State Communism at 100: Remembering and Forgetting The Russian Revolution

23
State Communism at 100: Remembering

and Forgetting the Russian Revolution
jan plamper
The October Revolution, no matter how much we differ in its interpretation,

was a milestone on the path toward the first communist state in human
history. Like any revolutionary state, the founding of the Soviet Union was
accompanied by iconoclasm – by the toppling of tsarist statues, the tearing
down of portraits and the prohibition of old religious and monarchic holi-
days. Like any revolutionary state, the Soviet Union then filled the built
environment with its own statues, created its own portraits and established
new holidays. And, like any revolutionary state, the Soviet Union in its self-
descriptions professed to have created the new from scratch, in a kind of
big bang of signifiers, whereas in reality the new was the result of a recombi-
nation of preexisting elements.
To gain an understanding of Soviet communism and its legacy, it is, then,
worth taking a close look at some of these (partially) new statues, portraits
and holidays. Let us start with the annual cycle of Soviet holidays and its
evolution over time. In the Soviet Union the anniversary of the October
Revolution marked the absolute high point of the calendar of celebrations.
It was celebrated from 1918 onward and later ranged in importance even
ahead of 9 May, the day of victory over Hitler’s Germany in World War II.
People had both days of the October Revolution, 7 and 8 November, off
work, and these involved commemorative events across the entire country,
7 November with a military parade on Red Square in Moscow. In late 1991 the
Soviet Union imploded, and instead of Moscow there was now a multiplicity
of capitals. Accordingly, the culture of celebrations was also decentralized.
From then on, the former Soviet republics dealt with the memory of
For conversations on this topic, I am grateful to Dietrich Beyrau, Alexander Etkind,

Alexei Evstratov, Juliane Fürst, Mischa Gabowitsch, Boris Kolonitskii, Nikolai Mikhailov,
Nikolay Mitrokhin, Igor Narskii, Stephen A. Smith and Andrei Zorin.
581
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Australian Catholic University, on 23 Oct 2017 at 11:53:32, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316471821.024
jan plamper
the October Revolution as they pleased – in Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and

Transnistria, for example, people to this day celebrate the “Day of the
Great Socialist October Revolution.”
Out of an anti-Soviet impulse, Boris Yeltsin, the president of the largest
successor state, the Russian Federation, curtailed the double-dip holiday by
24 hours: From 1992 onward only 7 November was celebrated. The military
parade on Red Square was suspended, so that no military parades at all took
place on Red Square between 1991 and 1994. It was only on 9 May 1995,
during the fiftieth anniversary of the victory, that another parade was
carried out in the country’s symbolic center, though without military
technology. This is the way it stayed until 2008. In other parts of the
Russian Federation, post-Soviet, syncretic celebratory practices formed
which invariably contained some Soviet elements. Among the latter was
a laying of wreaths at the Lenin monument on Lenin Square, so long as this
monument had not been destroyed and the place not renamed. After
Yeltsin defeated his communist competitor Gennadii Ziuganov in the
presidential elections of 1996, he deemed the anti-communist political
forces strengthened to such an extent that he dared to recode the revolu-
tionary holiday. On 7 November 1996 he signed a decree that renamed it
the “Day of Accord and Reconciliation.”
However, and contrary to the Yeltsin command’s intentions, the
“Day of Accord and Reconciliation” (now the “Day of Unity”) never
shed its revolutionary meanings – after all, it was created as a response
to a date in the Soviet calendar, and 7 November in collective memory
continued to remain connected with “Red October.” To this day many
people and political groups celebrate 7 November in their particularist
commemorative practices as a distinctly Soviet day, from pensioner
communist sectarians with their Stalin portraits on Red Square, to the
Communist Party of the Russian Federation (Kommunisticheskaia
partiia Rossiiskoi federatsii, KPRF), a serious political force with real
support among voters of various ages. On 7 November the KPRF
leadership appears at rallies in red tracksuit jackets that have the party’s
logo on their left side, the Nike swoosh on the right and red KPRF
scarves, probably produced by a machine from capitalist South German
Baden-Württemberg in an embroidery factory normally making items
for football fans.1 During the 1990s, when the media were still relatively
free and uncensored, pictures of particularist commemorations “from
1 See cdn15.img22.ria.ru/images/106206/48/1062064816.jpg (2015).
582
State Communism at 100
below” began circulating, such as those of the elderly protesters with

