Sheila Fitzpatrick. Journal of Contemporary History. Volume 52, Issue 4, 2017.
The Russian Revolution lay at the very heart of the ‘Short Twentieth Century’ of Eric Hobsbawm’s world history, published in 1994. Its repercussions were ‘far more profound and global repercussions than its ancestor’, the French Revolution.
A mere thirty to forty years after Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station in Petrograd, one third of humanity found itself living under regimes directly derived from the ‘Ten Days That Shook the World’, and Lenin’s organizational model, the Communist Party.
Twenty years further on, however, the lasting geo-political impact looks less impressive. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European regimes in 1989–91, the number of Communist states in the world is down to five (China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba)—and of those, only North Korea is still unreconstructed and clinging to the old verities.
The centenary of 2017 catches scholars, as well as post-Soviet Russia, off balance, since—with regard to the revolution’s place in Russian history, as distinct from its global impact—nobody knows quite what to say about it. Without the Cold War as a framework, Western historians’ discussion of the Russian Revolution has lost its edge and sense of relevance. Russians (and Putin’s government) are in a still worse situation, for they are obliged to mark the centenary without having made up their minds if the Revolution was a good or a bad thing. In the first half of this article, I will look at the evolution of interpretation of the Russian Revolution since the Second World War, attempting to put Western and Soviet (Russian) historiographical developments in conversation with each other. In the second half of the paper, I will turn to the problems the centenary poses for post-Soviet Russia and the ways its ideologists hope to handle them.
For many years, two different and relatively monolithic interpretations of the Russian Revolution held sway, one in the Soviet Union, the other in the West. In the Soviet Union, ‘the great socialist October Revolution’ was a milestone in human history, signifying Russian leadership in the historically inevitable international transition from capitalism to socialism. The collapse of the old regime in 1917 was no mere historical contingency, in the Soviet view, but foreordained: all the prerequisites called for by a Marxist understanding of history were in place. Similarly, the October Revolution brought to power the only historically legitimate contender, the Bolshevik Party, which rested on the support of the industrial working class of the Russian Empire. Lenin’s leadership and policies within his own party were never challenged, and the bond between party and working class was indissoluble. The Bolsheviks had no serious challengers on the ‘progressive’ side of Russian politics because, in the words of the famous Short Course of party history, all the other socialist parties had become bourgeois parties even before the revolution, and fought for the preservation and integrity of the capitalist system. The Bolshevik party was the only party which led the struggle of the masses for the overthrow of the bourgeois and the establishment of the power of the Soviets.
The dominant Western understanding, underpinned by Cold War hostility to Communism and the Soviet Union, was in sharp contrast to the Soviet. As summarized approvingly by Richard Pipes (whose own history of the Russian Revolution was published in 1990), Western historians of the postwar cohort (‘traditional historians’):
saw October 1917 not as a popular uprising but as a coup d’état carried out by a small band of conspirators who exploited the anarchy that followed the collapse of tsarism. This collapse they interpreted as avoidable and caused by Russia’s involvement in the world war and the political ineptitude of the tsarist regime … The Leninist and Stalinist regimes were seen as deriving their authority principally from the application of terror.
Just as the Soviet view was unqualifiedly positive, so the ‘traditional’ Western view cited by Pipes was unrelievedly negative. All the same, there were unexpected points of correspondence, albeit with the value signs reversed. Both emphasized the political over the social, saw the Bolsheviks’ leadership as essential to the October seizure of power, treated the Bolshevik Party as monolithic, and attributed to it coherent objectives, systematically pursued, that were derived from an unchanging corpus of Marxist-Leninist ideology. In neither model was there much room for contingency, spontaneity or unplanned outcomes. For each side, the interpretation of the Russian Revolution was too important to be left purely to ordinary historians. In the West, ‘Sovietologists’, mainly political scientists by discipline, were accorded special authority as interpreters, while in the Soviet Union this authority was given not only to the party’s professional ideologists but also to those who belonged to the sub-field of ‘party history’.
