Armando Iannucci plays fast and loose with history in his farce The Death of Stalin. But its depiction of the cult of personality that can develop around political leaders is bitingly relevant.
Female protesters in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) in 1917 on International Women’s Day.
Wikimedia Commons
Because the Kremlin hopes to project strength and unity, history isn’t used as much to inform as it is to inspire, with events cherry-picked to fit within a fuzzy framework of ‘Russian greatness.’
Alexander Kerensky, prime minister of Russia’s Provisional Government in 1917.
Wikimedia Commons
Four empires fell, a world was shaken, a new order arose – and the long 20th century really began.
Red carnations are laid on the Berlin tomb of German communist leader Rosa Luxemburg during a ceremony to commemorate her death.
Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters
If Rosa Luxemburg and her comrades had been successful with their German revolution in 1919, history would most probably have taken a very different course, avoiding the rise of fascism in Europe.
Sergei Rachmaninoff fled the Russian revolution 100 years ago. Spending the remainder of his life in the US, he composed what is perhaps his greatest work in 1940, the Symphonic Dances.
When women are remembered as part of the Communist or any other political tradition it’s often as an afterthought, or as part of the support system of the revolution.
Yunus Omar, Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Alie Fataar exemplifies the type of teacher South Africa sorely requires today if its classrooms are to be used to develop a new generation of critical, engaged students.
Russian army officers take the oath of allegiance to the Revolution, 1917.
Everett Historical/shutterstock
How is Vladimir Putin - for whom uprisings are anathema - treating this year’s centenary of the Russian revolution?
The Tsar Nicholas II and his son Alexei in capitivity in Tobolsk in 1917.
Romanov Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University/Wikimedia Commons