Tag Archives: Russian Revolution

Samuel Farber: “The Russian Revolution Reconsidered”

Posted on November 28, 2018 by

“S. A. Smith’s book Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis 1890-1928 … sets out to explain how the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, inspired by a radical democratic and egalitarian spirit, degenerated into the Stalinist totalitarian regime.”

Posted in governance, justice, Nota Bene, power, revolution, terror, tragic politics, tyranny

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Paula Erizanu: “The Revolutionary Sex”

Posted on June 1, 2018 by

“For one shining moment, being a Russian woman meant sexual freedom and radical equality. Never seen before – or since.”

Posted in founding, freedom, gender, law, Nota Bene, revolution

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“October! The Soviet Centenary”

Posted on February 2, 2018 by

South Atlantic Quarterly 116: 4 (October 2017), Hardt & Mezzadra, eds.

Posted in anarchism, Blog, film, founding, gender, revolution, terror, the common, the Left, tragic politics

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“Revolution Every Day” at Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art

Posted on January 8, 2018 by

The exhibition “juxtaposes works of Soviet graphic art—primarily posters from the 1920s and 1930s—with works on video and film.”

Posted in fine arts, In The News, revolution

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Stephen Lovell: “The great error”

Posted on December 28, 2017 by

Yuri Slezkine’s argument in The House of Government: A saga of the Russian Revolution is that ‘the Bolsheviks were not a party but an apocalyptic sect. In an extended essay on comparative religion …, he puts Russia’s victorious revolutionaries in a long line of millenarians extending back to the ancient Israelites; in their “totalitarian” demands on the individual believer, he suggests, the Bolsheviks are cut from the same cloth as the sixteenth-century Münster Anabaptists and the original “radical fundamentalist”, Jesus Christ.’

Posted in ethics, governance, Nota Bene, revolution, terror, the Left

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Bhaskar Sunkara: “The Few who Won”

Posted on December 17, 2017 by

“Yet both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were wrong in 1917. The Mensheviks’ faith in Russian liberals was misplaced, as were the Bolsheviks’ hopes for world revolution and an easy leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. The Bolsheviks, having seen over ten million killed in a capitalist war, and living in an era of upheaval, can be forgiven. We can also forgive them because they were first. What is less forgivable is that a model built from errors and excesses, forged in the worst of conditions, came to dominate a left living in an unrecognizable world.”

Posted in founding, governance, melancholy, Nota Bene, power, revolution, terror, the Left, tragic politics

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Jonathan Smele: “Russian Revolution Reading List”

Posted on November 27, 2017 by

5 books, with descriptions

Posted in Blog, revolution

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Youssef El-Gingihy: “100 years on from the Russian Revolution, could a 21st century revolt bring about the end of capitalism?”

Posted on November 13, 2017 by

“Since 1917, countless social movements have taken their cue from this momentous uprising, and its lasting impact on the world may yet to be felt fully.”

Posted in defeat, Nota Bene, power, revolution, the Left, tragic politics

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Henry Farrell: “Revolutionary Possibility”

Posted on September 27, 2017 by

“The theme of revolution and what it means runs through China Miéville’s work — especially his Iron Council, which is fantasy, and Embassytown, which is science fiction. With October, these novels form a revolutionary triptych, asking what revolution involves and how one can describe a revolution which would by definition be so radical that its outcome cannot be understood by those who have not undergone it.”

Posted in Nota Bene, power, revolution, tragic politics

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David Sessions: ” “The Radical Hopes of the Russian Revolution”

Posted on September 24, 2017 by

‘Was the October revolution bound to lead to terror? … Both Tariq Ali and China Miéville sense that our flattened, calcified versions of the revolutionary past have something to do with the absence of political imagination and emancipatory hope in the present. “Today’s dominant ideology and the power structures it defends are so hostile to the social and liberation struggles of the last century,” Ali writes, “that a recovery of as much historical and political memory as is feasible becomes an act of resistance.”’

Posted in emergency, founding, governance, Nota Bene, revolution, terror, the Left, tragic politics

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