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After the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in February 1917, Russia was subject to an eight month experiment in democracy. Sarah Badcock studies its failure through an exploration of the experiences and motivations of ordinary men and women, urban and rural, military and civilian. Using previously neglected documents from regional archives, this 2007 text offers a history of the revolution as experienced in the two Volga provinces of Nizhegorod and Kazan. Badcock exposes the confusions and contradictions between political elites and ordinary people and emphasises the role of the latter as political actors. By looking beyond Petersburg and Moscow, she shows how local concerns, conditions and interests were foremost in shaping how the revolution was received and understood. She also reveals the ways in which the small group of intellectuals who dominated the high political scene of 1917 had their political alternatives circumscribed by the desires and demands of ordinary people.

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Response to Boris Mironov, 'The Russian proletariat as cannon fodder in 1917'. This short and provocative article claims to debunk Soviet mythologies of Russia's working class, but in so doing it perpetuates an alternative mythology of an undifferentiated, ill-educated and violent working class that were effectively marionettes dancing to the command of the political elites. Prof. Mironov (BM throughout) explains the prominence of the Bolsheviks among the urban working class as a triumph of the most radical and most aggressive rhetoric; in

The rich historiography of the revolution has tended to focus around urban and political elites, labour history and events in Petrograd and to a lesser extent Moscow. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened previously inaccessible archives and shifted the ideological battlegrounds ranged over by scholars of the Russian revolution. New archivally based research is shifting its focus away from the capitals and political elites, and draws together social and political approaches to the revolution. By investigating revolutionary events outside the capitals, and lived experiences of revolution for Russia's ordinary people, most of whom were rural, not urban dwellers, current research draws a complex and multifaceted picture of revolutionary events. Explanations for the failure of democratic politics in Russia can now be found not only in the ineptitudes of Nicholas II, the failings of Kerensky, or the machinations of Lenin and his cohort. Instead, ordinary people, outside the capitals and in the countryside, defined and determined revolutionary events.