In less than three years, Russia will mark an occasion sure to arouse controversy and emotion: the 100th anniversary of the October 1917 Revolution, one of the defining moments of the 20th Century. The revolution uprooted the Russian population, split the country, and in the upheaval that ensued, millions lost their lives or fled their homes to join diasporas overseas. What followed was the establishment of a Communist regime that would remain one of the dominant global forces until the early 1990s: The Soviet Union's birth pangs were of war and unprecedented devastation. As the dust settled, the victorious Communist Party set out to establish total control of their territory's social and historical narrative, ensuring that only the Soviet side of the story was seen as official, or indeed even seen at all.
It is not yet clear what line Russia's contemporary leaders will take in marking this centennial. During the Cold War, the Soviet government ensured that its revolutionary victory was celebrated as a massive, countrywide pageant in which the entire state must participate. Its purpose was to elicit a patriotic outpouring of gratitude for the achievements of the Soviet regime. Soviet media and Moscow's massive propaganda machine portrayed the actions of the Communist revolutionaries as just, necessary and inviolate. The "Reds" - Communist forces and their allies - were the good guys, while the "Whites" - counterrevolutionaries, monarchists, the pro-Tsarist nobility, Western imperialists and former Tsarist military elites - were represented as antagonistic, unjust, evil, and representatives of a rotten regime whose time had come. "Whites" had to be destroyed in order to make way for a new country whose bright future would be guided by social, economic and political egalitarianism.
A chance to review history
Following the dissolution of the USSR, when a more objective view of the October Revolution could be attained - with archives and numerous documents declassified - many competing narratives emerged about events that had been so carefully guarded by the Soviet government - including what really transpired during the bloody civil war of 1917-1920. Vladimir Putin will face a dilemma in 2017: how to mark the anniversary of the demise of the a Russian Empire that lasted 400 years, and whose former glory he is seeking to partially reestablish, while at the same time according credibility and respect to the events that birthed a massive Soviet superpower.
In fact, 1917 was marked by two Russian revolutions - the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in February, followed by a Communist coup in October of that year. The former event led to the establishment of a democratic Russian parliament as the central ruling authority - the Provisional Government - while the latter was followed by a civil war that wrecked the country's economy and destroyed its social strata and political order before the emergence of a strong, centralized Soviet Union.
During that pivotal year, the Russian Empire and its newly formed government faced a confluence of adverse factors that led to its eventual downfall: Its economy was under enormous economic strain due to World War I - millions of soldiers were manning the front lines and not the factories or farms. Meanwhile a string of military defeats at the hands of Germans begat a lack of confidence in the ruling elite's ability to assert the glory of the empire and lead the nation. The Provisional Government - made up of liberals, socialists and otherwise reform-minded politicians - had no answer for these vast challenges. Throughout society, competing political narratives and principles emerged to challenge Russia's monarchy and its political and social structures.
At that pivotal moment in the country's democratic infancy, pro-Communist forces seized the initiative and led a coup in October that disbanded the Provisional Government, seized control of the capital - Petrograd - and pitted many competing interests against each other in what would eventually become a civil war of - Reds against Whites. Soviet propaganda later portrayed revolutionary actions as necessary in order to save the nation, rescue it from economic and political decline, and establish a strong, centralized regime with the ability to lead the nation and realize its full potential. In the Soviet view, the bloody civil war was needed to sweep aside any reactionary forces that sought to return the Empire to the status quo - either by restoring the Tsar to the throne or by keeping the power in the hands of the nobility and the emerging capitalist classes who had driven Russia's integration into the global economy.
Following the events of 1917, Soviet propaganda rallied the masses to eventual victory with simple slogans that criticized "Western imperialist" meddling in Russian affairs and sought to portray capitalist entities as foreign to Russian historical and social principles. While the industry that brought modernization to the Russian Empire prior to World War I produced the working classes so intrinsic to Soviet revolutionary victory, they were seen as agents of foreign influence and of principles that stood in the way of a unique system championed by the Communist Party across the former Russian Empire.
In the past several years, Putin's government has employed a socio-political narrative that capitalizes on Russia's failed transition to a full market economy and to Western-style democracy between 1991-2001. Today, large segments of Russian society rue that decade. It is seen by many as a time of unrealized hope, of loss of economic power and global prestige, of a breakdown of the rule of law, a rise in criminality, and of military instability in regions such as Chechnya and the Caucasus. Putin's popularity is owed in large part to the real and perceived steps he has taken to centralize power for the sake of the country's economic and social stability. Even today, as the Russian economy and state face considerable pushback to their actions in eastern Ukraine, the majority of the population supports the government against what many view as Western influence in territories that were historically under Russian influence.
As the anniversary of both 1917 revolutions approaches, Putin's government will have to choose how to celebrate events with so much importance to the history of Russian state. Authorities could draw a parallel between the months from February to October 1917 and the years from 1991 to 2001, emphasizing that Western liberal notions of representative democracy and capitalist economic principles have repeatedly failed to address the need for stability of a large state with so many social, economic, ethnic, and cultural nuances. And while troves of information about Red and White excesses during the civil war are readily available to the Russian population, Putin would not let slip by a chance to emphasize that the October revolution led to the establishment of the Soviet Union as a superpower. Russians are already indulging in a revival of cult Soviet personalities such as Joseph Stalin, and Putin has called the dissolution of Soviet Union in 1991 "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." As the 2017 centennial dates approach, the Russian government will try to strike a balance: acknowledging the negative consequences of the February and October events, while seeking to drive home the idea that it was all for Russia's greater good.
(AP photo)
