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The Russian Revolution lay at the very heart of the Short Twentieth Century of
Eric Hobsbawms world history, published in 1994. Its repercussions were far
more profound and global repercussions than its ancestor, the French
Revolution. A mere thirty to forty years after Lenins arrival at the Finland
Station in Petrograd, one third of humanity found itself living under regimes
directly derived from the Ten Days That Shook the World.., and Lenins
organizational model, the Communist Party.1 Twenty years further on, however,
the lasting geo-political impact looks less impressive. With the collapse of the
Communist states in the world is down to five (China, North Korea, Vietnam,
Laos, and Cuba) - and of those, only North Korea is still unreconstructed and
distinct from its global impact - nobody knows quite what to say about it.
Russian Revolution has lost its edge and sense of relevance. Russians (and
Putins government) are in a still worse situation, for they are obliged to mark
the centenary without having made up their minds if the Revolution was a good
or a bad thing. In the first half of this paper, I will look at the evolution of
interpretation of the Russian Revolution since the Second World War, attempting
1Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes. A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New
York 1994), 55.
2
conversation with each other. In the second half of the paper, I will turn to the
problems the centenary poses for post-Soviet Russia and the ways its ideologists
For many years, two different and relatively monolithic interpretations of the
Russian Revolution held sway, one in the Soviet Union, the other in the West. In
the Soviet Union, the great socialist October Revolution was a milestone in
regime in 1917 was no mere historical contingency, in the Soviet view, but
history were in place. Similarly, the October Revolution brought to power the
only historically legitimate contender, the Bolshevik Party, which rested on the
support of the industrial working class of the Russian Empire. Lenins leadership
and policies within his own party were never challenged, and the bond between
party and working class was indissoluble. The Bolsheviks had no serious
the famous Short Course of party history, all the other socialist parties had
become
bourgeois parties even before the revolution and fought for the
preservation and integrity of the capitalist system. The Bolshevik party was
2Note that the date of writing is January 2017. Things may change further into
the centenary year.
3
the only party which led the struggle of the masses for the overthrow of the
to Communism and the Soviet Union, was in sharp contrast to the Soviet. As
(traditional historians)
saw October 1917 not as a popular uprising but as a coup dtat carried out
ineptitude of the tsarist regime... The Leninist and Stalinist regimes were
Western view cited by Pipes was unrelievedly negative. All the same, there were
unexpected points of correspondence, albeit with the value signs reversed. Both
emphasized the political over the social, saw the Bolsheviks leadership as
outcomes. For each side, the interpretation of the Russian Revolution was too
3 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Short Course
(Moscow 1939), 224.
4 Richard Pipes, Vixi. Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (New Haven 2003), 221.
4
interpreters, while in the Soviet Union this authority was given not only to the
partys professional ideologists but also to those who belonged to the sub-field of
party history.
the inadequacy of the old Left/Right dichotomy in politics and the structural
similarity of Soviet (extreme Left) and Nazi (extreme Right) regimes. The
This was the model of the Soviet system that had most traction among
Sovietologists in the Cold War years, and even more with the broader public. 6 At
the same time, unlike its Soviet counterpart, it was never without competition.
significance of the revolution came from modernization theory. 7 This put the
that could connect with Marxist ways of thinking, and in general scholars of this
persuasion were less committed to a negative view of the Soviet Union than
5 The canonical texts here are Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA 1956) and Hannah
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York 1966).
6 See Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New
York 1995).
7 See David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of Americas Soviet
those of the totalitarian school. Although the notion of modernization was not
near equivalent, and the term backwardness (as something which the Soviet
regime, in contrast to the Tsarist regime, could and must overcome) was
omnipresent.
A major debate arose among Western scholars in the 1960s and 1970s.
and adherents of the totalitarian model, this also had an important disciplinary
disinclination within the subfield of Russian history to admit that anything after
1917 was accessible to historical enquiry, and partly because the totalitarian
total reach of control from the top. The new social historians,8 like their
counterparts in other fields of history at the time, wanted to write history from
the bottom up, as opposed to the top down. In a Cold War context, this was
highly controversial. The revisionist challenge split the field and produced a
great deal of acrimony and mutual accusations of political bias which continued
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the first and most heated
8As a caveat emptor to the reader, it should be noted that I was one of them: for
my account of the controversies, see my articles Revisionism in Soviet History,
History and Theory 46:4 (December 2007), 77-91, and Revisionism in
Retrospect: A Personal View, Slavic Review 67:3 (Fall 2008), 682-704.
