MA Thesis in European Studies Graduate School for Humanities
UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Author: Boris Staal
Student number: 6133045 Main Supervisor: D. Fainberg Second Supervisor: A.M. Kalinovsky
THE CUSTODIANS OF
THE REVOLUTION
RUSSIAN HISTORICAL
MUSEUMS AND THE MEMORY
OF OCTOBER 1917
CONTENTS
Introduction . . . .3
1 The construction of the memory of the revolution, 1917–1927 . . . 8
1.1 Introduction . . . 9
1.2 Monumental propaganda and Narkompros . . . 10
1.3 The first festivals . . . .13
1.4 Including the masses in the spectacles . . . 14
1.5 The Istpart Commission . . . 16
1.6 Revolutionary museums . . . 18
1.7 Conclusion: ten years ‘October’ . . . .22
2 Soviet history from perestroika to Putin . . . .25
2.1 Introduction . . . 26
2.2 Gorbachev: reforming the Soviet system . . . 28
2.3 Yeltsin: anti-communism in Russia’s political transformation . . . .32
2.4 Putin’s historical politics: a return to the Soviet era? . . . . 39
2.5 Conclusion . . . 59
3 Russian historical museums and the preservation of the revolutionary memory . . . 62
3.1 Introduction . . . 63
3.2 Contemporary Russian popular historical memory and the Revolution . . . 64
3.3 Revolutionary museums in post-Soviet Russia . . . 65
SOVIET NOSTALGIA: PRESERVATION OF THE ERA’S MEMORY The State Central Museum of Contemporary History . . . 67
Lenin’s Memorial Room at the Memorial Museum Raznochinny Petersburg . . . 73
The Elizarov Memorial Apartment . . . 76
REMEMBRANCE FOR THE SAKE OF THE VICTIMS The State Museum of Political History . . . 79
WHAT REVOLUTION? A RETURN TO PRE-SOVIET HISTORY The State Historical Museum . . . 88
State Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg . . . 92
Museum of Moscow . . . 95
3.4 Conclusion . . . 99
4 Conclusion . . . 102
5 Appendix . . . 106
INTRODUCTION
November 7, 2017 will mark the centennial of the October revolution. through-out the world, initiatives are planned to pay attention to this historical date. The Hermitage museum in Amsterdam, a branch of the St. Petersburg State Hermitage Museum, for example is one of them. Already in 2014, from Amsterdam a proposal was sent to Russia which contained their wish to host an exhibition in 2017 to commemorate this special year. What could be more interesting, they thought, than to host an exhibition on the event so closely related to the history of the State Hermitage. It was there, in the former palace of the Romanovs, that on the night of October 25, 1917, the Bolsheviks took over power from the Provisional Govern-ment. It is the image of the storming of the Winter Palace, one of the museum’s central buildings, which is the main image associated with the revolution, and it was there where between 1920 and 1955 the first Museum of the Revolution had been located. The answer that came from St. Petersburg was clear. It was a great idea, and the museum was very happy to cooperate with its Amsterdam branch in curating such an exhibition. Especially, they added, since Amsterdam was the perfect place for this. In St. Petersburg on the other hand, it would not be possible, because, as they explained, in contemporary Russia the issue is too sensitive still. It turns out that in the hundred years that have passed since Lenin and the other Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government and established the Soviet state, its status has drastically changed. Where it for over seventy years was func-tioning as the foundational narrative of the socialist state, in the present situation it is appealing as such only to a minority of the population. Throughout the Soviet period, the anniversaries of the revolution were celebrated through large public events, but already more than a decade ago, in 2005, its national holiday has been officially abolished. In contemporary Russia, other events have replaced the central status that the revolution held during the Soviet era, first and foremost the victory in the Great Patriotic War, celebrated on May 9. Where many different aspects of Soviet history are still part of the national historical canon, the revolution it seems, is not among them.
The current lack of interest in the event can be witnessed not only on the political level or in Russian society in general, but even within the Russian aca-demic world. Nowadays, many historical students and scholars devote their time to studying other areas of interest within the field, and less and less monographs are published on the subject. Boris Kolonitskii, a Russian historian of the revo-lution noted in 2009 that the vast majority of the new generation of historians seems to share the view that ‘all has already been said’, even if their personal ideological position differs greatly from the communist one. Where November 7, 2017 will mark the centennial of the revolution, it seems that it will be of interest only to a very few.
So how did it happen that the revolution, which for more than seven decades functioned as the origin story of the Soviet Union, has ended up in the dustbin of history after the system came to an end in 1991? And if the observation made by Kolonitskii, that many of the younger historians hold the believe that “everything
has been said”, is true, what then is the view on the revolution currently being held within Russia? In order to come to an answer to these questions, it is essential to first get a better understanding of what memory of the revolution it was that was being remembered in the Soviet Union, and why.
The first chapter deals with the Bolsheviks’ attempts to shape the history of the revolution in such a way that it suited their needs during these years. Directly after the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Provisional Government, they were faced by different groups bound together through their opposition to the new regime. When the revolutionary enthusiasm of the first years started to give way to to the realization that the situation in the country had all but been improved, the people living within the borders of the Soviet state grew ever more discontent. These developments were forming a threat to the survival of the newly established com-munist state.
Since it was still a ‘project under construction’, for the new regime it became essential to prove its viability in order to gain for itself the legitimacy it until then was still lacking. In this process, acquainting ‘the masses’ with the core values and thoughts of the Marxist-Leninist ideology became a central issue. As the chapter shows, during the first decade after ‘October’ different groups in society, avant-garde artist, as well as members of different Soviet cultural institutions (Narkom-pros, Istpart), were playing a highly important role in the shaping of the memory revolution. In addition to the existing literature on Soviet cultural practices of the first decade, mass festivals and public reenactments on the revolution’s anniver-saries, this chapter introduces an important aspect in which the state during these years was heavily involved, but which has previously remained undiscussed. The creation of historical museums, through which the regime sought to ‘enlighten’ the people. Within several years after 1917, hundreds of these museums were founded throughout the whole of the Soviet Union to familiarize them with the movement’s history.
From the late 1980s onwards, for the first time the sacred position of the revolution started to be questioned openly. Chapter two, discusses the changes the story of the revolution underwent during these years. It shows how, as a con-sequence of Gorbachev’s reforms, in the historical debates of the perestroika era the revolution’s sacred status was no longer predetermined. This process then was continued after 1991, when the Soviet Union was dissolved and Boris Yeltsin replaced Gorbachev. During these years, anti-communist sentiments were leading, and Yeltsin made a serious attempt to remove all remains of the Soviet state. Streets were renamed, statues taken down and a majority of the museums dedicated to the revolution and Lenin was closed. It was then that the memory of the revolution would see a drastic change: from the ‘Great October Socialist Revolution’, the official view now became that it had been a foreign coup, aimed at the destruction of the Russian state.
