Abstract
The outbreak of a socialist revolution in one of the least industrially developed European regions might be found by the contemporaries as surprising as the destabilizing potential of new revolutionary thoughts in the following period of the civil war. Its consequences were fully manifested, for instance, in young successor states of the Austrian Empire: Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary.
Apart from the immediate influence of revolutionary events, we would like to focus on transferring and transforming functions of ideas, concepts, and practices of the revolution both within Russian, or rather Soviet Empire, and in the Central-Eastern European region. During the conference, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the events in Russia, we would like to consider individual layers of reception, commemoration, and performance of revolutionary thoughts, images, and practices in the area of the Central and Eastern Europe.
We would like to render the Russian revolution in its ambiguity between the event itself, medium-term social and economic transformations, and a long-term reconfiguration of the spaces of power and politics. In what ways and directions did the revolutionary violence spread? What concept of the revolution became the basis for the hegemonic ideological toolbox of the Stalinist Empire after the subsequent civil war? How were the images of the Russian Revolution changing within the dominant discourses of the state-socialist dictatorships in the post-Stalinist era? What was left of revolutionary thoughts in the so-called post-ideological era after the "end of history" in 1989?