Stalin portraits on and around Red Square, thus keeping the revolu-
tionary memory of 7 November alive.
There was one institution that could not but take issue with the
continued Soviet framing of 7 November: the reempowered Russian
Orthodox Church. No matter how many compromises the church had
made with the Soviet state, no matter how mired it had become in the
Soviet secret services, from its perspective 7 November marked the begin-
ning of an awful, godless time. Most likely, though it is hard to tell, the
church initiated the rescheduling of the holiday. In 2004 the interreligious
committee of the Russian parliament, the Duma, got things started by
proposing 4 November as an alternative. It reasoned that 4 November 1612
was the day on which the Muscovites ousted the Polish Rzeczpospolita
from Moscow, ended the “Time of Troubles” and established the
Romanov dynasty.
The date and the accuracy of the historical events were disputed from the
very beginning. Several historians pointed out that Kuzma Minin and Dmitrii
Pozharskii had not reconquered Kitai-Gorod and the Kremlin on this day.
The major points of reference in 2004, however, were not the opinion of
professional historians, but two historical events that could serve as prece-
dents. For one thing, it was the very first Romanov tsar, Fedor Mikhailovich,
who declared 4 November as the day on which Moscow was reconquered.
What is more, the second Romanov tsar, Aleksei Mikhailovich, designated
4 November the religious holiday of the Our Lady of Kazan Icon, one of
Orthodoxy’s most revered icons. In so doing Aleksei Mikhailovich wanted to
commemorate the birth of his first son, who was born on 4 November 1648
(and died a year later while still a child) – originally the Our Lady of Kazan
Icon day was celebrated in the summer.
More Duma committees and parties joined the legislative initiative of the
interreligious committee, youth organizations supported the project by
demonstrating in the provinces and on 29 September 2004 the patriarch
personally intervened: “This day reminds us how in 1612 Russians [rossiiane,
a term denoting all Russians regardless of ethnic background, which was
reinstated in the post-Soviet era; russkie describes ethnic Russians only] of
different faiths and different ethnic backgrounds overcame their differences,
defeated the dangerous enemy, and led the country to a stable civil peace.”2
(To be sure, the patriarch made this statement at a time when ethnic tensions
2 See www.afonru.ru/news/2015_09_10/4/.
583
jan plamper
were on the rise and attacks by ethnically Russian extreme rightists on

ethnically Caucasian or Central Asian Russians became rampant – despite
the fact that all shared Russian citizenship and were rossiiane.) At the same
time – and this line became dominant – 4 November was meant to
symbolize the victory over the “Polish–Lithuanian interventionists” in
1612. To quote an official explanatory briefing (dated 12 October 2004)
associated with the draft legislation, “On 4 November 1612 the warriors of
the people’s volunteer corps stormed Kitai-Gorod and thus liberated
Moscow from the Polish interventionists, demonstrating an example of
heroism and the unity of the entire people, irrespective of background,
belief and status in society.”3 As this quotation shows, the reinterpretation
of the holiday came along with an orientation toward an exterior enemy
who needed to be expelled from Russia. Thus 4 November was firmly
placed in today’s central unifying historical myth, the victory over Hitler,
and the holiday of 9 May. Victory Day is the only Soviet myth that has
weathered all zigzags and changes of the decades since 1945 and from
which the majority of former Soviet citizens, no matter whether they
reside in Moscow, Minsk or Mogilev, Brighton Beach, Berlin-Marzahn or
Be’er Sheva, define their identity, if only for the horrendous loss of lives –
27 million Soviet dead is the number that is considered accurate today.
The creation of the 4 November holiday thus meant, as it were, the
foundation of a second Victory Day, a second 9 May. The quotation’s
emphasis on ethnic and religious harmony and on classlessness also shows
that the shrill, revolutionary tone of 7 November was meant to be over-
written and a kind of social symphony created in its stead.
The legal change was definitively decided in late 2004 and “Unity Day”
(literally, “Day of the Unity of the People”) celebrated for the first time in
2005. Since then a new celebratory culture has come into existence, and yet it
is still unclear whether this day will ever be accepted. During its first year 2005
polls revealed that 92 percent of Russian citizens did not know what was
being celebrated. As late as 2011 18 percent still told the independent, credible
pollsters from the Levada Center that they planned on celebrating the old
revolutionary holiday on 7 November. Only 16 percent said they would
celebrate the new Unity Day. Similarly, in 2011 half of those interviewed
spoke negatively about the abolishment of the revolutionary holiday.
3 “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska, K proektu Federal’nogo zakona ‘O vnesenii izmeneniia v stat’iu’

1 Federal’nogo zakona ‘O dniakh voinskoi slavy (pobednykh dniakh) Rossii,’” www
.lawmix.ru/lawprojects/49350/.
584
The only authentic Unity Day that they spoke of was 9 May.4 When in 2015
the tenth anniversary of 4 November was celebrated, there were – despite
authentic patriotism in the wake of the annexation of Crimea, despite state
investments in balloons and flags in the white, blue and red of the Russian
tricolor, which were waved in the entire country, despite state-controlled
media – still voices that said Unity Day “had not taken root. The majority of
people simply sees it as an additional day off from work during the
gloomy November season.”5
So much for the revolutionary holiday of 7 November. Let us now try and
map the wider memory landscape of communism and the revolution: What
will be the locus of 1917? Where is it likely to be situated in the commem-
orative topography of 2017 during the 100th anniversary? What does this tell
us about the fate of communism in the first state that made it a lived and
political reality?
Gosudarstvo, or The State – The Power,

and the Glory, for Ever and Ever
If there is a leitmotif that runs through the polyphony, or cacophony, of the
Putinite politics of memory, it is that of étatism – gosudarstvennost’. In many
ways this term is a carryover from communist times, tailored, to be sure, to
the needs of global capitalism. The term signifies the belief in the intrinsic
power of a strong state. It further signifies a privileging of the executive over
the legislative and judiciary powers, a trust in the capability of the state to be
in the best position to solve social tasks, and a deep mistrust of federalism.
It finally signifies the necessity of economic intervention and making sure
that a part of the gains from selling natural resources ends up in state coffers
in order to fulfill the state’s many tasks. So much for the level of state
representations.
It is a different question altogether that in reality the tasks of the state are
executed by a mafia-like coterie of people that came into being not through
meritocratic principles, but through loyalty, family relations and common
socialization, especially in the KGB; that his clique uses the state as a vehicle
for its personal enrichment and not for the fulfillment of social, welfare-state
tasks; and that it has destroyed the division of powers and censors the fourth
4 See vz.ru/columns/2011/11/7/536568.html (Mikhail Solomatin, 7 Nov. 2011).

