1

CELEBRATING (OR NOT) THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

The Russian Revolution lay at the very heart of the Short Twentieth Century of

Eric Hobsbawms 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 Lenins 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 Lenins

organizational model, the Communist Party.1 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 revolutions 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

Putins 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 paper, I will look at the evolution of

interpretation of the Russian Revolution since the Second World War, attempting

1Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes. A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New
York 1994), 55.
 2

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.2

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. Lenins 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

2Note that the date of writing is January 2017. Things may change further into
the centenary year.
 3

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.3

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 dtat 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 Russias 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.4

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,

3 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Short Course
(Moscow 1939), 224.
4 Richard Pipes, Vixi. Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (New Haven 2003), 221.
 4

mainly political scientists by discipline, were accorded special authority as

interpreters, while in the Soviet Union this authority was given not only to the

partys 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.5 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. 6 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. 7 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

5 The canonical texts here are Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA 1956) and Hannah
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York 1966).
6 See Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New

York 1995).
7 See David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of Americas Soviet

Experts (New York 2009), 180-205.

 5

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,8 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

8As a caveat emptor to the reader, it should be noted that I was one of them: for
my account of the controversies, see my articles Revisionism in Soviet History,
History and Theory 46:4 (December 2007), 77-91, and Revisionism in
Retrospect: A Personal View, Slavic Review 67:3 (Fall 2008), 682-704.
 6

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 Pipess view, were essentially dupes of the

Soviet regime which, by giving selective access to exchange scholars working on

labor, created a built-in bias in favour of Lenins regime in Western scholarship.

In a review of one revisionist work that outraged all the younger generation of

social historians, he suggested that once in the Soviet Union, they tend to fall

under the spell of Marxism-Leninism and to adopt, quite unconsciously the

main tenets of Communist historiography.9

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.10 They had access to these via inter-

9Richard Pipes, review in Times Literary Supplement, 23 March 1990, 305.

10Major works from the 1917 revisionist group included Alexander Rabinowitch,
Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising
(Bloomington, IND, 1968) and idem, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The
Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York 1976); Ronald G. Suny, The Baku
Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton,
NJ 1972); William G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The
Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917-1921 (Princeton, NJ 1974); Diane Koenker,
 7

governmental scholarly exchanges (run by IREX in the US 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.11 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.12 Some were Marxists. Most of them focussed on the

working class and, in contrast to their predecessors, emphasized working-class

support for the Bolsheviks and their maximalist position in 1917. Alexander

Rabinowitchs 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.13 When the Bolsheviks finally took action in October,

Rabinowitch argued in his next book, they were reflecting popular discontent

and had strong popular support. 14

Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton NJ 1981); S. A. Smith, Red
Petrograd. Revolution in the Factories (Cambridge, 1983); David Mandel,
Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime (New York, 1983) and idem,
Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power (New York, 1984); and Diane
P. Koenker and William G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917
(Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
11 On reactions to first-hand immersion in Soviet life on the part of exchangees,

see Samuel H. Baron and Cathy A. Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historical
Research: Reminiscences of American Scholars from the Cold War to the Present
(Armonk, NY 2003); Loren Graham, Moscow Stories (Bloomington IND 2006) and
my own A Spy in the Archives (London, 2014).
12 See Leopold Kheimson (Leopold Haimson), O vremeni i o sebe (interview),

Otechestvennaia istoriia, 2005 no. 6, 185-97.

13 Rabinowitch, Prelude.
14 Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks, xvii and 310-14.
 8

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. 15 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.16

(Ironically, the Library had scarcely managed to reform this - not without

objections from old migrs 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 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

15 The dominant coup version was exemplified in the 1970s by S. P. Melgunov,

Kak bolsheviki zakhvatili vlast; Oktiabrskii perevorot 1917 goda (Paris 1953),
translated as The Bolshevik Seizure of Power (Santa Barbara, CA 1972). Despite
the revisionists, whom Pipes disdained even to mention in his book, it was still a
coup in Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1899-1919 (London 1990), (ch.
11: The October Coup).
16 See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Introduction: Sources on the Social History of the

1930s, in Sheila Fitzpatrick and Lynne Viola, eds., A Researchers Guide to Sources
on Soviet Social History in the 1930s (Armonk, NY 1990), 4, 20 (n. 2).
 9

countrys economic and the proletariats socio-political development; and it was

a proletarian socialist revolution led by the proletariats 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. 17

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 nations foundation myth. As John Keep

pointed out,18 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.

