Yesterday, I posted the “Why I am an Anarchist” manifesto from Nikolai Pavlov, written in 1917. This was written during the Russian Revolution, and as an Anarchist, Pavlov still had a small hope that the revolution would succeed and not end in a dictatorship, as he probably suspected it would. I don’t know this, of course, I don’t know what went through his mind when the communists arrested him, and I have never been close to an ongoing revolution. We don’t share the same world; however, we do share the same power scale. 

It is hard to imagine what it is like to live in another time. I am old enough to have lived without the internet for my first 25 years, and the first 15 years that we had internet were relatively tame compared to the bombardment you have now if you let it in. In 1917, most people in Russia were aware of the events unfolding: a war with Germany and a revolution in the western part of the empire. However, most people who were not directly involved in the war, for instance, because they lived too far from the front, led their lives as they always did, with an occasional news bulletin or stories from travelers as the only source of news.