Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Russia

'Why should you care about the Russian Revolution?' by Mark Edele

by •
October 2017, no. 395
Russia

'Why should you care about the Russian Revolution?' by Mark Edele

by •
October 2017, no. 395

‘What about Lenin do you admire most?’ Catherine Merridale, author of Lenin on the Train (2016), answered as most historians would: ‘I can’t think of anything much to admire.’  That this question could be asked at all in 2017 shows that the Russian Revolution continues to fascinate. Such continuities with the mental world of the Cold War are no speciality of the political left, but they rely on nearly heroic efforts to simplify an incredibly complex historical reality.

Leave a comment
Mark Edele

Mark Edele is the inaugural Hansen Chair in History at the University of Melbourne. An Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2015–19), he is the author of Soviet Veterans of the Second World War (2008), Stalinist Society (2011), and Stalin’s Defectors: How Red Army soldiers became Hitler’s collaborators (2017). Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish survival in the Soviet Union, edited with Sheila Fitzpatrick and Atina Grossmann, will be published later this year, and Red Empire: A Short History of the Soviet Union in 2018.

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Comment (1)

  • The credibility of Professor Edele’s otherwise fairly balanced survey of recent publications on the Russian Revolution is undermined by his failure to make any mention of the wars of intervention. Leslie Louis.
    Posted by L.J Louis
    05 October 2017

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.