On November 7th, the dwindling tribe of Communist Party loyalists and
nostalgists will commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik
Revolution. Vladimir Putin, however, has made it clear that the
centenary is not an occasion for state celebration. While the foreign
press has published countless perspectives on Lenin and Trotsky, Soviet
Communism, and the global influence of those revolutionary days, as far
as the Kremlin is concerned, November 7th in Russia should be an
ordinary working day. Why that’s so is at the very center of Putin’s
political outlook and his view of the history of the Russian state.
John Reed, the American journalist who is buried in the necropolis of
the Kremlin wall, called his classic account of the Bolshevik Revolution
“Ten Days That Shook the World.” It was indeed a colossal upheaval. In 1917, the Romanov dynasty was overturned, and the Bolsheviks prevailed
over less radical factions; by the following year, the
three-hundred-year-old Russian Empire was over. The Bolsheviks executed
Nicholas II and his family. They set out to exterminate the peasantry,
the nobility, and the clergy; they uprooted Russian traditional national
identity and faith. The Bolsheviks enforced a new, “classless” society
and a new ideological culture in place of imperial Russia.
In the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik revolution became a foundational myth
complete with a founding father, Lenin, who, despite his mortal
expiration in January, 1924, was officially declared “forever alive” and
put on display in the mausoleum outside the Kremlin walls. The
Revolution’s formal name was the Great October Socialist Revolution, or
Veliky Oktyabr’ (“Great October”). In the first grade, a child became
an Oktyabrionok, a descendant of Oktyabr’; as primary-schoolers, we
all wore a star-shaped pin with an image of Lenin as a curly-headed
little boy. Seven-year-olds across the eleven time zones of the Soviet
state sang, “We are happy kids / October kids / We are given this name /
in honor of the October victory.”
Each year on November 7th, the Great October anniversary was
commemorated all over the Soviet Union. (A calendar reform was one of
many revolutionary transformations.) Even as late as the
nineteen-seventies and eighties, as Communist ideology was fading, we
celebrated the Revolution with parades and rallies. Streets and squares
were renamed not just after the Revolution itself but after its
anniversaries: in Moscow, we had Ten Years of October Street and Fifty
Years of October Street; in 1977, a plaza near the Kremlin was renamed
Sixty Years of October Square.
Most of these names are still around today. Lenin’s embalmed body is
still in the mausoleum, and countless statues of him remain standing.
And yet the Bolshevik Revolution has been all but absent in the official
discourse. This process of disappearing began not long after the
collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1996, Boris Yeltsin stripped the
November 7th holiday of its origin, renaming it the Day of Accord and
Reconciliation, but the new name sounded meaningless amid the discord
and turmoil associated with his rule. In 2004, Putin cancelled the
holiday altogether.
In this centenary year, discussion of “Great October” is limited almost
entirely to academic conferences and small intellectual venues, and
Russian officials avoid the subject. Last week, Dmitri Peskov, Putin’s
spokesman, said that the Kremlin is planning no Revolution-related events. “What’s
the point of celebrating, anyway?” he added.
The crucial political point here is that, while the Communist-era
narrative and Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev hailed the
revolutionary rupture—the abrupt destruction of the ancien régime and
the advent of the brave new world–– Putin is deeply averse to any abrupt
political shifts. He is a distinctly anti-revolutionary conservative,
deeply apprehensive of any grassroots challenge. To Putin, all signs of
independent public activism and protest are a challenge to
stability––specifically, the stability of his rule.
“Too often in our national history, instead of an opposition to the
government, we faced opposition to Russia itself,” Putin said in
2013. “And we know how that
ends. It ends with the destruction of the state itself.”
Back in 1989, as a K.G.B. officer stationed in Dresden, Putin
experienced the decline of Soviet power with great alarm. Once in power
himself, he watched unrest in Georgia, Ukraine, Central Asia, and the
Middle East end in the overthrow of even the toughest-seeming
authoritarian governments. He saw these examples of political tumult as
warnings. When protesters came out in force in 2011, demanding a “Russia
Without Putin,” Putin made it plain that he would show little tolerance.
