It has been a century since the Russian Revolution. The occasion has naturally provoked all manner of commemorations. The establishment calls it an unfortunate sequence of events never to be repeated, the right spits its vicious bile at the memory of a workers’ world, and the Left, to one degree or another, celebrates and analyzes and tries to ask how to make the history come alive again.

Red Wedge has a few ideas regarding this last point. To us, the art, the poetry, the music, the performance, the mass imagination unleashed by these events; are worth not just revisiting and understanding on their own terms but engaging on their own. If art encourages us to imagine ourselves beyond the confines of our time and place, then anyone committed to radical social change must ask how in 1917 that vision traced a line from what was to what could be, and whether that trajectory has any meaning for us today.