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A hundred years ago, on March 12, socialists in Petrograd distributed the following appeal for an insurrectional general strike to bring down tsarism. That day – the culmination of the Russian February revolution – witnessed the crumbling of tsarist power.

has launched the first of two important collaborative projects that will be of much interest to left activists and scholars internationally.

Leon Trotsky was one of the central leaders of the Russian Revolution. As the organiser and Commissar of the Red Army that saved the Soviet power and as the leading light of the struggle against Stalinism, he is surely one of the great heroic — and tragic — figures of the 20th century.

The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome by ROLAND CHAMBERS Faber & Faber, 2010, $24.99 390 pages, (pb) Arthur Ransome was a popular children's author in England who counted the offspring of A. A. Milne and J. R. R. Tolkien among his millions of devoted young readers.

ANZACS in Arkhangel: The Untold Story of Australia and the Invasion of Russia 1918-19 By Michael Challinger Hardie Grant Books, 2010, 285 pages, $35 (pb) “The remedy for Bolshevism is bullets”, was the blunt message of the editorial in Britain’s establishment newspaper, The Times, in 1919 as military forces from 16 capitalist countries invaded Russia after the 1917 revolution. Among the invaders were about 150 Australian soldiers, as recounted in Michael Challinger’s history of the Australian role in the invasion.