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Some Reflections On The Russian Revolution
Mon, May 9, 2016 @ 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
$45 – $65
Five sessions with The Revolutions Study Group
May 9-June 13 (no meeting May 30)
Next year will be the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Conveners of the Revolutions Study Group, which has been reading on this topic over the past year, invite all to join them in some precentennial reflections on this history and its continuing significance for the world socialist movement. On May 9 and 16, Jim Creegan, Amy Dalton, Brandon Rippey, and David Worley make short presentations as a way of opening class discussion, expected to focus on issues of cognitive dissonance: the impotence of democratic reformism when an old regime disintegrates; the grinding of revolutionary ideals by the relentless realities of civil war and economic collapse; and the heroism of revolutionary optimism in the face of savage resistance and foreign intervention.
We will view and discuss these films:
May 23 Tsar to Lenin (1937 documentary narrated by Max Eastman)
June 6 Reds (1981 drama directed by Warren Beatty)
June 13 Bed and Sofa (1927 Soviet silent film set in the civil war period).
The Revolutions Study Group (originally at the Brecht Forum) has been meeting since 2009. While individual participants may come and go, the group has held together, studying in depth a range of history including the French Revolution, the Mau-Mau Revolt, the Haitian Revolution, the European Revolutions of 1848, the May 1968 movement in France, a survey of the Italian left after WWII, the Spanish Civil War, the Mexican Revolution, the Socialist (2nd) International with an emphasis on German Social Democracy, and the 1905 Russian revolution and Russian Social Democracy prior to World War I.