The Western consensus cited by Pipes referred rested on a view of the Soviet Union as ‘totalitarian’. The totalitarian model arose out of a perception of the inadequacy of the old ‘Left/Right’ dichotomy in politics and the structural similarity of Soviet (extreme Left) and Nazi (extreme Right) regimes. The Russian Revolution was seen by totalitarian theorists as a disaster, leading to suppression of all societal and individual initiative, and characterized by untrammelled state violence against the population.
This was the model of the Soviet system that had most traction among Sovietologists in the Cold War years, and even more with the broader public. At the same time, unlike its Soviet counterpart, it was never without competition. Early in the postwar period, the main competition in interpreting the significance of the revolution came from modernization theory. This put the Soviet Union in a broad comparative framework of societies making the transition from a ‘traditional’ (feudal, agrarian) system to an industrialized modern one. There was an underlying sense of progress in modernization theory that could connect with Marxist ways of thinking, and in general scholars of this persuasion were less committed to a negative view of the Soviet Union than those of the totalitarian school. Although the notion of modernization was not overtly present in Soviet discourse, ‘the building of socialism’ was functionally a near equivalent, and the term ‘backwardness’ (as something which the Soviet regime, in contrast to the Tsarist regime, could and must overcome) was omnipresent.
A major debate arose among Western scholars in the 1960s and 1970s. Often portrayed in purely ideological terms as a conflict between ‘revisionists’ and adherents of the totalitarian model, this also had an important disciplinary dimension, signalling the arrival of historians, particularly social historians, in a field hitherto dominated by political scientists. Historians had been marginalized in the writing of Soviet history in the postwar decades, partly because of a disinclination within the subfield of Russian history to admit that anything after 1917 was accessible to historical enquiry, and partly because the totalitarian model virtually excluded the possibility of social history by emphasizing the ‘total’ reach of control from the top. The new social historians, like their counterparts in other fields of history at the time, wanted to write history from the ‘bottom up’, as opposed to the ‘top down’. In a Cold War context, this was highly controversial. The ‘revisionist’ challenge split the field, and produced a great deal of acrimony and mutual accusations of political bias, which continued well into the 1980s.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the first and most heated fields of battle. Richard Pipes, already a senior scholar, in contrast to the revisionists, who were mainly young and junior, was one of the major figures on the anti-revisionist side. After giving the characterization of ‘traditional’ quoted above, he described the opposition as he saw it:
The revisionists challenged this entire interpretation head on. The collapse of tsarism, in their judgement was inevitable, whether or not Russia entered World War I, because of the mounting misery and unhappiness of the ‘masses’. The Bolshevik power seizure was no less preordained: far from being a conspiratorial minority, the Bolsheviks in 1917 embodied the will of the common people, who pressured them to take power and form a government of soviets …
The 1917 revisionists, in Pipes’ view, were essentially dupes of the Soviet regime, which, by giving selective access to exchange scholars working on labour, created a ‘built-in bias in favour of Lenin’s regime’ in Western scholarship. In a review of one revisionist work, he suggested—outraging all the younger generation of social historians—that ‘once in the Soviet Union they [the revisionists] tend to fall under the spell of “Marxism-Leninism” and to adopt, quite unconsciously, the main tenets of Communist historiography’.
The scholars of 1917 Pipes had in his sights published a number of major works, many of them dissertation-based and, from the mid 1970s, making use of Soviet archives as well as libraries. They had access to these via inter-governmental scholarly exchanges (run by IREX in the USA and the British Council in the UK) that gave selected doctoral students a research year in the Soviet Union. The exchanges were enormously important in creating a cohort of young scholars who—in contrast to their seniors—knew the Soviet Union at first hand and had had the chance to make friends and professional contacts there. A number of the 1917 revisionists were former students or disciples of Leopold Haimson at Columbia University, who taught late Imperial history under the rubric of ‘pre-revolution’ and, since 1956, had had close and friendly contacts with Soviet scholars. Some were Marxists. Most of them focused on the working class and, in contrast to their predecessors, emphasized working-class support for the Bolsheviks and their maximalist position in 1917. Alexander Rabinowitch’s first book showed the Bolsheviks to have actually been less eager to take power in the July Days than their supporters in the Petrograd working class and the Army. When the Bolsheviks finally took action in October, Rabinowitch argued in his next book, they were reflecting popular discontent and had ‘strong popular support’.
