Taming the Revolution: The Politics of Memory One Hundred Years after October

Abstract:This article examines the mnemonic strategies of the Putin administration in and around the centenary year of the Russian revolution in 2017. Given the contested nature of the Soviet legacy in Russian politics, the Kremlin sought to depoliticize the revolution by playing down the ideological struggles and focusing instead on the turmoil and suffering it had caused to Russians of all classes and convictions. In addition, because the Bolshevik revolution marked a disruptive moment that might contradict President Vladimir Putin's narrative of a Russian "civilizational" identity with roots in the distant past, the Kremlin reframed the revolution, and the Soviet era in general, within a cyclical grand narrative punctuated by "times of troubles" between one regime system and another, which was also applied to the rise of Putin after the chaotic 1990s.