Lars T. Lih is among the most respected and widely read historians of Russian and revolutionary history. He has kindly provided the following record of his publications since 1986. Most of his web publications are grouped below under “Online Articles”; most of them are described on this website at Lars Lih Online and More Lars Lih Online – JR
Books
Lars T. Lih
Lenin (London: Reaktion Books, 2011) (part of series Critical Lives).
Co-editor, Zinoviev and Martov: Head to Head in Halle, Ben Lewis, co-editor (London: November Publications, 2011).
Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? In Context (Leiden: Brill, 2006) (paperback edition by Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009) (a German edition is being prepared by Laika Verlag, Hamburg).
Co-editor, The Stalin-Molotov Letters, 1925-1936, Oleg V. Naumov and Oleg Khlevniuk, Russian co-editors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) (part of the series Annals of Communism).
Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990) (part of series Studies in the History of Society and Culture, Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds.).
‘Deferred Dreams’: Forthcoming Collection of Articles on Post-Revolutionary Bolshevism
Note from Lars Lih: Over a period of about a decade, my primary research focus was various issues concerning the Bolshevik outlook after 1917. My first target was what I call “the myth of war communism” and the assertion that the Bolsheviks thought they were on the verge of a leap into communism in 1920, just prior to the introduction of NEP in 1921. But this polemical target led to many other topics, with the result that I discussed issues that cover the entire range of the Soviet experience. These articles have been scattered in various books and journals over the years, and are now often hard to track down.
Therefore, I am now preparing a collection entitled Deferred Dreams that will be published in the near future as part of the Historical Materialism book series. My hope is that, when these articles are read as a group, their overall impact will be greater than they appeared as single essays. I have listed the essays that will appear in Deferred Dreams in the following section.
I. Beginnings
1. “The Mystery of the ABC,” Slavic Review 56:1 (Spring 1997), 50-72.
2. “Vlast from the Past,” Left History, 6:2 (Fall 1999), 29-52.
II. Policies
3. “Grain Monopoly and Agricultural Transformation: Ideals and Necessities,” in Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, eds. Edward Acton and William Rosenberg (London: Arnold, 1997), 621-32.
4. “Bolshevik Razverstka and War Communism,” Slavic Review, 45:4 (Winter 1986), 673-89.
5. Bolshevik Sowing Committees of 1920: Apotheosis of War Communism?, Carl Beck Paper No. 803, University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian and East European Studies, 1990.
III. Bolsheviks
6. “Zinoviev: Populist Leninist,” The NEP Era: Soviet Russia, 1921-1928, 2 (2008), 1-23.
7. “‘Our Position is in the Highest Degree Tragic’: Bolshevik ‘Euphoria’ in 1920,” in History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism, Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys, eds. (London: Verso), 2007, 118-137 (on Trotsky).
8. “Stalin’s Anti-Bureaucratic Scenario” (introduction to The Stalin-Molotov Letters, 1925-1936 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 1-63.
IV. Bukharin and the Meaning of War Communism, NEP and the Stalin Era
9. “‘Inescapable Torments’: Bukharin’s Vision of the Russian Revolution” (previously unpublished).
10. “Political Testament of Lenin and Bukharin and the Meaning of NEP,” Slavic Review, 50:2 (Summer 1991), 241-52.
11. “Bukharin’s ‘Illusion’: War Communism and the Meaning of NEP,” Russian History 27:4 (Winter 2000), 417-460.
12. “Bukharin’s Philosophical Arabesques and the Stalin Era,” Science and Society, 73:1 (January 2009), 147-50.
V. The Longue durée
13. “Melodrama and the Myth of the Soviet Union,” in Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia, Joan Neuberger and Louise McReynolds, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 178-208.
14. “Perestroika’s Revival of NEP: A Contemporary Chronicle, 1985-1990,” The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921-1928, 3 (2009), 1-34.
15. “The Soviet Union and the Road to Communism,” in Cambridge History of Russia, Vol. III, The Twentieth Century, ed. Ron Suny (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 706-731.
Other Articles in Journals and Edited Collections
“Fully Armed: Kamenev and Pravda in March 1917” (2014, unpublished).
“Letter from Afar, Corrections from Up Close: Did the Petrograd Bolsheviks Censor Lenin?” (2014, unpublished).
“The Bolsheviks and October,” in The Wiley/Blackwell Companion to the Russian Revolution, Daniel Orlovsky, ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley), forthcoming.