Though cautiously phrased, these were fighting words. Traditional political historians, as Pipes emphasized, were strongly wedded to the notion that the Bolshevik takeover in October was a coup, lacking democratic support or legitimacy. This issue of legitimacy was a highly fraught one during the Cold War, since lack of democratic legitimacy was a key element of the US condemnation of the Soviet regime. This extended even to the US Library of Congress, which until the 1980s declined to recognize the existence of the Soviet Union in its subject catalogue, using the perplexing ‘Russia, 1923 on’ instead. (Ironically, the Library had scarcely managed to reform this—not without objections from old émigrés and hard-core deniers of Soviet legitimacy—when, to general astonishment, the Soviet Union collapsed.)
From Pipes’ standpoint, Rabinowitch and others were just pushing the Soviet line. But in fact, Soviet historiography was in the process of emerging from its long Stalinist stagnation and was no longer monolithic. There were challengers and revisionists (not so labelled) there too; and it was actually with these challengers, rather than their ‘orthodox’ opponents, that the Western revisionists had most in common.
The orthodox Soviet interpretation rested on a number of axioms: the Russian Revolution was in Marxist terms inevitable (zakonomerno), not a contingent result of the First World War; it was not ‘premature’ in terms of the country’s economic and the proletariat’s socio-political development; and it was a proletarian socialist revolution led by the proletariat’s ‘vanguard’, the Bolshevik Party, which played the dominant role in Russian political struggles throughout 1917. No other party had legitimate claims to represent the working class, which meant that it was impossible to publish data showing workers’ support for the Mensheviks or the SRs at any point. Lenin was, by definition, always right, and in addition always had the support of the minority of Old Bolshevik leaders whose reputation had survived the Stalin period. Leaders of the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ oppositions of the 1920s, notably the unmentionable Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, had never supported Lenin on any issue nor played any significant role in the Revolution or Civil War.
Obviously, these axioms made it impossible to write a factually-accurate or even coherent account of the Revolution. But in 1956, with the destalinization initiatives of the 20th Party Congress, it became possible to start chipping away at them. The forces of conservatism and inertia within the historical profession and ideological bureaucracy remained strong, however, and there was also the problem of popular investment in the nation’s foundation myth. As John Keep pointed out, ‘Great October’ played a similar role for the believing Soviet Communist ‘as the Gospel story once did for pious Christians’: meddle with it at your peril.
Sometimes the Soviet critics of orthodox axioms presented themselves as challengers, as in the case of Anna Pankratova and Eduard Burdzhalov in 1956, but more often they eschewed overt challenge and, basing themselves firmly in archival sources, offered factual corrections with cautiously-phrased conclusions that the initiated knew how to read. That strong attachment to sources, preferably archival, and empirical detail was one of the things the Soviet reformers had in common with the Western revisionists, along with the fact that they were usually junior scholars challenging/correcting their seniors. In addition, both groups were challenging an orthodoxy that attributed total control and initiative to the Bolshevik Party, and were using social history for this purpose. When new-style Soviet historians like Burdzhalov called for an approach that established ‘the masses’ as ‘the driving force of historical development’, this may have sounded like a Soviet Marxist cliché to Pipes, but it was actually a challenge to the dominant Soviet (Stalinist) view—particularly entrenched in departments of party history, as distinct from general history of the Russia/USSR—that the party played that role.
Among Soviet historians, including the critics of orthodoxy, Marxism was a given. That was not so in the West, including among revisionist social historians, and the 1917 revisionists’ attachment to the working class and its dominant role had its critics. One of Rabinowitch’s students at Indiana later recalled that, while he was ‘attracted to social and labor history’, he nevertheless ‘remained leery of what I considered the idealization of workers on the part of historians who seemed to exaggerate workers’ “consciousness”’ (‘consciousness’ was a key word in the discourse of the Haimsonians). I had a similar reaction, though I was a revisionist myself, albeit mainly on the Stalin period. My The Russian Revolution treated the revolution as a complex 20-year event, encompassing ‘Stalin’s revolution from above’ of the early 1930s and the Great Purges of 1937–8. Sceptical of the significance over the long term of (pro-Bolshevik) ‘working-class consciousness’, I stressed, instead, the importance of individual working-class upward mobility, which involved abandonment of the working class for a higher social status, in the creation of support for the Soviet regime. An article of mine noting the political embarrassment to the Bolsheviks of the post-revolutionary ‘disappearance’ of the urban industrial working class (through factory closures and workers’ departure) during the Civil War provoked strong objections from Ronald Suny and other 1917 revisionists.
