Revolution and Counterrevolution

Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory

Based on research in four factory-specific archives, Revolution and Counterrevolution is the most thorough investigation to date on working-class life during Russia’s revolutionary era. Focusing on class conflict and workers’ frequently changing response to management and state labor policies, the study also meticulously reconstructs everyday life, including leisure activities, domestic issues, the changing role of women, and popular religious belief.
About the author

Kevin Murphy teaches history at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. His current writing projects include A People’s History of the Russian Revolution and a study of the role of trade unions in Soviet society.
Reviews

“Murphy has given us an impeccably researched case study of the vicissitudes of workers’ politics on the shop floor, which charts the rise and fall of worker activism.... This is not a monolithic working class of revolutionary heroes or atomized victims, but a politically and ideologically diverse and contradictory group whose daily struggles and internal battles Murphy charts with subtlety and precision.”
--Donald Filtzer, University of East London

“The archives have been open now for fifteen years and few historians of revolutionary Russia have tested previously held assumptions and interpretations of the past through systematic studies of primary source material as Murphy has achieved in this study.”
--The Russian Review

“Kevin Murphy has produced an outstanding and original work that is a must-read for all those interested in Soviet history.”
--Capital and Class

“The workers of the Hammer and Sickle factory come alive here in an exciting story of struggle, victory, and defeat. Their voices ring out to us across the years, as we join them in their meetings and on the shop floor, at the height of revolutionary hopes and the defeats of the Stalin years. Murphy offers an unprecedented view of dissent and accommodation at the grassroots level.”
--Wendy Goldman, Carnegie Mellon University

“In the course of this brilliant study, Murphy knocks down the conventional wisdom from academics and political pundits who denigrate the Russian Revolution as a coup by an authoritarian minority. Those wanting to understand the inside view of a real workers’ revolution in all its contexts will find Murphy’s book invaluable.”
--Ahmed Shawki, author, Black Liberation and So

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