The two-day symposium addresses the artistic and intellectual legacy of 1917, and the dynamics of left-wing political thought and artistic practice in a transnational context. The symposium will explore the historiographic shifts that affected knowledge production in the various fields of humanities and social sciences, as well as developments in the field of arts. In doing so, the symposium will pay special attention to a fundamental aspect of 20th century globalization: the transmission, circulation and reception of values, cultures, and beliefs between what Western contemporaries called the “Second World” and “Third World”. It also looks at the transformations in left-wing, intellectual thought brought about by new forms of internet-based economic and social development. Symposium participants will discuss the social mechanisms which made new, critical left-wing theories possible, as well as their current position within a post-crisis context as marked by the success of the populist right. The symposium is organized by The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) at CEU: a repository of important collections related to the history of the Cold War and grave international human rights violations, as well as a laboratory of archival experiments on new ways of assessing, contextualizing, presenting, and making use of archival documents. The symposium will be accompanied by film screenings within the framework of Verzio IHRDFF.