6
revisionists, who were mainly young and junior, was one of the major figures on
The revisionists challenged this entire interpretation head on. The collapse
the masses. The Bolshevik power seizure was no less preordained: far
will of the common people, who pressured them to take power and form a
government of soviets...
In a review of one revisionist work that outraged all the younger generation of
social historians, he suggested that once in the Soviet Union, they tend to fall
The scholars of 1917 Pipes had in his sights published a number of major
works, many of them dissertation-based and, from the mid 1970s, making use of
Soviet archives as well as libraries.10 They had access to these via inter-
governmental scholarly exchanges (run by IREX in the US and the British Council
in the UK) that gave selected doctoral students a research year in the Soviet
scholars who - in contrast to their seniors - knew the Soviet Union at first hand
and had had the chance to make friends and professional contacts there.11 A
Haimson at Columbia University, who taught late Imperial history under the
rubric of pre-revolution and, since 1956, had had close and friendly contacts
with Soviet scholars.12 Some were Marxists. Most of them focussed on the
support for the Bolsheviks and their maximalist position in 1917. Alexander
Rabinowitchs first book showed the Bolsheviks to have actually been less eager
to take power in the July Days than their supporters in the Petrograd working
class and the Army.13 When the Bolsheviks finally took action in October,
Rabinowitch argued in his next book, they were reflecting popular discontent
Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton NJ 1981); S. A. Smith, Red
Petrograd. Revolution in the Factories (Cambridge, 1983); David Mandel,
Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime (New York, 1983) and idem,
Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power (New York, 1984); and Diane
P. Koenker and William G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917
(Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
11 On reactions to first-hand immersion in Soviet life on the part of exchangees,
see Samuel H. Baron and Cathy A. Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historical
Research: Reminiscences of American Scholars from the Cold War to the Present
(Armonk, NY 2003); Loren Graham, Moscow Stories (Bloomington IND 2006) and
my own A Spy in the Archives (London, 2014).
12 See Leopold Kheimson (Leopold Haimson), O vremeni i o sebe (interview),
that the Bolshevik takeover in October was a coup, lacking democratic support
or legitimacy. 15 This issue of legitimacy was a highly fraught one during the Cold
Congress, which until the 1980s declined to recognize the existence of the Soviet
Union in its subject catalogue, using the perplexing Russia, 1923 on instead.16
(Ironically, the Library had scarcely managed to reform this - not without
objections from old migrs and hard-core deniers of Soviet legitimacy - when,
From Pipes standpoint, Rabinowitch and others were just pushing the
Soviet line. But in fact Soviet historiography was in process of emerging from its
long Stalinist stagnation and was no longer monolithic. There were challengers
and revisionists (not so labelled) there too; and it was actually with these
contingent result of the First world War; it was not premature in terms of the
1930s, in Sheila Fitzpatrick and Lynne Viola, eds., A Researchers Guide to Sources
on Soviet Social History in the 1930s (Armonk, NY 1990), 4, 20 (n. 2).
9
Bolshevik Party, which played the dominant role in Russian political struggles
throughout 1917. No other party had legitimate claims to represent the working
class, which meant that it was impossible to publish data showing workers
support for the Mensheviks or the SRs at any point. Lenin was, by definition,
always right, and in addition always had the support of the minority of Old
Bolshevik leaders whose reputation had survived the Stalin period. Leaders of
the Left and Right oppositions of the 1920s, notably the unmentionable
Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, had never supported Lenin on any
issue nor played any significant role in the Revolution or Civil War. 17
or even coherent account of the Revolution. But in 1956, with the destalinization
initiatives of the 20th Party Congress, it became possible to start chipping away at
them. The forces of conservatism and inertia within the historical profession and
ideological bureaucracy remained strong, however, and there was also the
pointed out,18 Great October played a similar role for the believing Soviet
Communist as the Gospel story once did for pious Christians: meddle with it at
your peril.
