1917, the revolution that continues to disturb

A century ago, on October 25, 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized control of St. Petersburg. This founding act would lead to the birth of the Soviet Union. Yet the fact that the October Revolution turns 100 this year seems to be arousing little interest in Russia. No official festivities are planned to mark the centenary. Sabine Dullin, Sciences Po professor and researcher at the Centre for History, explains the tensions and political issues underpinning this decision.

1917, or a brief digression between two imperial Russias

After much hesitation, Vladimir Putin decided not to celebrate the centenary of 1917. The Russian national holiday previously devoted to the October Revolution is no more. In 2005, the Kremlin replaced it with a “Unity Day” celebrating the expulsion of the Poles from Moscow in 1612. The Great Russian nationalism against which Lenin’s revolution was carried out is in fact a major stumbling block in Putin’s conservative Russia. The revolutionaries are accused of having “stabbed [the Russian state] in the back” by making peace with Germany. For those making this accusation, there is no doubt that without this betrayal Russia would have been in the victors’ camp.

The second “national” thorn in the new Russia’s foot—and a more painful one because it is more current—is the independence declared in 1918 by several territories which had previously been part of the Empire: the Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Baltic provinces and Turkestan. As far as Putin is concerned, Lenin, a champion of peoples’ right to self-determination, set a time bomb. Indeed, while these countries were reintegrated into the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a result of the civil war, they regained their independence in 1991 on the foundations established in 1918 and in the name of the right to secession enshrined in the Soviet constitution. So it’s hardly a surprise that 1917 is commemorated more in the Baltic countries and in Ukraine than in Russia. Putin can no more celebrate 1917-1920, a period of Russian division and disintegration, than can the majority of the Russian people. They see it as a harmful digression between two imperial Russias, that of the tsars and that of Stalin.

Uncomfortable democracy

In the wake of the Soviet Union’s downfall in the 1990s, people once again recalled that before October 1917, there had been February. The hope of establishing a new democracy in post-Soviet Russia drew strength from this rediscovery of the revolution driven by women and soldiers in the Petrograd winter. The tsar’s swift abdication had led to the creation of a provisional government that granted fundamental freedoms and universal suffrage. When Boris Yeltsin baptised the parliament elected in 1991 with the Russian name “Duma”, he was taking up the thread of a history of Russian democracy begun in 1905, revived in 1917 and aborted in 1918 with the Bolsheviks’ abrupt dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. The feeling of a missed opportunity for the smooth modernisation and democratisation of Russia in 1905 and again in February 1917 was widespread in the 1990s and fed into the work of many Russian historians. This is no longer the case nearly 25 years later. The centenary of 1917 in France emphasises the radical democracy invented in revolutionary Russia. But people refuse to remember it now in Russia, with the exception of those who oppose the dominant idea that an authoritarian power is more worthy of respect or more effective than a muddled democracy.

Lenin versus Stalin

Nostalgia for the Soviet system, when it exists in post-Soviet society, focuses much more on the USSR of Stalin, that “effective manager”, winner of the Second World War and unifier of the lands of Empire, than on 1917. We are even seeing portraits of Stalin re-emerge in public places. Some also look back wistfully on the USSR of Brezhnev, who offered what they perceive as very strong social protection in comparison to the current situation, and a low cost of living.

Be that as it may, Lenin, the great leader of October 1917, is not quite dead; his statue still adorns many squares and his embalmed body still lies in the mausoleum on Red Square, attesting to the complexity of constructing collective memory in today’s Russia.