I just finished Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and see some interesting parallels in Lunacharsky's "Basis for a System of Popular Education" (referenced here on pg 177 but printed in full in the appendix starting on pg 308). Particularly he draws a distinction between instruction and education that to me is basically the same as Freire's distinction between the banking and problem-posing methods of education.

There are so many good little vignettes in this book, but these scene with the armored car soldiers deciding on whether to remain neutral or join with the Bolsheviks really illustrates a couple things that I feel people don't really understand and the revolution. First, just how much it all stood right on the edge of a knife and could really have gone any way if things hadn't gone just right, plus just how chaotic and confusing it all just have been to regular people in an age where all of this was getting decided in person with limited communication methods. And second, how so much of the revolution was not just a top down thing with a small group of armed revolutionaries riding in and seizing control for the masses, but actually very much bottom-up and distributed, with every army unit, shop floor, neighborhood, etc having to meet and discuss and make decisions, but in a way that wouldn't have been possible without the revolutionary leaders actually integrating with the people and actually understanding them.

"Imagine this struggle being repeated in every barracks of the city, the district, the whole front, all Russia. Imagine the sleepless Krylenkos, watching the regiments, hurrying from place to place, arguing, threatening, entreating. And then imagine the same in all the locals of every labor union, in the factories, the villages, on the battleships of the far-flung Russian fleets; think of the hundreds of thousands of Russian men staring up at speakers all over the vast country, workmen, peasants, soldiers, sailors, trying so hard to understand and to choose, thinking so intensely - and deciding so unanimously at the end. So was the Russian Revolution..."