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On the Anniversary of the Russian Revolution

November 7 marks the 108th Anniversary of the October Revolution.

Verso Books 6 November 2025

On the Anniversary of the Russian Revolution

108 years ago, the Bolsheviks descended upon Petrograd and sparked the Revolution that continues to reverberate today.

See below for our October Revolution Reading List, including Donald Sassoon's Revolutions, a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history – now available for preorder!

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Revolutions

by Donald Sassoon

Revolutions is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions in terms of fleeting events, such as the Fall of the Bastille or the Storming of the Winte...
Hardback

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The Soviet Century

by Moshe Lewin

Edited by Gregory Elliott

One hundred years after the Russian Revolution the Soviet Union remains the most extraordinary, yet tragic, attempt to create a society beyond capitalism. Yet its history was one that for a long ti...
Paperback

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October

by China Miéville

In February of 1917 Russia was a backward, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world’s first workers’ state, straining t...
Paperback

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Travellers of the World Revolution

by Brigitte Studer

The Communist International was the first organised attempt to bring about worldwide revolution and left a lasting mark on 20th-century history. The book offers a new and fascinating account of thi...
Hardback

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The State and Revolution

by V. I. Lenin

Introduction by Antonio Negri

Lenin’s booklet The State and Revolution struck the world of Marxist theory like a lightning bolt. Written in the months running up to the October Revolution of 1917, Lenin turned the traditional s...
Paperback

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Imperialism and the National Question

by V. I. Lenin

Introduction by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Fired up by the outbreak of the First World War and outraged by the capitulation of most socialist parties to the demands of national bourgeoisies, Lenin sought to understand the deeper roots of th...
Paperback

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Not By Politics Alone

by V. I. Lenin

Edited by Tamara Deutscher

This vivid selection, compiled and introduced by Tamara Deutscher, written by Lenin and those who knew him, brings us the revolution in his everyday life – the man who lived by politics but not by ...
Paperback

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Red Flag Wounded

by Ronald Suny

Red Flag Wounded brings together essays covering the controversies and debates over the fraught history of the Soviet Union from the revolution to its disintegration. Those monumental years were ma...
Paperback

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Osip Mandelstam

by Ralph Dutli

Translated by Ben Fowkes

This is the first full-scale biography of Osip Mandelstam to combine an analysis of his poetry with a description of his personal life, from his beginnings as a young intellectual in pre-revolution...
Hardback

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The Thinking Reed

by Boris Kagarlitsky

Translated by Brian Pearce

This panoramic account of political culture in the Soviet Union, by one of the leading voices of unofficial radical socialism, examines the way in which cultural life in the arts, philosophy and hi...
Paperback

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Trotsky as Alternative

by Ernest Mandel

Translated by Gus Fagan

Leon Trotsky has become one of the twentieth century’s most enduring political legends. Joining the Bolsheviks on the eve of the 1917 revolution he played a vital role as Lenin’s right-hand man in ...
Paperback

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The Dialectic of Change

by Boris Kagarlitsky

Translated by Rick Simon

In this follow-up to his acclaimed The Thinking Reed, Boris Kagarlistky presents an incisive analysis of the interplay between reform and revolution in Western and Eastern Europe in the twentieth c...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $23.00
Mimesis

by Valery Podoroga

Introduction by Ioulia Podoroga

Translated by Evgeni V. Pavlov

The Russian Revolution was a literary as well as political upheaval. With a focus on the revolutionary works of Andrei Platonov and the futurist collective Oberiu, leading Russian literary thinker ...
Paperback

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The Communist Manifesto / The April Theses

by Friedrich Engels, V. I. Lenin and Karl Marx

Introduction by Tariq Ali

It was the 1917 Russian Revolution that transformed the scale of the Communist Manifesto, making it the key text for socialists everywhere. On the centenary of this upheaval, this volume pairs Marx...
Paperback

