Owen Matthews Owen Matthews

Red faces

The autocratic president reveres the USSR, but abhors the kind of popular uprising that created it

issue 07 January 2017

How to celebrate the centenary of the Russian revolutions of 1917? Modern Russians are deeply divided over the legacy of that tumultuous year. Russia’s few remaining liberals remember that the overthrow of the tsar in February 1917 ushered in a flowering of the artistic avant-garde, a brief period of feminism, liberal values and democracy.

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