Yeltsin eventually stepped down in 2000, and under his successor, Vladimir Putin, many of the communist symbols that had been removed during the 1990s would make their way back into Russia’s national history. During Putin’s first year, he reinstalled the Soviet era national anthem, and the following years would see
the return of many more previously dismissed histories. The statue of the infamous founder of the Cheka ‘iron Feliks’ Dzerzhinsky, for example, has after a period of absence made its way back into the center of Moscow and according to multiple opinion polls conducted over the past decade, even Stalin is having a revival. Among academics, journalists and politicians, especially in the West but also within Russia, often the concern is expressed that his actions show how Putin, through reviving these historical memories, seeks the restauration of the Soviet system. This he tries to achieve, the general view goes, through the formulation and implementation of a state promoted view on the national history. Through an analysis of the way the October revolution is dealt with by the current Russian authorities, the chapter shows that in reality this process is much more nuanced, thereby opposing generally held assumptions regarding the nature of Putin’s ‘historical politics’.
The final chapter then analyses seven different historical museums, both in Moscow and St. Petersburg, that all have or had Soviet history on display for most of the period between 1917 and the present. It shows that throughout the past twenty-five years these museums, which until 1991 were presenting a single, Soviet, interpretation of the country’s history, have created for themselves completely different interpretations of the Soviet era. In this respect, the different views that can be found in these museums are a representation of the changes the narrative of the revolution has seen since 1991, and they reflect the various sentiments that exist within the present Russian society.
What makes these museums interesting is the fact that whereas over the course of time the views on the revolution have changed, the museums have seen some form of continuation. They were created in the 1920s, or even before, and during these years played a central role in the Bolsheviks’ cultural policies. Although they underwent changes in their organization, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 these museums retained (most of) their collections. Almost all have remained in their original building. Given the fact that in contemporary Russia the interest in the revolution has been strongly decreasing over the past decades, these muse-ums then fulfill an important function in keeping alive the memory, or memories, of the event. In many ways, they are the last vestiges of what once was the most important moment in the process of the shaping of a national identity. As this thesis will argue, it is as such that they should be studied. In the existing historiography, these museums have received little attention so far, which given their central posi-tion both in the cities as in society as a whole is remarkable at least. The present research aims to fill in this gap, and therefore contributes to get a better under-standing of the place of the revolution in contemporary Russia.
The first part of the research, chapter one and two, are both historical analyses based to a large extend on secondary literature. These are substantiated with pri-mary sources that are used to introduce new ideas that can confirm or counter existing views. The second part of the research, chapter three, on the other hand is essentially based on my own research, conducted in St. Petersburg and Moscow between July and September 2015. During these months, I have visited these muse-ums several times to analyze their exhibitions. The quotes that are used throughout the chapter come from their own writings. Texts printed on the walls of the exhibition
(or when these were not present, presented through the audio-guide), provided through information folders or their websites. Also, I have spoken to museum directors and curators, professional historians from different universities in both cities as well as people from NGO’s. In the writing of this research, the conversations I had with these people were an essential element in the process of understanding the importance history in Russia has played and does still play. It is only where I have quoted from these interviews that they are included in the annotation, but their views and opinions have shaped my research to a great extend.
One last note of clarification must be made. Months after the revolution, the Bolsheviks sought a way to show a clear break with the Tsarist past, and decided to switch from the previously used Julian calendar to the by Western European countries used Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar was 13 days ahead of the Julian calendar, and historical dates were adjusted accordingly. The October revolution would from then have its anniversary on November 7. It is only in descrip-tions of October 25, 1917, that the old date is used. ‘October’ on the other hand, which is frequently used, is referring the the revolution as a larger (memory) project. Additionally, the name of what at present is the city of St. Petersburg has undergone several changes throughout the past century. It was called St. Petersburg until 1914, when its name was changed to Petrograd. In 1924, after the death of Lenin, the city was renamed Leningrad, which it would remain until 1991. In that year, after a referendum held among the city’s citizens, it was decided to return to the old Tsarist name, St. Petersburg. Throughout this research, the names are used that correspond to these different periods.
No revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself — V.I. Lenin, 22 October, 19181
1
THE CONSTRUCTION
OF THE MEMORY OF
THE REVOLUTION,
1917–1927
1.1 INTRODUCTION
The revolutionary events that took place in Petrograd on the night of October 25–26, 1917 had been witnessed only by a small part of the Russian population. The Soviet leadership quickly recognized that in order to give the new state any kind of legitimacy, the experiences and ideals of the revolution had to be ‘brought’ to those that had failed to witness it. Until the late 1920s, the interpretation and mem-orization of the October Revolution functioned as a central element in Soviet state-making, and the memory that was created during the first decade has proven to be a lasting one: almost a century after the event took place, the way it is currently remembered is still strongly based on the myths constructed during the earliest stages of the Soviet era. Myths, because the memory of the Revolution as it has survived today did not emerge immediately from the actual events. It was only over the course of time and not even fully under supervision of the party that Octo-ber 25, 1917, became the Soviet equivalent of what July 14, 1789 is for France.2
This chapter follows the construction of the revolutionary memory during the first years after the event. It discusses several key-moments in this process: the celebrations of May Day and November 7, 1918; the anniversary of the revolution in 1920 and its public reenactment in Petrograd; the creation of the Istpart com-mission in 1920; the death of Lenin in 1924 and the revolution’s tenth anniversary in 1927 (when through Eisenstein’s film October the ‘history’ of revolution reached its climax). Another important returning theme is the Soviet of People’s Commis-sariat for Education (Narodnyi KomisCommis-sariat Prosveschcheniya, hereafter Narkompros), the main organ responsible for Soviet culture. During the early years, Narkompros took up a leading role in the composing and writing of a single, unified, history of the revolutionary movement.
Building on secondary literature as well as primary sources, this chapter shows how for the early Bolsheviks, memorizing the revolution was more than just the commemoration of the movement’s ‘golden hour’. At the time of the revolution, the Bolshevik party consisted of around 350.000 members, a small number on a population close to two-hundred million that lived within the borders of Tsarist Russia. Above all, the largely peasant society the Bolsheviks inherited in 1917 was highly illiterate. In order to spread the message of Marxism-Leninism, the Bolshevik elite could no longer rely mainly on the written word, as they had done up to 1917. It was through visual propaganda that during the early years the state sought to overcome the legitimacy problem they were facing.
During the first years of the creation of this memory, a highly important role was played by the country’s avant-garde artists and others who with great enthusiasm participated in the different celebrations, but did not necessarily share all the Bolsheviks views on the future of the country. In the eyes of the regime on the other hand, the earliest celebrations of October’s anniversaries or its reenactments were not solely meant to be works of art glorifying the event and it was from 1920 onwards that the influence of these indivudals changed.
1 V.I. Lenin, V.I. Lenin: Collected Works Volume 28 (Moscow, 1974), p. 124. 2 See for example Corney, Telling October or Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals.
The goals of the revolution had all but materialized, the civil war was dragging on, and unrest in the country grew. Strikes that took place throughout the Soviet Union eventually culminated in the uprising of the Kronstadt sailors, early participants of the revolution. During these years, the control of the state exer-cised on all aspects of society was tightened and the freedom of the early years was replaced by a more repressive regime. This development was reflected in the anniversaries of November 7. Professional historians and the Bolshevik cul-tural elite were now made responsible for the construction of its memory, which became highly institutionalized.
