Since 1917, countless social movements have taken their cue from this momentous uprising, and its lasting impact on the world may yet to be felt fully
By Youssef El-Gingihy
The centenary of the Russian Revolution comes at a strange moment. It is not being officially marked let alone celebrated in Putin’s Russia. The collapse and demise of communism in 1991 appears to have consigned it ironically to what Trotsky termed the dustbin of history.
The Russian Revolution has had a bad press in the West. And that is putting it mildly. Its leaders – Lenin, then Stalin – are often equated with Hitler as mass murderers who oversaw totalitarian regimes. The left was eventually forced to concede that the revolution transmuted into an autocratic regime embodied in the purges and gulags under Stalin. The victors, as they say, write the history books.
