His initiative began in schools, where textbooks deemed too negative about the Soviet period were denied approval by the Ministry of Education, effectively removing them from the classroom. In 2007, Putin told a conference of history teachers:
As to some problematic pages in our history, yes, we have had them. But what state hasn’t? And we’ve had fewer of such pages than some other [states]. And ours were not as horrible as those of some others. Yes, we have had some terrible pages: let us remember the events beginning in 1937, let us not forget about them. But other countries have had no less, and even more. In any case, we did not pour chemicals over thousands of kilometers or drop on a small country seven times more bombs than during the entire World War II, as the Americans did in Vietnam. Nor did we have other black pages, such as Nazism, for instance. All sorts of things happen in the history of every state. And we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with guilt …
Putin did not deny Stalin’s crimes. But he argued for the need not to dwell on them, to balance them against his achievements as the builder of the country’s ‘glorious Soviet past’. In a manual for history teachers commissioned by the President and heavily promoted in Russian schools, Stalin was portrayed as an ‘effective manager’ who ‘acted rationally in conducting a campaign of terror to ensure the country’s modernization’.
Polls suggested that the Russians shared this troubling attitude to the Revolution’s violence. According to a survey conducted in 2007 in three cities (St Petersburg, Kazan and Lenin’s birthplace, Ulyanovsk), 71 per cent of the population thought that Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka (the forerunner of the KGB) in 1917, had ‘protected public order and civic life’. Only 7 per cent believed he was a ‘criminal and executioner’. More disturbing was the survey’s finding that while nearly everyone was well informed about the mass repressions under Stalin – with most acknowledging that ‘between 10 and 30 million victims’ had suffered – two-thirds of these respondents still believed that Stalin had been positive for the country. Many thought that, under Stalin, people had been ‘kinder and more compassionate’. Even with knowledge of the millions who were killed, the Russians, it appeared, continued to accept the Bolshevik idea that mass state violence can be justified to meet the Revolution’s goals.
In the autumn of 2011, millions of Russians watched the TV show The Court of Time (Sud vremeni), in which various figures and episodes from Russian history were judged in a mock trial with advocates, witnesses and a jury of the viewers, who reached their verdict by voting on the telephone. The judgements arrived at in this trial by state TV do not hold out much hope for a change in Russian attitudes. Presented with the evidence of Stalin’s war against the peasants and the catastrophic effects of forcible collectivisation, in which millions died of starvation and many more were sent to the Gulag camps or remote penal settlements, 78 per cent of the viewers nonetheless believed that these policies were justified, a ‘terrible necessity’ for Soviet industrialisation. Only 22 per cent considered them a ‘crime’.
Politically the Revolution may be dead, but it has an afterlife in these mentalities, which will continue to dominate the Russian polity for many years.
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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’.