5 See www.gazeta.ru/comments/2015/06/11_e_6837529.shtml (11 Jun. 2015). On the uni-
fied celebrations with balloons and flags see e.g. www.dni.ru/society/2015/11/4/319567
.html (4 Nov. 2005).
585
jan plamper
power, the media, specifically in order to hide its personal enrichment from
the population.6
The strong state as an intrinsic value is of course difficult to reconcile with
the destruction of the state in the two revolutions of 1917. Consequently
everything discontinuous – anything resembling a break or caesura – needs to
be downplayed and the formation of a new strong state, the Soviet state,
emphasized. That is why all gosudarstvenniki, the étatists, strive to shorten the
distance between 1917, the end of the tsarist empire, and 1922, the beginning
of the Soviet Union, as much as they can and emphasize the natural con-
tinuity between the two empires. In so doing, the communism of the world’s
first communist state also moves into the background.
It is in endowing the strong, continuous state with religious legitimacy that
the Russian Orthodox Church enters the picture. And here the Archimandrite
Tikhon plays a special role. Tikhon heads the Sretenskii Monastery in
Moscow and is rumored to be Putin’s confessor. What is known for certain
is that he has accompanied Putin on many of his foreign travels and is
considered a likely successor of Patriarch Kirill. The 1958-born Tikhon, or
Georgii Shevkunov by secular name, had just graduated from the Gerasimov
film school in Moscow when, in 1982, he claims to have experienced some
kind of epiphany. After this he got himself baptized and became a priest and
later a monk. The film school part in his career is significant because Tikhon
has developed into one of the leading propagandists of the Kremlin and the
church. In 2011 he published a bestseller Unholy Holies, which in 2012 sold
more than 1 million copies and even beat the Russian translation of Fifty
Shades of Grey.7 His popularity, however, is first and foremost founded on his
film Death of an Empire: The Byzantine Lesson of 2008, which deserves a closer
look.
This movie is a technically elaborate pastiche of documentary, computer
animations and reenacted, docudrama-type scenes. What the viewer sees is
first of all Tikhon himself in the role of raconteur-cum-flaneur, who is at one
point placed in his black frock in front of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia; at another
he can be seen walking through a crowd of people on Venice’s San Marco
Square and a few cuts later he is montaged in a Venetian gondola. In between
there are 3D computer animations of Constantinople during its prime;
original black-and-white scenes of the victory against the Teutonic Knights
6 See Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2014); Mikhail Zygar, All the Kremlin’s Men: The Four Metamorphoses of
Vladimir Putin (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016).
7 Charles Clover, “Putin and the Monk,” Financial Times Magazine (25 Jan. 2013).
586
on the ice of Lake Peipus from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 Alexander Nevsky;
collages of icons and artwork; scenes in which little plaster figurines reenact
drunken binges of late Byzantine decadence (at one point we see a torture
scene reenacted in the original location, the Turkish catacombs; at another
point a young boy of African descent in a Byzantine, but actually Roman,
toga, deeply immersed in a manuscript) – all in order to underscore the
peaceful multiethnicity and intellectual prowess of the empire.
The film’s message can easily be summarized. Byzantium was the
greatest empire that ever existed, Russia is its legitimate, natural successor –
this is of course the old theory of Moscow, the Third Rome. Byzantium
was destroyed by external enemies who copied its scientific and other
achievements and then used them against Byzantium itself. Rather than
continuing the religious, Eastern Orthodox tradition, they only utilized
Byzantine technology to accumulate superfluous material things; instead of
souls they possessed only coldness, and instead of multiethnic harmony
they were capable only of monoethnic hatred. Byzantium fell apart
because it failed to solve the problem of the successor, i.e. the problem of
preemstvennost’; this issue had become acute under Vladimir Putin and
Dmitrii Medvedev the year before the film appeared because of the restric-
tion to two elected terms of office for the president. All of Russia was
worried about Putin’s preemnik, or successor.
The film’s often-pseudohistorical Russian language, reminiscent of Church
Slavonic, is enriched by elements from the present. Thus we hear that Venice
is in the clutches of a “financial oligarchy” (an allusion to the post-Soviet
oligarchs); that the “eternal problem of all empires” is the “separatism in the
peripheries” (an allusion to Chechnya and Georgia); that the good Byzantine
tsar Basil II “unrelentingly built a vertical of power” (an allusion to Putin) and
bequeathed to his successor “a kind of stabilization fund” (an allusion to the
stabilization fund created on the model of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund
by Putin’s minister of finance Aleksei Kudrin). In sum, stability, a strong state,
a single religion, which others convert to, the great social symphony and a lot
of soul – these form “the Byzantine lesson.”
Martyrology
Tikhon is also the mastermind behind another project. There are plans to
build a new cathedral on the territory of his Sretenskii Monastery, and not
just any cathedral, but Moscow’s tallest. It will be even taller than the
cathedral in the vicinity of the Kremlin, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior,
587
jan plamper
which Stalin had demolished in 1931 and which was rebuilt faithfully to the
original in 1995 and inaugurated in 2000. This new, tallest Moscow cathedral
on the premises of Sretenskii Monastery will be dedicated to the “Martyrs of
the Revolution.”8
Martyrology is another dominant framework in the church, both regard-
ing the memory of 1917 in particular and the entire Soviet period in general.
In it the revolution figures as an ill that came from outside and broke
into a healthy, Russian Orthodox-majority society. Closely connected with
martyrology are conspiracy theories – of the revolution as a Jewish con-
spiracy, a Masonic conspiracy, a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, a conspiracy
of Wilhelmine Germany, a “Western” conspiracy of the allied British,
Americans and Japanese (see more below) and so on. In the martyrological
framework, the church was forced to go either underground or into exile,
and individual church representatives were murdered, tortured and killed
in the Gulag.
Importantly, this is not a victim narrative: The key feature of martyrdom is
that it is positively charged. This is encapsulated by the motto of the priests
and monks imprisoned on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, the Ur-
Gulag, as early as under Lenin: “What do we need the charms of liberty, our
happiness lies also on the Solovki” (Chto nam prelesti svobody, shchast’e nam i v
Solovkakh).9 Paradoxically, this ended up legitimating the revolution and the
anti-religious policy of the Bolsheviks. Both were interpreted as a higher,
transcendental fate and had to be suffered rather than resisted. Ultimately this
created a religiously charged moral-historical entanglement between Russian
Orthodoxy and the apparatchik representatives of the Soviet state, also, in
a way, legitimating the former KGB agent Putin.
Some clergymen treat the connection between Putin and his confessor
Tikhon with humor: “In our confessions there is not very much specific
information. You just say ‘I stole’ or ‘I fornicated.’ Maybe you add a few
specific details like how much and how often. But you don’t need to be very
specific. If Father Tikhon is captured by some foreign intelligence service and
tortured, there would not be much he could tell them.”10 On a more serious
note, beyond martyrology there is of course another – second – connection
8 See izvestia.ru/news/546146; www.pravoslavie.ru/60331.html; www.the-village.ru/vil

