Audio: Ronald Grigor Suny on Reconsidering Russia

Historian Ronald Grigor Suny, whose Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution is out from Verso in November, appeared recently on the Reconsidering Russia podcast. 

In this interview, Dr. Suny discusses the history of his grandfather – the composer Grikor Suni – and his experience of the Russian Revolution, the Revolution in Transcaucasia, Stepan Shahumyan and the Baku Commune, and the issue of class and nationality in the Russian Revolution. This interview also includes discussions of Dr. Suny’s work with Leopold Haimson at Columbia, his close friendship with Moshe Lewin, Revisionism vs. Authoritarianism in Soviet and Russian historiography, and the recent push for “de-communization” in Armenia.

Suny's many other books include The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States and A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, and A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin.

Listen to the full interview below. 

Red Flag Unfurled

by Ronald Suny

Reflecting on the fate of the Russian Revolution one hundred years after October, Ronald Grigor Suny—one of the world’s leading historians of the period—explores the historiographical controversies...

October

by China Miéville

In February of 1917 Russia was a backward, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world’s first workers’ state, straining t...

History and Revolution

Contributions by Daniel Bensaïd, Geoff Eley, Marc Ferro, Florence Gauthier, Geoff Kennedy, Lars T. Lih and Enzo Traverso

Edited by Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys

In History and Revolution, a group of respected historians confronts the conservative, revisionist trends in historical enquiry that have been dominant in the last twenty years. Ranging from an exp...

The Dilemmas of Lenin

by Tariq Ali

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the October 1917 uprising, is one of the most misunderstood leaders of the twentieth century. In his own time, there were many, even among his enemies, who acknowle...

The Soviet Century

by Moshe Lewin

Edited by Gregory Elliott

One hundred years after the Russian Revolution the Soviet Union remains the most extraordinary, yet tragic, attempt to create a society beyond capitalism. Yet its history was one that for a long ti...

The Day After the Revolution

by V. I. Lenin and Slavoj Žižek

Lenin’s originality and importance as a revolutionary leader is most often associated with the seizure of power in 1917. But, Žižek argues in his new study and collection of original texts, Lenin’s...

Collected Works, Volume 1

by V. I. Lenin

Among the most influential political and social forces of the twentieth century, modern communism rests firmly on philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings developed by Vladimir Ilyich U...

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