F.L. Tuma on the February and October Revolutions in Russia

Abstract

The article examines some still unexplored aspects of the Slovenian attitude to the February and October revolutions in the Russia of 1917. The research was carried out primarily on the basis of press materials – memoirs of the Slovenian patriot Tuma, which were published in twenty issues of a Trieste newspaper, Edinost, in 1919. Tuma’s notes are very important sources for studying this topic, in particular because he was the only Slovenian intellectual and patriot who spent almost the entire time of the First World War, from 1914 to 1918, in Petrograd. He was also the only Slovenian who had access to the Russian government. The goal of the study is to reveal the peculiarities of the Slovenian perception of Russian reality during the two revolutions and to assess the objectivity of Tuma’s attempts at analysis. The conclusion is that, although he was an eyewitness of great events, his judgments cannot be regarded as completely objective. On the other hand, the publication of Tuma’s memoirs undoubtedly helped to shape a matrix of Slovenian notions about Tsarist and Bolshevik Russia.