My word, no! When you go trawling in the swamp of uncanonical information, you actually have to perform the filtering work yourself. If you're not interested

My word, no! When you go trawling in the swamp of uncanonical information, you actually have to perform the filtering work yourself. If you're not interested in judging sources yourself, by all means stick to the Economist! It's not that bad. Yes, Schiff's role is relatively minor. But that's also a far cry from "nothing to see here, move along, the October Revolution is purely a product of the legitimate revolutionary aspirations of the Russian workers and peasants." Unless you're actually concerned with whether the problem is the Jooze, or this one guy Schiff, or whatever, the larger and broader point that the Bolsheviks had strong support from influential East Coast circles is basically correct and extremely relevant. It's easy to use a small factual error to disguise this broader and more interesting truth. When you're filtering water from a swamp, the fact that the swamp has moose turds in it shouldn't bother you that much. Of course it has moose turds. It's a swamp. That's why you brought your filter. I do wish there was a better source of water, but there really isn't. The Russian Revolution is a remarkable event in history because almost everyone who has written about it since WWII has followed what's essentially the mainstream American or Soviet lines (which are not at all that different). You simply can't get out of this box without going into the swamp. Harvard University Press is not publishing any Czarist accounts of 1917 by Czarist history professors.