Reviews
1917: The Russian Revolution by Robin D.G. Kelley, Walter Rodney, Jesse Benjamin, Vijay Prashad
izcanbeguscott's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
I need to re-read this at some point because I think some of the nuance went over my head, but man, Walter Rodney was the GOAT.
Soviet history is a notorious pain in the ass to learn about, as basically everyone has an opinion on the USSR and the way things went down. Rodney serves as a great person to analyze the history of the revolution, as he understood and sympathized with the concerns of the proletariat in Russia a lot more than most Western authors who just want to go "man, isn't it great we beat these evil guys in the Cold War?" He was also aware that they were in many ways a state capitalist enterprise who just wanted in a competition over who could swing their nuts the hardest with the US by the end.
Rodney breaks down the tsarist regime, the way support was built and then snowballed, the early days of governing a clearly novel experiment, and the eventual power struggle that tanked the whole thing. His critiques of Stalin are a little too nice, as history has only exposed him as just a completely despicable son of a bitch and Rodney doesn't go that far. This was not published by him though, and it was the 80's - just like How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, he wasn't really bursting at the seam for sources.
Great read, educational and made me fall in love with Rodney.
Soviet history is a notorious pain in the ass to learn about, as basically everyone has an opinion on the USSR and the way things went down. Rodney serves as a great person to analyze the history of the revolution, as he understood and sympathized with the concerns of the proletariat in Russia a lot more than most Western authors who just want to go "man, isn't it great we beat these evil guys in the Cold War?" He was also aware that they were in many ways a state capitalist enterprise who just wanted in a competition over who could swing their nuts the hardest with the US by the end.
Rodney breaks down the tsarist regime, the way support was built and then snowballed, the early days of governing a clearly novel experiment, and the eventual power struggle that tanked the whole thing. His critiques of Stalin are a little too nice, as history has only exposed him as just a completely despicable son of a bitch and Rodney doesn't go that far. This was not published by him though, and it was the 80's - just like How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, he wasn't really bursting at the seam for sources.
Great read, educational and made me fall in love with Rodney.
lxmn_s's review against another edition
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
this went so hard, i only wish rodney had lived long enough to publish it himself. (kelly and benjamin did a great job tho)
stevia333k's review against another edition
5.0
i've been told by other people that this book is kind of basic, and that it's more of a summary of other authors & of discourse during Rodney's life. however, not only was i not alive during this discourse & it's norms, but since I'm an amateur/hobbyist sovietologist, this was a great & helpful read because it also got me caught up on why the bolsheviks were good, but also why the bolsheviks were perceived as snobby, etc etc. it was like listening to a community elder tell us about how things were going down back in their day & that can help with figuring out evolution, etc.
matthew4's review against another edition
4.0
Refreshingly unique perspective (or at least compared to the stale texts we read during my East European Studies undergrad!) on the historiography of the Russian Revolution, relating it to 'socialist' movements in the global south at the time of Rodney's writing. Rodney is definitely more sympathetic to elements of RES than I am, but nonetheless the method he utilises in the book, or more precisely, in the lectures and notes that then became the book thanks for the hard work of R.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin, is more than worth noting and taking seriously.