The October Revolution of 1917 enters these passages less as a narrated seizure of power than as a historical divide whose meaning keeps changing. Its traces surface in the memories of an émigré newspaper, in arguments about the durability of the Soviet Union, and in later struggles over who may claim the moral and political inheritance of Russia’s past.

A newspaper preserves the Revolution in miniature

NOVOYE RUSSKOYE SLOVO, a Russian-language daily founded in 1910, is presented as an institution whose history brushes against the Revolution without becoming a grand stage for it. Its offices occupy one floor of a run-down building near Broadway; its pages combine delayed translations from New York papers with serial fiction, recipes, and the contributions of obsessive anti-Communists. The contrast is pointed: a newspaper that resembles Pravda in format is now a modest workplace among Russian émigrés.

Most of its elderly editors had emigrated just after the Revolution. The oldest could still recall Leon Trotsky visiting the paper before it. In this recollection, the revolutionary figure is approached through the stories of people who knew the newspaper’s daily world, rather than through a formal account of the uprising. The old editor’s anecdotes shrink the distance between world-historical fame and ordinary material life: Trotsky had lived in the Bronx, lectured on world revolution to empty halls, and, in 1917, bought two hundred dollars’ worth of furniture on installment before disappearing from the loan company’s view. The story’s final reversal is its scale: the man who had vanished from a creditor’s reach went on to command the army of the largest country in the world.

Revolution, empire, and historical hindsight

The Revolution’s long aftermath is also implicit in the account of the Soviet Union as an empire that could not be assumed to endure. The narrator’s mother argued in Decline of an Empire that the USSR was not simply Russia but a mosaic of peoples, including numerous Muslim minorities whose demographic weight and dissatisfaction threatened Russian dominance. She judged the state fragile, vulnerable to pressures from its nationalities, and liable to collapse under its own weight. Although events did not unfold exactly as she predicted, the following decade appeared to vindicate her central intuition.

That interpretation itself became part of the struggle over Soviet history. Pravda denounced the book as a pernicious form of anti-Communism, yet a historian associated with the article later asked the author’s mother for a copy, revealing a gap between public denunciation and private curiosity. The Revolution’s legacy is therefore connected not only to the state that followed it but also to the unstable boundaries of what could be acknowledged about that state.

The contested inheritance of Soviet politics

The passages place later opposition politics within this unsettled historical field, without presenting those movements as a simple continuation of 1917. Anna Politkovskaya defended forty National Bolshevik Party militants sentenced after occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices. She described them as courageous young people capable of restoring hope in the country’s moral future. Yelena Bonner, widow of Andrei Sakharov, also expressed support for the militants, despite the party name’s troubling associations. Their judgments unsettled the narrator’s prior assumption that Eduard Limonov was merely a fascist leading skinheads: the same movement could be regarded by prominent dissidents as part of a struggle for democracy.

The party’s own later rhetoric drew on the dislocations following the end of the Soviet Union. At its convention, Limonov addressed several hundred delegates from a party said to have seven thousand members across Russia. He described Russians in former Soviet republics as abandoned and displaced, citing communities in Latvia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, and proposed encouraging insurgencies and separatist republics in the Baltic states and Central Asia. These claims were the party’s political framing of the post-Soviet order, not evidence that the Revolution itself had caused the later conflicts. Their relevance lies in how the old revolutionary and imperial inheritance remained available for competing political uses.

From historical legacy to state conflict

The later treatment of opposition shows how contested political memory met new institutional limits. Before the presidential election, a law against extremism and fascism gave the authorities latitude to define the terms; after the National Bolshevik Party’s authorization was refused, Limonov warned the minister that an unrecognized party would be driven underground. The party was described as having seven thousand adherents, while the minister’s response raised the possibility of terrorism. The exchange exposes the narrowing space between legal political organization and the state’s security language.

After the coalition The Other Russia failed to become a lasting electoral vehicle, Limonov launched Strategy 31, invoking the constitutional right to demonstrate. On qualifying thirty-first days, roughly a hundred demonstrators assembled at Triumfalnaya Square, while police outnumbered them about five to one and arrested some of them; Limonov regularly spent a few days in prison. These later episodes do not recount the October Revolution. They show instead how the book’s historical frame extends forward: revolutionary memory persists as an argument about political legitimacy, while the practical contest takes place through parties, public demonstrations, and the state’s power to prohibit or disperse them.