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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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  • The Soviet Century

    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

    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...
  • Osip Mandelstam

    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...
  • The Thinking Reed

    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

    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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  • Mimesis

    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 ...
  • Revolution at the Gates

    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

    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

    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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  • Lenin

    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...
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  • Dead Again

    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 ...
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  • The Disintegration of the Monolith

    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...
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  • What About the Workers?

    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

    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...
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  • Before Stalinism

    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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