Dr. Suny has generously agreed to join us for this meeting, so this will be an excellent opportunity to discuss this work directly with the author, as well as fellow graduate students, right at the moment of the Revolution’s centennial. If you would like to attend, please RSVP to Matt Hershey (mthersh@umich.edu).
Food and drinks will be provided.
Please see the short description from Verso:
“Reflecting on the fate of the Russian Revolution one hundred years after October, Ronald Grigor Suny—one of the world’s leading historians of the period—explores the historiographical controversies over 1917, Stalinism, and the end of “Communism” and provides an assessment of the achievements, costs, losses and legacies of the choices made by Soviet leaders. While a quarter century after the disintegration of the USSR, the story usually told is one of failure and inevitable collapse, Suny reevaluates the promises, missed opportunities, achievements, and colossal costs of trying to build a kind of “socialism” in the inhospitable environment of peasant Russia. He ponders what lessons 1917 provides for Marxism and the alternatives to capitalism and bourgeois democracy.”