Russian Past. Essays on Soviet Historiography since Stalin, ed. Samuel H. Baron
and Nancy W. Heer (Columbus, OH 1977) 141.
10
but more often they eschewed overt challenge and, basing themselves firmly in
that the initiated knew how to read. That strong attachment to sources,
preferably archival, and empirical detail was one of the things the Soviet
reformers had in common with the Western revisionists, along with the fact that
addition, both groups were challenging an orthodoxy that attributed total control
and initiative to the Bolshevik Party, and were using social history for this
development,20 this may have sounded like a Soviet Marxist clich to Pipes, but
a given. That was not so in the West, including among revisionist social
historians, and the 1917 revisionists attachment to the working class and its
dominant role had its critics. One of Rabinowitchs students at Indiana later
recalled that, while he was attracted to social and labor history, he nevertheless
similar reaction, though I was a revisionist myself, albeit mainly on the Stalin
event, encompassing Stalins revolution from above of the early 1930s and the
Great Purges of 1937-8. Sceptical of the significance over the long term of (pro-
working class for a higher social status,23 in the creation of support for the Soviet
(through factory closures and workers departure) during the Civil War
provoked strong objections from Ronald Suny and other 1917 revisionists.24
at Harvard, also crossed swords with the 1917 revisionists. His own research
showed that within months of the October Revolution, working-class support for
the Bolsheviks dropped off as the economic situation in the towns deteriorated,
republished in Cultural Front. Responses from Ronald Suny and Daniel Orlovsky,
together with my reply, accompanied the original publication in Slavic Review
47:4 (1988).
12
(not yet proscribed) Mensheviks and SRs.25 In 1985, he took issue with an article
with Bolsheviks and Soviet rule among workers did not in fact indicate any basic
shift in political allegiance of the working class. Implicitly at issue (as in Sunys
argument with me) was the question of the Bolshevik Partys legitimacy as
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened the archives - including
Party - to Western scholars. But this had relatively little immediate impact on
study of the Russian Revolution, which was no longer one of the hot areas of
Soviet history. Where innovative work on 1917 was being done in the West, it
was largely on the Russian provinces and Soviet borderlands. 27 A cultural turn
historical profession, but it left only a small mark on 1917 studies, and was
notable mainly for being announced by a Russian (formerly Soviet) and British
25 Vladimir N. Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October: Socialist Opposition and the
Rise of a Bolshevik Dictatorship (Ithaca, NY 1987); idem., Behind the Front Lines of
the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922
(Princeton, NJ 1994).
26 William G. Rosenberg, Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power after October,
Slavic Review 44 (1985), 213-38; Vladimir Brovkin, Politics, not Economics, was
the Key, ibid. 244-50; Rosenberg, Reply, 251-6.
27 The pioneer of regional studies was Donald J. Raleigh, with his Revolution on
the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca, NY 1986), Experiencing Russias Civil War:
Politics, Society and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov,1917-1922 (Princeton NJ,
2002), and the edited volume Provincial Landscapes; Local Dimensions of Soviet
Power, 1917-1953 (Pittsburgh, 2001). The collapse of the Soviet Union into its
constituent republics gave a tremendous boost to empire studies, where Ron
Suny was one of the leaders: see Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A
State of Nations. Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Ozford
2001).
13
historian, writing together28 - an early sign that the old Iron Curtain boundary
The main impact of the new currents of the 1990s in the West, however,
was to push the Russian Revolution off center stage. In the first place, the
terms of the Soviet regimes legitimacy.29 In the second place, the existing
implying a radical break at 1917 - was now being undermined. Scholars like
Holquist and Joshua Sanborn began working across the revolutionary divide; 30
and the First World War, long obscured in the historiography (both Soviet and
the Russian Revolution? Peter Holquist asked. Nothing much, as it turned out, if
you noticed how many state practices came out of the First World War and/or
28 Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution. the
Languages and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
29 Peter Holquist, Whats so Revolutionary about the Russian Revolution? The
1996).