This effected not only the already existing practices, the early Soviet festivals and reenactments celebrating the revolution’s anniversaries on which the focus in recent research has been placed almost exclusively.3 It is in addition to the exist-ing historiography that this chapter introduces a new element which has previously been left untreated, but which seems to have been a highly important asset for the Bolsheviks in the construction of a revolutionary history. In their attempt to acquaint the people living within the borders of the Soviet Union with Marxist-Leninist ideology, during the 1920s hundreds of historical museums displaying the history of the revolutionary movement were created. The content of these museums was strictly controlled by the responsible institutions to make sure it represented Soviet history and ideology in line with the views of those in the Kremlin. When these views changed, the exhibitions were revised accordingly.
By discussing these museums alongside the existing studies on other cultural practices from the first decade after 1917, this chapter shows how they were created not only during the same period but above all out of similar educational and pro-pagandistic intentions as those that were at the basis of the celebrations and reen-actments. Taken together, these different forms of agitational propaganda provide a better understanding of the importance the early Bolshevik state attached to culture as a part of their state-building process.
1.2 MONUMENTAL PROPAGANDA AND NARKOMPROS The political transformation of the new state that started with the revolution of October continued until 1922 when the end of the civil war marked the final victory of the ‘Reds’ over the counter-revolutionary ‘Whites’. This ideological battle on the other hand was not solely fought through the use of arms. In their fight for power, the Bolsheviks also employed other ‘weapons’ to strengthen their position as legitimate successors to the vacuum left after the abdication of Nicholas II and to which the Provisional Government had not succeeded to form a stable replace-ment. In their search for legitimacy, the new state placed strong emphasis on the creation of a Soviet, revolutionary, culture as a way to break with the Tsarist era past and structures.
One of the first measures in this process was taken on April 12, 1918, when the Soviet of People’s Commissariat for Education (Narodnyi Komissariat
3 See for example S. Corbesero, The Anniversaries of the October Revolution, 1918–1927: Politics and Imagery (Pittsburgh, 2005), F.C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2004) or M. Rolf, Das Sowjetische Massenfest (Hamburg, 2006).
Prosveschcheniya, hereafter Narkompros) passed the decree ‘On the Monuments of the Republic’. Originally an initiative of Lenin to bring artists under control of the state4, the decree contained several points “to mark the great revolution that has transformed Russia”. It ordered the removal of “monuments erected in honor of the tsars and their servants” that where “of no historical or artistic interest”. This was to be determined by a newly created commission which additionally had to “organize a broad competition for the design of monuments to celebrate the great days of the Russian Socialist Revolution”. The Soviet furthermore “expresse[d] the wish that by 1 May some of the more monstrous statues will have already been removed”. Instead, new statues had to be erected of “monument-worthy figures”, heroes from Russia but foremost from antiquity and Western-Europe.5 Next to these new monuments of revolutionaries, plans were made for the celebrations of May Day, consisting of two main elements: the decoration of streets and squares and the organization of an “orderly and beautiful mass parade”.6
The celebrations of May 1, 1918 would mean the first public festivities orga-nized by the new Bolshevik leadership, and under the supervision of Narkompros, both Petrograd and Moscow (the country’s capital since March 5) were extensively decorated by the leading avant-garde artists. Following Lenin’s concept of monu-mental propaganda, all decorations were modest and temporary in nature. Painted canvasses covered the cities’ buildings, statues made out of non-durable materials were put up and wooden triumphal arches spanned the main streets. Tsarist sym-bols that had not (yet) been removed were covered with red cloths.7
In the earliest celebrations of the revolution artists like Kazimir Malevich, Nathan Altman, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko or Vladimir Tatlin, among others, played an important role in producing the decorations for the main buildings and streets of Petrograd and Moscow. For November 7, 1918, one of the most well-known decorations was made by the futurist artist Nathan Altman, who’s work covered all the buildings of the Palace Square and transformed the Alexander column into a cubist construction.
Initially, the influence of the avant-garde artists was not limited to these two festive days. With the majority of the Russian people being unable to read or write, spreading the ‘message of Marxism’ required new forms of communi-cation. The Bolshevik state quickly recognized the propagandistic possibilities of the avant-garde movement. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the worldview of many avant-gardists and Bolsheviks had been developing a similar path, both groups being revolutionaries in their own way. The Bolsheviks envi-sioned a new world-order on the basis of Marxist-Leninist ideology while similar to developments in Western-European countries, the avant-garde artists attempted a break with the old structures of Tsarist Russia and to create a new, modern,
4 Corbesero, The Anniversaries of the October Revolution, p. 25. 5 M. Rolf, Das Sowjetische Massenfest (Hamburg, 2006), p. 66.
6 ‘Decree of the Soviet of People’s Commissars, “On Monuments of the Republic”, April 12, 1918’ in Tolstoy, Street Art of the Revolution, p. 39.
7 For photos, artists’ sketches and written reports on the 1918 celebrations of May 1 and the October Revolution, see Tolstoy, Street Art of the Revolution, pp. 39–83.
world through their works. The revolution then, when it came, gave their work a completely different meaning. “Only futurist art is constructed on collective bases. Only futurist art is right now the art of the proletariat”, Altman would write about this in 19188, and at the time similar ideas were held by many of the avant-garde artists.
For the Bolshevik party, these artists were initially a very valuable asset. In his essay Revolution and Art, 1920–22, Lunacharskii stated that:
“I anticipate a great deal from the influence of the revolution on art; to put it simply, I expect art to be saved from the worst forms of decadence and from pure formalism by its aspiration toward the real objective and by its infectious expression of great ideas and great experiences. But in addition to this the state has another continuous task within its cultural activity, namely, to diffuse the revolutionary image of ideas, sensations, and actions throughout the country. From this standpoint, the state asks itself: can art be of use to it in this? And the answer inevitably suggests itself: if revolution can give art its soul, then art can give the revolution its mouthpiece.”9
For several years, both movements would remain highly connected. The Bolshe-viks’ plans for the construction of a new society offered the avant-gardists the opportunity to work with previously unexplored fields of art. All available means of agitational propaganda10 were employed to reach out to the people and acquaint them with the new ideology: photo collages, film, ROSTA windows11, architecture or even trains fully covered with revolutionary slogans and scenes that travelled through the country12. For the artists, the possibilities for their creativity seemed endless. It was during the second half of the 1920s, that the avant-garde movement eventually would lose its function of ‘art of the proletariat’ when under Stalin socialist-realism became the sole form of art approved by the state. Other move-ments, including the avant-gardists, were banned. In the 1930s, works from Russian avant-garde artists would still be exhibited, yet no longer for their artistic value. In 1931 for example, the Tretyakov Gallery hosted the exhibition “Art from the Capitalist Era”, about this ‘bourgeois form of art’.13
8 N. Altman, ‘“Futurism” and Proletarian Art, 1918’, in J.E. Bowlt (ed.), Russian art of the avant garde:
theory and criticism (London, 1988), p. 164.
9 A. Lunacharsky, ‘Revolution and Art, 1920–22’, in Bowlt (ed.), Russian art of the avant garde, p. 191. 10 The Department for Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop. was responsible for determining the content
of all official information, overseeing political education in schools, watching over all forms of mass com-munication, and mobilizing public support for party programs. Entry on Agitprop in Encyclopeadia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/topic/agitprop (June 27, 2016).
