Radicals have lived under the political shadow of the Russian Revolution for more than a hundred years. Inspired by the example of 1917, generation after generation of socialists sought to learn and implement what they took to be the core political lessons of the Bolsheviks.

Though millions of activists gave everything to this project and played important roles in winning gains for working people across the world, Leninist parties have never come close to making their own revolution in advanced capitalist democracy. The tragedy of the Bolsheviks’ inspiring example was not only that they so quickly succumbed to the horrors of Stalinism, but that they over-projected a revolutionary approach ill-suited for parliamentary contexts.

But this doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to learn from the Russian Revolution. The revolutionary movements culminating in 1917 demonstrated an important and lasting lesson: capitalism is not eternal, it can be overturned. And though there are dramatic differences between organizing under an autocracy and today’s welfare states, there remains much to learn from the inspiring, and remarkably successful, efforts of socialists to root socialism in Russia’s mass workers’ movements.