A more “positive” way of viewing history was demonstrated prominently in 2012 when Russia marked the bicentenary of Napoleon’s invasion with unabashed patriotic celebrations. Putin was fighting an election campaign and delivered a rousing speech in which he talked of the “battle for Russia”, patriotism, national unity and self-sacrifice. He described his supporters as the natural successors of the 1812 generation, and his opponents as the foreign invaders.
The revolution, however, is difficult to fit into a positive, unifying vision. Many elements of the imperial power of Russia before 1917 are amenable to the current regime, so celebrating the February revolution is awkward. Even more so when you consider that attempts to build a Western-style liberal democracy are clearly out of sync with Putin’s authoritarian style of democratic politics.
Equally, Putin recently condemned the violence deployed against the clergy and other social groups after the October revolution. He blamed the Bolsheviks for Russia’s loss in the First World War. The creation of new socialist republics in the early 1920s had led to the dispersal of Russians outside of Russia and, in Putin’s view, laid the foundations for the collapse of the Soviet Union. In reclaiming Crimea and intervening in Eastern Ukraine, so the official line goes, Russia is only righting the wrongs caused by the revolution and bringing ethnic Russians back home.
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