11 The Russian Telegrap. Agency (ROSTA) was the state news-agency in Soviet Russia. During the civil war, it displayed its news – due to the high degree of illiteracy often in the form of cartoons – in shop windows and other public spaces. Through these posters, the state communicated its main values or other more urgent matters.
12 S. Tsiara, ‘Utopia and the Reality in the Art of the October Revolution”, Historein, Vol. 7 (2007), p. 88. 13 The development of a new typ. of museum, denouncing art (and religion) in the 1930s is described by
1.3 THE FIRST FESTIVALS
The celebrations of May 1, 1918 were received with mixed reactions. While different observers were critical towards the new festive day14, Lunacharskii wrote in his diary that:
“Many of the city’s [Petrograd] streets and squares have been decorated, in some places with great taste, to the honor of the artist organizers. […] Of course, I am absolutely certain that the posters will be criticized. After all, it is so easy to criticize the Futurists. […] Not everything has been a success, but already something great and delightful is being set in motion.... I went to the Neva and was met by a truly magical fairytale!...”15
The festivities of May 1 had been a test for the new government, and in the eyes of those responsible for its organization, they had been highly successful. With these positive experiences, the first anniversary of the revolution several months later then had to become something truly spectacular. A week(!) before the revolution’s first anniversary, a committee was set up in order to organize the celebrations which would be lasting two days. One of the main tasks the committee had to deal with was the distribution of extra rations of food16 – after years of war and upheaval a very welcome addition to the people’s meager diets. Furthermore, following Lenin’s plan of ‘monumental propaganda’, throughout the country (and especially in Petro-grad and Moscow) revolutionary plays were staged. Similar to the celebration of May Day earlier that year, public spaces were decorated, monuments and statues were revealed, processions were held, fireworks were lit and public exhibitions were created, all to spread the revolutionary message.17 In order to make sure that this message was conveyed in the correct way, much explanation was done by the organizing committee in the form of introductory speeches or explanatory plaques. These elements of early Soviet festivities are discussed by James von Geldern in Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (1993). Von Geldern shows how these festivals celebrating the revolution were in fact far from revolutionary in essence. Where the Soviet political ideology was a clear break with the past, the revolutionary festivals instead were based on elements taken from different moments of both national and international history, most notably revolutionary France, the Paris commune, Tsarist Russia and the language and signs of the February Revolution.18 This continuum with earlier times seems to have been caused by the absence of clear guidelines from the state on how the anniversary was to be celebrated, the influential contribution of non-Bolsheviks – especially avant-garde artists and theater groups – in its planning and execution, as well as the lack of exclusively Bolshevik symbols available.19 The historians Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii
14 M.V. Dobuzhinsky, ‘A bomb or a firecracker: a conversation between two artists’, in Tolstoy, Street Art
of the Revolution, pp. 51–52.
15 ‘Extract from A.V. Lunacharsky’s diary for 1 May 1918, describing the May Day festivities in Petrograd’, in: Tolstoy, Street Art of the Revolution, p. 50.
16 Corbesero, The Anniversaries of the October Revolution, p. 33. 17 Corney, Telling October, p. 57.
come to similar findings in their Interpreting the Russian Revolution: the Language and Symbols of 1917 (1999), which analyses how the Bolsheviks especially between the revolutions of February and October extensively adopted (and adapted) existing symbols and rituals in their state-building.20
1.4 INCLUDING THE MASSES IN THE SPECTACLES
The celebrations of November 7, 1919 showed similarities to those of the year before, although due to the ongoing civil war, this time they were celebrated on a single day and on a more modest scale. The civil war became also notable in the form of the celebrations. This time, their emphasis was more on agitation than on celebration which led to a ‘militarization’ of the celebrations.21 Even more than had been the case one year earlier, the defense of the legacy of the revolution had become a central element during the second anniversary.
The anniversary of 1920 in turn showed a strong contrast with its two pre-decessors, both in its form and intentions. Where in the organization of the anni-versaries of 1918 and 1919 the state had given outside parties a great deal of influence, this time it would exercise strict control over the celebrations. This was deemed necessary after the two earlier celebrations had shown that the (well meant) con-tribution of the masses did not always produce the outcome envisioned by the state. In the spring of 1920, Lunacharskii wrote:
“We must, however be on our guard against entertainment alone. Some people believe that collective creativity means a spontaneous, indepen-dent manifestation of the will of the masses. But until social life teaches the masses some kind of instinctive compliance with a higher order or rhythm, one cannot expect the throng to be able by itself to create any-thing but a lively noise and the colorful coming and going of festively dressed people.”22
The decision of the state to stop relying especially on non-state actors in the plan-ning and execution of the revolutionary festivals came at a time when in general the control of the state on the country was increasing quickly. The civil war was threatening the preexistence of the new Bolshevik state. The hopes and dreams of the early days seemed further away than ever, so was the promise of a world revolution. Suffering greatly from yet another crisis, the positive attitude of the people towards the regime quickly declined. In an attempt to strengthen its position, the regime implemented the system of War communism which consisted of a series of political, social and economic restrictions that would only come to an end with the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921.
19 Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, p. 73.
20 O. Figes and B. Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: the Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, 1999).
21 See for example Corney, Telling October, pp. 60–62 and Corbesero, The Anniversaries of the October Revolution, p. 73.
To revive the faded revolutionary sentiments, in the celebrations of 1920 a Tsarist-era artistic element was reintroduced: the public mass performing of historical events. Throughout the year already several of these mass spectacles had been organized to commemorate important historical events, but the most significant, both in its scale and influence, certainly was the reenactment of the storming of the Winter Palace. The spectacle that was held on Uritskii Square was organized by a team of ten of Petrograd’s best directors, led by N. Yevreinov. Just as had been the case during the festivals of 1918, the influence of the artists involved in the reenactment was highly visible. Being a director of plays, Yevreinov took the liberty to interpret the facts in a way that they would generate a dramatic effect: “Our method of work will be artistic simplification”, he explained in an interview in the newspaper Life of Art.
“Even the Winter Palace itself will be involved as a gigantic actor, as a vast character in the play which will manifest its own mimicry and inner emo-tions. The director [Yevreinov] must make the stones speak, so that the spectator feels what is going on inside, behind those cold red walls.”23
Up to this moment, Smolnii and the Field of Mars had taken up the central role in October’s anniversaries. It was through Storming of the Winter Palace that the build-ing for the first time would function as the Soviet ‘Bastille’.24 The decor further included the square itself, on which three stages were constructed that all differed in their design and theatrical style.
Around ten-thousand actors, both professionals and soldiers of the Red Army, participated in the performance.25 The hundred-and-sixty-thousand spec-tators, who despite their significant number had to get the feeling that they were participants themselves, witnessed a representation of the event far more dramatic than had been the actual case. It was at this moment and mainly due to the efforts of Yevreinov and his team, that the history of the October Revolution would for the first time get the heroic features it is still often associated with: the storming of the Winter Palace by the Red guards, the defense of the women’s battalion and ultimately the victory of Bolshevism. An eyewitness account of the spectacle was later published in the journal Theatre Courier:
“There they rushed, caught by the beam of a searchlight, and artillery roared. The air resounded with the volleys fired from the Aurora, anchored on the Neva, the rattle of rifles and machine guns. Then the action transferred to the Winter Palace. Light would flash on in the windows of the sleeping giant and the figures of people fighting would be visible. The attack ended. The palace was captured. The banner of the victors appeared deep purple out of the darkness above the palace. Five red stars lit up on the pediment. Then
23 From an interview with N.N. Yevreinov in Life of Art, September 30–31, 1920. Published in English in: Tolstoy, Street Art of the Revlution, p. 137.
