This is a complex and multifaceted volume, as one might expect from a compilation with eighteen contributions and twenty-two contributors. Thirteen are Anglo-American, nine are from the Russian Federation. They include senior scholars such as Sheila Fitzpatrick, Ronald Suny, Robert Service, Mark Steinberg, Vladimir Buldakov, Vladimir Mau, and the editors, plus more recently established scholars like Lara Douds, James Ryan, and Andy Willimott. The vast majority of contributions give a critical assessment of different phases of “western,” Soviet, and Russian historiography, including new approaches, plus a brief section on the impact of the revolution.

As is perhaps obvious from this description, one of the key features of the collection is diversity. This can also lead to divergence, even contradiction, of various contributions. There is also an extraordinary range of approach, from a kind of thematic pointillisme to sweeping tours d’horizon encompassing not only the whole Russian experience since 1917 but also, for some contributors, a global sweep. While there is no consensus between the contributors they tend, by and large, to come from the new Russian conservatism and western liberal approaches. None of them “supports” the revolution and few praise even aspects of it. It is not a comprehensive account of the revolution, its legacy, or its memorialization, but it is a very rich compilation of elements of all these things. It is not noteworthy for the originality of its content. Many authors revisit areas already associated with them, like Willimott in his engaging refreshment of his work on communes. Ryan’s helpful and well-informed contribution is actually a reworking of an already published article.

It is impossible to comment on all of the contributions in one review but a small sample may help give an idea of what awaits the reader. Vladislav Aksenov writes about violence from a “psychological” and emotional perspective which, rather like Buldakov’s approach, takes us back to the likes of Lev Shulʹgin, Maksim Gorʹkii, and others’ perception of the “dark people” without any apparent awareness and certainly no sympathy, with ideas about the social framing of violence from Mircea Eliade to the “political economy” of mass movements. Some account of why they have rejected that approach would have been welcome. Robert Rosenstone notes Sergei Eisenstein’s film October has framed perceptions of actual October, not least to entrenching the notion that there was a “storming of the Winter Palace” when the reality was less grand, though this is hardly a new revelation. Robert Rosenstone is surely right to root the fictional scenes in a need for a narrative climax to the movie and about its impact in spreading fake history, some of which he details without, perhaps surprisingly, mentioning its erasure of Lev Trotskii from the story.

Again, a not especially original concept, that railway workers had a great influence in 1905 (and 1917), is developed by Carole Leonard into a welcome in-depth study of the nature of strikes around the time of the 1905 revolution. This is a powerful counter to the aforementioned approaches that tend to dismiss mass actors as emotional, cruel, and mindless. In perhaps the most exciting and stimulating of the contributions, Mark Steinberg reflects brilliantly on Walter Benjamin’s notion of revolution as humanity’s “leap in the open air of history,” a concept which, Steinberg reminds us, implies we should judge historical events in view of what happened in their own time, not through the prism of their consequences. The leap, not the landing. Unless we do this, Steinberg suggests, we will miss the vibrant hopes and passions important to the participants at the time. Several co-contributors could take his advice on board. In a similar enquiry of my own into memorialization and the state of the historiography of the revolution I concluded, thinking of the disappearance from current study of workers, peasants, left-wing parties, even the Bolsheviks, there was a sense, shared by Steinberg, that everything is considered except the revolution itself, especially the independent and creative action of the masses.

Much more could be said about this rich collection that encompasses a kaleidoscope of ideas within its 300 pages. It needs to be read, as a superb compendium of often clashing approaches to the revolution, by anyone with an interest in what is, pace some of the contributors, a seminal event of recent history whose consequences have still to be fully worked out.