E. H. Carr’s Revolutionary Personalities

Despite his diminished standing as a public intellectual, E. H. Carr (1892–1982) retains a begrudging respect among historians of the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution. In fact, his nuanced and subjective philosophy of history and commitment to dispassionate empirical research laid a foundation for the revisionist approaches to Soviet history that have since become mainstream in the field. Yet despite his position in the historiographical genealogy, Carr’s actual writings on the history of the USSR often go overlooked. In volume 5 of his History of Soviet Russia, Carr included five character sketches of the leading Bolshevik personalities of the 1920s – Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Among these, Carr’s sketch on Stalin gained notoriety as a statement of the ‘circumstantial argument’ that the ‘revolutions from above’ resulted from larger historical forces and that Stalin himself was essentially irrelevant. This essay explores how both the weaknesses and the strengths in Carr’s particular interpretation of Stalin derived from his philosophy of history, and how once liberated from the demands of a strictly causal explanatory framework, Carr’s sketches of the other personalities are an example of a substantial and influential contribution to the field that drew attention to the diversity of outlooks among the leading early Bolsheviks.