17 This paragraph draws on Markwick, Rewriting; articles by Robert McNeal, John

Keep and Nancy Heer in Baron and Heer, Windows; and Nancy Whittier Heer,
Politics and History in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA 1971).
18 John Keep, The Great October Socialist Revolution, in Windows on the

Russian Past. Essays on Soviet Historiography since Stalin, ed. Samuel H. Baron
and Nancy W. Heer (Columbus, OH 1977) 141.
 10

Sometimes the Soviet critics of orthodox axioms presented themselves as

challengers, as in the case of Anna Pankratova and Eduard Burdzhalov in 1956,19

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,20 this may have sounded like a Soviet Marxist clich to Pipes, but

it was actually a challenge to the dominant Soviet (Stalinist) view - particularly

entrenched in departments of party history,21 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 Rabinowitchs 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

19 See Markwick, Rewriting, 51-62; Heer, Politics, 61-75, 187-97.

20 Burdzhalov, 1956, quoted Markwick, Rewriting, 50.
21 Otdely po istorii KPSS. All Soviet history faculties had such departments, and

they were often bulwarks of conservative orthodoxy.

 11

historians who seemed to exaggerate workers consciousness 22

(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 Stalins 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,23 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.24

The young Russian migr historian Vladimir Brovkin, a protg 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

22 Donald J. Raleigh, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Saratov, in Baron and

Frierson, Adventures, 141. On Raleighs later innovative contribution, see below.
23 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 1st edition (Oxford 1982), 4th edition

(Oxford forthcoming 2017). The upward mobility argument, totally out of

bounds in the Soviet Union as well as unpopular both with Western 1917
revisionists and their opponents, is set out in my book, Education and Social
Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934 (Cambridge 1979) as well as in an article
first published in 1978, Stalin and the Making of a New Elite, in Fitzpatrick, The
Cultural Front (Ithaca NY 1992).
24 See The Bolsheviks Dilemma: The Class Issue in Party Politics and Culture,

republished in Cultural Front. Responses from Ronald Suny and Daniel Orlovsky,
together with my reply, accompanied the original publication in Slavic Review
47:4 (1988).
 12

(not yet proscribed) Mensheviks and SRs.25 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 Sunys

argument with me) was the question of the Bolshevik Partys legitimacy as

vanguard of the proletariat and executor of proletarian dictatorship. 26

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. 27 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

25 Vladimir N. Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October: Socialist Opposition and the
Rise of a Bolshevik Dictatorship (Ithaca, NY 1987); idem., Behind the Front Lines of
the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922
(Princeton, NJ 1994).
26 William G. Rosenberg, Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power after October,

Slavic Review 44 (1985), 213-38; Vladimir Brovkin, Politics, not Economics, was
the Key, ibid. 244-50; Rosenberg, Reply, 251-6.
27 The pioneer of regional studies was Donald J. Raleigh, with his Revolution on

the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca, NY 1986), Experiencing Russias Civil War:
Politics, Society and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov,1917-1922 (Princeton NJ,
2002), and the edited volume Provincial Landscapes; Local Dimensions of Soviet
Power, 1917-1953 (Pittsburgh, 2001). The collapse of the Soviet Union into its
constituent republics gave a tremendous boost to empire studies, where Ron
Suny was one of the leaders: see Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A
State of Nations. Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Ozford
2001).
 13

historian, writing together28 - 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 regimes legitimacy.29 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

Holquist and Joshua Sanborn began working across the revolutionary divide; 30

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 Figess

very successful popular history of the Russian Revolution treated it as a tragic

socio-political collapse that began in the 1890s.31 Whats so revolutionary about

the Russian Revolution? Peter 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.32

28 Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution. the
Languages and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
29 Peter Holquist, Whats so Revolutionary about the Russian Revolution? The

New-Style Politics, 1914-1921, in David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis eds.

Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (Basingstoke 2000), 87-8.
30 Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russias Continuum of Crisis,

1914-1921 (Cambridge, MA 2002). Joshua A., Sanborn, Drafting the Russian

Nation. Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics 1905-1925 (De Kalb,
Ill.., 2003); idem, Imperial Apocalypse. The Great War and the Destruction of the
Russian Empire (Oxford, 2014); Ianni Kotsonis, States of Obligation: Taxes and
Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic (Toronto 2014)..
31 Orlando Figes, A Peoples Tragedy. The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (London

1996).
32 Holquist, Whats so Revolutionary?, in Hoffmann and Kotsonis. Russian

Modernity, 87-11. To be fair, Holquist does, if only in the last paragraph,

introduce Soviet ideology as something new brought in by the Russian
 14

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.33 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 migr 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.34

