Recorded December 6, 2017.

A lecture by Professor Steve Smith (All Souls College Oxford) as part of the Utopia Dystopia series. This lecture is in collaboration with the Department of History's International History Seminar Series.

The Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917 in the conviction that this would trigger a revolution that would overthrow global capitalism and commence the transition to socialism. The Bolsheviks looked to Europe, and certainly social turbulence convulsed central, southern and eastern Europe between 1918 and 1923. However, the depth of revolutionary crisis in countries such as Germany and Italy was never as great as in Russia in 1917, and insurrections of the type that had put the Bolsheviks into power failed. The lecture argues that despite the Bolsheviks’ conviction that the significance of their revolution lay in the promise of workers’ power, its principal significance lay in its challenge to colonialism and imperialism, a challenge emblematized in the Congress of the Peoples of the East in September 1920. The lecture argues that it was in Asia (Persia, Korea, China, India) that the impact of the October Revolution was most enduring, at least in the immediate aftermath of October.

Steve Smith is a senior research fellow at All Souls College Oxford and a professor in the Faculty of Modern History in the University. He is a widely published historian of modern Russia and modern China and his most recent book is Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890-1927 (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently writing a book which compares the efforts of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union (1917-41) and the People’s Republic of China (1949-76) to eliminate 'superstition' from daily life.

A century after the Russian Revolution of 1917, its driving forces and its legacy, and indeed even its start and end, are still the subject of debate. It encompassed two key episodes in 1917, the February and October revolutions. The February revolution (known as such because of Russia’s use of the Julian calendar until February 1918) began on March 8, 1917. This led to the collapse of the imperial rule by the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, and the establishment of a democratic provisional government. The October revolution (which in the Julian calendar began on October 24th and 25th) began on November 6th and 7th led by Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik party, and overthrew the provisional government to establish the first Marxist state in the world. It generated the dominant model of revolution for the remainder of the 20th century, engendered communist parties in many countries and was exported to much of Eastern Europe in the former of Soviet hegemony after victory in 1945, and helped shape the process of decolonisation.

As we journey through Ireland’s decade of commemorations and move ever closer to considering the complex war of independence and civil war that preceded the formation of the Irish State, this lecture series will reflect on the aftermath of the Russian Revolution right up to today and how it changed the course of world history at many levels.

The Utopia Dystopia lecture series has been organised by Trinity College Dublin’s Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies and Department of History in association with the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.

See the full list of lectures from this series https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/whats-on/details/utopia-dystopia.php

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/