Dreams of Emancipation

Given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, why do emancipation messages that emanated from Russia count? Navigating multilingual sources, this book addresses the role of Russia’s multiethnic society and borderlands in generating kaleidoscopic repercussions of its 1917 Revolution. It also sees the USSR’s interactions with its neighboring countries as a crucible of the Soviet modality of communism. The book shows how the collapse of the Russian Empire further released a vast range of liberationist projects and dreams, far from confined to the goals of Bolshevism, in its borderlands and beyond, and how the Soviet Union became a highly ambiguous source of emancipatory inspiration in the long twentieth century overshadowing today’s global politics.