Sympathy with the October Revolution was at a low ebb, and Richard Pipess

1990s monograph, treating the Revolution as a tragic catastrophe, was eagerly

translated.35 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, 36 with Vladimir Buldakov labelling it a new

Revolution. But, given how tired a topic Soviet ideology is, that did not offer a
research agenda anywhere near as appealing as the First World War.
33 See Vronique Garros, Dans lEx-URSS: de la difficult dcrire lhistoire,

Annales. conomies, Socits, Civilisations 47:4 (1992), 985-1002; Sheila

Fitzpatrick, Ending the Revolution: Reflections on Soviet History and its
Interpreters, Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture, Proceedings of the British Academy
162 (2009), 40..
34 This was already in the air during perestroika: for disapproving references to

its popularity, see the discussion between historians Pavel Volobuev and Yuri
Poliakov with the head of the ideology sector of the Communist Party, V.
Melnichenko (undated, but probably early 1991):
http://scepsis.net/library/id_1948.html, accessed 20 October 2016.
35
Richard Paips (Richard Pipes), (, 2005) [Russian
translation of Russian Revolution (1990)]. This was one of comparatively few
Western works on 1917 to be translated; the bulk of the post-Soviet translations were
in ROSSPENs History of Stalinism series.
36 e.g. O. V. Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu krasnymi i belymi (1917-1920)

(Moscow 2006); A. L. Litvin, Krasnyi terror i belyi terror, 1918-22 g. (Kazan

1995).
 15

time of troubles comparable to that of the 17th century and other periods of

anarchic Russian bunt . 37

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 Ukraines orange revolution - understood as opening the

way to national disintegration and foreign interference in the country - as a

powerful discouragement. 38 The real problem that the centenary of the Russian

Revolution posed for Putins 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% of

respondents viewed the Russian Revolution in a more or less positive light and

31% negative.39 (The positive number probably went down over the past ten

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

37 V. P. Buldakov, Krasnaia smuta; Priroda i posledstviia revoliutsionnogo nasilia

(Moscow 1997). The bunt image is echoed in the epigraph to a recent English
work, Brenton, ed., Historically Inevitable? (2016): Pushkins Russian bunt,
mindless and merciless.
38 See comments of a political scientist (Aleksei Makarkin) and an organizer of

the Moscow street protests of 2011-12 (Gennadii Gudkov) quoted in Mikhail

Zubov, Prizrak revoliutsii - 2017, Moskovskii komsomolets, 29 December 2016.
Despite favouring a (peaceful) restoration of Soviet power, Gudkov told the
journalist that the most important thing is that protest moods should not be
used by a fifth column for weakening or destroying the country and taking
power according to the Kiev scenario.
39 http://www.levada.ru/2005/11/02/otnoshenie-rossiyan-k-oktyabrskoj

revolyutsii-1917-goda, accessed 11 January 2017. Of the positive group (56%),

26% agreed that the October Revolution had opened a new era in the history of
the peoples of Russia while 31% thought it had given a push to their social and
economic development. On the negative side, 16% thought it had been a brake
on development and 15% a catastrophe.
 16

of Russian history found that 30% viewed the late Tsarist period as more good

than bad, as against 19% with the opposite view, while with regard to the first

years after the revolution of 1917, 19% held a positive view and 48% a

negative.40 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% of those aged 40 and over

would have actively supported the Bolsheviks and only 6% fought against them.

In the under 40 group, the partisans were more evenly balanced, with 8%

actively pro-Bolshevik, 9% actively anti-(but 20% said they would have gone

abroad).41

Putins 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

countrys foundation myth, came around in 2016: the southeners 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 struggle42 In 1889, the French Revolutions centenary year,

40 http://www.levada.ru/2016/03/01/praviteli-v-otechestvennoj-istorii/,
accessed 11 January 2017. The big negatives were for the Gorbachev and Eltsin
eras. Stalins time had a 40% positive rating (higher than Khrushchevs), but
almost as many people were negative. Putins positive Rating was 70% (up from
51% in2012).
41 http://www.levada.ru/2005/11/02/otnoshenie-rossiyan-k-oktyabrskoj

revolyutsii-1917-goda, accessed 11 January 2017.

