Legacies of a Revolutionary Century: Reflections on the 100^th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917

The breakdown of tsarism and the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia a century ago ushered in an era during which visions of revolutionary social transformation both galvanized and terrified people around the world. Now we seemingly live in a more cynical age. The centennial of the Russian Revolution is receiving almost no public attention in the country where it took place, while in the West, the erstwhile Cold War foreign policy consensus--developed in large part in response to the threat of Soviet communism--is rapidly fracturing. A reexamination of the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution can help us understand precisely how the ideological 20th century gave rise to the post-ideological 21st century.

Stephen E. Hanson

(Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1991; BA, Harvard, 1985) is Vice Provost for International Affairs, Director of the Wendy and Emery Reves Center for International Studies, and Lettie Pate Evans Professor in the Department of Government at the College of William & Mary. He is the author of Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), which won the 1998 Wayne S. Vucinich book award from the Association for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies (ASEEES). He is also a co-editor of Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), a co-author of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2001), and the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters examining postcommunist politics in comparative perspective. In 2014, Hanson served as the ASEEES President. He has held visiting professorships at Harvard University (2011) and Oxford University (2016), and will teach as a visiting professor at Yale University in 2018.