The Russian Revolution Centennial: Research of a New Generation

Abstract

The Russian Revolution Centennial has been celebrated around the world with programs, conferences, and publications. New perspectives have been brought to bear on long standing and new problems relating to 1917 and the broader antecedents and outcomes of the upheavals of that year. Among these are the question of power, center vs. periphery, the nationalities and identity, gender, violence, emotions, symbols and language, conspiracies, rumor, social history, and the like. Many of these themes were taken up in June 2016 in St. Petersburg at the Colloquium organized every three years by the Institute of Russian History St. Petersburg, Russian Academy of Sciences, the European University of St. Petersburg, and a leading group of Western scholars. The theme was “The Epoch of Russia’s Revolution, 1914–1922” and over forty scholars participated from Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic nations and others from around the globe. The conference volume was published as Epokha voin i revoliutsii: 19141922, edited by B.I. Kolonitskii and D.T. Orlovskii (St. Petersburg, NestorIstoriia, 2017), and it included all the papers plus the commentaries and a transcript of the discussions surrounding the papers and the concluding session that attempted to draw conclusions from the three-day event. One of the Colloquium’s ongoing traditions, in addition to the collaboration and dialog of Russian, East European, Eurasian, and Western scholars (the Colloquiumbegan in the late Soviet period of the 1980s and has run continuously