The Centenary of the Russian Revolution Came and Went: What Next?

Abstract

Major anniversaries of defining moments in history provide unique opportunities for governments, historians, and the public to revisit popular narratives, often resulting in their revision, modification, or even rejection, which reflect the climate of the times. On the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution in 1889, for instance, the French erected the Eiffel Tower, one of the world’s most renowned landmarks, in a political environment that sought to legitimate the values of the Third Republic. A hundred years later, the glass and metal Louvre Pyramid, which serves as the main entrance to the Louvre Museum, opened. It, too, became a landmark of the city of Paris but in a strikingly different political climate in which politics had shifted to the center and right and some major historians questioned the results of the French Revolution. How has Russia commemorated the centennial of its equally consequential revolution? The journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History launched the conversation on this question with a forum, “State of the Field: 1917 on the Eve of the Centenary,” published in the fall 2015 issue of the journal, including reflections by historians S. A. Smith, Boris Kolonitskii (Kolonitsky), and Liudmila Novikova, and a reaction piece that I wrote. As Kolonitskii observed, despite the historiographical trend in both Western and some Russian scholarship to view the 1914–1922 period as a “continuum of crisis,” in historian Peter Holquist’s felicitous formulation, already by 2015 the politics of memory in Russia following the centenary of