The relationship between Russian labor and Bolshevik power in the months immediately following October remains a central and contentious issue of early Soviet history. Bolshevik political legitimacy turns in large measure on the degree to which the party was able in this period to retain the support of workers whose activism in 1917 had brought the Bolsheviks to power; and the nature and extent of workers' opposition to the new regime in these early months is fundamental to our understanding of its dictatorial structure. These issues, central to the work of E. H. Carr, Leonard Schapiro, and others, have recently reemerged in the literature, both implicitly and explicitly. Whereas new books by S. A. Smith, David Mandel, and Diane Koenker on 1917 have examined carefully the social circumstances of Petrograd and Moscow workers, Schapiro's own last volume, The Russian Revolutions of 1917, takes sharp issue with historians whose work centers on “social trends, economic theories, or sociological analysis.” Roy Medvedev and Vladimir Brovkin have demonstrated how elections to local Soviets in the spring of 1918 brought extensive gains for Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, including popular majorities in all provincial capitals where elections took place; and an important new collection of materials edited by M. S. Bernshtam for Alexander Solzhenitsyn's series on modern Russian history reasserts an old Right Menshevik view, put most forcefully perhaps by Grigorii Aronson, who maintained that the Bolsheviks had been in power scarcely two months before

all sympathy for them had disappeared, and the benevolent neutrality of the weeks preceding [October] gave way to a committed opposition. […]