42 See Ireland 2016: the Official Centenary Programme, www.ireland.ie,

accessed 13 January 2017; Robert Fisk, Irelands Easter Rising and how History
 17

President Carnot, addressing an enthusiastic audience in the Hall of Mirrors at

Versailles, hailed the French Revolutions 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)43

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).44 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,45 whose first meeting would be held in the winter.46

is Being Twisted in Celebrating the Struggle for Independence, The Independent

(London), 18 January 2016.
43 reported from London in the Melbourne Argus, 7 May 1889.
44 Press release, RIA Novosti, 5 November 2014:

https://ria.ru/politics/20141105/1031839813.html, accessed 26 October 2016.

45http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/001201612200017?index=1

&rangeSize=1, accessed 7 January 2017.

46 Press release, RIA Novosti, 5 November 2014:

https://ria.ru/politics/20141105/1031839813.html, accessed 26 October 2016.

46http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/001201612200017?index=1

&rangeSize=1, accessed 7 January 2017. Announcement of the appointment of

the committees chairman Academician Anatoly Torkunov, diplomat and rector
of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations was made by Sergei
Naryshkin, chairman of the Russian Historical Society (RIO) and a former
 18

According to a political blogger, the presidents administration was still making

up its mind how to handle the centenary, and no decisions had been made about

funding.47 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 issue no official

interpretation;48 this news, however, was put out through an informal

conversation with a foreign journalist, not via public announcement in Russia.

Invitations for an academic conference on the 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 an American

foundation.49

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, World War II 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

speaker of the State Duma and head of the presidents administration, recently
appointed head of the External Intelligence Service (Sluzhba vneshnei razvedki)
of the Russian Federation: http://ng-nov.ru/2016/12/28/narishkin-schitaet-
stoletie-revolyucii-1917-povodom, accessed 7 Jan 2017. The Committee has yet
(mid-January 2017) shown no signs of life.
47 A. Kostiukhin, How will Russia note the centenary of the revolution? 15 Dec

2016: http://akostyuhin.livejournal.com/286561.html, accessed 7 January 2017.

48 Neil MacFarquhar, Revolution? What Revolution? Russia Asks 100 Later, The

New York Times, 10 March 2017.

49 Emails to author from National Committee, 31 January (invitation) and 28

March 2017 (preliminary program). Among the five panels listed were
Revolution and violence (a very Western formulation) and The collapse of
empires.
 19

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 Putins point of view but even

worse in that the victims were the tsars, for whom presentday 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 off 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.50

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.51 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 (primireniia).

50 quoted A. Kostiukhin, How will Russia note the centenary of the revolution?
15 Dec 2016: http://akostyuhin.livejournal.com/286561.html, accessed 7
January 2017.
51
https//ria.ru/society/20161227/1484741774.html, accessed 7 Jan 2017.
 20

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

societys best people and giving opportunities to its worst. 52 At the same time,

this particular revolution was a Russian one, still labelled great in post-Soviet

histories. 53 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 Russias 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

52 Vladimir Medinsky, Revoliutsiia. Mify i realnost. n.d.

http://patriotplatform.ru./news/4058.html, accessed 7 Jan 2017.
53
For its use in officially-approved Russian history textbooks, see
http://expedrt.ru.2016/03/4/v-rossii-prodjet-prazdnovanie-100-letiya-revolyutsii/,
accessed 10.26.2016. Medinskys key speech on reconciliation was delivered at a
roundtable in May 2015 on 100 Years of the Great Russian Revolution:
http://edinstvoistorii.odnako.org, accessed 26 Oct 2016.
 21

sectarian passions. Reconciliation is the banner that can heal the wounds and set

Russia on course for the future. 54

One can only imagine the fury of Lenin, the great raskolnik, 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. 55)

Putins 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 ones 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.56

Reconciliation has the support of the Moscow Patriarch and even the

heirs of the Romanov dynasty, Princess Maria Vladimirovna and Prince Georgii

54
Speech at roundtable in May 2015 on 100 Years of the Great Russian Revolution:
http://edinstvoistorii.odnako.org, accessed 26 Oct 2016.
55 In his play Magi (1919): see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of

Enlightenment. Soviet Organization of Education, and the Arts under Lunacharsky,

October 1917-1921 (Cambridge 1970), 52-9.
56 Quoted from a message from Putin to the Federal meeting (Federalnoe

sobranie, 1 December 2016, not otherwise identified:

http://akostyuhin.livejournal.com/286561.html, accessed 7 January 2017.
 22

Mikhailovich. They planned a visit Moscow and St Petersburg in March 2017 in

the hope of reconciling todays supporters and opponents of the revolutions of

1917,57 but it looks as those plans were shelved. (In Ireland, early thoughts of

inviting Prince Charles to celebrate the centenary of the Easter Uprising in 2016

were also wisely abandoned.58) 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. Medinskys 2015 speech provoked criticism from both

left and right. 59

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

Medinskys plan does include an edifice - a monument to reconciliation

(Pamiatnik Primireniia) to be built in the Crimea.60 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 (MVIO), which Minister Medinsky

happens to chair, by an migr 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

