Introduction

REVOLUTION was still in the air in Berlin in September 1991. The previous month an attempted coup by army officers in Moscow had seemed poised to reverse the liberalisation of the Soviet Union. Its failure led to the rapid unravelling of the Soviet state, a process whose consequences are still not at all clear. What is clear and what was commonly felt, is that we had been witnessing, even participating in a series of events at least as important for Russia and the wider world as was the Meiji Ishin (the events of 1868) for Japan and world history. Our experience of contemporary changes made the discussion about Revolution and Japan seem more immediately relevant than is often the case at international academic conferences.