Rethinking a Great Event: The October Revolution as Memory Project

Abstract

What if that discourse about [the French Revolution as] a radical break reflects no more than the illusion of change?…Unless the historian comes to grips with it, he is bound to execrate or to celebrate, both of which are ways of commemorating.François Furet,Interpreting the French RevolutionInsofar as we yield without struggle to an external suggestion, we believe we are free in our thought and feelings. Therefore most social influences we obey usually remain unperceived.Maurice Halbwachs,The Collective MemoryEven under the increasingly more open conditions of glasnost and after, the October Revolution has proven difficult for Western, Soviet, and post-Soviet historians to reconceptualize. In this essay I shall examine the reasons behind this difficulty and suggest where a reconceptualization of October might fruitfully be sought. Rethinking October from the perspective of recent research into the construction of historical or collective memory, I will argue, affords unique insights into exactly why October has proven so enduring. Focusing on the October Revolution as the crucial element in the primarily Bolshevik efforts to establish and enshrine the legitimacy of the new Soviet state during the first decade after October 1917 problematizes the event in a way that traditional approaches, deeply implicated in this issue of (il)legitimacy, are unable to do.