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 (...)
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, (...)
This rigorous but accessible study was prepared for a training course and presented in the summer of 1989. The French version has been published on Europe solidaire website [1] on January 21, 2016 on the occasion of the 92nd anniversary of Lenin’s death, followed by an English translation. The (...)
Introduction
Given the importance Marxists place on the fight against racial and national oppression, it is surprising that relatively little attention has been paid to the socialists of imperial Russia’s borderlands. Most of the inhabitants of the tsarist empire were non-Russian (Poles, Jews, (...)
The following comments by Mike Ely on Eric Blanc’s “National liberation and Bolshevism reexamined: A view from the borderlands” first appeared in Kasama Project . See also Eric Blanc’s rejoinder and other comments (“Constituent Assembly” and “Five Views“ ). There is value in opening up a deeper (...)
The following comments by Eric Blanc first appeared in Kasama Project ; they reply to a contribution by Mike Ely . For other items in this discussion, see Eric Blanc’s “National liberation and Bolshevism reexamined” and other comments (“Constituent Assembly” and “Five Views“ ). 1) First of all, I’d (...)
Eric Blanc’s essay, “National Liberation and Bolshevism Reexamined: A View From The Borderlands,” is “a stimulating and insightful essay” that will “inspire and inform reconsideration of questions long thought settled,” writes Richard Fidler . While I cannot confirm every aspect of Blanc’s analysis, (...)
The following contribution was written in reply to “National liberation and Bolshevism reexamined: A view from the borderlands” published on John Riddell’s website . A stimulating and insightful essay. Along with the promised monograph, it will inspire and inform reconsideration of questions long (...)
A view from the Czarist empire’s borderlands obliges us to rethink many long-held assumptions about the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, as well as the development of Marxist approaches to national liberation, peasant struggle, permanent revolution, and the emancipation of women.
The following (...)
Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk, Elissa Bemporad, Indiana University Press, 2013, 292 pp., $28.00.
For most Jews in the United States, the legacy of the Soviet Union is linked to anti-Semitism. This is understandable, given not only the targeting of Jewish writers, (...)
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