Russia Follow

Ukraine's 'Orange Revolution' is not all it seems.

V ictor Serge was born in Brussels in 1890. In 1908 he went to Paris, where he edited an anarchist paper.

THERE IS no exhibition more exciting than one showing the explosion of artistic expression thrown up by the Russian Revolution of 1917.

nowadays most people recognise that Stalin’s rule in Russia was a perversion of the very name of socialism. But for many years those on the left who spoke out against Stalin were few in number and often persecuted.

Taking its title from one of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s greatest poems, in which the future poet of the Russian Revolution revealed that he could be as tender hearted as "a cloud in trousers", this play sets out to bring us the story of the man himself.

There were two revolutions in Russia in 1917 - the first in February, the second in October. The February Revolution swept away the thousand-year rule of the Tsar.

Widely billed as 'Russia's 9/11', the Beslan hostage tragedy in September, and the downing of two passenger aircraft by Chechen suicide bombers the same month, have seen the Kremlin do its best to ape Bush and Blair's 'war on terror'.

AT THE end of the Second World War the world was carved up between the US, Russia and Britain. Hungary fell under Russian control.

GERMANY WAS on the brink of revolution after the First World War. A workers’ revolt in this powerful country could have broken the isolation of the Russian Revolution and helped to prevent the rise of Adolf Hitler. It was a turning point in the history of the 20th century.

THROUGH A history of sustained violence against Chechnya, Russia sowed the seeds of the Beslan tragedy.

For a few brief years after the October revolution of 1917, relations between Chechens and Russians changed dramatically.

REVOLUTIONS DO not break out just because of the efforts of groups of socialists, I pointed out last week. They occur because great social crises create situations in which, as the Russian revolutionary Lenin put it, "the lower classes do not want to live in the old way" and "the upper classes" are "unable to live in the old way" any longer.