The Russian Revolution is the most misunderstood and misinterpreted event in modern history. In The Anonymous Russian Revolution, Neil Faulkner goes beyond myth and escapes fiction, putting the Russian people, who were the true heroes of this turbulent period, at the center of the story. Millions of people came together in a mass movement, organized democratic assemblies, mobilized for militant action and overthrew a vast regime of landlords, profiteers and warriors.
Faulkner rejects caricatures of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as authoritarian conspirators or progenitors of Stalinist dictatorship, and claims that the Russian Revolution was an explosion of democracy and creativity, crushed by bloody counter-revolution, and replaced with a form of bureaucracy by state capitalism.
Based on powerful first-hand accounts, this history marks the centenary of the Revolution by restoring its democratic essence, offering a perfect handbook for the modern reader.
Neil Faulkner is a British archaeologist, historian, author, lecturer, presenter and political activist. He studied at King's College, Cambridge and the UCL Institute of Archaeology. He was a teacher before becoming an archaeologist. He is currently a research fellow at the University of Bristol, editor of Military History Monthly and coordinator of the Great Arab Revolt Project (in Jordan) and the Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project (in Norfolk, England). On 22 May 2008 he was elected a member of the Society of Antiquaries of London.