Sean Guillory and the Russian Revolution

The Public Sphere

Joining us today is Sean Guillory, who teaches in the Russian and East European Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Sean has a Ph.D. in History from UCLA. He is the host of the Sean's Russia Blog Podcast, a weekly conversation on Eurasian politics, history, and culture. You can follow him on Twitter at @seansrussiablog and support him through Patreon.

Sean recently wrote a great essay for Contrivers' Review on the Russian Revolution. When I approached him for the piece, my idea was to get a meta-review: a discussion of all the takes on the Russian Revolution — a timely but controversial topic. What we got was a richer critique of how writers in general mistreat the Russian Revolution. In some ways, any history of a revolution might fall prey to these errors. But America's long history with Russia, Marxism, and anti-communism makes our reading of the Russian Revolution particularly vulnerable.

• Sean Guillory, "Making Sense of the Russian Revolution," Contrivers' Review.
• Baskar Sunkara, "The Few Who Won," Jacobin.
• Sheila Fitzpatrick, "What's Left?" London Review of Books.
• Vladimir Tismaneanu, "One Hundred Years of Communism," Public Seminar.
• Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain (University of California Press, 1997).
• Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Havard University Press, 2009).
• Reds (1981).
• Edmund Wilson, To The Finland Station (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
• Lars T. Lih, Lenin (Reaktion Books, 2012).
• Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd (Belknap Press, 2017)
• Mark Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017)
• China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (Verso, 2017).
• Mikhail Zygar, All the Kremlin's Men (PublicAffairs, 2017).

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers' Review.

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Thanks for listening.

Our cover art a modified version of a photo from the Fonds André Cros, preserved by the city archives of Toulouse and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license by the deliberation n°27.3 of June 23rd, 2017 of the Town Council of the City of Toulouse.