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Friday, March 29, 2024

Russia in October 1917 and a century later

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It was entirely reasonable to expect that during the time immediately preceding 2017 lavish preparations would be made by Russia’s government for the commemoration of what New York Times correspondent John Reed, in his best-selling book “Ten Days That Shook the World,” described as one of the decisive events of the modern era. But no such thing happened, and as 2017 draws to a close there are no celebrations or any indications that there will be any festivities before the year ends.

Why the unwillingness to commemorate an event that truly shook the world and placed Russia–now called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics–on the road to the superpower status that it enjoyed until the 1980s? Why has president Vladimir Putin, an exemplar of the USSR political system, had nothing to say by way of remembering Nikolai Lenin and the other hot-eyed communists who plotted against and eventually succeeded in overthrowing the centuries-old Tsarist regime?

The answer is made up of two parts. The first part relates to how the political-social-economic philosophy created by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels has fared since the triumph of communism in Russia. The second part has to do with the political and economic changes that have taken place in Russia–now called the Russian Federation–since the implementation of the glasnost and perestroika policies laid down by president Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s and the removal of the Berlin Wall at the end of that decade. The Russian Communist Party still exists, but politically Russia is now a democratic State–in theory, at least–and the Russian economy now functions along capitalist, non-collectivist lines. One wonders whether Marx and Lenin are, from their graves, frowning or pleased about the presence of numerous Russian businessmen in the list of world billionaires. There is little resemblance between the structure of today’s Russian economy and the society advocated by Marx and Engels in their writings.

The other part of the reason for the Russian authorities’ reluctance to commemorate the centenary of the October 1917 revolution has to do with how communism has fared in the world since those heady days one hundred years ago. Marx, Engels and their fellow-ideologues dreamed of a world in which one country after another would rally to the Hammer and Sickle, but the harsh policies adopted by Lenin and Josef Stalin during their first three decades in power–the forced collectivization of private farms, the pogroms, the extermination of the Kulaks, the Siberian prison camps–served to dissuade the lower income classes of the Western countries from embracing the communist ideology. The Eastern European countries that fell behind the Iron Curtain at the end of World War II were quick to switch to democracy upon the dissolution of the USSR, and the former Asian Soviet socialist republics were equally quick to establish democratic regimes in the wake of the demise of USSR. In the western hemisphere only one country–Cuba–is communist. In Asia only China and its client-state North Korea maintain communist systems, though the Chinese economy has gone capitalist, producing an enormous number of billionaires. Like China, Vietnam has a communist government operating alongside a capitalist economy.

With so little to show after a century of proselytizational effort, and with its own political and economic systems having embraced democracy and capitalism, is it any wonder that Mr. Putin and his colleagues are not minded to commemorate the October 1917 revolution and thereby draw attention to communism’s utter failure to unite the world’s poor workers and peasants behind the Hammer and Sickle?

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Better for the fellows in the Kremlin to pretend that there never were “ten days that shook the world”. Save face that way.

E-mail: romero.business.class@gmail.com

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