24 Corney, Telling October, pp. 58–59. 25 Schlögel, Jenseits des Grossen Oktober, p. 363.
rockets went up and diamond-like stars lit up the sky, and waterfalls of fire-works gushed down in a rain of sparks. The ‘Internationale’ sounded and the parade of victors began, illuminated by the searchlights and fireworks…”26
Yevreinov might not have been aware of it at the time, but his Storming of the Winter Palace with all its newly introduced elements would not go down in history as merely an artistic representation of the revolution. In the absence of original documentation of the event, the reenactment of 1920 offered the Bolsheviks a rare opportunity to recapture ‘the revolution’ on film and photo. They did just that. The image of the moment the Red Guards storm the Winter Palace quickly became the sole visual representation of the whole event, and up to today it has often (yet mistakenly) been invoked as an original image of November 7, 1917.
For decades, the mythical representation of the revolution created by Yevreinov would inspire artists throughout the Soviet Union, and a countless number of works of art based on his reenactment have been produced. At least one of these works has had an impact on the memory of the revolution that exceeded Yevreinov’s Storming of the Winter Palace: the movie October (Ten Days that Shook the World) by Sergei Eisenstein (1928). Between 1925 and 1927, the Soviet Union’s best filmmakers, Eisenstein, Esfir Shub, Boris Barnet and Vsevolod Pudovkin, among others, were commissioned by two production com-panies (Sovkino and Mezhrabprom) to produce several movies for the celebration of the anniversaries of the 1905 and October Revolutions. Eisenstein’s October would serve as the ‘grande finale’.27 Based on the 1920 play held at the palace square, October included a large crowd storming through the gates of the Winter Palace, the fight within its walls and Kerensky’s flight from the palace. For the first time introduced by Yevreinov, it was through October that these elements would reach an audience throughout the whole of the Soviet Union and beyond, both geographically and in time.
1.5 THE ISTPART COMMISSION
As a consequence of the radically lowered living conditions in the country due to the ongoing civil war, throughout 1920 unrest among workers and peasants had been rising in the provinces. In early 1921, it moved over to Petrograd where in a short period several larger strikes took place. Initially, the demands of those in the country had been mainly economical, but the workers of Petrograd wanted more: an increase of their political and civil rights. The unrest reached its climax in March with the Kronstadt uprising. In support of the workers of Petrograd, sailors located in Kronstadt, a naval base several kilometers outside of Petrograd in the Gulf of Finland, started rebelling. Although the uprising was quickly put down, the sailors formed a serious threat to the survival of the new regime. To use the words of Corney: “October was under attack”.28
26 N. Shubksy’s ‘On Uritskii Square’ describes the mass dramatization of Storming of the Winter Palace. In: Tolstoy, Street Art of the Revlution, p. 139.
27 Corney, Telling October, p. 184. 28 Corney, Telling October, p. 97.
Several months before, Narkompros had launched an active campaign to “shape the public memory of October in order to create new Soviet citizens”.29 The Com-mission on the History of the October Revolution and the Communist Party (Istpart) was created, and was given the task to collect and write the history of the October Revolution and the Bolshevik party as a whole. The new commission was headed by the Marxist historian and deputy chairman of Narkompros M.N. Pokrovskii. Although Pokrovskii remained active in his function at Narkompros from which Istpart received its funding, the commission’s autonomy was ensured in its statute. This way, Pokrovskii was granted the freedom to employ whomever he viewed suitable.30
The events that had taken place during the winter of 1920 and the spring of next year had demonstrated that the legitimacy of the Bolsheviks was not self- evident and their base of power – even though the Red Army had proven to be successful both in the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion and recent clashes with the Whites – fragile. It was the task of Istpart to professionalize the history of the revolution and to transform the history of the Bolshevik party into a “history of all”. The enthusiastic artists and individuals who until then had been mainly responsible for the creation of the revolutionary narrative were now replaced by a small group of intellectuals, all with their roots in the early revolutionary move-ment.31 Interestingly, those selected by Pokrovskii – who himself later would be still associated with the founding of Soviet historical science32 – to join Istpart in 1920 did not necessarily have to be Bolsheviks: the commission included several well-known Mensheviks and other non-Bolshevik academics.33
To construct the Soviet state’s history, Istpart spent the following years compiling a revolutionary archive. Over the years, this turned out to be a trouble-some undertaking because the illegal status of the revolutionaries in Tsarist Russia had refrained them from keeping diaries on their activities. Other activities of the commission included publishing on the history of the revolutionary movement, setting up exhibitions on the revolution and the party, and the collecting and writing down of memoirs of Old Bolsheviks. Especially the contribution of these ‘old party comrades’ was important for the project. With very little written original sources available, it was them who were seen as the main sources of information.
In practice the work of the Istpart commission turned out to be far from envisioned. Trying to reach out to the people in their search for accounts of 1917, they handed out questionnaires to party members, had requests for information published in newspapers and set-up local Istpart branches, but their attempts
29 Burgess, The Istpart Commission, p. 5.
30 W.F. Burgess, The Istpart Commission: the historical department of the Russian Communist Party Central
Committee, 1920–1928 (Ann Arbor, 1983), p. 31.
31 Corney, Telling October, P. 100.
32 S.M. Dubrovsky, ‘Academician M. N. Pokrovsky and his Role in the Development of Soviet Historical Science’, Soviet Studies in History, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1962), pp. 23–43. Respected by Lenin and after his death in 1932 buried at the Red Square, Pokrovsky he fell out of grace in the mid-30s under Stalin to be only rehabil-itated during the 1950s during the de-Stalinization period. See for a full description of Pokrovsky’s life and legacy G.M. Enteen, The Soviet Scholar-Bureaucrat: M.N. Pokrovskii and the Society of Marxist Historians (University Park, PA, 1978).
generated little success. Over the years, very little new materials got available to the commission to work with, and the cooperation between the central Istpart committee and its local branches was poor. The main goal with which the com-mission was set up, the creation of a coherent history of party and revolution, seemed unattainable.34
In his analysis of the Istpart commission as an element of the construction of the narrative of the revolution, Corney convincingly shows how the failure of Istpart was caused by the lack of materials available to the commission, the prob-lematic cooperation between the central Istpart commission and its local branches or the difficulties that arose out of different views of those that did the research and those who worked at the former Tsarist archives, among others.35 Nevertheless, another crucial problem which seems to have contributed to the eventual dismissal of the Istpart commission in 1928 was already present from its creation in 1920: the differing views between the members of the commission and Lenin (and after Lenin’s death in 1924 the other party members). When discussing the tasks of the to-be-created commission, Lenin told Pokrovksii about his desire for a book on the history of the October Revolution: “not a full length, formal history, but some-thing that could be completed in the shortest time possible”.36 From the start, it was clear to Pokrovskii that he had to balance his own wishes – to write a proper, well researched, academic history of the party and the revolution – with those of Lenin, whose main interest seemed the work’s propagandistic possibilities. A second dispute arose after the death of Lenin about the compiling of his memoires. Due to the small amount of works Istpart had published during its four years in existence, the party commissioned the newly created V.I. Lenin Institute to do this work instead. Until its incorporation in the Agitprop department in 1928, the Istpart commission’s funding would decrease yearly, as did its output.
