The issue of which decade should be considered the more influential creates a dilemma, for the 1990s are simply too recent to be judged properly, while the influence of the period from 1910 to 1920 is much more apparent and clearly reached far. The two decades are related primarily because the years between them constitute the lifespan of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union came into existence with the Russian Revolution in 1917 and ended with the breakup of the union in 1989. We know what effect the founding of the Soviet Union had on the next seventy years of history and on much of the world, while the consequences of the breakup are only beginning to be discerned and have only had a decade to make any difference at all. By any measure, socially, politically, economically, and artistically, the period from 1910 to 1920 was certainly more influential than the 1980s, which may prove more influential in the long run, but which have not done so yet.
The Revolution was the culmination of a long period of ferment, not the beginning. For half a century Russia had been in some turmoil: "Until 1861 Russia had for 300 years been a predominantly agricultural system maintained by the labor and taxes of peasant-serfs." The peasant-serfs were tied to the land in a system that endured for three centuries, but in the nineteenth century the system was seen as increasingly inefficient. The Industrial Revolution did not affect Russia until the last quarter of the century. The result was a period of modernization that tested the parameters of Russian society and that helped to create a revolutionary situation: "Both the knowledge and the aspirations of the masses increased dramatically, so that appeals for revolutionary change not only reached more people but found among them a readier response."
The other major political action of the decade was World War I. The First World War, known then as the Great War, was also supposed to be th...