between wanting Russia in the international economic system and wanting to appease their French partners in an alliance they were still trying to maintain produced an ongoing instability that kept Russia on the periphery, greatly hindered Europe’s post-war recovery, and contributed to the interwar environment of international economic and political insecurity.

This book discusses the history of Soviet atheism from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 until the return of religion to public life in the final years of the Soviet Union. When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, they were armed with a vision: to make Communism a world without religion. More specifically, they sought to remove religion from the “sacred spaces” of Soviet life. They rejected all previous sources of authority, replacing the autocratic state with Soviet power, religious morality with class morality, and backward superstition with an enlightened, rational, and modern way of life. Despite all these earnest efforts, however, Soviet Communism never managed to overcome religion or produce an atheist society. This book examines why Soviet Communism abandoned its commitment to atheism, and whether there was a relationship between the divorce of Communism and atheism, and the divorce of the state from the Soviet Communist Party.

This chapter examines the thoughts and political practices of other revolutionaries, namely Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot. Lenin is considered the greatest purifier of the world known to history. He achieved power and set about regenerating humanity. His political actions have enabled the effects of the gnostic recipe to be verified “in the field.” The Bolshevik Revolution also demonstrates what happens when professional revolutionaries gain power. Mao Tse-tung was one of the staunchest critics of bureaucracy, the new state bourgeoisie, corruption, and betrayal. Similar to Robespierre, Mao stood for radical catastrophism, the binary-code mentality, the obsession with purity, the identification of the Devil, and the doctrine of purification, according to which your enemies can only be exterminated. Pol Pot was a firm supporter of the Leninist organization of the Khmer Rouge. He was convinced that only a political party based on a rigid hierarchy and a fierce ideological determination would be able to transform the present world.

This chapter examines the U.S. occupation of Haiti and the Bolshevik Revolution. Claude Barnett was sufficiently insightful to realize that the U.S. occupation of Haiti, which had commenced in 1915 and was to last until 1934, was not in his or his class's interests. Moreover, as numerous African Americans moved leftward during this same period under the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution and the emergent U.S. Communist Party, Barnett—though a staunch Republican—demonstrated his flexibility by seeking to accommodate them too. Unlike some in his class, Barnett did not instinctively bow to either colonialism or anticommunism. Indeed, the racial and class interests of Barnett directed him toward anticolonialism and thus, in turn, led this Republican toward aligning with a growing left-wing influence among African Americans propelled by the intensified impoverishment brought by the Great Depression.

The success of the Bolshevik Revolution confirmed that economic backwardness was not necessarily an obstacle for socialism, as it triggered the radicalization of leftist movements in the region. Yet this also led to polarization of the left on questions of Soviet-Russian developments and possible cooperation with non-socialist parties, as well as agrarian and national questions. While in many countries social democracy entered the political mainstream in the 1920s, its position was undermined by the rise of right-wing authoritarianism. In turn, the Great Depression made the communist position more plausible, but the Stalinization of communist parties and the imposition of socialist realism alienated most intellectual supporters. Eventually, some radical leftists turned against the communist movement attacking its dogmatism and the Stalinist show trials. At the same time, the rise of Nazism forced leftist groups to seek a common ground, first in the form of “Popular Front” ideology, and, during the war, in the form of armed partisan movements.