A people's tragedy

So how should we commemorate the Revolution during its centenary? In 1889, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated at the entrance to the Paris World Fair of that year. The tower symbolized the values of the Third Republic derived from 1789. No such landmark could be built in Russia, where the commemoration of the October Revolution has divided Russia since the downfall of the Soviet regime. In 1996, Boris Yeltsin replaced the 7 November Revolution Day with a Day of Accord and Reconciliation, ‘in order to diminish confrontations and effect conciliation between different segments of society’. But Communists continued to commemorate the Revolution’s anniversary in the traditional Soviet manner with a demonstration in massed ranks with red banners. Putin tried to resolve the conflict by establishing a Day of National Unity on 4 November (the date of the end of the Polish occupation of Russia in 1612). It took the place of the 7 November holiday in the official calendar from 2005. But the Day of National Unity did not catch on. According to a 2007 poll, only 4 per cent of the population could say what it was for. Six out of ten people were opposed to the dropping of Revolution Day. Despite Putin’s efforts to reclaim the positive achievements of the country’s Soviet past, there is no historical narrative of the October Revolution around which the nation can unite: some see it as a national catastrophe, others as the start of a great civilization, but the country as a whole remains unable to come to terms with its violent and contradictory legacies.

Likewise, no consensus could be achieved on what to do with the founder of the Soviet state. Yeltsin and the Russian Orthodox Church supported calls to close the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow, where Lenin’s preserved body has been on display since 1924, and bury him next to his mother at the Volkov Cemetery in St Petersburg, as he had wanted for himself. But the Communists were organized and vocal in resisting this, so the issue remained unresolved. Putin was opposed to removing Lenin from the Mausoleum, reasoning that it would offend the older generation of Russians, who had sacrificed so much for the Soviet system, by implying they had cherished false ideals.

With such division and confusion, the commemoration of the Revolution will probably be muted in Russia in 2017. That too seems most likely in the West, where the Russian Revolution has retreated in our historical consciousness, partly as a result of declining media interest since the end of the Cold War, as our focus has been redirected to the Middle East and the problem of Islamic extremism; and perhaps in part because our growing concern about human rights, which dominates our moral discourse about political change, has led us to be less understanding of the emotive force of other values, such as social justice and wealth redistribution, which fuel revolutionary violence.

But as events in recent years have shown, the age of revolutions has not passed. The ‘colour revolutions’ in the Balkans, Ukraine, Georgia and the Lebanon, the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Euromaidan remind us of the power of mass protest to bring down governments, usually with violence. In all these movements there are lessons to be learned from comparisons with 1917. Their use of social media to organize the crowds, for example, would have been appreciated by Lenin. As the Jacobins were for the revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, so the Bolsheviks became a model for all the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, from China to Iran, as well as for the terrorists of our own age. All the methods used by ISIS – the use of war and terror to build a revolutionary state, the fanatical devotion and military discipline of its followers, and its brilliant use of propaganda – were first mastered by the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War.

We should not complacently suppose that revolution could not pose a threat to Western liberal democracies. The recent rise in populist mass movements across Europe should remind us that revolutions can erupt unexpectedly: they are never far away. Europe’s history in the twentieth century demonstrates how fragile democracy has been. If it won its great ideological battles against fascism and communism, it did so only narrowly, and its victory was by no means preordained: it could have turned out otherwise. As I wrote in the final paragraphs of A People’s Tragedy in 1996, ‘we must try to strengthen our democracy, both as a source of freedom and of social justice, lest the disadvantages and the disillusioned reject it again’.

London, January 2017

Preface to the 1996 Edition