“Bringing Bolshevism Back to the Bolshevik Revolution: The Myth of the April Theses,” in Revolution from Below in 1917, ed. Chris Read (a Home Front volume in the Centennial Project Russia’s Great War and Revolution) (Bloomington, IN: Slavica), forthcoming.
“Marx’s Melodrama: The Class Struggle Trilogy,” Historical Materialism, forthcoming.
“Ordinary Miracles: Lenin’s Call for Revolutionary Ambition,” in Textual Moments in the History of Revolutionary Thought, ed. Rachel Hammersley (part of series Textual Moments in the History of Political Thought) (London: Bloomsbury Academic), forthcoming.
“‘A New Era of War and Revolution’: Lenin, Kautsky, Hegel and the Outbreak of World War I,” in Cataclysm 1914:The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics, ed. Alexander Anievas (Historical Materialism series) (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
“Lenin and Bolshevism,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism, S. A. Smith, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
“Permanent Revolution: A Rejoinder,” Science & Society, Vol. 77, No. 3, July 2013, 416–427 (part of “Permanent Revolution: The Early 20th-Century Debate about Sustained Struggle, Consciousness, Class and Transformation,” 397-427 of the same issue, a symposium in response to my article “Democratic Revolution in Permanenz”).
“The Non-Geometric Elwood,” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue canadienne des slavistes 54:1–2 (March-June 2012), 185-213.
“Democratic Revolution in Permanenz,” Science and Society 76: 4 (October 2012), 433–462.
“The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: The Debates of April 1917 in Context,” Russian History 38 (2011), 199–242.
“Kautsky when he was a Marxist (Database of post-1914 comments by Lenin),” Historical Materialism (February 2011), http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/journal/online-articles/kautsky-as-marxist-data-base.
“Robert C. Tucker, 1918-2010,” co-authored with Stephen F. Cohen, Robert English, Michael Kraus and Robert Sharlet, Slavic Review 70:1 (Spring 2011), 242-245.
“Robert C. Tucker, 1918-2010,” The NEP Era: Soviet Russia, 1921-1928 4 (2010), 5-9.
“Lenin Disputed,” Historical Materialism 18:3 (2010), 108-74 (response to “Symposium on Lars Lih’s ‘Lenin Rediscovered’,” 25-107 of same issue).
“Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich and the Russian Revolution” in Encyclopedia of Political Theory, ed. Mark Bevir (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009), 789-793.
“Lenin’s Aggressive Unoriginality, 1914-1916,” Socialist Studies: the Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies5:2 (Fall 2009), 90-112.
“Lenin and Kautsky, The Final Chapter,” International Socialist Review 59 (May-June, 2008), http://www.isreview.org/issues/59/feat-lenin.shtml.
“Decembrists to the Rise of Russian Marxism,” in International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, Immanuel Ness, ed., 2008.
“1905 and All That: The Revolution and Its Aftermath,” review essay in Kritika 8:4 (Fall 2007), 861-76.
“Marc Angenot, Jules Guesde, ou: Le Marxisme orthodoxe,” review essay in Kritika 7:4 (Fall 2006), 905-18.
“Lenin and the Great Awakening,” in Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 283-96.
“How a Founding Document was Found, or One Hundred Years of Lenin’s What Is to be Done?,” Kritika 4:1 (Winter 2003), 1-45.
“Comment on Bertrand Patenaude’s ‘Peasants into Russians,’” Russian Review, 55:3 (1996), 494-6.
“The ABC of Communism,” Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, Supplement, ed. George Rhyne (1995), 5-9 (article on the 1919 book by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky).
“War Communism and Bolshevik Ideals,” Socialist Alternatives, 2:2 (1993), 17-42. (Socialist Alternatives is a journal published jointly in Canada and Russia; my article also appeared in the Russian language edition.)
“Breakdown and Reconstitution: Thinking about the Russian Revolution” (review essay), Problems of Communism, 39:2 (March-April 1990), 98-104.
On-Line Articles
“On Marxism and Melodrama: An Interview With Lars Lih,” The North Star (2 October 2013), http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=10443.
“Fortunes of a Formula: From Democratic Centralism to Democratic Centralism,” John Riddell: Marxist Essays and Commentary (14 April 2013), https://johnriddell.com/2013/04/14/fortunes-of-a-formula-from-democratic-centralism-to-democratic-centralism/.
“Further Fortunes of a Formula: Bogdanov and Zinoviev on Democratic Centralism,” Weekly Worker 972 (July 25, 2013), http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/972/.
“1912: ‘A faction is not a party’” (Part one of series “Bolshevism and the Party”), Weekly Worker 912 (3 May 2012), http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/912/.
