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The Russian Revolution enthused anti-colonial movements around the world, fueling hopes that the European empires could be overthrown. But the revolt against empire was also fundamental to Lenin’s own strategy, as he worked to unite workers’ revolts in the metropoles with national struggles to (...)
When Alexandra Kollontai, one of the founders of the Zhenotdel, the women’s department of the Bolshevik Party, wanted to turn her colleagues’ attention toward questions of sexual freedom and what love might look like under socialism, she was met more than once with an eye roll. After the (...)
In February 1918, the repudiation of the debt by the Soviet government shocked international finance and sparked off unanimous condemnation by the governments of the great powers.
This decision of repudiation was intrinsic to this first big movement for social emancipation which rattled the (...)
When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they announced the overthrow of a world scarred by exploitation and domination. In the very moment of revolution, these sentiments were put to the test as antisemitic pogroms swept across the former Pale of Jewish Settlement. The pogroms reached a (...)
The 1954 classic study of the Ukrainian Revolution, Borotbism by Ivan Maistrenko has just been republished in a new edition. It was one of the first significant accounts of the revolution in English.
The Borotbists were the left faction of the Ukrainian Party of Socialists Revolutionaries, (...)
Today is the 140th birthday of Ioseb Jughashvili, also known as Koba, but best known as Joseph Stalin: figurehead of the Soviet bureaucracy that seized control of Russia following the degeneration of the Bolshevik regime. We publish here a review (first released on John Riddell’s blog) of the (...)
The histories of the revolutionary anti-colonial movements in South Asia and their engagement with the October Revolution are reflected upon, in this article. Accompanying these reflections is a sensitivity to contemporary problems of Islamophobia, the manipulation of popular protests by (...)
THE BIG QUESTION surrounding the centenary of the October Revolution: Is this event a hundred years ago still relevant for the left today?
For decades now, there’s been a steady drumbeat of mainstream historians and ideologues telling us that the legacy of October has been, and deserves to be, (...)
Regardless of one’s opinion on The Russian Revolution and the subsequent development of Russian society, the self-organized workers’ councils – the soviets – remain an important breakthrough. For the most part, the discussion of the centenary of the revolution has conveniently steered clear of this (...)
On the occasion of the centenary of the Russian revolution, researchers are talking about the possible influence of the Tatar Mirsaid Sultan Galiev in Asia. With regard to South and Southeast Asia, it seems to be nil, perhaps because we are dealing with too different cultural worlds and too (...)
A hundred years later, the question of the historical legacy of the October Revolution is not an easy one for socialists, given that Stalinism took root within less than a decade after that revolution and the restoration of capitalism seventy years later met little popular resistance. One can, (...)
On the occasion of the publication of his latest book, Que faire de 1917? Une contre-histoire de la revolution russe (“What is to be done about 1917? A counter-history of the Russian Revolution” a controversial history of the Russian Revolution, published by Autrement editions, we interviewed (...)
A discussion of the impact of the revolution on African liberation movements before World War II.
[T]he vanguard of the Russian workers and the national minorities, now set free from imperial oppression, are thinking seriously about the fate of the oppressed classes, the suppressed national (...)
Part 1: 1905
Repudiation of debt at the heart of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917
February 23, 1917: Womens protest in Petrograd
In February 1918, the repudiation of the debt by the Soviet government shocked international finance and sparked off unanimous condemnation by the governments of (...)
Part 5: The French press in the pay of the Tsar
With the overthrow of Tsarism in February 1917 and the seizing of power by the Bolsheviks and their Socialist Revolutionary allies in October, numerous previously confidential documents were made public (see further on). This allowed Boris (...)
Part 9: The Soviet counter-attack: the Treaty of Rapallo, 1922
The London report presented in the previous chapter was such a deliberate provocation on the part of Western powers that the Soviet delegation immediately got in touch with the German delegation, which Paris and London had somehow (...)
At a distance of one hundred years, the Russian Revolution, which truly shook the world, deserves to be remembered once more in terms of its emancipatory significance and its downfall and betrayal. This revolution would not have happened had it not been for the crucial role played by the (...)
Antisemitism was found across the political divide in Russia’s year of revolution.
Members of the Jewish Bund with bodies of their comrades killed in Odessa during the Russian revolution of 1905. Wikimedia Commons
Early morning, October 25, 1917. Workers are taking up strategic points on the (...)
For those interested in engaging with the history of the Russian Revolution in the hope of more effectively challenging capitalism, a tension between the universal and the particular looms large. The difficulty that inevitably arises is how to disentangle what was historically specific about (...)
October 1917 – Workers in Power. Authors: Paul Le Blanc, Ernest Mandel, David Mandel, François Vercammen, and contemporary texts by Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Leon Trotsky. Edited: Fred Leplat and Alex de Jong London: Merlin Press, the IIRE and Resistance Books, 2016. 256 pages
Nearly a century ago, (...)
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