Chapter 1: Introduction: Protest Technologies and Media Revolutions in the Longue Durée

In November 2017, we invited contributors to ‘Connecting to the Masses 100 Years from the Russian Revolution: From Agitprop to the Attention Economy’. During a two-day conference, which took place at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam, we collectively investigated historical strategies and lessons of ‘connecting to the masses’ considering the development of media, technology and communication strategies over the last century.

The Russian Revolution offers a particularly valuable and relatively unconsidered place to begin the investigation of the modern political communication. The Bolsheviks grasped the opportunity to change their world in the here and now, rather than trust in the tentative promises of gradual reform in the face of rapidly growing inequality and alienation. Responding to the pressures and failures of the Russian aristocracy during WW1, and in the midst of rage, desperation and harsh conditions that included food shortages and worsening poverty, the Bolsheviks felt the undercurrents in the seas of history and spoke to the people, exactly when the relationship between the Tsar and the population and between the Provisional government and the Soviets were at a crucial tipping point. They did so violently and unapologetically. The effects of their actions ran through the Cold War and the confrontation with the West, and are felt to this day in the complex and intense relations between Russia and the United States in the failed engagements since the fall of the USSR, the world's first socialist state. Many questions evoked by the Russian Revolution directly reflect those that scholars of political and media communications wrestle with today.