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

Revolutionary Aftereffects looks at the legacies of the 1917 Revolution in Russia today through a variety of disciplinary lenses.

Thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the 1917 Revolution still looms large. Not only because Russians remain divided over whether it arrived forcibly or inevitably, and whether it was a colossally tragic or colossally generative event, but also because the social, cultural, scientific, and even moral residues of the revolution remain everywhere in Putin’s Russia.

Revolutionary Aftereffects looks at the ways in which 1917 has and continues to be commemorated in Russia. Although post-Soviet Russia has emphasized its complete break with the past, this study of the memorialization and legacy of 1917 explores a fundamental continuity underlying an apparent discourse of discontinuity in post-socialist Russia. Contributors provide insight into the continuing reverberations of the revolution from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, not just history and literary studies but also heritage studies, anthropology, geography, and sociology. Collectively, they demonstrate the changing nature of the revolution’s memorialization in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia and the ambivalence and contradictions within those narratives.