In October 1987, Ronald G. Suny and I, along with Georges Nivat from Switzerland and Iurii Afanas'ev and Viktor Sheinis from Russia, took part in an international seminar on the 80th anniversary of the Russian held at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, organized by the economist Lenina Pomeranz. The former Brazilian ambassador to the Soviet Union, Sebastiao do Rego Barros, funded the event and enlisted Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, whom the ambassador knew personally, to write an introduction to the published conference proceedings. (1) I heard of no comparable conference or seminar that year in the United States or Europe and confirmed only a modest commemoration of the October Socialist Revolution in Russia. Revolution, and study of it, had fallen out of fashion (but could be discussed at an academic conference in Brazil now that its military regime had been displaced). In another sign of the times, the Russian-language edition of my on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov finally appeared in Saratov under the pretentious and ill-fitting but less provocative title Politicheskie sud' by Rossiiskoi gubernii: 1917 v Saratove (The Political Fates of a Russian Province: 1917 in Saratov). (2) The book had bounced back and forth between bankrupt publishers and inept, self-proclaimed translators before it found a sponsor willing to fund its publication. When I arrived in Saratov to celebrate its release in Russian, I learned that my benefactor, the State Duma candidate V. N. Davydov, could not attend the reception because he had been found dead in nearby Balashov, ostensibly of food or alcohol poisoning. Nagging rumors had it that he had been murdered. Much has changed in 20 years. As S. A. Smith points out, times are not especially friendly to the idea of (733), but, I would argue, they are (but may not remain) more conducive to dispassionate discussion of the Russian than they were 20 years ago, owing not only to Russia's resurgence on the world stage but also to the profound interest in World War I sparked by the centenary of its outbreak. Moreover, Russia's Great War and publication project, whose first volumes have appeared or are in press, has stimulated new research on and reassessments of the revolution since the initiative involves more than 200 scholars worldwide. (3) The approaching anniversary of the revolution therefore affords an opportunity for us not only to reflect upon the event with the benefit of hindsight but also to examine the lessons of hindsight at various points in the evolution of historical writing on the subject, to consider how our understandings are constrained and enabled, often unconsciously so, by the climate of the times, by volatile collective memories, by governmental political agendas, and, as the three essays presented here indicate, by the personal and generational experience, politics, intellectual predilections, preferences, vantage points, and even national origin of the historians who write about 1917. Boris Kolonitskii's essay reminds us of the value of studying the historians who wrote and who write about the revolution. His memoir-like account makes clear how personal experience, interests, and political climates determine the choices we make of what to study and how to study it, thereby revealing the merits of having historians see themselves as historical. (4) Notably, he voices deep appreciation for the writings of the Leningrad historians V. I. Startsev, O. N. Znamenskii, lu. S. Tokarev, G. L. Sobolev, R. Sh. Ganelin, Kh. M. Astrakhan, G. Z. Ioffe, and others, whose works, while largely overlooked today, represented required reading not only for Kolonitskii and other members of his age cohort in the Soviet Union but also for those of us in the West who studied 1917 before the dissolution of the USSR. For instance, the monographs of all these historians appeared on the recommended reading list that Alexander Rabinowitch distributed to his students when I enrolled in his colloquium on Soviet history at Indiana University in the spring of 1972. …