32 Holquist, Whats so Revolutionary?, in Hoffmann and Kotsonis. Russian
crisis of an existential kind among scholars, journalists and the public with
regard to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet period. Some tried to pretend it
had never existed, seeking to reconnect across an empty space with the lost pre-
revolutionary order.33 The spirit was one of national nostalgia for the monarchy
and, to some extent, a search for alternative political heroes like Petr Stolypin. It
became fashionable to adopt the view, long held by many migr historians, that
the late tsarist period had been a time of rapid economic development and
cultural flowering, spoiled only by the random disaster of the First World War.34
Sympathy with the October Revolution was at a low ebb, and Richard Pipess
translated.35 When Russian historians got back their nerve to write about the
much as White) during the Civil War, 36 with Vladimir Buldakov labelling it a new
Revolution. But, given how tired a topic Soviet ideology is, that did not offer a
research agenda anywhere near as appealing as the First World War.
33 See Vronique Garros, Dans lEx-URSS: de la difficult dcrire lhistoire,
its popularity, see the discussion between historians Pavel Volobuev and Yuri
Poliakov with the head of the ideology sector of the Communist Party, V.
Melnichenko (undated, but probably early 1991):
http://scepsis.net/library/id_1948.html, accessed 20 October 2016.
35
Richard Paips (Richard Pipes), (, 2005) [Russian
translation of Russian Revolution (1990)]. This was one of comparatively few
Western works on 1917 to be translated; the bulk of the post-Soviet translations were
in ROSSPENs History of Stalinism series.
36 e.g. O. V. Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu krasnymi i belymi (1917-1920)
time of troubles comparable to that of the 17th century and other periods of
Bunt is the last thing that Putin and his advisors want to encourage with the
centenary of the Russian Revolution. But that seemed unlikely to most Russian
powerful discouragement. 38 The real problem that the centenary of the Russian
Revolution posed for Putins government was that opinion on it remained deeply
respondents viewed the Russian Revolution in a more or less positive light and
31% negative.39 (The positive number probably went down over the past ten
than the over-40 age-group. In February 2016, a new poll rating different epochs
of Russian history found that 30% viewed the late Tsarist period as more good
than bad, as against 19% with the opposite view, while with regard to the first
years after the revolution of 1917, 19% held a positive view and 48% a
negative.40 At the same time, revolutionary romanticism was clearly not dead, as
another poll asking the hypothetical question of how they would have acted in
the October Revolution elicited the response that 22% of those aged 40 and over
would have actively supported the Bolsheviks and only 6% fought against them.
In the under 40 group, the partisans were more evenly balanced, with 8%
actively pro-Bolshevik, 9% actively anti-(but 20% said they would have gone
abroad).41
Putins regime was not the overthrower of the Soviet one, but it is not
choices before Putin are therefore much more complicated than those facing the
Irish republican government when the centenary of the Easter Rising, part of the
countrys foundation myth, came around in 2016: the southeners had to tread
carefully with the northern Unionists and the British, of course, and emphasize
that revolutionary violence was a thing of the past, but basically they were free
40 http://www.levada.ru/2016/03/01/praviteli-v-otechestvennoj-istorii/,
accessed 11 January 2017. The big negatives were for the Gorbachev and Eltsin
eras. Stalins time had a 40% positive rating (higher than Khrushchevs), but
almost as many people were negative. Putins positive Rating was 70% (up from
51% in2012).
41 http://www.levada.ru/2005/11/02/otnoshenie-rossiyan-k-oktyabrskoj
accessed 13 January 2017; Robert Fisk, Irelands Easter Rising and how History
17
But what ideals could Putin celebrate with the resonance of Irish independence
and French overthrow of tyranny? Socialism and equality? But the regime he
International revolution? That was a non-starter with the Russian public even
promise to be very low key. Putin had indicated well in advance that 1917
(my emphasis), noting that at the same time that the event might be downgraded
until 19 December 2016 that he got around to issuing a bland and uninformative
up its mind how to handle the centenary, and no decisions had been made about
funding.47 In March, 2017, a spokesman for Putin explained to The New York
Times that the Kremlin would sit out the centenary as far as public events were
Historians, went out only at the end of January; and the draft program, when it
followed a few months later was indeed so lacking in (Russian) political spin that
foundation.49
Post-Soviet Russia needs a usable past, but it is hard to see how the
and superpower leader, Lenin and the revolution do not fit easily into the
speaker of the State Duma and head of the presidents administration, recently
appointed head of the External Intelligence Service (Sluzhba vneshnei razvedki)
of the Russian Federation: http://ng-nov.ru/2016/12/28/narishkin-schitaet-
stoletie-revolyucii-1917-povodom, accessed 7 Jan 2017. The Committee has yet
(mid-January 2017) shown no signs of life.
