This is a hard question to answer because the history of 1917 is highly politicized and this politicization dates back to the events of 1917 itself. One of the oldest interpretations of 1917 was the so-called Menshevik or fatalist school that stresses that Russian maldevlopment, backwardness, and poor institutions doomed the Revolution from the start. Lenin and company succeed in no small measure because Russia was not prepared to handle such a social change. A number of Russian emigres and refugees contended that the Bolsheviks were a minority party that seized power against the wishes of the people. This line of interpretation would find resonance among historians like Richard Pipes who argued that the Bolsheviks seized power through a common and dedicated conspiracy and never really enjoyed popular support.

While this is one interpretation of the events of 1917, it is a problematic one. For one thing, it first arose in the wreckage of the Civil War among various emigres and those sympathetic to the ideals of 1917 but were aghast at the excesses of the Civil War and later Stalin dictatorship. This imparts this interpretation of 1917 a political edge to it, denying the Bolsheviks legitimacy, while simultaneously defending the need for a revolution. And Cold Warriors like Pipes simply abandoned any pretenses of defending the Revolution. What results from this politicized history is a skewed history that both castigates the Bolsheviks and tends to downplay or ignore the peasantry or other actors from below. Although it is difficult to find a peasant "voice," social history of the Russian peasantry has revealed a more sophisticated peasantry that makes the charge of "backwards" quite problematic.

Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy is an example of a book hostile to the Bolsheviks that falls into both of these traps. Despite Figes's rather sophisticated account of Nicholas II and tsarist institutions, his account of the peasant 1917 is a tad simplistic. While Figes's acknowledges that peasant politics could be quite sophisticated, A People's Tragedy tends to treat the violence of the black partitions as a flight into irrationality. Such a treatment dips into this fatalist well by presenting a narrative that despite the ideals and logic of peasant politics, the peasantry fell back into the traditional politics of the knout, but this time against the masters.

But A People's Tragedy's depiction of the peasantry is a model of sophistication in contrast to Figes's treatment of Lenin & co. Dave Pretty's review on H-net said it best. After drawing a somewhat fleshed-out picture of the late tsarist political culture, when Lenin enters the scene:

It is as if an Ian Fleming villain had walked in and taken over a John Le Carre novel, a black-and-white stick figure dominating a historical canvas otherwise marked by breathtaking chiaroscuro. Figes is correct to reject the monolithic party of Soviet myth, taken whole into Western historiography, with the moral valuation changed from good to evil, at a time when we had few other sources. He has not, however, overcome the simplistic portrait of the revolution's leader, taken from the same sources with the same toggling of moral assessment, from hero to demon; it remains just as iconic a representation, lacking depth and perspective. As a result, the last half of this book is permeated with a disconcerting and unresolved tension between what Figes the historian sees, and what Figes the moralist feels.

Sean McMeekin's recent The Russian Revolution: A New History goes down much this same road. This book falls in line with the now rather dated Pipes interpretation of a conspiratorial Bolsheviks that operated against the wider interests of the people. Pace the journalist Gregory Feifer's glowing NYT's review of McMeekin, Pipes did not shatter the traditional historiographic consensus. The conspiracy angle was the traditional interpretation and Pipes's works reified it and it remained dominant in the academy through the 1970s. The social history of the 1960s and 70s, which unlike Pipes actually consulted Russian ground-level sources, found much greater support for the Bolsheviks as well as a more divided and uncertain Bolshevik leadership. Both Sheila Fitzpatrick and Alexander Rabinowitch's various works of social history have shown that conspiracy angle of the Bolsheviks seizing power is untenable as their platform had a broad base of support.

Much like Pretty, Fitzpatrick has a pretty condemnatory and dismissive view of McMeekin's warmed-over Pipes in LRB:

McMeekin, the youngest of the authors here, set out to write a ‘new history’, by which he means an anti-Marxist one. Following Pipes, but with his own twist, he includes an extensive bibliography of works ‘cited or profitably consulted’ that omits all social histories except Figes. This includes Smith’s and Steinberg’s earlier books, as well as my own Russian Revolution (though it is cited on p.xii as an example of Marxist, Soviet-influenced work {sidenote- Fitzpatrick is being a little snarky here since she was under periodic attack from Soviet authors for being anti-Marxist and she likely expects her audience to know this} ). It could be argued that McMeekin doesn’t need to read the social histories since his focus in The Russian Revolution, as in his earlier work, is on the political, diplomatic, military and international economic aspects. He draws on a multinational archival source base, and the book is quite interesting in detail, particularly the economic parts. But there’s a whiff of right-wing nuttiness in his idea that ‘Marxist-style maximalist socialism’ is a real current threat in Western capitalist countries. He doesn’t quite call the whole revolution, from Lenin’s sealed train in April 1917 to the Rapallo Treaty in 1922, a German conspiracy, but that’s more or less what his narrative suggests.

Naturally, it is not an iron law of Russian historiography that a historian must have a positive view of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But as Pretty notes, a moralizing view denudes the great man of his complexity. Much of Figes's moralizing and McMeekin's narrative concern themselves with banging at open doors such as Lenin not being fully prepared for the Revolutions in February and October, or drifting into totalitarian models that lumps Lenin in with not only Stalin, but Hitler and Mussolini. There are more sophisticated and illuminating critical portraits of Lenin out there. Both Fitzpatrick and Rabinowitch do show a more indecisive and adjusting Lenin, and that is why Soviet critics attacked them as well as archconservatives in the West like Pipes for daring to suggest that the Bolsheviks had some popular legitimacy.

As far as good books on the Russian Revolution, there are several. The best introductory text to 1917 is Sheila Fitzpatrick's The Russian Revolution. It is a slim and accessible volume that is one of the basic texts for the Russian Revolution. Rex Wade's The Russian Revolution is a bit thicker than Fitpatrick's, but another alternative. Alexander Rabinowitch's trilogy on 1917 (Prelude to Revolution, The Bolsheviks Come To Power, and The Bolsheviks in Power) are also excellent examinations of the events of that year. Rabinowitch pioneered a history from below approach to 1917 that was quite controversial when he first hit the scene (and he was attacked both on the right and left), but has become a somewhat orthodox approach to 1917. While both Fitzpatrick and Rabinowitch mostly cover those who took to the streets in 1917, Dominic Lieven's recent book The End of Tsarist Russia (also known as Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia in the UK) focuses on elite and governmental responses to the decline of Romanov power and the stresses of war. Lieven does not have much to say about the Revolution itself, but covers the military and political background to the events leading up to 1917 in a way that is much more sound than either Figes or McMeekin. Mark Steinberg's recent The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 is a more recent social history of the Revolution that looks towards the voices and sources McMeekin and the like eschew (Steinberg has a good podcast on Sean's Russia Blog that explains the genesis of the book and its methodology).

Of course, 1917 is inseparable from the revolutionaries of the period. Lenin is subject to both hagiography and hatchet-jobs, with the further complication that his theory often overshadows his actions. James White's Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution is a slim and valuable examination of how Lenin thought to squeeze his theory into objective realities. Lenin: Conspirator in Exile by Helen Rappaport provides a window into the milieu of revolutionaries in exile and the social networks that sustained Lenin. Stephen Kotkin's Stalin: The Paradoxes of Power is a door-stopper of a book and the first part of trilogy and Kotkin's sections prior to 1917 bring this world to life. Elizabeth White's The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1921–1939 examines one of the Bolsheviks' chief rivalries in 1917.