Narrating the Russian Revolution: Institutionalism and continuity across regime change

The ongoing interpretative battle of which Don Rowney writes, takes place among scholars of the Russian Revolution. The revolutionary regime needed to separate itself from the old regime by a practice of message control that attributed creative energy to the revolution and magnified its difference from the pre-revolutionary state. In this way the very real continuities of institutions have been obscured, and require an institutionalist perspective to be restored to view. The author aims to amend what he sees as the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of Theda Skocpol's interpretation, the prevailing paradigm of the institutionalist approach. © 2005 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History.