It would be disastrously reductive to assume that any single factor contributed more than any other to the Red Army winning the Russian Civil War. Different historians with different ideologies will necessarily take different views regarding this question. However, if the war was most bitterly fought and for the longest time in the westernmost reaches …
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Source Analysis: Lenin’s Rise to Power
That V.I. Lenin left behind volumes of his own writings is helpful in determining his justifications for his historic actions. For example, two of his essays, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution,” from April 1917, also known as the “April Theses,”[1]and “Theses on the Constituent Assembly”[2] from six months later, help to …
Russian Historiography: Totalitarianism vs Revisionism
Back to school! Here’s my first discussion post for my Modern Russia class. ==== Having read the textbook chapters for the week and the readings by Alice Gomstyn and Richard Pipes, as well as having very recently read J. Arch Getty‘s two books on the Great Purges, I have come to the conclusion that both …
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Appeal to All Members of the KPR(b)
What appears below is my translation from German of a translation from Russian of the so-called Ryutin Appeal, which is essentially a condensed version of the Ryutin Platform of two years earlier. Given that it’s a translation of a translation, all the standard caveats apply. The source is: Annette Vogt, “Eine bestechende Analyse, eine fundierte …
Agenda for February and March
Through a variety of approaches, including CLEP (American History II), AP credit from high school (American History I), a course transferred from a local community college (World History II), and three courses online at SNHU (World History I, Modern War and Society, and Making History), I have completed half of the courses in the history …
Meritocracy: A Mongol Innovation
Of the many innovations introduced to other parts of the world by the Mongols, as they invaded neighboring regions and established their empire, meritocracy is among those with the greatest impact over time. Meritocracy, quite simply, is defined as “a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their …
Term Paper: Arab Rule in Sicily
By 732 CE, the armies of the Umayyad Caliphate, with their conquest of the Iberian Peninsula well under way, had crossed the Pyrenees only to be defeated in France by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours. With only 250 kilometers between Carthage in North Africa and the western Sicilian city of Trapani and just …
Two Buddhas
For religions with long histories and large numbers of adherents, history can often have a significant impact on the way in which the faith is practiced. Whether Sunni or Shia powers were the first to extent control over a non-Islamic area, for instance, might have determined whether that population is Sunni or Shia right down …
Conversion in Late Antiquity: Islam v. Christianity
Christianity and Islam are closely related religions, with the key differences between focusing mainly on their different understandings of Jesus and the latter’s emphasis on the prophesies of Muhammad. Although they are not the only Abrahamic faiths, they nevertheless spread rapidly in the century or two following their founding, and through today, their adherents make …
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Greece, Rome, Democracy
Although the Constitution of the United States borrowed from both Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic, I believe that, while Athenian democracy more closely resembles what most people think of when they consider democracy, the U.S. Constitution, particularly in its original form, more closely resembles the Roman Republic, particularly with regard to the institutions established …
Inevitable Historicity 