A master historian of the Russian Revolution, S.A. Smith has wrestled the events and personalities, policies and mass politics of the years 1890 to 1928 into a coherent and compelling story of the entrance of ordinary people onto the stage of history and the brutal, violent descent of Russia into dictatorship. Smith explains better than anyone else how a revolution marked by radical democracy and hope for social justice sacrificed many of its ideals to win and hold power and inspire an international movement against capitalism and imperialism. (Ronald Grigor Suny, Distinguished University Professor of History and Political Science, The University of Michigan)

Steve Smith is a historian of modern Russia and China, who was a graduate student at both Moscow State University and at Peking University. He is the author of many books and articles on the Russian and Chinese revolutions, including Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-18 (CUP, 1983) and Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (CUP, 2008), and is editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (OUP, 2014). He taught for many years at the University of Essex, where he is an emeritus professor, and then at the European University Institute in Florence, before being elected to a senior research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2012.