Scholarly Passions around the Myth of “Great October”: Results of the Past Decade

As in the past, much is being written about the revolution in Russia. It is scarcely possible to give a definitive answer to the question of which approaches now dominate, as bibliographies of the literature coming out on the subject are extremely unreliable. For this reason, it seems more appropriate to limit myself here to subjective impressions. At the world Slavic (ICCEES) congress at Harrowgate in 1990, I was rash enough to declare that within five years Russian (at that time still Soviet) historiography could expect a sort of renaissance. My optimism was certainly linked to the opening of the archives, but even more important seemed to be the disappearance of ideological controls. Alas, my hopes were not completely justified. By the next world congress, in Warsaw in 1995, I was subjected to pointed criticisms. The crux of the matter, as it turned out, did not lie in the flow of information and freedom of authorial expression. For qualitative improvement in the understanding of the Soviet past these things were not enough.

If the October Revolution established a grandiose myth, then the fall of "Russian communism" gave birth to a new one. At the epicenter of mythopoesis, it appears, only a few historians have been capable of finding a firm foothold. The greatest damage which doctrinal Diktat inflicted upon historical consciousness was an alienation from one's own past. Even professional researchers act as if they are dealing with a revolution that was thrust upon them and an alien system that grew out of it. The past became either "otherwordly" or "unreal": the actors of the revolution and counterrevolution were transformed into mock heroes and villains, wearing partisan masks; ordinary people found a right to a place in history only as representatives of classes. It would seem that this history, "dematerialized" with the help of a "materialistic method," provokes its own endless rewriting.

The reaction to the previous Soviet historiography has been instructive. When, in 1995, the Scientific Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences put together a series of conferences on Russian revolutionary history with the title Revoliutsiia i chelovek [The revolution and the individual] the majority of historians could hardly have supposed that the project would yield so many works on 1917 of the same "old" kind.¹ Disputes over the "historical meaning" of the revolution by that time had already acquired an abstract, speculative character; emotions were turned into doctrines, stock phrases of public debate into concepts.

I personally was amazed as I became aware of some of the claims people were making in discussions of my book Krasnaia smuta [A Red Time of Troubles].² Having concentrated on exposing "factors of unpredictability" and real (not ideologically imagined) currents of power in the revolution, currents which arose out of underlying accumulations of human aggression, I had not suspected that I was encroaching on something "sacred." Of course, I was prepared for accusations of anti-communist "slander," but it still gave me pause when colleagues whom I had quoted abundantly came forth with those sorts of attacks. It seemed that the former official conceptions of the Russian Revolution had taken on the peculiar character of a "sacred relic" to be guarded, the defense of which was capable of sweeping up even ex-connoisseurs of anti-Soviet jokes. The possibility of being "wounded by the past" turned even anti-Communists into "patriots" ready to defend "their own," forgetting both methodology and the truth itself.

It was curious that something similar could be observed in other fields of knowledge in the humanities. Theory and source base existed as if independent of one another. Young scholars, having a perfectly good understanding of new methodologies, were nonetheless guided by something else when it came to concrete research. One could observe a dogmatism analogous to that of Soviet times. The thing is, the phenomenon of Soviet historiography was much more complicated than people are used to thinking. It was not so much a matter of Marxist doctrine. The study of the history of October, as serious students have observed, flowed into the framework...