In the decade after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the history of Russian and Soviet labor and Social Democracy, once a subject of prodigious academic research, fell into a memory hole, as historians turned toward other topics.
Can Leninists explain the Russian Revolution and its lessons for today? My new book Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire, 1882-1917 marshals extensive new primary data from across the Russian Empire to challenge longstanding myths about the Russian Revolution and to challenge unhelpful Leninist (aka “revolutionary socialist”) political strategies based on these myths.