Reading Hannah Arendt's Crises of the Republic, I was struck by a long passage at the end in which she points to "an entirely new form of government" that arose, quite spontaneously, out of every revolution, only to be swallowed up by subsequent events and virtually written out of history. These councils occurred, Arendt writes, "in the French Revolution, with Jefferson in the American Revolution, in the Parisian commune, in the Russian revolutions, in the wake of the revolutions in Germany and Austria at the end of World War I, finally in the Hungarian Revolution. What is more, they never came into being as a result of a conscious revolutionary tradition or theory, but entirely spontaneously, each time as though there had never been anything of the sort before."

I must confess that the only one of these instances I've seriously studied in depth is the Russian Revolution. But doing my research, I was astonished at how little information most of the books contained on the Soviets (that is, the spontaneous councils that sprang up across the land), which seemed to me to be the primary spring of everything that happened in 1917. Hunger and opposition to the war and the decline of the tsar's authority provided the setting for the revolution, but they could not cause it; that there was a revolution was because of ordinary people's sudden discovery of what Arendt terms "political action." Discovering a "public life" where previously there had been only a vacuum, the disaffected soldiers and workers rushed to fill the available space.

Richard Pipes, a Reaganite scholar who has written the longest account of the Revolution and its aftermath available in the West, observed once that the tsar's absoluteness of power was precisely what made his rule so precarious; had he placed more of his power in the hands of lords and smaller rulers across the land (like putting money in a bank) he could have better safeguarded it from the people. Instead, Pipes wrote, the country's political system resembled a vast warehouse with a long line connecting the tsar and each person he ruled; when the line was snapped, the result was political chaos. This misses the point. The revolution was not merely "chaos," but the shifting of power away from the center to a vast and varied collection of groups who had seized it for themselves. Pipes, who believes in the oligarchic rule of the few over the dangerous many, condemned the (relatively few) radicals in the Duma for exacerbating the situation with their inflammatory words against the tsar. The Duma-radicals, however, comprised only one group battling for power as the tsar's authority waned.

It is truly astonishing how little has been written - at least in English - about the precarious existence of democracy between February and October 1917. Reduced to a chapter in most histories, as if the Bolshevik Coup were inevitable, the most crucial months in the history of Russia have been written out of its history.

Americans can see a similar omission in the numerous histories of our Civil War. The war began with a coup by the losing party in a presidential race; the Democratic Party, whose machines controlled most of the old South, chose to force a secession against the wishes of a majority of actual Southerners. A torrent of words has been wasted, by men as smart as Edmund Wilson and Gore Vidal, over whether the South had the "right" to leave the Union. The truth is that the South itself - that is, the people who made up its population - were barely consulted in the matter. Historians' refusal to acknowledge the power of political parties - who hold virtually all political power in this republic - has resulted in a war that makes no sense, for if the South was united in its wish to leave then the North's actions were obviously tyrannical. If, however, Southerners had remained loyal to the Union despite secession, the new government would have swiftly fallen apart. This explains the act that actually began the war: Jefferson Davis's government firing on Fort Sumter. Only a war could forge the unity possible to create a new nation independent of the old one, whose powerful hold on the people of the South could only be weakened by a war against the old government. Yet this conflict is all but absent in most histories of the Civil War, in which the Confederate nation itself barely exists.