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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.

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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.

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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