Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 7 – Over the last
century, Russia has suffered two revolutions followed by two
counter-revolutions, and not surprisingly, its current leaders have found it
difficult to come up with a formula that recognizes that reality without
subverting the messages owf evolutionary change that they want to send to the
Russian people today.
In 1917, there was a real revolution
in February, in which the tsar abdicated and the parliament took power. The
failures of that revolution to restore order led to the Bolshevik
counter-revolution in October whose fall-out was to suppress the freedoms,
individual and collective, the first revolution had proclaimed and to restore
the empire.
That counter-revolution took place
in two stages, the first under Lenin and then the second and more radical form
under Stalin. Lenin during his few years in office put in place the
institutional arrangements which Stalin then exploited over decades to
construct a horrific totalitarian regime and throw the country back even
further than it was before the abdication.
Seventy-four years later, Russia has
another genuine revolution, in August 1991, during which the CPSU collapsed and
in the ensuing weeks the USSR
disintegrated with the three Baltic countries recovering the de facto
independence that they had never lost de jure and the 11 non-Russian union
republics gained their independence.
But once again Russia suffered a
counter-revolution and one that in many ways resembles counter-revolution begun
in October 1917. In place of the ousted
Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin simultaneously talked about freedom and democracy
but suppressed opposition in Moscow and in Chechnya and put in place the arrangements
his successor has exploited.
Indeed, Yeltsin even named the man
who has taken the second counter-revolution to its current depths, Vladimir
Putin, thus going Lenin one better who openly questioned whether Stalin, in
fact his creation, had the right kind of personality to head what the Bolshevik
leader thought was still a revolutionary regime.
Not surprisingly, given these
parallels, Putin has been anything but eager to promote a genuine commemoration
of what happened in 1917, because the real revolutionaries were in February and
they overthrew the tsarist regime which he likes to view as a matrix for his
own rule and the Bolsheviks were for all their revolutionary slogans de facto counter-revolutionaries.
An increasing number of Russians have understood this problem – see,
for example, Vladimir Annishenkov’s essay, “On the Centenary of the October
Counter-Revolution” (in Russian) on the Russkaya liniya portal (ruskline.ru/analitika/2017/11/06/k_stoletiyu_oktyabrskoj_kontrrevolyucii/).
But most haven’t because the regime has convinced most that those who call
themselves revolutionaries really are.
On this anniversary of the first
Russian counter-revolution at a time when the second Russian counter-revolution
is going full speed ahead, it is important not to fall into the same trap and
to recognize that reality and also the difficulties that Russians and so many
others have in recognizing, admitting, and taking it into account.
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