Walter Rodney on the Russian Revolution

Introduction [Excerpt]:
Walter Rodney on the Russian Revolution
Robin D. G. Kelley
During the academic year 1970-71, Walter Rodney, the renowned Marxist historian of
Africa and the Caribbean, taught an advanced graduate course titled “Historians and
Revolutions” at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, focusing entirely on the
historiographies of the French and Russian Revolutions. This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill
European historiography course. Rodney’s objectives were to introduce students to dialectical
materialism as a methodology for interpreting the history of revolutionary movements, critique
bourgeois histories and their liberal conceits of objectivity, and to draw political lessons for the
Third World. Russia, having experienced the first successful socialist revolution in the world,
figured prominently in the course.1
To prepare, he underwent a thorough review of Russian history in the year or more prior
to the course, reading on the emancipation of the serfs, the rise of the Russian left intelligentsia, the 1905 Revolution, the February Revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik seizure of power inOctober, Lenin’s New Economic Policy, Trotsky’s interpretation of history, and the rise of Stalinism and “socialism in one country.” He read voraciously and systematically, critically
absorbing virtually everything available to him in the English language—from U.S. and British
Cold War scholarship to translations of Soviet historiography. The result was a series of
original lectures that revisited key economic and political developments, the challenges of
socialist transformation in a “backwards” empire, the consolidation of state power, debates
within Marxist circles over the character of Russia’s revolution, and the ideological bases of
historical interpretation. Rather than simply re-narrate well-known events, Rodney took up the 
more challenging task of interrogating the meaning, representation, and significance of the
Russian Revolution as a world historical event whose reverberations profoundly shaped Marxist thought, Third World liberation movements, and theories of socialist transformation.