State memory: 1917 and Russian memory politics. By MANFRED SAPPER and VOLKER WEICHSEL
‘Russian memory
politics represses both the utopia and the violence. It wants neither to know
about the perpetrators nor to commemorate the victims.’ The editors of Eurozine
partner journal ‘Osteuropa’ reflect on the political meaning of Russia’s
official commemoration of 1917.
Word has got out:
history politics is about politics, not history. The interpretation of the past
serves to define the present and to mark out the future. Russia’s commemoration
of the centenary of the February and October Revolutions therefore tells us a
lot about how the political leadership in the Kremlin sees itself, about the
worldviews of various social groups, and about the values of Russians.
The same
goes for all the other states that belonged to the Soviet Union until 1991. In the Soviet Union,
the revolution in October 1917 was considered to be an event of global
significance, the beginning of the liberation of human beings from material
want, political coercion, violence and war. The exploitation of humans by other
humans would be abolished and equality and justice restored. Empires and
nation-states alike would be overcome. All nations would be united in a
worldwide Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The ideal of the revolution was
nothing less than eternal peace on Earth.
However, the
Bolsheviks were never able to get a social majority behind them or their
utopia. At the beginning of the communist world movement was a violent power
grab that, after the First World War, immediately led Russia into civil war.
The spirit of utopia soon began to justify immeasurable violence: mass
shootings, camps, annihilation through famine, terror. Official Russian
memory politics represses both the utopia and the violence. It wants neither to
know about the perpetrators nor to commemorate the victims. It recognizes only
one tragedy, which allegedly struck society like a natural disaster – and the
state, which alone was able to offer salvation.
For the Russian
leadership, the question of how to mark the centenary of 2017 is therefore a
political-historical conundrum. How to commemorate events that symbolise the
downfall and the destruction of a state, of the Russian Empire? How to remember
ideals about which the ruling elite were so cynical, but which still served as
the basis for the state and its apparatus? That can’t happen without
memory-political inconsistencies. The patron saint of the Revolution, Vladimir
I. Lenin, has fallen low. Putin has long blamed Lenin and his nationalities
policy for the destruction of the Russian Empire. At the same time, Putin –
whose rise is thanks to his career in the KGB and the FSB – is proud to belong
in the tradition of the Cheka, the communist secret police, whose centenary is
also this year, on 20 December.
The Russian regime’s
fixation on the strong state and the mantra of stability, which reflects the
fear of any kind of change and which allows all demands from society for reform
to be denounced as calls for revolution, leads to 1917 being repressed. The
Revolution is no longer to be seen as a caesura. The historical-political
guidelines prescribe that the years 1914–1921 be taken as a single phase. In
historiographical terms, there are reasons for widening the horizon. In terms
of memory politics, however, the aim is to assert continuity between the Russian
Empire and the Soviet Union. The longstanding claim of the critics of the
Soviet Union – that it was an extension of the Russian Empire with a different
ideology – has today been given a positive spin to become Russia’s official
state ideology.
The Russian minister
of culture, Vladimir Medinsky, set out the parameters of this interpretation
back in 2015. Like the dynastic, social and national crisis at the beginning of
the seventeenth century, the revolutionary period was a ‘Time of Troubles’ that
had led to the loss of Empire. The reason for the downfall of the state was
twofold: on the one hand, the defeat of Russia in the First World War; on the
other, the split of the elite into ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’. According to this view
of things, the lesson of history is unconditional unity. The ‘Time of Troubles’
– a concept also used by the current regime and its supporters to refer to the
1990s – serves as a warning that justifies the repression of social plurality.
When, even in the highest political circles, the Russian Revolution is said to
have been a conspiracy of foreign powers against the Russian state, then
associations with the campaign against supposed ‘foreign agents’ in civil
society are not unintended.
This worldview
perfectly matches that of the Orthodox Church. In the central thrust of memory
politics and contemporary political thinking, Church and State hierarchies sing
in a single, patriotic accord. Their ‘harmonious’ commemoration of the order
defeated in 1917 allows it to be forgotten that priests and believers suffered
particularly harshly under the Bolsheviks – and also that the Church was deeply
connected to the power structures of the Soviet Union. This kind of
commemo-ration justifies the authoritarian political order in the same way as
Russia’s renunciation of Europe and any kind of self-accountable, liberal
thinking. Nothing could be more alien to Russia’s ruling elites than the idea
of enlightened, mature people who aspire to be citizens, to take responsibility
for the social community, to choose their representatives in free elections and
to control the government through the rule of law and the separation of powers.
Those were the liberal ideals of the February Revolution.
After seventy years
of Soviet rule, a brief interregnum, and almost two decades of Putin, they have
been repressed entirely. The shock for the Kremlin was therefore great when the
Maidan in Ukraine brought back memories of the revolutionary potential of a
democratic upheaval. This text is the editorial
to Osteuropa
(6–8/2017), ‘Revolution Redux. 1917–2017: Forwards and forever forgotten’.
Alexander
Rabinowitch: The
Bolsheviks Come to Power in Petrograd: Centennial Reflections
Marcel van der Linden: Why Leninism and Bolshevism Are Not the Same
Marcel van der Linden: Why Leninism and Bolshevism Are Not the Same
