Stanford Politics

Next week marks the 100^th anniversary of the October Revolution, the second and better-known wave of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which consolidated Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s communist government and sounded the death knell of democracy in Russia. A century later, this cataclysmic event still reverberates through Europe and the post-Soviet space. Yet many countries, not least Russia herself, are struggling to come to terms with their communist pasts and interpret the Revolution’s historical legacy in the context of modern ideals.

For better or worse, the events of 1917 continue to shape the politics of many countries in undeniable ways, at the same time as others strive to finally evade its hundred-year-long shadow.

Earlier this year, many around the world marked the centennial of the February Revolution, the first stage of the communist revolution in which Nicholas II’s tsarist regime was replaced by a short-lived democracy. Yet from Moscow, one would hardly have noticed the occasion: the Kremlin all but failed to acknowledge the anniversary on March 8^th, once major holiday in the Soviet Union, focusing instead on military displays related to the Second World War.

The events of 1917 indeed present a nagging contradiction to Vladimir Putin. On one hand, as journalist Michael Zygar writes, the Kremlin “can’t identify themselves with Lenin, because he was a revolutionary,” and on the other, “they can’t identify with [Tsar] Nicholas II, because he was a weak leader.”

Fearing the so-called colour revolutions that overthrew Moscow’s hegemony in Ukraine, Georgia, and other post-Soviet republics, Putin has insisted “that we didn’t need the world revolution” in 1917. The Russian president has endeavored to anchor his rule in a continuous history of stable Russian governance and Orthodox Christianity, objectives ostensibly opposed to the Bolsheviks’ atheistic and, of course, revolutionary ideals.

Yet, last week the Kremlin seemed to have found an exception to Zygar’s claim that nothing from 1917 “can be used as propaganda tool.”  An upcoming series by the state-run Channel One (Pervii Kanal) in commemoration of the October Revolution begs the question, identifying Putin’s historical analogue by circumscribing instead who he is not: Leon Trotsky.

One of the fathers of communism in Russia, Trotsky was expelled by Stalin in the late 1920s and continued to criticize Stalin from abroad until his famous death-by-ice-pick in Mexico in 1940. The biopic’s trailer [warning: violence and nudity] paints a morally dubious image of Trotsky as a naïve, overzealous idealist, ending with the blood-stained words, “Revolution… is me.”

According to Alexander Reznik, a historian at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, Trotsky is possibly intended to represent Russia’s leading opposition figure, Alexei Navalny. If Putin styles his leadership as confident, predictable, and nationalistic, the young democrat, like Trotsky, is “destructive, savage, unpatriotic, and probably working for foreign governments.”

The message is clear: revolution now (or in the upcoming 2018 elections) as a century ago, would be misguided, foolhardy, and dangerous.

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The implications of the October Revolution extend beyond Russian domestic politics. Besides cementing the demise of the tsarist regime inside of Russia, 1917 also marked the last year in which Ukraine, the Baltic states, and several other now-independent nations resided under Russian rule, at least until World War II. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed by Lenin to end Russia’s involvement in the First World War granted independence to Ukraine, Georgia, Finland and (after Germany’s defeat) Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It is no secret that even today, Putin disputes the sovereignty of many these nations once considered part of Russia, calling Ukraine “not even a country.”

Even within these countries’ borders, Soviet legacies continue to confuse and confound politics. In Ukraine, some scholars allege that the principal cleavages in society are not ethnic nor linguistic but rather between conflicting responses to the country’s communist past: “non/anti-Soviet and post/neo-Soviet.”

In Poland, opposition to the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party is fractured between Lech Walesa’s anti-communist Solidarity movement and the post-communist Democratic Left Alliance, hindering a concerted response to the government’s undemocratic actions.

And the Czech Republic may soon elect a “member of the Communist nomenklatura” as their prime minister.

Yet the salience of Soviet legacies risks being overstated. As former Estonian President Toomas Ilves and former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul will discuss at Stanford this upcoming week, enduring labels as “former Soviet republics” or “new EU entrants” continue to overshadow the Nordic-Baltic states’ dramatic technological and democratic advances in the last two decades.

One hundred years later, the complicated legacy of the October Revolution and the dramatic geopolitical changes it spawned continue to influence national politics in both real and imagined ways.

Most telling are governments’ receptions to the regicidal event. Lenin’s anti-elite, ‘anti-establishment’ agenda no doubt resonates with today’s populist rhetoric; yet, no modern right-wing strongman, even a former Soviet intelligence officer like Putin, would be caught admitting as much. Neither incumbent nor opposition in Russia benefits from such unflattering — and, for the most part, unfitting — historical analogies. For that reason, many across Europe will rejoice that the shadow of 1917 is finally setting with the last century.

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Sarah Manney is a senior studying political science. She is the founder and president of the European Security Undergraduate Network (ESUN). This is the third edition of “Cardinal Richelieu,” a weekly column in Stanford Politics, written by members of ESUN.