The young Russian émigré historian Vladimir Brovkin, a protégé of Pipes at Harvard, also crossed swords with the 1917 revisionists. His own research showed that within months of the October Revolution, working-class support for the Bolsheviks dropped off as the economic situation in the towns deteriorated, leading in some instances to a transfer of support to other socialist parties, the (not yet proscribed) Mensheviks and SRs. In 1985, he took issue with an article by William Rosenberg which, on the basis of extensive archival work, argued that, appearances notwithstanding, the emergence of economic-based discontent with Bolsheviks and Soviet rule among workers did not in fact indicate any basic shift in political allegiance of the working class. Implicitly at issue (as in Suny’s argument with me) was the question of the Bolshevik Party’s legitimacy as ‘vanguard of the proletariat’ and executor of ‘proletarian dictatorship’.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened the archives—including the hitherto inaccessible archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party—to Western scholars. But this had relatively little immediate impact on study of the Russian Revolution, which was no longer one of the ‘hot’ areas of Soviet history. Where innovative work on 1917 was being done in the West, it was largely on the Russian provinces and Soviet borderlands. A ‘cultural turn’ had arrived, ending a quarter century of social-history dominance in the historical profession, but it left only a small mark on 1917 studies, and was notable mainly for being announced by a Russian (formerly Soviet) and British historian, writing together—an early sign that the old ‘Iron Curtain’ boundary between East and West was crumbling.
The main impact of the new currents of the 1990s in the West, however, was to push the Russian Revolution off center stage. In the first place, the disappearance of the Soviet regime removed ‘the need to debate October in terms of the Soviet regime’s legitimacy’. In the second place, the existing convention of studying ‘Soviet’ and ‘Imperial’ history in separate compartments—implying a radical break at 1917—was now being undermined. Scholars like Peter Holquist and Joshua Sanborn began working across the revolutionary divide; and the First World War, long obscured in the historiography (both Soviet and Western), became visible again as part of a ‘continuum of crisis’. Orlando Figes’s very successful popular history of the Russian Revolution treated it as a tragic socio-political collapse that began in the 1890s. ‘What’s so revolutionary about the Russian Revolution?’ Holquist asked. Nothing much, as it turned out, if you noticed how many state practices came out of the First World War and/or were common to Reds as well as Whites in the Civil War.
In Russia, the collapse of the Soviet Union produced a historiographical crisis of an existential kind among scholars, journalists and the public with regard to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet period. Some tried to pretend it had never existed, seeking to reconnect across an empty space with the lost pre-revolutionary order. The spirit was one of national nostalgia for the monarchy and, to some extent, a search for alternative political heroes like Petr Stolypin. It became fashionable to adopt the view, long held by many émigré historians, that the late tsarist period had been a time of rapid economic development and cultural flowering, spoiled only by the random disaster of the First World War. Sympathy with the October Revolution was at a low ebb, and Richard Pipes’s 1990s monograph, treating the Revolution as a tragic catastrophe, was eagerly translated. When Russian historians got back their nerve to write about the revolutionary upheaval, it was largely in terms of violence and terror (Red as much as White) during the Civil War, with Vladimir Buldakov labelling it a new ‘time of troubles’ comparable to that of the 17th century and other periods of anarchic Russian bunt.
Bunt is the last thing that Putin and his advisors want to encourage with the centenary of the Russian Revolution. But that seemed unlikely to most Russian observers, who saw the Kiev’s Maidan of 2014—understood as opening the way to national disintegration and foreign interference in Ukraine—as a powerful discouragement. The real problem that the centenary of the Russian Revolution posed for Putin’s government was that opinion on it remained deeply polarized: to celebrate meant offending one substantial public, while to refuse to celebrate or condemn meant offending another.