lage/city/situation-comment/134659-kommentariy-dnya; red-sovet.su/post/15876/ro
c-celebrate-century-of-revolution-1917.
9 See back cover of Irina Reznikova, Pravoslavie na Solovkakh. Materialy po istorii
Solovetskogo lageria (St. Petersburg: Memorial, 1994).
10 Evgenii Nikiforov in Clover, “Putin and the Monk.”
588
that points to a much closer, direct personal relationship between the church
and the Soviet state. As is well known, many Russian priests who served in
Soviet times were KGB informants. It is proven that the post-Soviet Russian
Orthodox patriarchs – both Alexis II, who was elected in 1990 and his
successor, Kirill I, inaugurated in 2009 – were KGB agents. This is why
more liberal church circles do not hesitate to speak of the guilt that the
church burdened itself with. These circles claim real victim status for
the clergy members who were repressed in state violence as opposed to the
martyr narrative; they do not charge the suffering with metaphysical
meaning.
Conspirology
With the rise of the internet, conspiracy theories have become more
popular than ever, and yet Russia’s konspirologiia likely occupies a leading
place in the world. It is the basis of state-historical narratives: America or
“Gayropa” – all evil comes from outside. This is just as true for Napoleon’s
Russian campaign of 1812 as it is for the collapse of the Soviet Union: In the
former case it was “the West” that invaded the Russian territory; in the
latter it was “the West” that incited the republics to secede from the Soviet
Union in order to then incorporate them into its own sphere of influence of
NATO and the EU.
At first glance, however, the October Revolution is not particularly well
suited for conspiracy theories since the responsible Bolsheviks created the
glorious Soviet empire and the KGB. And yet a lot of conspiracy interpreta-
tions feed into the official historical narratives, not to mention the unoffi-
cial ones. For one thing, the old thesis of the revolution (and hence the
introduction of a communist system) as a conspiracy of politicians from the
liberal parties and the Freemasons, with a lot of overlap between the two
groups, is being reactivated. These groups allegedly weakened the tsarist
empire from inside and ultimately also from the outside, since they were
allegedly connected with international Freemasonry. For instance, the
cultural institute Russkiy mir, a soft-power tool of cultural diplomacy,
which was founded in 2007 as an equivalent of the Goethe and Cervantes
Institutes, is instrumental in spreading this conspiracy theory.11 Sometimes
the liberals and Freemasons get mixed together with the Bolsheviks and the
11 Vera Tolz, “Modern Russian Memory of the Great War, 1914–1920,” in Eric Lohr et al.
(eds.), The Empire and Nationalism at War (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2014),
278–80.
589
jan plamper
German Wilhelmine Empire, and later Britain and the USA, especially
when the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty and the Russian Civil War are con-
cerned: They allegedly cut vitally necessary body parts off the Great
Russian Empire, particularly by pushing it out of Eastern Europe. In this
variant of the conspiracy theory, the Russian liberals look more like
handmaidens of Anglo-American governments, ones who strove for
a unipolar world and ultimately global dominance.12 It is important to
remember that none of these historical narratives strictly adheres to
logic, stringency or purity. Putin, for instance, in summer of 2012 in front
of military officials mentioned the “the national betrayal by the Bolshevik
leadership” as a cause of Russia’s defeat in World War I – despite the great
esteem in which he holds the Soviet empire and its secret services.13
The conspiracy theories that get circulated on the Russian internet or in
popular books is another thing altogether, even if the boundary between
official and unofficial representations of history often gets blurred. In popular
literature, cyclical historical theories are rampant.14 For adherents of these
cyclical theories the parallels are all too obvious: In 1914 in the west of the
empire a short war began that first gave a boost to the tsar’s popularity; in
2014 in the south of the empire a short war began in Crimea that first gave
a great boost to the president’s popularity. Three years later the structural
problems of the tsarist and Putinist regimes had become so obvious that these
were swept away, and deservedly so. There is only one kind of interpretation
that official representations stay clear of in post-Soviet times: anti-Semitic
ones. Anti-Semitic interpretations of the revolution flourish on the web and
elsewhere, often by reactivating older texts, often from the revolutionary
epoch itself, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.15
Color Revolutions
Today’s memory of the Russian Revolution is haunted by the possibility of
a revolution in contemporary Russia, a revolution by the Putin system and its
12 See Nataliia Narochnitskaia, Velikie voiny XX veka stoletiia. Reviziia i pravda istorii
(Moscow: Veche, 2010).
13 Tolz, “Modern Russian Memory,” 257.
14 See, e.g., voprosik.net/cikly-rossijskoj-istorii/. For a skeptical assessment of cyclical
theories of history, see Istoriia i antiistoriia. Kritika “novoi khronologii” Akademika
A. T. Fomenko. Analiz otveta A. T. Fomenko, 2nd edn. (Moscow: Yazyki russkoi kulʹtury,
2001).
15 See Marlène Laruelle, “Conspiracy and Alternate History in Russia: A Nationalist
Equation for Success?,” Russian Review 71, 4 (Oct. 2012), 565–80.
590
ruling economic-political elite. This potential revolution in contemporary

