Introduction

As the title of this volume on the Russian Revolution of 1905 suggests, the book is intended to provide readers with new perspectives on what is generally considered to have been one of the critical junctures in modern Russian history and, in many ways, in the history of the twentieth century, aptly termed the ‘age of extremes’. Initially prepared as papers for the XXXth Annual Conference of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution (at Nottingham, United Kingdom, on 3-5 January 2004), all the contributions except one were extensively discussed by a group of some forty scholars and then revised to take into account various criticisms and suggestions. The result, in my view, is a collection of highly interesting and stimulating chapters that shed light on an event that is still insufficiently understood.