March 04, 2017

Who are you in 1917 Russia?

Take the Political Compass of the Revolution test and find out who you would have been 100 years ago – an Anarchist, a Cadet, a Right SR, a Bolshevik or a member of the Black Hundreds. (In collaboration with Arzamas, Russian Life translated this quiz from the Russian.)

Political life was exceedingly tumultuous in 1917. Some parties and groups wanted to give all the land to the peasants and all the factories to the workers; others thirsted to fight in the war to a final victory; still others dreamed of demolishing the government to its very foundations.

In order to find out which of these groups you might have been a part of, you can use the Political Compass of the Revolution. Its horizontal axis refers to economic preferences, from the extreme left (socialists) to the extreme right (liberals). The vertical axis maps out data about political inclinations, from democratic to authoritarian.

We have laid out the ten basic political forces in the Revolution along these axes (see chart). In order to find out where you would have fallen, you need to take our quiz and evaluate 27 assertions about the most pressing problems in September 1917, after the Kornilov Affair had failed, but before the October Revolution took place.

You should not use the Compass to define your modern preferences. The situations of the different parties is tightly connected to September 1917: the position of many – in particular the Bolsheviks – later shifted on certain issues, even so far as to land on the directly opposite pole. Therefore, the proximity of any party or group to another on the Compass does not necessarily mean that they were allies in the political struggle: a group’s position on the graph is merely the sum of their ideological positions.

Take the Test

February 23, 2017

Revolution!

On February 23, 1917 the Revolution came to Petrograd. The Tsar abdicated and a long year of turmoil and political upheaval lie ahead...

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