“Few would deny”—wrote Isaiah Berlin in the American Historical Review for October 1949— “that the Russian Revolution has transformed the social and political outlook of our time. It is strange, therefore, that more than thirty years after its occurrence . . . the works thus far written have done no more than provide the evidence upon which it is possible to build such great and abiding monuments as those by which the French Revolution has been commemorated.” Since the above was written, whether because of the largeness of the subject, the nature of modern scholarship, the unresolved character of the historical process, or the lack of a man with a 19th-century appetite and courage to embrace so vast a theme in its entirety, all the good books which have appeared continue to “do no more than provide the evidence” out of which a Thierry or Guizot or Mignet may some day construct the monumental study of the revolution whose presence and consequences overshadow our day. Neither of the books under review aspires to be such a “monument,” but both provide important building blocks.

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