George Fedotov's reflections on the February revolution in Russia

The article discusses the process of historicizing perception of the 1917 Russian February Revolution by the eminent émigré historian who was an eyewitness and a participant of the revolutionary events unravelling back then in the Russian capital. Situational and fragmentary evidences, which were preserved in his letters of the time, became the basis for the historical narrative, which represented the revolution in focus as a spontaneous process of ancient regime destruction, ended by the Bolsheviks coup d’Étate. Therefore, the history represented in such a manner had no place for the February events as a phenomenon of particular importance. It was a search of the historian for a symbolic meaning of the February Revolution that turned it into a sign of the struggle for freedom. Ultimately, the interpretation of the revolutionary events became George Fedotov’s tool for the ideological struggle against Bolshevism and his advocacy for the revival of civil liberties in the Soviet Union. The latter circumstance allowed the author to conclude that the historian-emigrant constructed his latest historical representations for some political purposes.