Introduction: 1917 Still Shakes the World

In this special section of the magazine, four writers offer ways of understanding these events, in the context of history and in the present. Mitchell Cohen recovers the powerful critique the Mensheviks made of the ideas and policies of the Bolsheviks, their erstwhile comrades who turned first into rivals and then into oppressors. Keith Gessen describes what contemporary Russians and Ukrainians, both ordinary citizens and their rulers in the "post-Soviet" space, make of the October revolution and the system that resulted from it. Susie Linfield challenges the myth that the Balfour Declaration reveals the Zionist movement to have been an imperialist dagger aimed at the heart of the Muslim world. Finally, my essay seeks to restore the world-historical significance of U.S. intervention in the Great War and the large and diverse opposition at home to waging it.