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The Day After the Revolution

by V. I. Lenin and Slavoj Žižek

Lenin’s originality and importance as a revolutionary leader is most often associated with the seizure of power in 1917. But, Žižek argues in his new study and collection of original texts, Lenin’s...
Paperback

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Revolution at the Gates

by V. I. Lenin

Edited by Slavoj Žižek

The idea of a Lenin renaissance might well provoke an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK, but Lenin? Doesn’t he stand for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire twentieth-cen...
Paperback

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Collected Works, Volume 1

by V. I. Lenin

Among the most influential political and social forces of the twentieth century, modern communism rests firmly on philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings developed by Vladimir Ilyich U...
Paperback

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From Stalinism to Eurocommunism

by Ernest Mandel

Ernest Mandel’s book is a study of Eurocommunism unlike any other. Written in the polemical tradition of Trotsky, its sweep extends well beyond the immediate prospects of the Communist Parties of W...
Paperback

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The Dilemmas of Lenin

by Tariq Ali

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the October 1917 uprising, is one of the most misunderstood leaders of the twentieth century. In his own time, there were many, even among his enemies, who acknowle...
Paperback

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Terrorism and Communism

by Leon Trotsky

Preface by H. N. Brailsford

Foreword by Slavoj Žižek

Written in the white heat of revolutionary Russia’s Civil War, Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism is one of the most potent defenses of revolutionary dictatorship. In his provocative commentary to t...
Paperback

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Lenin

by Georg Lukács

Translated by Nicholas Jacobs

Out of the chaos following Lenin’s death and the mounting fury against Lukács and his freshly penned History and Class Consciousness (1923), this book bears an assessment of Lenin as “the only theo...
Paperback

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Imitation Democracy

by Dmitrii Furman

Afterword by Tony Wood

Foreword by Keith Gessen

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin implemented a political system of “imitation democracy,” marked by “a huge disparity between formal constitutional principles ...
Hardback

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Dissidents among Dissidents

by Ilya Budraitskis

Preface by Tony Wood

Ilya Budraitskis, one of the country’s most prominent leftist political commentators, explores the strange fusion of free-market ideology and postmodern nationalism that now prevails in Russia, and...
Paperback

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Russia without Putin

by Tony Wood

It is impossible to think of Russia today without thinking of Vladimir Putin. More than any other major national leader, he personifies his country in the eyes of the outside world, and dominates W...
Paperback

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Dead Again

by Masha Gessen

Isaiah Berlin once argued that the concept of the intelligentsia was “Russia’s greatest contribution to world civilization.” Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Russian intelligentsia has shared ...
Paperback

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The Disintegration of the Monolith

by Boris Kagarlitsky

Translated by Renfrey Clarke

In this book Boris Kagarlitsky offers a trenchant analysis of the break-up of the Soviet Union and the transformation of a section of the old nomenklatura into a new possessing and ruling elite.Kag...
Paperback

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Farewell Perestroika

by Boris Kagarlitsky

As a leading member of the Moscow Popular Front, Kagarlitsky and his associates sought to extend the debate and agitation throughout society as a whole. From the striking coalfields of Siberia and ...
Paperback

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What About the Workers?

by Michael Burawoy, Simon Clarke, Peter Fairbrother and Pavel Krotov

Most writing on the dramatic events in the former Soviet Union has been based on the assumption that Russia is engaged in a transition from “state socialism” to capitalism, and focuses on political...
Paperback

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The Crisis and the Crash

by Richard B. Day

A large literature exists in the West on the state that emerged from the October Revolution, and the internal controversies that punctuated its development have themselves been extensively examined...
Paperback

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Catastrophe or Catharsis?

by Stanislav Menshikov

Catastrophe or Catharsis? lays bare the reasons why the Soviet economic reform has plunged into crisis. In precise, vivid prose, Menshikov describes the exhaustion of the ‘command system’ in the pr...
Hardback

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Before Stalinism

by Samuel Farber

Before Stalinism is a historical study of democratic life and institutions and their decline in the early years of the Russian Revolution. While attempting to synthesize a wealth of available hi...
Paperback

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