Gaidar Institute Press Presents a Series of Books to Commemorate the Centennial of the Russian Revolution

The event was organized by the RANEPA and  Gaidar Institute Publishing House.

The following guests were invited to participate Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (IGSO) Boris Kagarlitsky, Secretary of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation Valery Fadeev, Leading Researcher of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Professor of the European University at St. Petersburg Boris Kolonitsky.

A roundtable was held as part of the event.

The guests were shown new books from the Russian Revolution series:

1. Goldstone, Jack A. Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction. 

2. Skocpol, Theda. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China.

3. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution.

4. Steinberg, Mark D. The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921.

5. Mau, V. A. Revolutions: The Mechanisms, Prerequisites and Consequences of Radical Social Transformations.

The book by the eminent specialist in the field of historical macrosociology and one of the founders of cliodynamics Jack A. Goldstone studies the structure, causes and results of revolutions - the key turning points in the evolution of societies and their transition from monarchies, empires, dictatorships and personalist regimes to democratic forms of government. The author offers a critical analysis of the main contemporary theories of revolutions with his own vision of this problem-ridden field. He illustrates his theoretic discourse by vivid accounts of the revolutions that happened during different eras, starting with ancient Greece and Rome and tracing their development revolutions through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Reformation to modernity, ending the book with a brief forecast of the likely future of revolution in years to come.  

The book by Harvard Professor Theda Skocpol introduces a new system of coordinates for analyzing the causes, conflicts and outcomes of revolutions. Her study combines innovative theoretic approaches with a meticulous in-depth comparative historical analysis of the French Revolution from 1787 to the early 1800s, the Russian Revolution from 1917 to the 1930s, and the Chinese Revolution from 1911 through the 1960s. Theda Skocpol demonstrates how the combination of factors like state structures, external political and economic forces and relations between social classes makes it possible to explain the sources of social revolutions as well as their achievements. Believing that the existing revolution theories - both Marxist and non-Marxist ones - have provided inadequate explanations of the actual historical patterns of revolutions, the author offers some fresh perspectives. Above all, she maintains that states conceived as administrative and coercive organizations potentially autonomous from class controls and interests must be made central to explanations of revolutions.

Impeccable in its scientific objectivity, the book by Sheila Fitzpatrick recounts the breathtaking history of a Marxist revolution that was meant to transform the world, but instead inflicted tremendous suffering on the Russian people and, like the French Revolution a century before, ended up eating it own offspring. The author offers very informative accounts of the February and October revolutions of 1917, the Civil War, NEP, Stalin's 'revolution from above', Five-Year Plans, and the Great Purges', viewing each of these as episodes of the continual two-decades-long revolution process. The book relies on archive data that were previously unavailable for Western and Soviet historians alike, as well on latest very important publications. 

Mark Steinberg offers a new history of the Russian Revolution, exploring how people experienced it in their own lives, from the Bloody Sunday of 1905 to the final shots of the civil war in 1921. The book focuses on human experience to address key issues of inequality, power, and violence, and ideas of justice and freedom. 

The book by Vladimir Mau deals with the theoretic issues and history of the great revolutions. Based on his analysis of the English Revolution (17th century), the French Revolution (the turn of the 19th century, and the Russian Revolution (early 20th century), the author reveals the regularities constituting the elements of radical social transformations. Relying on the results of comparative studies of the past revolutions, he substantiates his thesis of a specifically revolutionary character of the post-Communist transformations in Russia. The book pays special attention to the Russian experience of fundamental transformations that occurred in the early and late 20th century, which is quite natural as this year marks the hundredth anniversary of the 1917 Russian revolutions. The book is intended for use by historians, economists, sociologists, and all those who are interested in socioeconomic transformation issues.