ABSTRACT
The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 was soon reflected in the ways in which the Russian Revolution has been viewed. In the West, for example, there was a resurgence of what can only be termed triumphalist writings which welcomed the fall of the Soviet Union. It was taken as vindication of the view that the October Revolution in 1917 was a malign experiment, foisted on an unwilling country by a tiny minority of Bolshevik zealots. In Russia itself there has been much soul-searching, with repeated rejections of October, and its eventual progeny, Stalinism, as alien aberrations in the course of Russian history—echoing attempts after 1945 by conservative German historians, such as Gerhard Ritter, to explain Nazism in a similar way.
