Cautious Putin shuns revolution centenary
RUSSIA: Vladimir Putin stayed away from events marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution yesterday, an event that changed the world but has awkward associations for the former KGB operative.
In the Soviet era, missile launchers rumbled across Moscow’s Red Square on November 7, Soviet leaders watched from atop the mausoleum of Vladimir Lenin - father of the Bolshevik Revolution - and the day was a public holiday.
Red Square did host a military parade yesterday, but it was mainly a stylised historical reenactment of a World War II event. It was not shown live on state TV, and featured merely a brief segment on the 1917 revolution with Red Army soldiers.
The centenary, Putin’s spokesman said, was a routine working day for the president, who had several meetings at the Kremlin.
Putin, in his quest to weld a proud national identity, has cherry-picked parts of Russia’s Soviet past, like its World War II victory and its success in space. But while he does not stress communism’s role in those feats, he has sometimes struck an ambivalent tone, once calling the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.
In rare comments on the subject ahead of the centenary, Putin made it clear he thought it would have been better if the 1917 revolution had never happened, and that he believed there was nothing to celebrate.
The centenary may leave him with mixed feelings, but it remains a hallowed anniversary for the Russian Communist Party and for many older Russians.
Communist Party supporters, who held a week-long series of celebratory events to mark the revolution’s centenary, believe their time will come again.
‘‘Capitalism is stumbling from one crisis to another,’’ veteran party leader Gennady Zyuganov wrote in a congratulatory note to his supporters. ‘‘We are convinced that the sun of socialism will once again rise over Russia and the whole world.’’