The Russian revolution: a view from the third world

A never-before published history of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution and its post-colonial legacy, woven together from lecture excerpts by the renowned Pan-African revolutionary socialist theorist

In his short life, Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the foremost thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Wherever he was, Rodney was a lightning rod for working-class Black Power organizing. His deportation sparked Jamaica’s Rodney Riots in 1968, and his scholarship trained a generation how to approach politics on an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding the Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney was assassinated.

Walter Rodney’s The Russian Revolution collects surviving texts from a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Dar es Salaam, an intellectual hub of the independent Third World. It had been his intention to work these into a book, a goal completed posthumously with the editorial aid of Robin D.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin. Moving across the historiography of the long Russian Revolution with clarity and insight, Rodney transcends the ideological fault lines of the Cold War. Surveying a broad range of subjects—the Narodniks, social democracy, the October Revolution, civil war, and the challenges of Stalinism—Rodney articulates a distinct viewpoint from the Third World, one that grounds revolutionary theory and history with the people in motion.

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed twentieth-century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney was assassinated.

Robin D.G. Kelley is Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA and author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

Jesse Benjamin is an Associate Professor at Kennesaw State University and a Board Member of the Walter Rodney Foundation (WRF), where he edits the peer-reviewed journals Zanj and Intersectionality, and is the Co-editor of Groundings, the WRF publication.

Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Chief Editor of LeftWord Books. He is the author of The Poorer Nations and the editor of Letters from Palestine, both from Verso.