Chou En-lai remarked famously about the French Revolution, when asked to assess its historical significance, that it was too soon to say. This has not prevented legions of politicians and historians from passing judgment on it. His hesitation applies a fortiori to the Russian Revolution of 1917, the 80th anniversary of which was observed yesterday. It has been as important for the 20th century as the French Revolution was for the 19th - just as convulsive and influential. And, despite the collapse of the official communist regimes after 1989, it is simply too soon to say that the ideas which inspired the Bolshevik revolution have definitively run their historical course.
Eighty years on from 1789, France was about to be plunged into a war that led to the Paris Commune and the rise of a united Germany ruled by Bismarck. The logic of competing imperial powers led on within another 50 years to the first World War, which gave rise to the revolution in Russia. Its leaders, whether Menshevik or Bolshevik, were acutely aware of French revolutionary precedents, including the transformation of popular uprisings into reigns of terror led by revolutionary ideologues, and the consolidation of official nationalisms under Napoleon and Stalin.
These revolutions within the revolution make comparisons difficult, even within the same historical tradition. Stalinism had little in common with the libertarian direct democracy and the internationalism of Lenin's Bolsheviks, who believed so passionately that their revolutionary gamble in an underdeveloped country would have to spread to the heartlands of world capitalism if they were to succeed. When it failed to do so "socialism in one country" was erected by Stalin on the basis of autarchy, forced collectivisation and industrialisation and tyrannical rule. Russia bore the greatest burden of the war against Hitler, whose own rise to power is inexplicable without reference to communism.
The Soviet Union survived that war and went on to see its influence extended through the Cold War. Satellite regimes in central and eastern Europe, together with anti-colonial revolts in China and the Third World, gave it legitimacy and a certain stability through the 1950s and 1960s.
In retrospect, one can see how false a picture this gave as Brezhnev succeeded Khruschev and the Soviet Union fell far behind the developed West other than in its military-industrial complex. Gorbachev's reform programme was heroic but ill-fated and ill-resourced. It has given way to the full-blooded reversion to private capitalism under Yeltsin.
Yesterday's call from some of Yeltsin's communist opponents for a new revolution against the inequalities and injustices of Yeltsin's Russia seems like a cry in the wilderness. And yet world capitalism has never been so global, or so volatile - conditions that would have been well recognised by the Russian revolutionaries.