As of 2005, a poll by the independent Levada Institute found that 56 per cent of respondents viewed the Russian Revolution in a more or less positive light and 31 per cent negative. (The positive number probably went down over the past 10 years, as Levada surveys consistently show young people’ to be more anti-Soviet than the over-40 age-group. In February 2016, a new poll rating different epochs of Russian history found that 30 per cent viewed the late Tsarist period as ‘more good than bad’, as against 19 per cent with the opposite view, while with regard to the ‘first years after the revolution of 1917’, 19 per cent held a positive view and 48 per cent a negative. At the same time, revolutionary romanticism was clearly not dead, as another poll asking the hypothetical question of how they would have acted in the October Revolution elicited the response that 22 per cent of those aged 40 and over would have actively supported the Bolsheviks and only 6 per cent fought against them. In the under 40 group, the partisans were more evenly balanced, with 8 per cent actively pro-Bolshevik, 9 per cent actively anti-(but 20 per cent said they would have gone abroad.)
Putin’s regime was not the overthrower of the Soviet one, but it is not officially its successor either; the relationship is essentially ambiguous. The choices before Putin are therefore much more complicated than those facing the Irish republican government when the centenary of the Easter Rising, part of the country’s foundation myth, came around in 2016: the southerners had to tread carefully with the northern Unionists and the British, of course, and emphasize that revolutionary violence was a thing of the past, but basically they were free to hold a non-problematic celebration of the heroes and martyrs of their historic independence struggle. In 1889, the French Revolution’s centenary year, President Carnot, addressing an enthusiastic audience in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, hailed the French Revolution’s overthrow of tyranny and enshrinement of the sovereignty of the people (albeit, as he was careful to add, through their elected representatives, not in a disorderly manner on the street). But what ideals could Putin celebrate with the resonance of Irish independence and French overthrow of tyranny? Socialism and equality? But the regime he heads is not socialist. Dictatorship of the proletariat? Wrong kind of dictatorship. International revolution? That was a non-starter with the Russian public even the first time round.
Not surprisingly, therefore, centenary celebrations in post-Soviet Russia promise to be very low key. Putin had indicated well in advance that 1917 remembrance should take the form of ‘deep objective professional evaluation’ (my emphasis), noting that at the same time that the event might be downgraded from a ‘revolution’ to a more pedestrian ‘overturn’ (perevorot). It was not until 19 December 2016 that he got around to issuing a bland and uninformative official order on the preparation of centenary celebrations and the formation of an Organizing Committee, whose first meeting would be held ‘in the winter’. According to a political blogger, the president’s administration was still making up its mind how to handle the centenary, and no decisions had been made about funding.
In March 2017, a spokesman for Putin explained to the New York Times that the Kremlin would ‘sit out’ the centenary as far as public events were concerned because it remained too divisive, and would be issuing no ‘official interpretation’; this news, however, was put out through an information conversation with a foreign journalist, not via public announcement in Russia. Invitations for an academic conference on the Russian Revolution, to be held in late September in Moscow under the auspices of the National Commission of Historians, went out only at the end of January; and the draft program, when it followed a few months later, was indeed so lacking in (Russian) political spin that it would not have been out of place in a grant application to a US foundation.
Post-Soviet Russia needs a usable past, but it is hard to see how the Russian Revolution can contribute. In contrast to Stalin, who has an obvious place in the post-Soviet national story as a nation-builder, Second World War winner and superpower leader, Lenin and the revolution do not fit easily into the narrative. True, the revolution was an event of recognized historical magnitude that ‘shook the world’, and in that sense an asset for Russia in the international-prestige stakes. But on the other hand, it was a violent regime change leading to prolonged social disorder, not good in itself from Putin’s point of view but even worse in that the victims were the tsars, for whom present-day Russians often feel nostalgic affection, and the Russian Orthodox Church, with which Putin has developed close ties. One could, of course, treat the revolution simply as a prequel to the ‘gigantic achievements’ of the Soviet (Stalinist) era, but that does not solve the problem of whether the revolution itself was something to applaud or deplore. As the new speaker of the Duma confessed, he had been thinking for months about the upcoming centenary, but was unable to see what he could do—‘the role of the Duma in Feb 1917, which pushed the tsar into abdication, would scarcely appeal to our current deputies’.
