page_title: A History of Soviet Russia
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: A History of Soviet Russia / Reception
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Niederschlagung des Kronstädter Matrosenaufstands. Soldaten der Roten Armee greifen die Inselfestung Kronstadt über das Eis des finnischen Meerbusens an. Русский: Подавление Крондштатского мятежа. Красная армия атакует Кронштадт по льду Финского залива. English: Suppression of the Kronstadt mutiny. Soldiers of the Red Army attack the island fortress of Kronstadt on the ice of the Gulf of Finland.
context_page_description: A History of Soviet Russia is a 14-volume work by E. H. Carr, covering the first twelve years of the history of the Soviet Union. It was first published from 1950 onward and re-issued from 1978 onward.
  The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Volume 1.
  The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Volume 2.
  The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923. Volume 3.
  The Interregnum, 1923-1924.
  Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, Volume 1.
  Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, Volume 2.
  Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, Volume 3, Part 1.
  Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, Volume 3, Part 2.
  Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929, Volume 1, Part 1.
  Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929, Volume 1, Part 2.
  Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929, Volume 2.
  Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929, Volume 3, Part 1.
  Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929, Volume 3, Part 2.
  Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929, Volume 3, Part 3.
  Carr subsequently distilled the research contained in these fourteen volumes into a short book entitled The Russian Revolution: from Lenin to Stalin, 1917-1929 which covers the same period as the large history.
context_section_description: The History of Soviet Russia volumes met with a mixed reception. In 1970, the Encyclopædia Britannica described the History of Soviet Russia series as simply "magisterial". British historian Chimen Abramsky praised Carr as the world's foremost historian of the Soviet Union who displayed an astonishing knowledge of the subject. The Canadian historian John Keep called the series "[a] towering scholarly monument; in its shadow the rest of us are but pygmies". Deutscher called A History of Soviet Russia "a truly outstanding achievement". A. J. P. Taylor called A History of Soviet Russia the most fair and best series of books ever written on Soviet history. Taylor was later to call Carr "an Olympian among historians, a Goethe in range and spirit". American journalist Harrison Salisbury called Carr "one of the half dozen greatest specialists in Soviet affairs and in Soviet-German relations". British academic Michael Cox praised the History of Soviet Russia series as "an amazing construction: almost pyramid-like [...] in its architectural audacity" British historian John Barber argued that History of Soviet Russia series through a scrupulous and detailed survey of the evidence "transformed" the study of Soviet history in the West. British historian Hugh Seton-Watson called Carr "an object of admiration and gratitude" for his work in Soviet studies. The British Marxist historian Hillel Ticktin praised Carr as an honest historian of the Soviet Union and accused critics like Norman Stone, Richard Pipes and Leopold Labedz as "Cold Warriors" who were "not unconnected with serving the needs of official British and American foreign policy". In 1983, four American historians, namely Geoff Eley, W. Rosenberg, Moshe Lewin and Ronald Suny, wrote in a joint article in the London Review of Books of the "grandeur" of Carr's work and his "extraordinary pioneering quality". They claimed that the scope of Carr's history was such that he "went where no one had gone before and where only a few have really gone since", thus providing "an agenda of questions which will be pursued for the rest of the 20th century". British historian Jonathan Haslam called Carr a victim of British "McCarthyism" who was unjustly punished for his willingness to defend and praise the Soviet Union. Eric Hobsbawm wrote that Carr's History of Soviet Russia "constitutes, with Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, the most remarkable effort of single-handed historical scholarship undertaken in Britain within living memory". American historian Peter Wiles called the History of Soviet Russia "one of the great historiographical enterprises of our day" and wrote of Carr's "immensely impressive" work American historian Arno J. Mayer wrote that "the History of Soviet Russia [...] established E.H. Carr not only as the towering giant among Western specialists of recent Russian history, but certainly also as the leading British historian of his generation".
  Unusually for a book by a Western historian, A History of Soviet Russia met with warily favourable reviews by Soviet historians. Normally, any works by Western historians met with hostile reviews in the Soviet Union no matter how favourable and there was even a brand of polemical literature by Soviet historians attacking so-called "bourgeois historians" under the xenophobic grounds that only Soviet historians were capable of understanding the Soviet past". The History of Soviet Russia series were not translated into Russian and published in the Soviet Union until 1990. A Soviet journal commented in 1991 that Carr was "almost unknown to a broad Soviet readership", although all Soviet historians were aware of his work and most of them had considerable respect for Carr, but they had been unable to say so until Perestroika. Those Soviet historians who specialised in rebutting the "bourgeois falsifiers" as Western historians were so labelled in the Soviet Union attacked Carr for writing that Soviet countryside was in chaos after 1917, but they praised him as one of the "few bourgeois authors" who told the "truth" about So
caption: In A History of Soviet Russia, Carr paid more attention to relations between the Soviet Union and Outer Mongolia than to the Kronstadt mutiny, to which Carr gave only a few lines
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