We are remembering the one-hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup d’etat, popularly misnamed the Russian Revolution (the real Russian revolution, abolishing the monarchy and introducing democracy, took place in February of 1917). This monumental historical event, “ten days that shook the world” in the words of an American sympathiser John Reed, ushered in more than seventy years of Soviet communism and inspired similar movements elsewhere, consigning hundreds of millions of people to death or modern serfdom and the world as a whole to half a century of the cold war.