We have been invited to consider the memory and significance of the October Revolution on this, its centennial, anniversary, and have been asked to do so alongside the surprise, colour and ineffable promise of Konstantin Yuon’s resplendent New Planet, which can be read ‘either as a will for change or as a fear of what is to come’.1 The year 1917 also saw the adoption of the Mexican Constitution, which had ‘legitimate pride in showing the world that it is the first to consign in a constitution the sacred rights of the workers’,2 and that had occurred in February of that tumultuous year,3 well before the Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic of July 1918 delivered its ‘declaration of rights of the labouring and exploited people’.4