Revolutionary Aftereffects: Material, Social, and Cultural Legacies of 1917 in Russia Today

"The disciplinary breadth of Revolutionary Aftereffects provides a compelling set of entryways into the interesting question of what might constitute a useable Bolshevik and Soviet past that could renovate national memory in contemporary Russia."

David Fisher, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, The Russian Review

“Essential reading for academics interested in Russia’s past and present.” Elizabeth White, University of West England, Slavic Review

"More than the sum of its parts, this collection of fascinating and engaging essays examines the extant traces of 1917 in post-Soviet Russia, a revolutionary project long freed from the commemorative straitjacket in which the Soviet regime sought to confine it. Finding these traces in expected and unexpected forms today, including jubilees, tourism, architecture, discourse, literature, and film, this volume invites us to think creatively on intended and unintended aftereffects of this ‘absent’ event."

Frederick C. Corney, Professor of History, William & Mary

"Should we celebrate a revolution that failed to achieve its promises? Should we memorialize it at all? Or should we let it gradually slip – for good! – into the depths of history? This volume offers a set of illuminating answers to these questions. Looking at the centennial anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the authors highlight its ambivalent meaning. Certainly, the Revolution shook the world by unleashing a wide range of global trends – from anticolonial movements to grassroots feminism and from avant-garde art to mass literacy and free healthcare. Yet it was also instrumental in generating a culture of violence and a politics of terror. Through a series of informative case-studies, Revolutionary Aftereffects explores contradictory reverberations of the social explosion that took place more than a century ago."

Serguei Alex. Oushakine, Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University