Istpart had been created out of the idea that the party and ‘October’ were lacking a single, universal and clearly defined history. Yet, the creation of these histories was all but a quick process, as Lenin had wished. Just as had been the case during the earliest celebrations of the anniversaries, there were many different actors involved, all with diverging visions, making the construction of ‘the’ history of October nearly impossible. It would only be from the late 1920s onwards, that with the institutionalization of the revolutionary memory also the narrative itself became more homogeneous. This process was accelerated from the mid-1930s, when under Stalin many of the earliest Bolsheviks were cleared out of the party history, while others, most notably his own persona, were written into it.
1.6 REVOLUTIONARY MUSEUMS
During the early years of communism, both the festivals and the works of the Istpart commission were serving the same function. As means of (agitational) propaganda, they had to make the Russian people familiar with the history of the revolutions and educate them in the principles of Bolshevism in order to give the
34 Corney, Telling October, pp. 126–143. 35 Corney, Telling October, p. 131. 36 Burgess, The Istpart Commission, p. 28.
communist party the base of legitimacy it lacked. The main resources of the Istpart commission were allocated to the compiling of revolutionary archives and publi-cation of documents related to the history of the party and the revolution. Yet, it seems that Istpart had another important task which has not received serious attention in the existing literature: the construction of exhibitions and museums devoted to the October Revolution and the party. The issue is mentioned by Corney who introduces two types of museums that during this period were created: a “museum of relics” in Moscow “aimed at a mass audience” and temporary exhi-bitions composed to “acquaint party members with the history of the party”.37 Unfortunately, he only illustrates this finding with a short observation of two exhi-bitions organized by the Ekaterinoslav and Novgorod Istpart branches.38 In Burgess’ analysis of the Istpart commission on the other hand, there is no reference at all made of this fact.
Nevertheless, there is reason to argue that next to the yearly anniversaries of November 7 under the supervision of Narkompros and the works of the Istpart commission, during the 1920s museums and temporary exhibitions served as a ‘third pillar’ for the legitimation of the Bolshevik regime through culture. The exhibitions at the different revolutionary museums were created on a single rep-resentation of the Soviet past and displayed similar objects, documents and other artifacts. When new museums were created in the regions, the main museums in Moscow and Leningrad provided much of the materials. This way, the state could exercise strict control over the content.39 The regime was strongly aware of the museums’ propagandistic value. T. Shumnaya, at the time the director of what was still called the Museum of the Revolution (Moscow), described in 1998 the practical implications of the control exercised by the state:
“The growing complications of political life in the country by the end of the 1920’s were reflected in the museum. In 1929 the Commission of the Insti-tute of Lenin checked the museum and pointed out shortcomings in the ideology of the exposition. In spirit of the time the exhibition was struc-turally rearranged, resulting in excessive propaganda. Ever more attention was given to explanatory texts, at the expense of the museum objects themselves.”40
It might seem that during the late 1920s the state reacted to the creation of the revolutionary museums rather than that it played an active role in it. Yet, the 1920s would see a boom in the creation of historical museums, especially following the death of Lenin in 1924, and it were the members of Narkompros and Istpart that played a central role in this process. On January 11, 1920, the first revolutionary
37 F. Corney, Telling October, p. 117. 38 F. Corney, Telling October, p. 118.
39 A. Khazanov, ‘Selecting the Past: the politics of Memory in Moscow’s history museums’, City & Society, Vol. 12 (2000), p. 37.
40 M. van der Heijden, Museums in Revolution: Four historical museums in Moscow (Amsterdam, 1998), p. 23.
museum in the Soviet Union was opened in Petrograd in the halls of the Winter Palace. The State Museum of Revolution as it was named had been founded several months before by the Petrograd Soviet and among its initiators and first directors were Lunacharskii, Maxim Gorkii, Grigory Zinoviev, Sergey Oldenburg and Pavel Shchegolev. In its early days, the museum showed the history of the Russian rev-olutionary movement, including materials that had been collected during the late nineteenth century under the revolutionary leftist Narodnik movement and espe-cially regarding its more extremist split-off Narodnaya Volya (NV).41 Even before the October Revolution, another revolutionary museum had been founded in Moscow by the Society of the Museum of the Revolution, a group of revolutionaries from different leftist movements. The first plans for the foundation of a revolu-tionary museum in Moscow were made in March 1917, but only in 1922, in the building of the former English Club in Moscow on Gorki (now Tverskaya) street, the exhibition ‘Red Moscow’ was opened in commemoration of the revolution’s fifth anniversary. Through the efforts of Sergei Mickiewicz, the initiator of ‘Red Moscow’, the exhibition was transformed into a full museum. in 1923 the Moscow Historical Revolutionary Museum was opened, with Mickiewicz as the first direc-tor. The museum covered the long period of ‘revolution’ in Russia, starting with the peasant movements of the seventeenth century until October 1917. It was renamed the State Museum of the Revolution of the USSR one year later. In 1925, two years after it had been opened, the museum’s collection numbered 59.000 objects. In 1998, the collection had grown to 150.000 objects and nearly two-mil-lion documents, photos and books.42
When looking at the different organizations, it seems that there has been a small group of (intellectual) Bolsheviks who were responsible for most aspects of Soviet historical policy. Lunacharskii, the chairman of Narkompros, was at the same time involved in the foundation and managing of the State Museum of Revolution. His deputy, M.N. Pokrovskii, was the founder and first chairman of Istpart. A member of his commission, the historian P.E. Shchegolev, was also involved in the foundation of the museum. M.S. Olminskii, who later replaced Pokrovkii as chairman of Istpart, was one of the founders of the Central V.I. Lenin Museum in Moscow. During the 1880s–90s, Olminskii had been active in the Narodnaya Volya (NV) movement together with another of the Revolution Muse-um’s founders M. Novorusskii. One of the most famous initiators of the Museum of Revolution, the writer Maxim Gorkii, in turn was closely related to both Lenin and Lunacharskii.
41 Narodnaya Volya was active in Russia during the late nineteenth century. On March 1, 1881, members
of the movement – among them Lenin’s older brother Alexander – carried out the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on the streets of St. Petersburg. In 1907, on the place of the assassination, the Church of the Savior on Blood was build, in commemoration of Alexander II. Unlike the Narodniks, the members of
Narodnaya Volya believed that only through a political revolution a social revolution could be established.
