Communist backers mark Bolshevik Revolution centennial
MOSCOW—Unlike the grand celebrations of the Soviet past, the Kremlin skirted Tuesday’s centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution—an anniversary that drew only a routine demonstration by Communist devotees.
The government’s attitude reflects both a wide split in public perception of the revolution and the Kremlin’s uneasiness about the events in 1917 that heralded more than seven decades of the Communist Party rule.
President Vladimir Putin has bemoaned the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” but he also has deplored the revolution that destroyed the Russian empire and triggered a devastating civil war that killed millions.
“Let us ask ourselves: Was it not possible to follow an evolutionary path rather than go through a revolution?” Putin said in a speech last month. “Could we not have evolved by way of gradual and consistent forward movement rather than at a cost of destroying our statehood and the ruthless fracturing of millions of human lives?”
Putin made no mention of the revolution while attending official meetings on Tuesday, a regular working day, unlike in Soviet times when it was marked as the nation’s main holiday.
Putin’s ambivalence is rooted in his desire to claim the heritage of both the czarist and the Soviet empires. While he can’t denounce an event that is still revered by many of his supporters, the Russian leader disdains any uprisings and tends to see them as work of foreign spy agencies.
While the Kremlin has avoided any celebrations of the centennial, Russian state television marked the event with a slew of documentaries about the revolution and lavish biopics about revolutionary leaders.
All those productions made a particular emphasis of the alleged role by Germany in triggering the revolution by funding the Bolsheviks—the line that echoes the Kremlin’s allegations of the U.S. meddling in Russian affairs today.
Alexander Baunov, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, noted that Putin appears to see a parallel between his tight controls over the Russian political scene and the czarist government’s efforts to rein in the revolutionary movement.
“He sees his punitive measure as the continuation of the inconsequent and luckless struggle of law enforcement agencies of the Russian empire against the looming collapse of the state, and hopes to do better,” Baunov wrote in a commentary.
Putin has accused the U.S. of encouraging massive demonstrations against him in Moscow in 2011-2012, and he also has blamed Washington for masterminding a series of uprisings in Middle East, North Africa and ex-Soviet republics.
“The government has a fantastic, paranoid fear of revolution, and the memory of what happened 100 years ago still hurts,” liberal politician Leonid Gozman said in his blog.
The Kremlin’s reluctance to commemorate the still-polarizing event reflects deep divisions over the revolution in Russian society. A recent nationwide poll showed public opinion on whether the revolution was positive or negative for Russia was split almost evenly.
Even as the Kremlin ignored the centennial, thousands of Communist Party members and supporters marched along Moscow’s downtown Tverskaya Street carrying portraits of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin.
The Communists have continued to honor the date, and the authorities allowed them to march close to the Kremlin to mark the anniversary but kept them off Red Square.