THE LEGACY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
David Christian
We can think of history as a collection of interesting stories about the past. Or (in a more ancient historiographical mode) as a collection of exemplars, stories about the past that can illuminate the present. This essay is written in the second of these modes. It will argue that the very wide-angle lens of big history can help us see the deeper significance of the Russian Revolution in new ways.[i]
The Russian Revolution has a lot to teach us. It is topical because the second of 1917’s two revolutions, the October Revolution, happened almost exactly 100 years ago, on November 7. We call it the October Revolution because, according to the Julian calendar in force in Russia at the time, it took place on 25 October, but according to the Gregorian calendar used in Europe it took place on 7 November. (The new Bolshevik government introduced the Gregorian calendar in Russia on 1 February 1918. This worried many people because it meant that the day after 1 February was 15 February, and some worried that their lives would have shortened by two weeks.)
How can the Russian Revolution illuminate today’s world? Why, today, should we care about what happened in Russia 100 years ago? That is the central theme of this talk, and I hope I can offer some interesting, and perhaps illuminating, answers at several different historical scales. By doing that, I hope I can illustrate how the very wide-angle lens of big history can broaden our understanding of more conventional historical questions and topics.
[i] There is a rapidly growing literature on big history. For some samples, see David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, reprint with a new preface, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2004; David Christian, ‘The Return of Universal History,’ History and Theory, Theme Issue, 49 (December 2010), pp 5-26; and a more recent essay, David Christian, “What is Big History?”, Journal of Big History, Vol 1, No 1 (2017), pp 4-19.