57 Romanovs: RT news item; https://russian.rt.com/russia/article/347302-

romanov-vizit-rossiya-revolyutsiya, accessed 7 January 2017.
2016http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/001201612200017?inde
x=1&rangeSize=1, accessed 7 January 2017.
58 Fisk, Irelands Easter Rising.
59 See reports in gazeta.ru: https://gazeta.ru.science/2015/05/20 a

6695345.shtml, accessed 7 January 2017.

60 speech of 20 May 2015, loc.cit.
 23

allegedly do Putin and the Patriarch, and an international competition for its

design was announced on 1 December 2015. 61 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. 62 But although the monument is supposed to be unveiled

on 4 November 2017, it was not until late January that Kerch was announced as

the site and the architects named.63 While Crimeas Russian-led government

supports the plan,64 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.65 .

61 See postings on competition by RVIO: http://rvio.ru/activities/news/item-

2933; accessed 11 January 2017; interview with L-R, 7 February 2016:
https://lenta.ru/articles/2016/02/07/prince, accessed 12 January 2017;
biogoraphy: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobanov-Rostovskii_Nikita
Dmitrievich, accessed 12 January 2017.
62 Quoted in Iskra pravdy, 3 December 2015, 1.
63 Pamiatnik Primireniia ustanoviat v Kerchi vozle mosta v Krym, 25 January

2017: http://moicrimea.ru/pamiatnik-primireniia-ystanoviat-v-kerchi-vozle-
mosta-v-krym.html, accessed 19 April 2017. For earlier information on the plan,
see the 2015 announcement of the competition
(www.nakanune.ru/news/2015/11/30/22421796, accessed 12 January 2017) and a
follow-up call for submissions in October 2016
(http://rvio.histrf.ru/activities/projects/item-2917, accessed 11 January 2017).
64 In the person of Georgii Muradov, identified both as head of the Crimean

government and permanent representative of the Crimean Republic under the

president of the Russian Federation: Iskra pravdy, 3 December 2015, 1
65 Leonid Grach, identified as former chairman of the Crimean Supreme Soviet:

Iskra pravdy, 3 December 2015, 1.

 24

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 revolutions 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,66 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. 67 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 Figess peoples 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

66 S. A. Smith, The Historiography of the Russian Revolution 100 Years On,

Kritika 16:4 (2015), 733.
67 Donald J. Raleigh, The Russian Revolution after all these 100 Years, Kritika

16:4 (2015), 788.

 25

untold suffering and destruction.68 On the horizon (due for publication in the fall

of 2017) is Yuri Slezkines long-awaited House of Government, offering an

interpretation of the Russian revolution movement and early Soviet rule as

analogous to a millenarian religious movement.69 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% of the Levada Centers respondents who in 2005 said they

would have tried to sit out the Revolution or emigrated rather than actively

participating may be ready,70 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 Tolstoys Road to Calvary (Khozhdenie po mukam), a

trilogy about suffering in the revolution and Civil War written by a Count who

was an migr 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 films synopsis, nobody could have imagined that

the rich, stable, flourishing Russian Empire had only three years and two months

to live).71

68 Figes, Peoples Tragedy.

69 Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government (Princeton, NJ forthcoming Fall 2017).
70 http://www.levada.ru/2005/11/02/otnoshenie-rossiyan-k-oktyabrskoj

revolyutsii-1917-goda, accessed 11 January 2017.

71 Quoted http://akostyuhin.livejournal.com/286561.html, accessed 7 January

2017.
 26

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.72 In a sense, that

is always true of great historical events because our understanding, influenced

by current circumstances, keeps changing. Although Franois 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. 73 Thirty years ago

most Russian/Soviet scholars (whatever side we were on) felt that we knew

what to make of it 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?

72 In cold fact, it appears that he thought he was being asked about the Paris
student revolt of 1968: www.historytoday.com/blog/news-blog/dean-
nicholas/zhou-enlai-famous-saying-debunked, accessed 15 January 2017.
73 On the bicentenary arguments of French historians, including Furet, see Steven

L. Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution: disputed legacies: France, 1789-1989 (Ithaca, NY

1995).