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Wednesday, 07.11.2007
The October Revolution: As the Winter Palace fell
André Ballin, Moscow. The October Revolution is turning 90 years old, but nobody’s throwing a party. Two years ago, the 7th November was relegated to a normal working day. But it remains an important date.
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It is late in the evening on the 7th November 1917, which according to the old Julian calendar is 25th October. In Petrograd it is cold and dark, but the snowy streets of the Russian capital are unusually animated.
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At 9.40pm, a gun fires from the battleship Aurora. It is the starting gun for a revolution that the history books will call the ‘Socialist October Revolution’ and which will change the course of the 20th century. Its results still shape the present.
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Revolution as a consequence of collapse of authority in Tsarist Russia
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The revolution in October 1917 was the inevitable result of a situation where no part of the Russian elite was capable of taking and keeping power. The erosion of the Russian state began with defeat in the Russian-Japanese war, and was exacerbated by the disastrous defeats in the First World War. These revealed all too clearly Tsar Nikolai II’s lack of leadership qualities. When in February 1917 the people rose up against him, the Tsar hardly attempted to resist. He abdicated – and the monarchy fell.
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Bourgeois government failed due to continuation of war.
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A bourgeois government then took over, but never had complete control, because it had to share power with the social-revolutionary workers and soldiers councils. The solution of important social problems (land reform) and political questions (ending the war) was continually deferred. Foreign political alliances and overestimation of Russia’s power meant that, despite all its military defeats, Russia was still speculating on annexing areas around the Bosphorus. This was to be its downfall.
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The longer the war went on, the more the government lost its initial popularity.
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Freedom, peace, bread and land
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The Bolshevists carried the day with their slogan “Freedom, peace, bread and land“. These were the demands Vladimir Lenin raised in his famous April Theses. The Bolshevik’s undisputed intellectual leader had been initially surprised in his Swiss exile by the speed of events in 1917.
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He travelled in a sealed train through Germany and Finland to Petrograd. There are numerous reports that Lenin and the revolution was financed by the German general staff to knock Russia out of the war.
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By late autumn 1917, Russia was anyway no longer capable of coherent action. The soldiers deserted in droves from the front, there was unrest in the armament factories and discontent among the rural population was discontented. The government had lost control over the situation.
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Blood hardly spilled during storm of Winter Palace
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Lenin wanted to exploit this situation to seize power. On the evening of 25th October, a few hundred members of the Red Guard tried to storm the Winter Palace. Initially the militarily inexperienced Bolshevists were easily repulsed by the palace guards.
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Three waves of attack achieved nothing. It was only as parts of the 106th infantry division came to the help of the rebels that the fourth attack succeeded. The uprising was less bloody as later portrayed in Sergei Eisenstein’s monumental film.
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New historical epoch
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And nevertheless it was the most revolutionary event of the 20th century. The revolution was “of international, global significance, because it meant a fundamental shift in the history of mankind, a shift from the old capitalist world to the new socialist world,” wrote Lenin’s successor Stalin in 1927.
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The October revolution was a turning point in history. It marked the beginning of real existing socialism. The Soviet experiment lasted until 1991 and differed fundamentally from the Utopia idealised by socialist theoreticians.
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Modernisation bought with blood
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Supporters of the revolution could claim a powerful modernisation leap for a backward agrarian country like Russia, including eliminating poverty and making education universal. The Soviet Union needed only a few decades to become one of the world’s most powerful empires and competitor to the West.
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But such progress was paid for in blood. The Red Terror in the civil war, the collectivisation and subsequent famines and the Stalinist repressions cost the lives of millions of Soviet citizens. Internal repression was matched by external isolation during the cold war.
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Instead of the permanent revolution came stagnation
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The land finally petrified in bureaucracy. The annual celebrations of the October Revolution were only demonstrations of power. Huge military parades past a white-haired politburo perched on the Lenin mausoleum shaped the picture of the October Revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. They were proof of Communism’s gradual decline.
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Curiously the public holiday survived the collapse of the Soviet Union by 15 years. November 7th ceased to be a public holiday only in 2005. Andrei Issayev, chairman of the social affairs committee of the Duma, said that those many Russian whose relatives fell victim to Communist repression saw no reason to celebrate the day.
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Demonstration in the evening
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Instead, the 4th of November, the day on which Moscow was liberated from the Polish invaders in 1612, is now a public holiday.
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Communists and Stalinists still rally on November 7th - after the end of the working day. There are no longer any official commemorations of the ‘Day of the Great Socialist Revolution’.
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Nevertheless, Russia is still littered with reminders of the Revolution. One of the most impressive is the Moscow metro station ‘Square of the Revolution’, where martial revolutionaries still wait for the signal to attack. Luckily they are made of bronze. (ab/.rufo/Moscow)
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