47 A. Kostiukhin, How will Russia note the centenary of the revolution? 15 Dec
March 2017 (preliminary program). Among the five panels listed were
Revolution and violence (a very Western formulation) and The collapse of
empires.
19
that shook the world, and in that sense an asset for Russia in the international -
prestige stakes. But on the other hand, it was a violent regime change leading to
prolonged social disorder, not good in itself from Putins point of view but even
worse in that the victims were the tsars, for whom presentday Russians often
feel nostalgic affection, and the Russian Orthodox Church, with which Putin has
developed close ties. One could, of course, treat the revolution simply as a
prequel to the gigantic achievements off the Soviet (Stalinist) era, but that does
not solve the problem of whether the revolution itself was something to applaud
or deplore. As the new speaker of the Duma confessed, he had been thinking for
months about the upcoming centenary, but was unable to see what he could do
the role of the Duma in Feb 1917, which pushed the tsar into abdication, would
value of unity, of civil accord, the ability of society to find compromises and not
allow extreme schism in the society in the form of civil war.51 This seemed to
desirable balancing act. But the minister for culture, Vladimir Medinsky, had
since the middle of 2015 been pushing a more elegant version of the moral-
educational role. His idea was that the theme for the centenary celebration
50 quoted A. Kostiukhin, How will Russia note the centenary of the revolution?
15 Dec 2016: http://akostyuhin.livejournal.com/286561.html, accessed 7
January 2017.
51
https//ria.ru/society/20161227/1484741774.html, accessed 7 Jan 2017.
20
training, clearly gave serious thought to the issue. His personal starting point
was the premise that revolutions are always bad and bloody, making things
societys best people and giving opportunities to its worst. 52 At the same time,
this particular revolution was a Russian one, still labelled great in post-Soviet
Revolution, Medinsky did his best to negotiate the contradictions. The best way
to see the Russian Revolution, he suggested, was as a tragedy, but with heroic
elements. Terror on both sides of the revolution and Civil War should be
condemned. But protagonists on both sides, idealists who were often heroic,
should be remembered and respected (as long as they were genuine idealists
and not war criminals). There is in fact no moral difference between them: seen
in retrospect, both the reds and the whites were ruled by patriotic efforts to
achieve the flourishing of the Homeland, it was just that each side understood
that in its own way. Both sides contributed to the legacy of Russias past. By the
same token, the Russian Revolution and the Soviet era are an integral part of
acrimonious splitting of society, must be avoided at all costs; and the worst thing
that could happen to Russia with the 2017 celebrations would be a revival of old
sectarian passions. Reconciliation is the banner that can heal the wounds and set
One can only imagine the fury of Lenin, the great raskolnik, of having his
revolution celebrated in this way. But actually even here Medinsky could claim a
expressed the thought that Reds and Whites were each fighting for their own
truth, playing their appointed historical roles. (But Lunacharsky got into trouble
reconciliation agenda, but a few weeks earlier one source quoted him as saying
that the lesson that needed to be drawn from the revolution was
touched the life of each family in Russia, on whatever side of the barricades
Reconciliation has the support of the Moscow Patriarch and even the
heirs of the Romanov dynasty, Princess Maria Vladimirovna and Prince Georgii
54
Speech at roundtable in May 2015 on 100 Years of the Great Russian Revolution:
http://edinstvoistorii.odnako.org, accessed 26 Oct 2016.
