ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the global legacy of the Russian Revolution by making comparisons with revolutions dating back to the sixteenth century. It finds similarities in how communications, counterrevolutions, and national liberation movements formed the legacies of both the Russian Revolution and its antecedents in both Europe and the wider world. All early-modern and modern revolutions, including Russia’s, began in tandem with travel and communications innovations, which spread word of revolutionary actions. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation were inseparable from new printing technologies that enabled the mass production of pamphlets and propaganda images on both sides of the conflict. In the 1640s, news of revolts against Spain in Catalonia, Portugal, Sicily, and Naples spread fast across Europe through printed books and newspapers, then in their infancy but already a potent mass medium. A similar dynamic occurred in the wake of the Russian Revolution and Civil War.
