Revolution!

Commemorating the October 2017 centenary of the Russian Revolution, an anthology of wide-ranging voices and scholarship throwing fresh light on this momentous historical event.

This October the world commemorates the centenary of the Russian Revolution, one of the crucial moments of the twentieth century, and an event passionately fought over by those on all sides of the political spectrum. 

Revolution! will contain writing by Russians and by foreigners who went to Russia and for whom the Russian Revolution was a political litmus test. The themes—hunger and heating, the limits of personal freedom, the infallibility of the party, free love, the role of art in the revolution—dominated twentieth century intellectual life and continue to resonate today. Many books on the Russian Revolution will be published in the centenary year, but Revolution! will be unique in portraying this momentous event through the writings of those who witnessed it (or its immediate after-effects).

Following No Man’s Land and No Pasaran, it is an anthology that vividly portrays the many sides of an event that changed the course of world history—and is still contested today.

“Leninists, Bolsheviks, anarchists and communists, thugs, registered housebreakers – what a muddle! What a Satanic vinaigrette! What immense work – to raise once more and cleanse from all this garbage the great idea of socialism.” —Teffi

Pete Ayrton was born in London in 1943. After a brief period teaching philosophy, his work as a translator led to his founding of Serpent's Tail. No Man's Land, his collection of writings from World War I, was highly acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic and was named one of the Economist’s Best Books of the Year.