55 In his play Magi (1919): see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of
1917,57 but it looks as those plans were shelved. (In Ireland, early thoughts of
inviting Prince Charles to celebrate the centenary of the Easter Uprising in 2016
that, while it may conceivably unite warring factions, it is equally likely to annoy
partisans of both sides. Medinskys 2015 speech provoked criticism from both
The French built the Eiffel tower in 1889 to commemorate the centenary
of their Revolution. In 2017, the Russians have nothing so ambitious in mind, but
Medinsky said, because this is the place where the Civil War ended, but
obviously in light of the recent Russian takeover of the Crimea from Ukraine it
made to the Russian Military History Society (MVIO), which Minister Medinsky
allegedly do Putin and the Patriarch, and an international competition for its
design was announced on 1 December 2015. 61 Its great moral potential was
Whites, but also in a global sense... reconciliation of East and West, Russian and
on 4 November 2017, it was not until late January that Kerch was announced as
the site and the architects named.63 While Crimeas Russian-led government
supports the plan,64 there is also local opposition. There can be no talk of any
2017: http://moicrimea.ru/pamiatnik-primireniia-ystanoviat-v-kerchi-vozle-
mosta-v-krym.html, accessed 19 April 2017. For earlier information on the plan,
see the 2015 announcement of the competition
(www.nakanune.ru/news/2015/11/30/22421796, accessed 12 January 2017) and a
follow-up call for submissions in October 2016
(http://rvio.histrf.ru/activities/projects/item-2917, accessed 11 January 2017).
64 In the person of Georgii Muradov, identified both as head of the Crimean
In the West, conferences on the centenary of the Russian Revolution are being
controversies waiting to erupt about the revolutions significance, they have yet
reflex at the arrival of a significant date than a sign of conviction that the Russian
invested in its study. Writing in a Kritika symposium on the revolution at the end
of 2015, Steve Smith suggested gloomily that while our knowledge of the
Russian Revolution and the Civil War has increased significantly, in key respects
Russian Revolution than they were twenty years ago, as Don Raleigh suggested
in the same symposium. 67 But perhaps it was those very Cold War passions,
impeding objective discussion, that made scholarly participants and the broader
With the Western public, the most influential recent interpretation of the
Russian Revolution has been Figess peoples tragedy in the mid 1990s,
Russian society (rather than its famed industrial working class), and caused
untold suffering and destruction.68 On the horizon (due for publication in the fall
round of scholarly discussion, that may even solve the relevance question for a
broader public, since radical Islam, with its own millenarian aspects, has taken
over the role of Western bugbear held during the Cold War by Communism.
premature. The 42% of the Levada Centers respondents who in 2005 said they
would have tried to sit out the Revolution or emigrated rather than actively
participating may be ready,70 but there remain vocal partisans on each side. The
main television channels are hedging their bets. NTV will run a new 12-part
trilogy about suffering in the revolution and Civil War written by a Count who
was an migr when he started it and a Soviet citizen when he finished. The
Russia 1 channel is offering a new film called 1914, with Richard Pipes as a
the future (in the words of the films synopsis, nobody could have imagined that
the rich, stable, flourishing Russian Empire had only three years and two months
to live).71
2017.
26
Legend has it that when Chou Enlai was asked in 1972 about the success
of the French Revolution, he replied that it was too early to tell.72 In a sense, that
claimed that the Revolution is over, the French revolution was still an object of
strong contestation at the time of its bicentenary in 1989. 73 Thirty years ago
most Russian/Soviet scholars (whatever side we were on) felt that we knew
what to make of it of the Russian Revolution, or at least that we knew what the
because the shock of the collapse of the Soviet Union is still being absorbed. But
times will change, as they always do, and the Russian Revolution, with its
undeniably huge impact on the twentieth century, is too big a historical event
ever to go away. Who knows what our twenty-second century descendants will
be saying about the Russian Revolution when the bicentenary comes around?
72 In cold fact, it appears that he thought he was being asked about the Paris
student revolt of 1968: www.historytoday.com/blog/news-blog/dean-
nicholas/zhou-enlai-famous-saying-debunked, accessed 15 January 2017.
73 On the bicentenary arguments of French historians, including Furet, see Steven