In appointing the Organizing Committee, Sergei Naryshkin suggested a moral-educational role for the forthcoming centenary, reminding citizens of ‘the value of unity, of civil accord, the ability of society to find compromises and not allow extreme schism in the society in the form of civil war’. This seemed to come too close to outright condemnation of the revolution to achieve the desirable balancing act. But the minister for culture, Vladimir Medinsky, had since the middle of 2015 been pushing a more elegant version of the moral-educational role. His idea was that the theme for the centenary celebration should be reconciliation (primirenie).
Medinsky, an ethnic Ukrainian born 1970 who is a political scientist by training, clearly gave serious thought to the issue. His personal starting point was the premise that revolutions are always bad and bloody, making things worse not better, leading to injustice and ‘moral degradation’, destroying society’s ‘best people’ and giving opportunities to its worst. At the same time, this particular revolution was a Russian one, still labelled ‘great’ in post-Soviet histories. In a speech at a roundtable on ‘100 Years of the Great Russian Revolution’, Medinsky did his best to negotiate the contradictions. The best way to see the Russian Revolution, he suggested, was as a tragedy, but with heroic elements. Terror on both sides of the revolution and Civil War should be condemned. But protagonists on both sides, idealists who were often heroic, should be remembered and respected (as long as they were genuine idealists and not war criminals). There is in fact no moral difference between them: seen in retrospect, ‘both the “reds” and the “whites” were ruled by patriotic efforts to achieve the flourishing of the Homeland, it was just that each side understood that in its own way’. Both sides contributed to the legacy of Russia’s past. By the same token, the Russian Revolution and the Soviet era are an integral part of Russian history: the continuity and succession (preemstvennost’) of regimes, from Imperial through Soviet to post-Soviet, has to be recognized. Raskol, the acrimonious splitting of society, must be avoided at all costs; and the worst thing that could happen to Russia with the 2017 celebrations would be a revival of old sectarian passions. Reconciliation is the banner that can heal the wounds and set Russia on course for the future.
One can only imagine the fury of Lenin, the great raskol’nik, of having his revolution celebrated in this way. But actually, even here Medinsky could claim a kind of preemstvennost’—from his precursor as first Bolshevik minister of enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, who at the height of the civil war expressed the thought that Reds and Whites were each fighting for their own truth, playing their appointed historical roles. (But Lunacharsky got into trouble for it.)
Putin’s order on celebrating the centenary made no mention of the reconciliation agenda, but a few weeks earlier one source quoted him as saying that the lesson that needed to be drawn from the revolution was:
reconciliation, strengthening the social, political and civil accord that we have managed to achieve. It is inadmissible to drag schism, malice, resentments and embitterment of the past into our present life, to speculate in one’s own political and other interests on tragedies that touched the life of each family in Russia, on whatever side of the barricades their ancestors may have found themselves.
Reconciliation has the support of the Moscow Patriarch and even the heirs of the Romanov dynasty, Princess Maria Vladimirovna and Prince Georgii Mikhailovich. They planned a visit Moscow and St Petersburg in March 2017 in the hope of reconciling ‘today’s supporters and opponents of the revolutions of 1917’, but it looks as if those plans were shelved. (In Ireland, early thoughts of inviting Prince Charles to celebrate the centenary of the Easter Uprising in 2016 were wisely abandoned.) But the problem with a reconciliation platform is that, while it may conceivably unite warring factions, it is equally likely to annoy partisans of both sides. Medinsky’s 2015 speech provoked criticism from left and right.