“1917: How Lenin’s party became (Bolshevik)” (Part two of series “Bolshevism and the Party”), Weekly Worker 833 (17 May 2012), http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/914/how-lenins-party-became-bolshevik/.
“1920: Bolshevism and revolutionary social democracy” (Part three of series “Bolshevism and the Party”), Weekly Worker 917 (7 June 2012), http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/917/.
“Falling out over a Cliff,” Weekly Worker 901 (16 February 2012), http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/901/falling-out-over-a-cliff.
“Lenin, Kautsky and the ‘new era of revolutions’,” Weekly Worker 95 (22 December 1911), http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/895/lenin-kautsky-and-the-new-era-of-revolutions/.
“The book that didn’t bark (Introduction to Kautsky’s Republic and Social Democracy in France),” Weekly Worker 863 (28 April 2011), http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/863/the-book-that-didnt-bark/.
“Kautsky, Lenin and the April Theses” (Introduction to Kautsky’s reaction to the February Revolution),” Weekly Worker 800 (4 January 2010), http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/800/supplement-kautsky-lenin-and-the-april-theses/.
“Light and air of political freedom,” Weekly Worker 833 (16 September 2010), http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/833/light-and-air-of-political-freedom
“‘We must dream!’: Echoes of What Is to Be Done? in Lenin’s later career,” Links (June 2010), http://links.org.au/node/1980.
“Russia 1917 — Bolshevism was fully armed,” https://johnriddell.com/2015/04/22/lars-lih-russia-1917-bolshevism-was-fully-armed/
Book Reviews
Kevin Callahan, Demonstration Culture: European Socialism and the Second International in International Newsletter of Communist Studies, vol. 19, No. 25 (2013).
V. Sapon, Filosofiia probudivshegosia cheloveka: Libertarizm v rossiiskoi levoradikalnoi ideologii; Ternovyi venets svobody: Libertarizm v ideologii i revoliustionnoi praktike rossiiskikh levykh radikalov (1917–1918 gg) (two books on libertarianism in Russian revolutionary thought) in Revolutionary Russia, 26:1 (2013), 71-3.
Andrea Graziosi, Histoire de l’URSS in Slavic Review 71:2 (Summer 2012), 460-461.
Stephen Cohen, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War in The Montréal Review, January 2012 (http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Soviet-Fates-and-Lost-Alternatives-by-Stephen-Cohen.php).
Paul R. Gregory, Terror by Quota: State Security from Lenin to Stalin (An Archival Study) in Slavic Review 69:2 (Summer 2010), 508.
DVD review of Bolt by Shostakovich and Ice and Steel by Vladimir Deshevov in The NEP Era: Soviet Russia, 1921-1928 3 (2009), 80-4.
Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism in The Nation Magazine, November 16, 2009, 34-40.
Erik C. Landis, Bandits and Partisans: The Antonov Movement in the Russian Civil War in Slavic Review 68:3 (2009), 699.
Vladlen Loginov, Vladimir Lenin: vybor puti: Biografia in The NEP Era: Soviet Russia, 1921-1928 2 (2008), 81-3.
Robert Daniels, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia; Robert Service, Comrades! in Slavic Review (starred review) 67:2 (Spring 2008).
Leopold H. Haimson, Russia’s Revolutionary Experience, 1905-1917; Pete Glatter, ed., The Russian Revolution of 1905: Change Through Struggle; S. V. Tiutiukin, ed., Pervaia revoliutsiia v Rossii: Vzgliad cherez stoletie; Michael Melancon, The Lena Goldfields Massacre and the Crisis of the Late Tsarist State in Kritika (Fall 2007), 861-76.
Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe in Moscow Times, 2007.
Roderic Braithwaite, Moscow, 1941 in Moscow Times, November 17, 2006.
Mike Haynes, Russia: Class and Power 1917-2000; John Gooding, Socialism in Russia: Lenin and his Legacy, 1890-1991; Christopher Read, The Making and Breaking of the Soviet System in Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 39:2-3 (Summer-Fall 2005), 313-4.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks!: Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia in Moscow Times, October 21, 2005.
Bertrand Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 in The Journal of Modern History, volume 76 (2004), 1009–1011.
Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History in Washington Post Book World, April 13, 2003.
Maureen Perrie, The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia in The Journal of Modern History, vol. 75 (2003), 1004–1005.
Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 in The Historian, Summer 2002.
Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892-1982 in Journal of Modern History, 73:4 (December 2001), 931-2.
