The Revenge of the Serfs

It’s now been 100 years since the 1917 Russian Revolution. There are no simple explanations for great events, and what happened in Russia in 1917 certainly falls into that category, with an enormous impact in all spheres of life for its citizens.

Recent historiography, enriched by dozens of local studies, microhistory, and the opening of archives, stresses that these occurrences in Russia formed part of a continuum of crisis. The present volume faces the challenge, at once fascinating and complicated, of capturing and synthesizing in just two hundred pages the tens of thousands of pages of indispensable research different specialists have composed.

Julián Casanova provides the points of view of both the elites and the revolutionaries, the top and bottom of Russian society, reflecting the perspectives of those who focus on ideologies and abstract social forces and those who concentrate on the actual voices of individual people trapped within them. Activist, official, counterrevolutionary and revisionist histories. Stories full of heroes and villains, glorious for some and chaotic, disordered, violent, and excessive for others. A book like this, which summarizes a huge amount of research for an audience ranging from schoolchildren and students to general readers interested in 20th century history, has never existed before.