The Global Impact of the Russian Revolution

This book explores the global impact of the Russian Revolution, arguably the most influential revolution of the modern age. It explores how the Revolution influenced political movements on the radical Left and Right across the world and asks whether the Russian Revolution remains relevant today.

In Part one, four leading historians debate whether or not the Russian Revolution’s legacy endures today. Part two presents examples of how the Revolution inspired political movements across the world, from Latin America and East Asia, to Western Europe and the Soviet Union. The Revolution inspired both sides of the political spectrum―from anarchists, and leftist radicals who fought for a new socialist reality and dreamed of world revolution, to those who on the far Right who tried to stop them. Part three, an interview with the historian S. A. Smith, gives a personal account of how the Revolution influenced a scholar and his work. This volume shows the complexity of the Russian Revolution in today’s political world.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Revolutionary Russia.

Aaron Retish is Associate Professor of Russian History at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA. He has published on the revolutionary period and on the peasantry, local courts, and prisons of modern Russia.

Matthew Rendle is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter, UK. He has published on various aspects of the revolutionary period in Russian history and is the author of The State versus the People: Revolutionary Justice in Russia’s Civil War, 1917-22 (2020).