Note on Dates¶
Core Argument¶
This brief prefatory chapter addresses a technical but politically significant historiographical issue: the calendrical disjuncture between revolutionary Russia and the West. Until 14 February 1918, the Russian Empire operated on the Old Style (Julian) calendar, which lagged thirteen days behind the New Style (Gregorian) calendar used internationally. The chapter establishes that all dates for events occurring within Russia are rendered in the Old Style, with the New Style date supplied parenthetically. This is no mere editorial convenience. The thirteen-day gap is not a neutral fact; it carries substantive implications for understanding the tempo and sequence of revolutionary events. A reader encountering only New Style dates might misplace the February Revolution (which, in Old Style, occurred in February but corresponds to March in the West) or the October insurrection (which, by the Gregorian reckoning, took place in November). The note thus preempts a common source of confusion in comparative revolutionary chronology, particularly when juxtaposing Russian developments with contemporaneous events in Europe, such as the German Revolution or the armistice negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. The chapter implicitly argues that calendrical accuracy is not pedantry but a precondition for grasping the compressed, overlapping dynamics of 1917–1918. It also subtly underscores the Bolsheviks’ eventual adoption of the Gregorian calendar as part of their broader modernising and internationalist orientation — a break with Tsarist Orthodox tradition that aligned Soviet timekeeping with the global working-class movement. The note functions as a methodological guardrail, ensuring that the reader does not impose an anachronistic temporal framework onto the revolutionary process. By foregrounding this technical detail, the chapter signals that the text will attend to the concrete, material conditions of revolutionary struggle — including the very measurement of time itself — rather than treating dates as abstract markers.