“It has been thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet today, despite the efforts of its many gravediggers and eulogists, the short twentieth century has never felt more open, contingent and ambiguously alive. From the uneasy centenary of the Russian Revolution in 2017, to the epistemological dynamite of 2020-2021, there is clearly something to October that resists enshrinement as dead heritage – that exceeds the ability of state projects or conservative scholarship to domesticate it into a usable past. There has never been, in recent memory, a more interesting time to study revolutionary history – a time to reconsider fixed narratives, to crack open the potentialities of past socio-political rebellion, to recompose new histories of the Soviet experiment.”

Find the rest of this long and thoughtful review here.