Among the huge amount of books and articles published at the Revolution’s Hundredth anniversary, the author focuses on several volumes translated from English into Russian: Yuri Slezkine’s “The House of Government”, Mark Steinberg’s “The Russian Revolution. 1905–1921”, and Martin Malia’s “History’s Locomotives.” Comparing the authors’ approaches the author draws conclusions about their scientific and political implications. The books reflect trends in the Slavic studies over the last decades.

The ambition of this article is to initiate an understanding of the Russian Orthodox Christianity at the time of the revolution in a way that is different from the classical approach which is often focused on its institutional side and limited to historical facts. Its main thesis is that rather than being an obstacle, Orthodox Christianity to some extent contributed to the revolution’s success by providing familiar semantic background against which the majority of Russians interpreted, accepted and fought for the socialist ideals.

This essay examines the motifs of wings and flight in public interpretive practices during the revolution, which were ubiquitous but rarely recognized. At the empirical center of this story is a once famous memorial plaque, featuring a large winged figure symbolizing the revolution, installed on the first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution on Red Square above the graves of the martyrs of October.

The article investigates debates about the (ir)reconcilability of Christianity and socialism among Orthodox clergy and intelligentsia in late Imperial Russia. The first part of the paper focuses on anti‑socialist texts by radical right Orthodox clergy who argued for the impossibility to reconcile Christianity and socialism, and interpreted them as rigid categories. The second part of the paper discusses various intellectual experiments by left‑wing Orthodox clergy and by Marxist intelligentsia who looked at Christianity and socialism as fluid ideas under contestation.