Russia surfaces in a variety of forms. For one thing, it is well known that the
current elite is extremely dismissive of the so-called color revolutions of the
2000s – Georgia’s Rose Revolution of 2003, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of
2004, Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution of 2005 and most recently Ukraine’s
Euromaidan in 2014. There were also the protests in Moscow and other major
Russian cities in 2011–12 following the Medvedev–Putin job swap – which
transpired in late September 2011 and was perceived as anti-constitutional by
large parts of the voting population – and the rigged Duma elections of
4 December 2011. The protests lasted until well into the spring, even beyond
the 4 March 2012 presidential elections, and became known as the “Snow
Revolution.”
The current elite denies the legitimacy of all of these color revolutions
by depicting them as the result of negative outside intervention – as
orchestrated by Western secret services and Russian nongovernmental
organizations, which in turn are also represented as puppet organiza-
tions of Western secret services. The anti-foreign agent law (signed by
the reelected President Putin in July 2012) was, then, only the next
logical step. The purported attempts at external influence are placed in
long continuities – beginning with the Revolution of 1917 when “the
West,” the Entente, allegedly intervened, leading to the downfall of the
tsarist empire. There was a spectacular case in which a line of continuity
was constructed that can only be called phantasmatic: In April 2015 the
University of Nottingham historian Sarah Badcock’s doctoral student
was expelled from Russia on the grounds that she had entered the
country for doctoral research in the archives with a tourist rather than
a scholar’s scientific visa. In reality, the Russian news agency LifeNews
reported, the doctoral student was a foreign spy and a stooge of
her doctoral supervisor who “works on subjects the purpose of which
is the West’s attempt to create in Russia the conditions for a ‘color
revolution.’” Badcock and her supervisee both work on 1917. An
American colleague of Badcock’s commented wryly that the supposed
causal nexus between research on the Russian Revolution and the
sponsoring of a color revolution against Putin is as plausible as
the claim that “Starship Enterprise might have successfully countered
the Hunnic invasions.”16
16 See www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/03/british-student-laura-sumner-ordered-
leave-russia-media-speculate-spying.
591
jan plamper
Since 2014, however, the internal and external political situation of Russia
has deteriorated further. Wars in eastern Ukraine and Syria, a serious conflict
with Turkey after a Russian fighter jet was shot down in November 2015 and
a massive economic crisis have created a situation in which, in early 2016,
an early end of the Putin regime is discussed more and more often.17
Sociopolitically, Russia has become even more polarized. Even if Putin’s
popularity reached an all-time high after the annexation of Crimea, mino-
rities are radicalizing, on both the left and the right – in early 2016 a group
formed under “the Donetsk People Republic’s” separatist leader Igor Strelkov
that calls itself “Committee of 25 January” based on its founding date. Many
of these radicals are counting on a revolution in 2017, a vision of the future
that is partly founded on the popular cyclical ideas about history. The key
question is whether these radicals will manage to mobilize larger segments of
society – this is not that far-fetched, especially if the general population’s
economic situation continues to worsen and at the same time new photo-
graphs of opulent palaces in Crimea or new luxury presidential airplanes with
white leather seats and the double eagle logo, their own onboard fitness
studios, and golden sinks and faucets continue to surface in the public
sphere.18
What About Professional History-Writing?

