Saturday, November 18, 2017

Russian Revolution

 
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 100 YEAR
CENTENARY
By Stephen Wilson

 
The 100th centenary of the Russian revolution has
neither been officially commemorated ,condoned
or condemned. Instead of red banned parades,
the emphasis has been put on the 76th
anniversary of the 1941 military parade on Red
square where Stalin gave a stirring speech to
soldiers sent off to the front to help win the Battle
of Moscow. Reenactment parades involving as
many as 5000 military men and women were
performed. In deed, a few billboards promoted
the event depicting a young child giving flowers to
an old war veteran. Being comparatively
uncontroversial , the events of the Great Patriotic
War have overshadowed and displaced the
events of the Russian revolution. Other more
widespread billboards show a letter of the last
tsar expressing his love to his wife. The letter is
attempt to defend the tsar's reputation against a
bizarre dispute surrounding the recent film
Matilda which dramatizes the tsar's affair with
a ballet dancer.
Memories of the Russian revolution still polarise
and divide Russia. What might astonish outsiders
is how much support the revolution still retains
despite overwhelming evidence from the archives
and endless eyewitness accounts of mass
atrocities. The proponents of the revolution claim
without the revolution Russia would not have
emerged as a great Industrial society, would
never have established a free medical and
educational system and attained massive
literacy. The Russian revolution put the first
man into space. Lenin was a great sponsor of
Russian rocket science.
However, many Russians I spoke to thought that
the Russian revolution was a disaster. An
estimated half a million were killed in 3 years
following the initial period of the Red terror and
9 million died in the civil war from a combination
of typhus , starvation, and drought. It is not
surprising that when a Dutch teacher on an
exchange visit to a Russian school stated
he wanted to discuss the revolution most Russian
teachers did not want to speak about those
events. They regarded it as a huge disaster !
It is worth citing a 2016 survey from the All
Russian study of Adult Opinions. When
respondents were asked : 'Do you agree that
the Russian revolution expressed the will of
people throughout the Russian empire : 45%
agreed , 43 % disagreed and 12% stated it
was difficult to say. This may indicate sharp
differences in the opinions of Russians.When
respondents were asked : "What were the main
causes which led to the Russian revolution ?"
45 % stated difficult conditions of the people,
20% a weak government and 12 % a conspiracy.
It is striking to note that a lot of Russians still
blame the west for causing the Russian revolution
and not themselves. A common belief is that the
Germans sponsored and aided Lenin's seizure of
power.
It is often forgotten that even the Bolsheviks
themselves never referred to the events of
the takeover as a revolution but an uprising or
perevorot. I asked Alexei Aleshin , a chief editor
what he thought of this uprising. He stated :
'It was unavoidable. This is because the
monarchy had lost any power base within and
had no mechanism for exercising control. The
Bolsheviks took control because they were very
crafty and outwitted everyone else. But they were
also the most ruthless and in those times using
the strong rod proved the most effective. Many
Russians don't know much about those events
because they were brainwashed by state
propaganda. I would say that Russians who fled
abroad from the revolution are more aware of
what happened than local people. We are still
arguing about what actually happened ".
I asked an artist Natalia Miroshnik what she
thought about the revolution .She succinctly
declared : 'It was terrible ! I blame the
intelligentsia. They have all those impractical
ideas and to put them into practice. I think
that before the revolution things were better
because even though you had a hierarchy people
had more chance of earning a living or not being
starved. I painted the portrait of an old blind man
who told me that he was much better off before
the revolution. Everybody in his home town
were treated kindly by the baron . When the
baron was made homeless by the revolution
all the local people would secretly help him.
Lenin made a revolution because he could not
forgive the tsar for executing his older brother.
He wanted revenge !
It would be a grave mistake if people tried to
bury Lenin. It would provoke a civil war. I think
we should let sleeping dogs lie".
One of the legacies of the uprising is that events
have left most Russians with a distaste for
revolutions or in deed profound changes. A
survey found that 92% of Russians don't see
the need for a revolution while only 5% would
welcome one.

 

Sunday, November 5, 2017

Russian Repression

REMEMBERING REPRESSION
By Stephen Wilson
 
Russians would rather forget the revolution
 
The weather was dismal. Relentlessly and remorse
-lessly raining for 3 days without end. No reprieve
was in sight and I noticed more students coughing
and teachers taking sick leave requiring me to act
as a substitute. "When will this rotten rain cease?"'
I asked myself. Halloween was imminent and the
engulfing and encircling impenetrable darkness
rendering everything vague seemed fitting . I was
asked about Halloween but my mind was more
focused on commemorating ; 'The Day of the
Victims of Repression ' held every 30th October.
On this very day I found myself rushing off
to another student through the old First World
War Memorial park within the vicinity of a church
next to the metro station of Sokol.
 
As I cut through the park I noticed a candle-lit
ceremony where Russians were all queuing up
to take turns in reading out the details of victims
of the repression. Each person would read out the
name, profession , age and last residence of the
victim and then say a prayer for them. It reminded
me of an Orthodox Litany for the Dead. Then it
dawned on me it actually was. I noticed one young
woman read out the details of her great
grandfather. She also read out : "Mutinv Vladimir
Ivanovich , aged 42 , Director of State Bolshoi
Theatre , shot on the 26th November 1937."

This ceremony, held in pitch darkness, sounded
more chilling than any ghosts or phantoms from
Halloween. I recall a Russian joking to me :
"Ghosts would be too scared to haunt Russia ! "
My curiosity caught the attention of a kindly
woman called Margarita who explained what was
going on. " We are hear to remember the victims
of the repression so that it does not happen again
and to teach people about how terrible this was."
I asked her : " Aren't you afraid that this can
happen again? " Margarita retorted : " No we are
not afraid of anyone and we will continue to try
and make people aware of this tragedy. A lot of
Russians are unaware of their own history so our
job is to teach and remind them". She handed me
a badge from her Orthodox Brotherhood and
insisted that I too , should join in the ceremony by
reading out the names of the victims of the
ceremony. While waiting in the queue I
encountered a young woman who informed me
her husband's great grandfather had been a victim
of the repression and : "He had great difficulty
getting access to the archives which explained his
fate." The group were handing out leaflets stating:
'Millions of our innocent citizens perished in the
years of Soviet terror. This tragedy touched every
family. We ask you to light a candle in memory of
the victims of the repressed '.

According to some sources , as many as 700,000
victims were shot over the two years 1936 -1937.
However, the years of repression can't be confined
to those years and began in 1918 . According to
one historian Lucia Lyagushkina as many as
250,000 people were arrested on charges of
espionage. The absurdity of those allegations
comes across when you examine the archives
claiming this cleaner or teacher was a Japanese
spy or a Russian English teacher was working for
the British. Lucy claims that as many as 12
million people were victims of the repression.

Although a new memorial was opened in Moscow
where President Putin made a speech condemning
the repression, the recently poisoned atmosphere
suggests a return to some form of increased
repression is no longer a remote or distant
perspective. For instance, why is Memorial been
labelled : 'A Foreign Agent '? Why have directors
of the theater been put under house arrest ? Why
are opposition leaders constantly demonized and
attacked by thugs ? Why is a historian still in prison
on trumped up charges ? If the state really felt
sorrow for the victims of repression they would
release Yuri Dmitriev who has done so much to
recover and give a proper burial to the victims of
repression. Yet he still languishes in prison a year
after his arrest ! There has been almost silence
in Russia over his case.

An indication of the rising paranoiac atmosphere
in Moscow was indicated by a neighbor who
accused me of "Being an American agent" just

for speaking over the phone in English.