Historians and the Centennial of the Russian Revolution

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 have made total about-faces, but such changes of heart affected their reputation and, as a rule, were unlikely to enhance their authority. Just as important in the politics of memory are the knowledge and experiences of the masses, their ability to accurately process the information targeted at them. Finally, any memorial project needs at least a minimum of scholarly help. Of course, court historians are always ready to do as they are bid, although the cynical idea that the population can be fed any image of the past is dangerous even in the middle-term perspective. In the late 1980s we witnessed how public awareness of history’s “white [blank] spots” or its “black holes” became a serious factor in political destabilization.