Irrelevant
In Soviet times for professional historians studying “Red October”
meant studying the holiest of holies. To be sure, Soviet historiography
of 1917 was subject to ebbs and flows, to changes so momentous
that they would merit their own scholarly investigation. Now, it bears
noting that these traditionally influential historians of the revolution,
who are still institutionally based at the historical institutes of the
Academy of Sciences in Moscow and St. Petersburg, have not
been consulted in the preparations for commemorating 1917. While
professional Russian historians of the revolution are inundated with
17 See, e.g., from a pro-Western, economically liberal perspective, www.ryzkov.ru/in

dex.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=28414&catid=11:2011-12-26-10-30-14
&Itemid=6; http://www.mk.ru/politics/2015/09/18/revolyuciya-2017-goda.html
(18 Sep. 2015). For a different perspective, see the sociologist Lev Gudkov: www.m
k.ru/politics/2015/08/06/pochemu-v-2017-godu-v-rossii-ne-budet-revolyucii.html (8
Aug. 2015).
18 See home.bt.com/news/world-news/tsar-putins-100m-planes-cause-outrage-among-
russian-taxpayers-11363971207607.
592
invitations to Western centenary conferences during 2017, there is no

interest in them in their own country.
Yet there is plenty of interest in history and a highly active Russian politics
of memory. Suffice it to recall here a few milestones of the étatization of this
memory. In 2007 a Kremlin-supported new history schoolbook appeared,
which explained the victory in World War II largely as a result of Stalin’s
forced industrialization.19 In February 2009 Russia’s president at the time,
Dmitrii Medvedev, called for “criminal liability” in the case of “denying the
USSR’s victory in the Great Patriotic War,” and in May of that year
a “Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts
to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests” was founded.20
In February 2013 Putin called for a unified schoolbook that would end the
pluralism of various textbooks used in Russian schools and that would be
“free of inner contradictions and double entendres.”21 One of the “inner
contradictions” that figured prominently in the guidelines of the historians’
commission was the large “loss of human lives” in World War II. Suggestions
that the staggering numbers of casualties in the war might at least partially be
the result of Stalin’s misguided policies, his insufficient preparations for the
upcoming showdown with Nazi Germany (being caught by surprise on
22 June 1941) and his strategic mistakes as supreme commander will not
appear on the pages of the unified schoolbook.22 In 2014 an article by the
German doctoral student Sebastian Stopper, who had defended his history
thesis on partisans during World War II in the Briansk region, was placed,
right after Mussolini’s writings, on the Russian Ministry of Justice’s “list of
extremist materials.” The real reason was that Stopper had proven that
a German general was not killed by partisans in 1943 but instead had died
a natural death in 1979.23 And in March 2016 Sergei Mironenko, the Russian
19 On this, see the essays by David Brandenberger, Vladimir Solonari, Boris Mironov and
Elena Zubkova in the special issue “Ex Tempore: Toward a New Orthodoxy?
The Politics of History in Russia Today,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian
History 10, 4 (2009). The quotation about Stalin as “an effective manager” does not
figure in Filippov’s school textbook. On the genealogy and circulation of this canard,
see svpressa.ru/blogs/article/110256/.
20 See www.bbc.com/russian/russia/2009/05/090519_medvedev_history.shtml; rg.ru/
2009/05/20/komissia-dok.html.
21 See graniru.org/Politics/Russia/President/m.236312.html; rg.ru/2013/04/25/uchebnik-
anons.html; latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/the-single-logic-of-continuous-rus
sian-history/.
22 See www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-history-idUSBRE9AH0JK20131118; http://poli
t.ru/article/2013/09/18/history/.
23 See www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/russland-stuft-deutschen-historiker-stopper-als-
extremisten-ein-a-974971.html; www.zeit.de/2015/18/kriegsende-1945-gedenken-
russland/komplettansicht.
593
jan plamper
archival administration’s long-serving director, was fired because his institu-

tion had issued a publication that cast doubt on the myth of General Ivan
Panfilov’s (and the Panfilovites’) defense of Moscow in 1941.24 In a word, the
boundaries of interpretation are narrow for World War II because it is the site
of memory; in the case of the Russian Revolution they are quite flexible
because the revolution is considered less important.
Hence “a screaming silence” will dominate the forms of official memory of
Red October in 2017, according to revolutionary historian Nikolai Mikhailov
(Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg). Not silence, but “eclecticism” with
some elements condemning the revolution, and others praising it, will
dominate official memory, opines his colleague Boris Kolonitsky (European
University, St. Petersburg). They are in agreement that, if any official com-
memoration does take place, it will be produced outside academic, profes-
sional history. For instance, no official commemorative commissions, which
professional historians might have been invited to, have been formed. And
while the Ministry of Culture has allegedly provided a lot of money for
popular films on the revolution, professional historians have not been con-
sulted, nor has it transpired among them what these films are about.
Time and again one issue has been a bone of contention between official
commemoration and professional history in contemporary Russia: the new
(old) sacralization of power, here embodied in the monarchy. “How can one
speak critically about Nicholas II in public after he was canonized on
20 August 2000?,” asks Kolonitsky. The canonization of historical actors is
a problem few Western historians have to contend with, at least so far. Since
Charlie Hebdo it has become less absurd for artists and scholars in the West
that the practice of their secular professions might “violate religious feelings.”
Here Russia might become, much like after 1917, a laboratory for the future
for Paris, London or Berlin.
Summary and Prospect

