The train on fire: Martin Maila’s good and bad revolutions
Abstract
The review is analyzing the last work of Martin Maila, a renowned scholar of Russian history. In ‘History’s Locomotives’ Malia tries to provide a complex historical analysis of the very phenomenon of revolution, from the Hussites to the Bolsheviks. He argues that the revolution is essentially European phenomenon and that the revolutionary process was moving from the Western part of the continent to the Eastern one, becoming more brutal in the less developed countries and reaching its culmination in the Red October. The conclusions of the book are uncompromisingly pessimistic about the legacy of Russian revolution. A special discussion is reserved for the comparative approach, which forms the core of the author’s research method. However, a comparative study requires both serious preparation and accurate formulation of a problem to avoid the transformation of a comparison into an exposure.
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