By February 1917, the handful of future Bolshevik leaders of Russia were scattered all over the globe. Among the few things they had in common was a peculiar vision of the Russian economy and of global economic trends. That vision guided their revolutionary activity. Whether it was “correct” or not, they succeeded. With their grip on power secured, however, their economic reasoning had to confront new challenges, which eventually reshaped the original approach.

By most accounts, the Russian Revolution began on February 23, 1917 with the women's strike for bread and suffrage. Yet for the next thirteen years (until 1930), that revolutionary beginning was celebrated on March 12, after which it was expunged from the revolutionary calendar altogether. “International Women's Day” meanwhile became March 8 because of the change in the Russian calendar in 1918 (it had been 13 days behind the European calendar), and February 23 became “Red Army Day” and subsequently (in 2006), “Day of the Defender of the Fatherland.” Over the course of the early 1920s, the connection between the women's strike on February 23/March 8 and the February Revolution was actively undermined in several ways. First, the February Revolution itself was dated not from the moment when women marched in the streets of Petrograd calling out the men to strike, but rather from March 12 (February 27), which was the day of the founding of the Temporary Committee of the State Duma, soon to become the Provisional Government. Second, the celebration of the two holidays of Red Army Day on February 23 and International Women's Day on March 8 created a split between men and women in their celebrations, separating them and assigning spheres to each, the army for men and the home for women. Finally, the creation of February 23 as the anniversary of the Red Army's founding seems to have deliberately upstaged both women's involvement in the 1917 Revolution and the overthrow of autocracy.

In two important books, Runet (the Russian internet) is the central character, an essential component of the politics of commerce, economic policy, and strategic thinking. The first, written by an American specialist on information policy and the interaction between society and technology, looks back to the Soviet era, at the prescience and then failure of top Soviet scientists to introduce the networked society ahead of their American counterparts. The second is a collaborative work of Russian social scientists with an extensive agenda to identify, using discourse analysis, the principal political groups posting in “communities” of the like-minded in “VKontakte,” a large heterogeneous social media site combining personal interactions and extensive blogs within self-organized “communities.” The second half of this book differs substantially: Lev Gudkov, senior analyst at the Levada Center in Moscow, looks at the country as a whole through a different lens—a large number of national surveys gathered over the course of the Center’s activity. The first book chronicles the ambitious proposal by leading scientists to network the whole country in the service of the Soviet Union’s ideologically-based command economy. The second reveals a country riven by multiple, mutually incompatible ideologies espousing “anti” or negative platforms with little ideological heft until Vladimir Putin’s campaign to arouse a nationalist or, as the book puts it, an “imperialist syndrome” with the “return” of Crimea.

The article presents the results of narrative analysis of contemporary European history textbooks’ coverage of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The sample consists of 101 textbooks from 22 European states, published between 2000 and 2015 and currently in use in secondary and high schools. The results show that the Russian Revolution, unlike most other events in Russia's history, is narrated as a story not about Russianness, but about shared European historical experiences and social issues. The article discusses the implications of this way of narrating the Russian Revolution for the perceived logic of European history.

Looking at Soviet guidebooks from the 1920s to the 1960s, this essay argues that 1905 and 1917 revolutionary places as “tourist attractions” were mostly tangential to the tourist experience, although one could argue that the entire USSR was a monument to the “revolution.” The revolution remained one destination of many possible tourist excursions, its memory one building block of many that made up the basis of Soviet citizenship. The revolution as tourist attraction did not celebrate 1917 as a rupture, but rather a point of entry, the moment from which the many and not the few could share in a culture of world importance.