One year before the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution that
engendered the world’s first communist state, the picture on the ground is
a heterogeneous one, made up of a variety of often-contradictory memories.
Among these are the Putin government’s fear of a color revolution-like
regime change; the positive meaning of the October Revolution for a part
of the current elite, whose roots go back to Soviet institutions and the KGB;
24 See www.the-american-interest.com/2016/06/06/in-putins-russia-history-is-subversive/.
594
and the negative meaning of both 1917 revolutions for the Russian Orthodox
Church. The government does not have to take into consideration nostalgic
revolutionary memory “from below,” since such revolutionary memory
lacks broad support in the population. Revolutionary nostalgia is restricted
to the KPRF and real, large-scale, popular memory initiatives, as those that
defend the memory of the Great Patriotic War are noticeably absent. There
are no signs, for instance, that Sergei Kurginian’s Soviet nostalgic organiza-
tion “Essence of Time” (Sut’ vremeni) has adopted the revolution as a cause,
even though it envisions a Russian Orthodox-cum-Communist “USSR 2.0”
with global messianic aspirations.
But it is clear that the centenary will not be forgotten, even if the state
chooses to practice “screaming silence.” Unresolved historical-symbolic pro-
blems, such as Lenin’s dead body in the country’s symbolic center on Red
Square, ensure in very concrete, physical fashion that the anniversary is kept
alive. Whether one likes it or not, 1917 is “marked,” and this markedness is
driven not least by a strong cyclical-historical subterranean current, instantiated
in cultural products, such as Olga Slavnikova’s novel 2017 from 2006, a love/
environmental disaster story set in the capitalist Riphean (read: Ural) Mountains
in which the city authorities, in honor of the centenary, stage a costumed fight
between members of the Red Cavalry and the White Guards that gets horribly
out of hand. Or the 2012 Russian-American dystopian science fiction film
Branded, known as Moscow 2017 in Russian – a title based on a scene in which
the main protagonist, a marketing executive, calls our present age the “era of
marketing” and credits Vladimir Lenin with starting it, pointing to Soviet
advertising and propaganda.25 This trend also moves another year into focus:
1937. The impending eightieth anniversary of the pinnacle of Stalinist violence is
always present in all emancipatory memory initiatives of 1917. Liberation – and
indeed Soviet-style communism – can end, two decades later, in a bloody
tsunami of terror. That too belongs to the legacy of communism.26
25 Further, see (in the field of the arts) e.g. Rosalind Brodsky’s time travel project at the
London Institute for Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI), in
which she travels from 2017 back to the Moscow of 1917: Suzanne Treister, “From
Fictional Videogame Stills to Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky, 1991–2005,” in
Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell (eds.), Videogames and Art (Bristol: Intellect Books,
2007), 138–41.
26 One of the fears of the Putin–Medvedev government seems to be that “genuine” civil
society will usurp the memory of 1937 and thus render this memory hard to channel and
control. Hence the – liberal, at first glance – condemnation of the repressions, encapsu-
lated in the cipher 1937, during summer 2015 are best understood as a controlled
étatization of the memory of Stalinism. See www.themoscowtimes.com/article.php?
id=528254 (19 Aug. 2015).
595
jan plamper
Bibliographical Essay
The Russian Revolution was at the heart of Soviet and Western historical
research from the beginning of Soviet-style communism until its very end
on 31 December 1991. Writing about the revolution always meant taking an
ethical-political stance and situating oneself within the bipolar politics of
the Cold War. In the post-Soviet period the revolution became depoliti-
cized – and insignificant: The center of research gravity moved first to
Stalinism during the 1930s, then to the war years, later to the postwar
period, and more recently to the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods. Only
as the centenary of the revolution came closer was there a spate of new
books and articles on the Russian Revolution with the crescendo likely
reaching its height in 2017 itself. The memory of 1917 – collective and group
memories, and the politics and symbols of memory, as well as speculative
forecasts about what these variegated practices of commemorating the
revolution might look like in 2017 – have yet to become the subject of
monographic research, although the first journalistic treatments have
appeared, most of them online.
With the approaching centenary, new surveys of the historiography of
the Russian Revolution and its legacy for communism have been pub-
lished. In a 2015 special issue of the journal Kritika, S. A. Smith provides
a state-of-the-art overview, forcefully arguing for a recovery of the central
category of class that typified all of the historical actors in 1917 and more so
than in any other revolution – this category had moved out of sight during
the new cultural history of the Russian Revolution: “The Historiography
of the Russian Revolution 100 Years on,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and
Eurasian History 16, 4 (2015), 733–49. In the same issue Boris Kolonitsky,
arguably the most important Russophone author writing on the Russian
Revolution today, criticizes the preponderance of memoiristic accounts of
the revolution and thus the lapse into the main interpretations of the
historical actors and the political currents they embodied. He also
bemoans the emphasis on elites that comes with the rise of the memoir
genre in Russian post-Soviet history-writing of the revolution – less power-
ful, less literate people thus move out of focus: “On Studying the
1917 Revolution: Autobiographical Confessions and Historiographical
Predictions,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16,
4 (2015), 751–68. Other influential surveys of the historiography written
from the perspective of cultural history (and after the end of the Soviet
Union) include Stephen Kotkin, “1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources,
596
Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks,” Journal of Modern History

