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Nearly one hundred years ago, the Soviet regime was born in the fires of the October 1917 Revolution. As a result, throughout the Soviet era, all revolutionary, freedom-loving phenomena related to the country’s national liberation—including the period’s romantic fervor in the arts—had positive connotations. This is one feature of the Soviet period that the Putin era cannot share, because the latter is, in essence, counterrevolutionary. In fact, many characteristics of the current Russian model of authoritarianism, such as its repressive nature and its crusade against anything that can be broadly interpreted as extremism, stem from the government’s fear of color revolutions, the Arab Spring, and the Ukrainian Maidan movement of 2013–14.
The paradox is that, historically, Russia’s current political regime was born out of a peaceful bourgeois revolution, the liberal political and economic reforms of the early 1990s. This dissonance shapes the regime’s ambiguous relationship to the past. Although the current leadership ultimately hails from a revolution in the population’s mindset, in the country’s economic system, and in its political structures, the Kremlin is obsessed with its own self-preservation, and it cannot stand anything revolutionary.
This mentality determines, for example, the negative attitudes of Russian elites, including Putin himself, both toward Vladimir Lenin as a symbol of the 1917 revolution that in some ways points toward a very different period, the democratic revolutionary unrest and so-called chaos of the 1990s. In early 2016, Putin said of Lenin, “Letting your rule be guided by thoughts is right, but only when that idea leads to the right results, not like it did with Vladimir Ilyich . . . In the end that idea led to the fall of the Soviet Union.” He went on to say, “There were many such ideas as providing regions with autonomy and others . . . They planted an atomic bomb under the building that is called Russia which later exploded. We did not need a global revolution.”15 Public attitudes toward Lenin are relatively positive. In a March 2017 survey, 56 percent of respondents agreed that Lenin played a positive role in history.
What is a major challenge for the Russian authorities in 2017 is that it is impossible for them to ignore the centenary of the October Revolution, but it is unclear how they should commemorate it. The only idea that the government and the Russian Orthodox Church have come up with is to frame ongoing societal divisions as a chance for reconciliation between revolutionary Reds and the opposing Whites—even though these categories from Russian history have no relevance in the present. The limitations of this approach are underscored by the state’s controversial announcement in January 2017 that it would seek to transfer the ownership of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Saint Petersburg to the Russian Orthodox Church, which some residents opposed. (The cathedral had been put under state control during to the Soviet era and was transformed into a museum.) Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia tried to portray this development as an opportunity to achieve a measure of civic unity, saying, “the symbol of the reconciliation of our people . . . Consensus about returned churches should serve as the embodiment of consensus and mutual forgiveness between the Reds and the Whites, between the believers and the non-believers.”16 Contrary to this sentiment, however, the situation involving Saint Isaac’s Cathedral actually caused a serious conflict that did not unite but polarized not only residents of Saint Petersburg but nearly the entire nation into camps of supporters and opponents of the decision. As a result, if the cathedral became a symbol of anything, it embodied a societal split rather than an instance of reconciliation.
full: http://carnegie.ru/2017/10/05/past-that-divides-russia-s-new-official-history-pub-73304
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