Historians and the Centennial of the Russian Revolution

Abstract

One certainty is that the emergence of new approaches to studying the 1917 Russian Revolution will be determined not solely by the current historiographic situation but also by society’s expectations. For several years now, foreign colleagues have been asking: “How are people in Russia planning to mark the revolution’s centennial? How are they proposing to organize celebrations of the anniversary?” I usually laughed off the question, recalling the famous phrase about the “country with an unpredictable past.” Still, I did have some basis for making predictions (Kolonitskii, 2017). Not all of my assumptions proved correct, but some tendencies were easy to foresee. After all, politicians and public figures, writers and scholars, journalists and filmmakers all have rather limited financial and organizational resources for holding anniversary events, and the pool of qualified specialists needed to stage celebrations is rather small. Furthermore, the main participants in this process are constrained by their own past statements and actions. There are famous cases, of course, where commentators and even historians