For Eric Hobsbawm, the Russian Revolution...was the central event of the 20th century. Its practical impact on the world was ‘far more profound and global’ than that of The French Revolution a century earlier: for 'a mere thirty to forty years after Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station in Petrograd, one third of humanity found itself living under regimes directly derived from the [revolution]...and Lenin’s organisational model, the Communist Party’. Before 1991, this was a fairly standard view, even among historians who, unlike Hobsbawm, were neither Marxists nor Communists. But finishing his book in the early 1990s, Hobsbawm added a caveat: the century whose history he was writing was the ‘short’ 20th century, running from 1914 to 1991, and the world the Russian Revolution had shaped was ‘the world that went to pieces at the end of the 1980s’ – a lost world, in short, that was now being replaced by a post-20th-century world whose outlines could not yet be discerned. What the place of the Russian Revolution would be in the new era was unclear to Hobsbawm twenty years ago, and largely remains so to historians today...Nothing fails like failure, and for historians approaching the revolution’s centenary the disappearance of the Soviet Union casts a pall. In the rash of new books on the revolution, few make strong claims for its persisting significance and most have an apologetic air. Representing the new consensus, Tony Brenton calls it probably one of ‘history’s great dead ends, like the Inca Empire’. On top of that, the revolution, stripped of the old Marxist grandeur of historical necessity, turns out to look more or less like an accident.
— Sheila Fitzpatrick, contemplating the centenary of the Revolution
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. Marxism in Russia — as in China, India, and other developing countries — had a meaning rather different from that which it had in the industrialized countries of Western Europe. It was an ideology of modernization as well as an ideology of revolution. Even Lenin...made his name as a Marxist with a weighty study, 'The Development of Capitalism in Russia', that was both analysis and advocacy of the process of economic modernization...and it may surprise readers who know Lenin only as an anti-capitalist revolutionary. But capitalism was also a 'progressive' phenomenon to Marxists in late nineteenth-century Russia, a backward society that by Marxist definition was still semi-feudal. In ideological terms, they were in favour of capitalism because it was a necessary stage on the way to socialism. But in emotional terms, the commitment went deeper: the Russian Marxists admired the modern, industrial, urban world, and were offended by the backwardness of old rural Russia. It has often been pointed out that Lenin — an activist revolutionary willing to give history a push in the right direction — was an unorthodox Marxist with some of the revolutionary voluntarism of the old Populist tradition. That is true, but is relevant mainly to his behaviour in times of actual revolution, around 1905 and in 1917, In the 1890s, he chose Marxism rather than Populism because he was on the side of modernization; and that basic choice explains a great deal about the course of the Russian revolution after Lenin and his party took power in 1917.
— Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution
Revolutionaries knew quite well that the autocratic Empire, with its hangmen, its pogroms, its finery, its famines, its Siberian jails and ancient iniquity, could never survive the war.
— Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary
I stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change,
Killed the Czar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain
When I saw it was a time for a change,
Killed the Czar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain
— The Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil"
