Martin Aust. Die Russische Revolution

The centenary of the Russian Revolution was the occasion of numerous international conferences and symposia, as well as of the publication of dozens of new books and article collections. But if truth be told, both the scholarly and public commemorations of the anniversary of the “the Great October Revolution” were more muted and desultory than one might have expected. After all, the Revolution changed the course of modern history by introducing the powerful Soviet state into the Russian continuum, while challenging the international system with a new and at times incendiary revolutionary component. Part of the reason for the uncertainty in approaching the centenary is the fact that the heir to the Soviet Union, Putin’s Russian Federation, exhibits a deeply ambivalent attitude toward the Revolution and spends little effort trying to understand it. At the same time, scholars in the West—perhaps influenced by the precipitous fall of the Soviet Union and communist Eastern Europe, as well as by the purported “end of ideology”—have tended over the past three decades to downplay the events of 1917 and emphasize the continuities between the Old Regime and the Soviet experience.

Aesthetics · Art · Communism · Economic history · Fall of man · Ideology · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Russian revolution · Soviet union · State (computer science) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law