Putin’s goals—to keep Russian society quiescent and demobilized; to make
sure that Russian élites remain loyal to him—are at the root of his
evasive stance on divisive issues of Soviet history and his near silence
on the Bolshevik Revolution.
The history here is tricky. After 1991, as the Yeltsin government tried
to build a post-Soviet Russian nation on anti-Communist grounds, the
Revolution of 1917 was commonly referred to as a “tragedy” and a
“catastrophe.” Liberal intellectuals and journalists insisted that
Russia come to terms with the past by exposing the evils of the
Communist regime. This initiative, which was somewhat similar to “truth
and reconciliation” efforts in post-apartheid South Africa, failed
dramatically. Instead of reconciling Russian society, the process
exacerbated political divisions, which ran deeper than many had
imagined. These ideological divides, coupled with the many economic and
political failures of the Yeltsin era, helped pave the way to the rise
of Putin and stability as the ultimate political value.
In 1999, Putin inherited a Russia that was in a state of misery,
exhaustion, and turmoil—as Putin put it, “in a
condition of division, internally separated.” He opted for a different
means of reconciliation: instead of taking a “let’s talk about it”
approach, he resorted to a remedy of obfuscation and oblivion. Public
discussions about divisive and disquieting subjects—the roles of Lenin
and Stalin in Soviet history, the Communist dictatorship, mass
repressions––became increasingly marginalized in the official discourse
of political life and in the media. The Kremlin’s official stance on
these issues grew blurred.
In particular, Putin played down the major upheavals of the twentieth
century, from the collapse of Russian statehood, in 1917, to the
collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Instead, he tried to create a
more expansive view of history, minimizing the turmoil of revolutionary
Russia. “Russia,” he said, “did not begin
either in 1917, or in 1991. We have a single, uninterrupted history
spanning over a thousand years.”
As the hundredth anniversary of Great October drew close, Putin, in his
annual address to parliament, said, “The centennial is a reason . . . to
turn to the causes and the very nature of revolutions in Russia.” But,
rather than elaborating on the causes of revolution, Putin switched to his
perpetual theme: “We need history’s lessons primarily for reconciliation
and for strengthening the social, political and civil concord that we
have managed to achieve.”
In Putin’s Russia, “reconciliation” means universal loyalty to the
regime. As long as one pledges allegiance to the regime and shares its
anti-Western and anti-liberal stance, one can be a Communist or a
monarchist, an admirer of Stalin or Brezhnev or a worshipper of Nicholas
II. Unlike Soviet Communism, Putin’s regime draws on ideological
evasiveness, not rigidity.
As a result, despite Putin’s command of the regime, his control of the
media, and his intolerance of political dissent, ideas and historical
perceptions vary quite widely—and the centenary has made plain to what
extent Russia is not an ideological monolith. The Communist Party of the
Russian Federation, one of the four parliamentary parties, has just
launched week-long celebrations of the revolution anniversary in Moscow
and St. Petersburg. The events include “the 19th international meeting
of communist and workers’ parties,” a wreath-laying ceremony at Lenin’s
Tomb, and a visit to the great man’s old Kremlin offices. The Party
published a list of slogans for the centennial: “Long live the socialist
revolution!”; “Lenin-Stalin-Victory”; “Glory to the achievements of
Great October”; “Revolutions are the locomotives of history”;
“Revolution has happened, Revolution is alive.” The Kremlin, of course,
will not join the Communist festivities, but neither does it interfere
with the Party extolling the revolution. Meanwhile, the
leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church refers to the revolution as a
“spiritual catastrophe” and is commemorating 1917 as “the beginning
of an era of persecutions” and of the first assassinations of “new
martyrs”—the countless clergy executed by the Bolsheviks. A reliquary of
the new martyrs has been travelling around Russia in commemoration of
the anniversary.
And yet, despite the profoundly different ways in which the Communist
Party and the Russian Orthodox Church are treating this centenary
moment, the leaders of both institutions are willing contributors to
Putin’s reconciliation project. They easily dismiss their past and
present differences as minor, and cordially greet each other. Both are
utterly loyal to one figure: Vladimir Putin.