During the 1920s an incredible number of new museums was created. According to estimates, the State Museum of Revolution was one of almost 250 revolutionary museums throughout the Soviet Union43, although it has to be noted that it is hard to give an exact number due to the constant changes the existing museums under-went. The State Museum of the Revolution for example had its name changed several times, while large parts of its collection were moved throughout the Soviet Union in order to give local museums access to original revolutionary objects. In reality, little objects and documents on display were unique, and the museums relied heavily on photocopies. In the fact that full museums were created without possessing many authentic photos or documents, the Bolsheviks saw little problems.
Where the early 1920s saw a boom in historical revolutionary museums, from 1924 onwards a new kind of museums came up: V.I. Lenin memorial museums and apartments. Following Lenin’s death, quickly several museums were created commemorating the deceased leader. In Moscow, several days after his death, Lenin’s body was embalmed and put on display in a wooden mausoleum on the Red Square, where it has remained until today. With the party left without its leader, its coherence and legitimacy were at stake – again. At the thirteenth congress of the Russian Communist Party between May 23–31, 1924, the Central Committee discussed the legacy of Lenin and the principles of Leninism. Immediately following the congress, on May 31 an exhibition was opened by the Central Lenin institute at Bolshaya Dmitrovka 24, the precursor of the Central Lenin Museum. In 1936, the museum was moved to Revolution Square, where it remained until its disso-lution in the 1990s. In 1924 in Petrograd, after an initiative of neighbors, the ‘Corner of Illich’ was opened on Illich per. 7 (now Kazachiy Bolshoy per. 7) in the apartment Lenin had rented during the 1890s while working in St. Petersburg as a lawyer. Similar initiatives were undertaken in other apartments or places Lenin had been living (or hiding) prior to the October Revolution, for example the V.I. Lenin Memo-rial Apartment on ul. Lenina 52 (1927) or in Razliv, just outside of Leningrad, were Lenin had been hiding in July 1917 (1925).
43 E.A. Popravko (ed.), Muzeevedenie (Vladivostok, 2005). Handbook on museology, published online by the Vladivostok State University Economics and Service (VSUES) with a chapter on the history of Russian museums. http://abc.vvsu.ru/Books/muzeebed/page0004.asp#xex6 (November 11, 2015).
Narkompros Istpart State Museum
of Revolution V.I. Lenin Museum A.V. Lunacharskii M.N. Pokrovskii M.N. Pokrovskii M.S. Olminskii (NV) P.E. Shchegolev A.V. Lunacharskii P.E. Shchegolev M. Novorusskii (NV) M. Gorkii M.S. Olminskii (NV)
Through the creation of these memorial museums after his death, the role Lenin was accredited in the foundational narrative of the Soviet state was increased even further. Under Stalin, around Lenin’s persona eventually a cult would arise in which the leader would start playing an ever more important function. Perhaps the main example of this was the placement of his embalmed body in the quickly constructed wooden mausoleum at the Red Square, which later was replaced by a permanent building. Where other early participants of the revolution would sooner or later see themselves removed from the narrative, the position of Lenin as the founding father of the Soviet state already soon after his death started to take god-like pro-portions. Even today, this representation can be found in the different Lenin muse-ums that have survived the 1990s.
1.7 CONCLUSION: TEN YEARS ‘OCTOBER’
The first celebrations of November 7 in 1918 seem to have been the Russian interpretation of the ‘bread and circuses’ of ancient Rome. By using Tsarist era elements (food distribution, plays, fireworks), mixed with those referring to heroic predecessors (the singing of the Marseillaise) and even Orthodox aspects (proces-sions), the Bolsheviks tried to increase their base of support. The construction of this narrative was a continuous process of revaluation of the events that had taken place, both by members of the Bolshevik party, but (initially) to a great deal also by many who did not necessarily have much political affiliation. These people, mainly artists, had a strong influence in the design of the revolution’s earliest anniversaries, first in the decorations of Petrograd and Moscow, and later in the organization of mass spectacles that through its reenactment brought the revolution to the people. Because they were told very little on what they had to include, they interpreted for themselves what they thought was to be included. For artistic pur-poses, they added elements to their works that were perhaps historically incorrect, but helped them in telling a ‘good story’. It were these artists who gave the revolution many of its heroic features it is still associated with today, first and foremost the storming of the Winter Palace by the Red Guards.
Over the course of the first decade after the revolution, the cultural depart-ment of the Central Committee, Narkompros, got ever more concerned with the legitimation of the party through ‘October’. This resulted in an institutionalization of the festivities and the replacement of the voluntary participation of ‘the masses’ by strictly controlled production of agitational propaganda. At the same time of the institutionalization of October’s anniversaries, with the foundation of the Istpart Commission (and after Lenin’s dead also the Lenin Institute), Narkompros tried to produce historical research that looked into and published on the history of the revolutionary movement. Because the actual revolution had known very little par-ticipants, it was important that these stories were collected, written down and spread to the revolutionaries throughout the Soviet Union, to make them part of the events and to educate them in the history of the revolutionary movement. Nevertheless, due to the limited amount of information available to the Istpart commission, in fact precisely what it sought to resolve, the project was far from a success and in 1928 it was incorporated into the Department for Agitation and Propaganda.
In yet another attempt to solve their legitimacy problems, during the 1920s the Bolsheviks opened hundreds of revolutionary museums throughout the Soviet Union after the example of those that had been founded in Petrograd and Moscow. In the earliest stages, responsibility for their creation lay with the same elite responsible for Soviet culture in the highest organs of the party, Lunacharskii, Pokrovskii and Olminskii, among others. After the death of Lenin, new museums were created honoring the deceased leader of the revolution. Tighter control of the exhibitions displayed followed only at the end of the 1920s, when the power of the state had considerably increased.
Through showing the history of the party and the revolutionary events of 1917 to a large audience, the party sought to educate the population – just as was the case with the anniversary festivals or the research and publications of the Istpart commission or the V.I. Lenin Institute. According to official records, only the Central Museum of the Revolution in Moscow already was visited yearly by more than a million visitors, mainly of the younger generation. As a part of their curriculum, students visited in large numbers both the revolutionary museums and those honoring Lenin. In this respect, the historical narrative exhibited in these museums had a significant impact on the way those growing up in the Soviet Union were familiarized with the country’s history.
Another way through which the Bolsheviks were able to reach out to a sig-nificant amount of people was through the films dealing with the movement’s history, of which Eisenstein’s October has been the most influential, both within the Soviet Union as in the West. The image of the revolution as displayed in October included many different elements that had only made their way into the narrative throughout the decade that had passed. By building strongly the reenactment of 1920, the movie relied highly on fiction rather than facts, but through their inclusion in October they eventually would become ‘the’ narrative of the revolution as it has been remembered for decades since and often still is.