70, 2 (Jun. 1998), 384–425, and, from the perspective of social history
(and during the early 1980s before the end of the Soviet Union) by
Ronald Suny, “Toward a Social History of the October Revolution,”
American Historical Review 88, 1 (Feb. 1983), 31–52. The historiographical
sections in Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1982), Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and S. A. Smith, The
Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), still remain excellent places to start. Edward Acton,
Vladimir Cherniaev and William Rosenberg (eds.), Critical Companion to
the Russian Revolution 1914–1921 (London: Arnold, 1997), contains superb
surveys of Russian-language work as well.
The general historiography of the Russian Revolution over the past five or
so decades was for the most part dominated by social-historical studies that
downplayed the role of high politics and individuals: e.g. Leopold Haimson’s
key essays from 1964 and 1955 republished as Russia’s Revolutionary Experience,
1905–1917: Two Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) and
The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Boston, MA: Beacon,
1968), and the many works by Alexander Rabinowitch, beginning with
Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1968). During the 1990s and 2000s
several (partly Lotman- and Geertz-, partly Foucault-inspired) cultural-cum-
political histories appeared: Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and
Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. II (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1995); Mark D. Steinberg, Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in
the Russian Printing Industry 1867–1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992); Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the
Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002);
Mark D. Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2013); Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s
Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002); and now also Jonathan Smele, The “Russian” Civil Wars, 1916–1926:
Ten Years That Shook the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Holquist’s influential work, especially, has shifted the focus from October
to the civil war and more generally from the revolution as an event to longue
durée practices such as surveillance that enveloped all of the fighting parties in
the civil war, including the Bolshevik Reds and monarchist Whites. Regional
studies have expanded since the 1980s – these have been mitigating against
597
jan plamper
the Petrograd-centrism of the historiography and highlighting the com-

plexity and diversity on the ground beyond the major urban centers:
Donald J. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1986); Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga
Countryside in Revolution (1917–1921) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991);
Sarah Badcock, Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Popular, widely
read accounts include both the conservative, political history by Richard
Pipes and a new social history in which a cast of characters stands in for
social groups: Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf,
1990); Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924
(New York: Penguin Books, 1998).
Comparative histories of the communist revolutions in Russia and China are
far and few between, not least for lack of language competency – S. A. Smith is
the sole exception: Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); but also see the
collection by William G. Rosenberg and Marilyn B. Young (eds.),
Transforming Russia and China: Revolutionary Struggle in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Most recently comparative and
entangled histories of empires include Michael Reynolds, Shattering Empires:
The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires 1908–1918 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011); Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the
First World War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2011); and Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the
Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
The centenary itself will furnish synthetic works by master historians of the
revolution: Dominic Lieven, Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of
Tsarist Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2015); S. A. Smith, Russia in Revolution:
An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Mark
D. Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017); Laura Engelstein, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War,
1914–1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
As for the memory of the Russian Revolution, Frederick Corney’s
Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2004) was a milestone in retracing early
Bolshevik commemorative practices, showing that October before the
mid 1920s was not a central site of memory and had to be actively
implanted in collective memory. More generally on the Putin-era politics
of history, especially as relates to the 2007 Filippov textbook, see the
598
articles by David Brandenberger, Vladimir Solonari, Boris Mironov

and Elena Zubkova in the special issue, “Ex Tempore: Toward a New
Orthodoxy? The Politics of History in Russia Today,” Kritika:
Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, 4 (2009). On conspirology
and cyclical theories of history, see Marlène Laruelle, “Conspiracy and
Alternate History in Russia: A Nationalist Equation for Success?,” Russian
Review 71, 4 (Oct. 2012), 565–80.
599

State Communism at 100: Remembering and Forgetting The Russian Revolution

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

State Communism at 100: Remembering and Forgetting The Russian Revolution

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

23

State Communism at 100: Remembering

The October Revolution, no matter how much we differ in its interpretation,

For conversations on this topic, I am grateful to Dietrich Beyrau, Alexander Etkind,

the October Revolution as they pleased – in Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and

1 See cdn15.img22.ria.ru/images/106206/48/1062064816.jpg (2015).

below” began circulating, such as those of the elderly protesters with

were on the rise and attacks by ethnically Russian extreme rightists on

3 “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska, K proektu Federal’nogo zakona ‘O vnesenii izmeneniia v stat’iu’

Gosudarstvo, or The State – The Power,

4 See vz.ru/columns/2011/11/7/536568.html (Mikhail Solomatin, 7 Nov. 2011).

8 See izvestia.ru/news/546146; www.pravoslavie.ru/60331.html; www.the-village.ru/vil

ruling economic-political elite. This potential revolution in contemporary

What About Professional History-Writing?

17 See, e.g., from a pro-Western, economically liberal perspective, www.ryzkov.ru/in

invitations to Western centenary conferences during 2017, there is no

archival administration’s long-serving director, was ﬁred because his institu-

Summary and Prospect

Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks,” Journal of Modern History

the Petrograd-centrism of the historiography and highlighting the com-

articles by David Brandenberger, Vladimir Solonari, Boris Mironov

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi