The Russian Revolution Revisited

Those of us who were raised on that version of the Russian Revolution symbolized in the storming of the Petrograd Winter Palace and the dramatic gesture of Antonov-Ovseenko, he of the broadbrimmed, black felt hat, as he bursts into the room where Kerensky’s ministers are seated and, with a gesture of his arm, sweeps them all into the “dustbin of history”—we will never forget the impact this conception of the revolution had upon us. It is therefore a little disconcerting to...