Yanni Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861-1914; Alessandro Stanziani, L’économie en revolution: Le cas russe, 1870-1930; Esther Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics, and Problems of Russian Development in Kritika, 2:4 (Fall, 2001), 803-22.
Gregory L. Freeze, ed., Russia: A History, in Revolutionary Russia 14:2 (2001), 139-41.
Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive; Iu. N. Amiantov, Iu. A. Akhpakin, V. T. Loginov, eds., V. I Lenin: Neizvestnye dokumenty, 1891-1922 in Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 35:2-3 (Summer/Fall 2001), 301-6.
Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography in Washington Post Book World, October 2000.
Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire in Revolutionary Russia, 13:2 (2000), 91-3.
Bread Day, a film by Sergey Dvortsevoy in Slavic Review, 59:4 (Winter 2000), 877-8.
Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study in Practices in Slavic Review, 59:3 (Fall 2000), 704-5.
Evan Mawdsley, The Stalin Years: The Soviet Union, 1929-1953 in Revolutionary Russia, 12:2 (1999), 106-8.
Folke Dovring, Leninism: Political Economy as Pseudoscience in Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 33:2-4 (1999), 404-406.
Dmitry Shlapentokh, The Counter-Revolution in Revolution: Images of Thermidor and Napoleon at the Time of the Russian Revolution and Civil War in Russian Review, 58:4 (October 1999), 702-3.
Diliara Ibragimova, NEP i perestroika: massovoe soznanie selskogo naseleniia v usloviiakh perekhoda k rynku (NEP and Perestroika: Mass Consciousness of the Rural Population during the Transition to the Market) in Slavic Review, 57:2 (Summer 1998), 469-70.
Neil Harding, Leninism in Russian Review, 57:3 (July 1998), 478-9.
Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922 in Russian History, 25:1 (Spring 1998), 189-90.
Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary in Civilization (published by Smithsonian Institute), Summer 1996.
Donny Gluckstein, The Tragedy of Bukharin in Russian Review, 55:1 (January 1996), 133-4.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Invisible Allies and Michael Scammell, ed. The Solzhenitsyn Files in Washington Post Book World (31 December 1995), 1, 10.
Alec Nove, ed., The Stalin Phenomenon in Slavic Review, 54:1 (Spring 1995), 174-7.
Mary McAuley, Bread and Justice in Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 28:4 (Winter 1994), 482-4.
Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918-1929 in Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 28:2-3 (Summer-Fall 1994), 330-2.
R. W. Davies, ed., From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy in Slavic Review, 51:4 (Winter 1992), 814-5.
Diane Koenker, William G. Rosenberg, and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History in Slavic Review, 51:1 (Spring 1992), 177-8.
Igor Leiberov and Svetlana Rudachenko, Revoliutsiia i khleb (Revolution and Bread) in American Historical Review, 97:2 (April 1992), 587.
Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917-1930 in Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 25 (1991), 317-8.
Pavel Campeanu, The Genesis of the Stalinist Social Order in Slavic Review, 50:2 (Summer 1991), 443-4.
Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917-1921 in Russian History, 17:4 (Winter, 1990), 453-6.
Vladimir Kabanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo v usloviakh “voennogo kommunizma” (The Peasant Economy under the Conditions of “War Communism”) in American Historical Review, 95:4 (October, 1990), 1253.
Daniel Thorniley, The Rise and Rall of the Soviet Rural Communist Party, 1927-39 in Russian Review, 49:4 (October 1990), 504-5.
Francesco Benvenuti, The Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 1918-1922 in Slavic Review, 49:4 (Winter 1990), 654-5.
E. A. Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia: The Rise and Fall of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, 1920-34 in Russian Review 48:1 (January 1989), 102-3.
T. M. Kitanina, Voina, khleb i revoliutsiia: prodovol’stvennyi vopros v Rossii, 1914–oktiabr’ 1917 g. (War, Bread and Revolution: The Food-Supply Question in Russia, 1914—October 1917) in Slavic Review 47:1 (Spring 1988), 128.
Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918-1921 in Russian Review 46:4 (October 1987), 455-6.
Stephan Merl, Die Anfänge der Kollektivierung in der Sowjetunion: Der Übergang zur staatlichen Reglementierung der Produktions- und Marktbeziehungen im Dorf (1928-1930) in Slavic Review 46:3-4 (Fall/Winter 1987), 607-8.
Blair Ruble and Alex Pravda, Trade Unions in Communist States in Soviet Union 14:2 (1987), 246-7.
Harry Gelman, The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Detente in Russian Review 45:3 (July 1986), 103.
Aileen Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism in Political Psychology 5:1 (March 1984), 115-6.