The Relevance of the Russian Revolution

Abstract

It is self-evident that the Russian Revolution was an enormously important historical event – probably the most important of the 20th century. But the French Revolution was also an important historical event, so was the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

From the standpoint of this journal, however, the Russian Revolution was important in a different way: not just because it is more recent but because it embodied goals and aspirations that are our goals and aspirations – a socialist society of equality and freedom based on workers’ democratic control from below – and because it fought for those goals and aspirations with methods that have a bearing on the methods we use today.