The French built the Eiffel tower in 1889 to commemorate the centenary of their Revolution. In 2017, the Russians have nothing so ambitious in mind, but Medinsky’s plan does include an edifice—a ‘monument to reconciliation’ (Pamiatnik Primireniia) to be built in the Crimea. The location was appropriate, Medinsky said, because ‘this is the place where the Civil War ended’, but obviously in light of the recent Russian takeover of the Crimea from Ukraine it carries contemporary symbolic weight as well. The suggestion was originally made to the Russian Military History Society, which Minister Medinsky happens to chair, by an émigré banker and art collector, currently London-based, Prince Nikita Lobanov-Rostovskii, whose many and varied roles include chairmanship of the International Council of Russian Compatriates (Mezhdunarodnyi sovet rossiiskikh sootechestvennikov). Medinsky supported it, as allegedly do Putin and the Patriarch, and an international competition for its design was announced on 1 December 2015. Its great ‘moral potential’ was hailed by a spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Culture, who described it in grandiose terms as not just a monument to reconciliation between Reds and Whites, but also ‘in a global sense … reconciliation of East and West, Russian and Western civilization, the overcoming of that schism, which occurred between Russia and Ukraine’. But although the monument is supposed to be unveiled on 4 November 2017, it was not until late January of this year that Kerch was announced as the site and the architects named. While Crimea’s Russian-led government supports the plan, there is also local opposition. ‘There can be no talk of any monuments of Reconciliation between Reds and Whites—who, by the way, betrayed their country …’ said one participant in the Crimean discussion. ‘We have to stop this return of Tsarism’.
In the West, conferences on the centenary of the Russian Revolution are being held from Sundsvall to Santiago, no doubt offering the ‘deep objective professional evaluation’ recommended by Putin. If there are passionate controversies waiting to erupt about the revolution’s significance, they have yet to show themselves. The plethora of conferences is perhaps more an automatic reflex at the arrival of a significant date than a sign of conviction that the Russian Revolution still matters—or rather, that it matters to anyone not professionally invested in its study. Writing in a Kritika symposium on the revolution at the end of 2015, Steve Smith suggested gloomily that ‘while our knowledge of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War has increased significantly, in key respects our ability to understand—certainly to empathize with—the aspirations of 1917 has diminished’, and other participants were similarly downbeat. Current circumstances might be ‘more conducive to dispassionate discussion of the Russian Revolution than they were twenty years ago’, as Don Raleigh suggested in the same symposium. But perhaps it was those very Cold War passions, impeding objective discussion, that made scholarly participants and the broader public feel that their arguments mattered.
With the Western public, the most influential recent interpretation of the Russian Revolution has been Figes’s ‘people’s tragedy’ in the mid 1990s, portraying the revolution as a chaotic disturbance that stirred up the dregs of Russian society (rather than its famed industrial working class), and caused untold suffering and destruction. Yuri Slezkine’s long-awaited House of Government, just published, offers an interpretation of the Russian revolution movement and early Soviet rule as analogous to a millenarian religious movement. Apart from setting off a new round of scholarly discussion, that may even solve the ‘relevance’ question for a broader public, since radical Islam, with its own millenarian aspects, has taken over the role of Western bugbear held during the Cold War by Communism.
In Russia, it remains to be seen if the ‘reconciliation’ message is premature. The 42 per cent of the Levada Center’s respondents who in 2005 said they would have tried to sit out the Revolution or emigrated rather than actively participating may be ready, but there remain vocal partisans on each side. The main television channels are hedging their bets. NTV will run a new 12-part series based on Alexei Tolstoy’s Road to Calvary (Khozhdenie po mukam), a trilogy about suffering in the revolution and Civil War written by a Count who was an émigré when he started it and a Soviet citizen when he finished. The ‘Russia 1’ channel is offering a new film called 1914, with Richard Pipes as a scholarly advisor, in which 1917 appears to be simply the mystifying spoiler in the future (in the words of the film’s synopsis, ‘nobody could have imagined that the rich, stable, flourishing Russian Empire had only three years and two months to live’).
Legend has it that when Chou Enlai was asked in 1972 about the success of the French Revolution, he replied that it was too early to tell. In a sense, that is always true of great historical events because our understanding, influenced by current circumstances, keeps changing. Although François Furet famously claimed that ‘the Revolution is over’, the French revolution was still an object of strong contestation at the time of its bicentenary in 1989. Thirty years ago, most Russian/Soviet scholars (whatever side we were on) felt that we knew what to make of the Russian Revolution, or at least that we knew what the interpretative choices were; at the moment, we are not so sure, probably because the shock of the collapse of the Soviet Union is still being absorbed. But times will change, as they always do, and the Russian Revolution, with its undeniably huge impact on the twentieth century, is too big a historical event ever to go away. Who knows what our twenty-second century descendants will be saying about the Russian Revolution when the bicentenary comes around?