During the following more than sixty years, the main changes in the narrative were to be seen in its participants. Where between 1917–27 party history was mainly written based on accounts of the old Bolsheviks, under Stalin most of these par-ticipants were cleared out of its history or slandered. Instead other figures, including the leader himself, were accredited revolutionary credentials to an extend that made them key-players in the Bolshevik take-over of power. Nevertheless, the core story of the night of October 25 remained intact. The 1945 edition of the sole Stalin-era textbook on Soviet history which would be used until 1953, History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course (first published in 1938), gives the fol-lowing account of the revolution:
“The revolutionary units of the army, prepared for the uprising by the work of the Bolsheviks, carried out fighting orders with precision and fought side by side with the Red Guard. The navy did not lag behind the army. Kronstadt was a stronghold of the Bolshevik Party, and had long since refused to recognize the authority of the Provisional Government. The cruiser Aurora trained its guns on the Winter Palace, and on October 25
their thunder ushered in a new era, the era of the Great Socialist Revolution. […] The Provisional Government had taken refuge in the Winter Palace under the protection of cadets and shock battalions. On the night of October 25 the revolutionary workers, soldiers and sailors took the Winter Palace by storm and arrested the Provisional Government. The armed uprising in Petrograd had won.”44
This description is perhaps not as ‘colorful’ as the eyewitness account of the staged storming of the Winter Palace in 1920 and is filled with Soviet rhetoric, but in essence contains all the same elements.
The major change in the commemoration of the revolution during the Stalin was visible in the celebrations on November 7. The anniversaries were no longer celebrated as had been done during the first years, through festivals or reenact-ments. Instead, the Red Square had become the center of the celebrations and from on top of the Lenin mausoleum, Stalin watched representatives of different organizations march past. In these parades, the Red Army was playing a central role. Perhaps the most important anniversary during these years was the parade that took place at the 24th anniversary of October in, 1941. It was a critical moment in the Great Patriotic War, with the German forces located only several hundreds of kilometers outside of Moscow. Red Army soldiers paraded on the Red Square under supervision of Joseph Stalin. It was then that Stalin, who for this moment made a rare public appearance, would hold one of his most famous speeches. Following the parade, the soldiers went directly to the front. After the war, the parade would take on mythical status similar to the blockade of Leningrad, or the battle at Stalingrad, and since 2003 the anniversary of the 24th anniversary is celebrated yearly with a reenactment of the parade.
2
SOVIET HISTORY
FROM PERESTROIKA
TO PUTIN
2.1 INTRODUCTION
It is the evening of December 25, 1991, just after half-past-seven. In front of the Moscow Kremlin, a small audience has gathered and watches the red Soviet flag being lowered one last time. When in its stead the bright white-blue-red flag of the Russian Federation is raised, a few foreign visitors cheer. An older man, a war veteran, bursts out in an angry tirade.45 Shortly before this remarkable scene which would in fact go by almost unnoticed were it not for one reporter of the New York Times, Mikhail Gorbachev had publicly announced his resignation as the country’s president. At this night, more than seventy-four years after the “Great October Socialist Revolution” had brought the Bolsheviks to power, communist Russia, for long seen as the final phase of history, had become history itself.
Directly after his appointment as General Secretary in 1985, Gorbachev had tried to democratize the Soviet Union while going back to the core principles of socialism, similar to Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP).46 Only within several years, his policies of glasnost and perestroika turned out to have the opposite effect, ultimately fatal to the survival of the system as a whole. In this process of intro-ducing ‘socialism with a human face’, the revaluation of Lenin and the Octo-ber Revolution would play an essential role, both in Gorbachev’s plans as in their ultimate failure.
The mental revolution that took place between 1985–1991 turned out to be merely a harbinger of the revision of the early 1990s. Just as had been the case in early Soviet Russia, the new regime and many from Russia’s political and intellec-tual elite, both those who had started their careers in the communist party as those that had opposed it, quickly moved to condemnation of the previous era. Politicians, intellectuals and activists reviewed and rejected not only the country’s former leaders, as had started during perestroika most notably regarding Stalin, but which also was directed towards Lenin. Instead, in post-Communist Russia, the core values of Marxism-Leninism were strongly criticized. Especially in 1991–1992, studies of the communist era – much less in number in comparison to the last years before the collapse of the Soviet Union – were in strong contrast with those of the late 1980s. No longer did scholars attempt to rewrite Soviet history in order to return to the basics of socialism.
Where during perestroika different historical journals on Soviet history had come up quickly, in the first years of post-communist Russia they had lost their appeal to many, leading to a strong decrease in their print run.47 In early post-Soviet Russia, the works published were highly pro-Tsarist, anti-Leninist, anti-Stalinist but most of all anti-communist. The British Soviet historian Robert Davies wrote about this period that “not just the Stalin period was compared with Hitler’s Ger-many, but the whole 74 years of communism”.48 This academic development reflected a trend which was also visible in public historical discourse. TV shows
45 New York Times, ‘The Soviet State, Born of a Dream, Dies: End of an Empire – a special report’
(Decem-ber 26, 1991).
46 J. Gooding, Socialism in Russia: Lenin and his legacy, 1890–1991 (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 214. 47 R.W. Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era (New York, 1997), p. 221.
and magazines showed great interest in imperial Russia and its heroes, contrasted by a strong repudiation of the Soviet past.
Over the past decade-and-a-half, Russia’s dealing with its history has been the topic of interest to many scholars. Most publications focus on the ‘revival’ of Stalin, the return of Tsarist and Orthodox history in the country’s historical canon and above all the central position of the Great Patriotic War. In the majority of these studies, the present political situation is seen essential to the way historical events are viewed. Whereas other countries have an uncertain future, in Russia, a saying goes, it is the past which is unpredictable.
This chapter discusses the way Soviet history has been dealt with in Russia since roughly 1985. During this period, it underwent significant changes. The reforms of the Gorbachev period led to a fundamental reinterpretation of communism, when issues that were among the core building blocks of the legitimacy of the socialist society as a whole started to be questioned. In the historical debates during these years, eventually even Lenin, the founding father of the Soviet state, was no longer unassailable. This reinterpretation of Soviet history was all but the sole reason for the Union’s eventual downfall, but it certainly played an important role. The mental revolution that took place during these years was followed by a strong repudiation of all things associated with the communist era after its downfall in 1991. Yeltsin sought to remove all symbols referring to communism, in which he eventually due to their omnipresence would not succeed. The way the Yeltsin regime dealt with the legacy of its predecessor can be roughly divided into three phases, although within these periods there have been some essential deviations, mainly caused by political developments. The first period, which followed the August coup of 1991, would last until 1993 and is characterized by a rigid condem-nation of the Soviet past and the replacement of former Soviet history by a strong emphasis on pre-1917 events. During 1993 then, a short period followed when the anti-Communist campaign slowed down, but this was abruptly halted by the con-stitutional crisis of October 1993. Although in its aftermath a renewed anti- communist campaign would follow, from 1994 onwards, a more moderate approach could be witnessed, when attempts were made to actually deal with the Soviet past instead of solely dismissing it. It was only at the end of his presidency in 1999 that during his impeachment process Soviet history was yet again invoked, when Yeltsin was held responsible for the downfall of the Soviet Union. The new millennium then brought with Vladimir Putin not only a new man in power but also another revision of Russia’s national history. Under his leadership, many symbols of communism were reintroduced into the national historical canon.
During the time that has passed since the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the position of the October Revolution as a part of Soviet history has taken a slightly different path. Under Yeltsin, in accordance with the general held views on the Soviet period, it was seen as the moment at which the linear development of the Russian state had been halted by intervention of outside forces seeking the destruction of the Russian Empire. Whereas after the turn of the millennium under Putin many aspects of Soviet history have been valuated much more positive than was the case during Yeltsin’s presidency, this cannot be said about the revolution.
