In 1996, November 7 changed once more, becoming “The Day of Accord and Reconciliation.” The following year, President Yeltsin, himself a former Communist Party official, called for atonement and forgiveness during the overdue burial of Tsar Nicholas and his family (they’d been murdered in 1918, just two months before “The Day of the Proletarian Revolution” was instituted). [...]
The choice of November 4 was not random. The new holiday is tied to an episode of seventeenth-century Russian history that signified the end of the Times of Trouble, a fifteen-year period of political crises, famines, and foreign interventions that followed the demise of the Rurik dynasty in 1598. In early November 1612, a volunteer army chased Polish-Lithuanian occupiers out of Moscow. Three months later, a new tsar was appointed. It was then, said Patriarch Alexei in 2004, that the “Russian citizens of many confessions and nationalities overcame division, a powerful enemy and led the country to the stable civil peace.” Also, according to the Orthodox Church canon, November 4 had been celebrated before the Revolution as “The Day of the Kazan Icon of the Most Holy Theotokos,” with special liturgies and religious processions. [...]
Alongside this effort to rebrand the Revolution, the symbols of the ancien régime that the proletarian radicals once fought against have been craftily revived. Back in 2014, the four-hundred-year anniversary of the Romanov dynasty was celebrated with lavish exhibitions, TV documentaries, and an imperial ball at the Kremlin. School history books have been revised to recast Romanov rule in positive terms: Peter the Great as a noble reformer, Catherine the Great as an enlightened empress, Alexander III as a fierce fighter against domestic terrorism, and Nicholas II as a martyr of the “revolutionary plague.” Such drastic reversals of historical narrative in a country that spent most of the twentieth century demonizing its former imperial rulers as “bloody tyrants” was bound to scramble ideological circuits for some.
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