Russia is usually thought of as an improbable birthplace for the world’s first communist revolution. Indeed, the Bolsheviks’ fantastic ambitions of revolution across the planet often overshadow the reality that, over the immediately preceding decades, the Russian Empire had been the bulwark of reaction in the industrialized world.

Though the dubious credit for inaugurating the modern authoritarian playbook is usually awarded to Benito Mussolini’s Italy, there is a strong argument that the last thirty-six years of the Russian Empire — the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II, from 1881 to 1917 — provided the ultimate laboratory for state-of-emergency rule and reactionary terror. From weaponized prejudice to paramilitary street terror and the castigation and censorship of the written word, the arsenal of reaction was well developed already in Russia’s late nineteenth century.

With the quasi-enforced exile of almost the entire ruling class after 1917, creating a global diaspora of almost 2 million people, many of its ideas and methods spread around the world — with some fertilizing the political soil for fascism and Nazism.