Simon Sebag Montefiore: Today’s new world order has its roots in the events of 1917

This year marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution, which has parallels with today’s Putin-Trump power axis
Rebels with a cause: Bolshevik soldiers and students take up arms in Petersburg during the 1917 uprising
Simon Sebag Montefiore16 January 2017
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No one expected the Russian Revolution to break out a century ago — even though everyone knew the Romanovs were doomed. Zhou Enlai, Chairman Mao’s premier, reflected on the effects of the French Revolution that “it’s still too early to tell” but the Russian Revolution reverberates today in the world of Putin and Trump.

It is naïve (or maybe too early) to compare the disaffection of the Brexit or Trump elections with the violence, class war and secret-police terror of the great revolutions, French, Russian or Iranian. The real parallels today lie in methods and style — the cold powerbroking and political culture, practiced by Lenin, Stalin and their successors: on one hand, the cult of ruthless power; on the other, the culture of disinformation to delegitimise democracy, truth and other liberal hypocricies.

Let us travel back a century. “My brain feels rest here, no ministers, and no fidgety questions,” Tsar Nicholas II wrote from military HQ to his wife Alexandra on February 23, 1917. “It’s quiet in this house, no rumbling about, no excited shouts … I think I will turn to dominoes again.” A day later Alexandra reported “there were rows because poor people stormed bread shops” in the capital, St Petersburg, but nothing to fear. The tsar reflected, “I know this is alarming but we are stronger …” Then the factories of St Petersburg went on strike and the army joined the people. “It’s a hooligan movement, young boys and girls running about and screaming they have no bread…” Alexandra reassured Nicholas. So began the February Revolution. Within a week the city was out of control.

The Romanovs had been the most successful dynasty since Genghis Khan, conquering an empire covering a sixth of the world’s surface. However, their crown had been dangerously unstable since it survived the 1905 Revolution. The First World War weakened it further and the obstinacy and imperious idiocy of the imperial couple and their dependence on Rasputin (who had been murdered just a few weeks earlier) had squandered its last prestige.

But the revolutionary leaders were in disarray, under arrest or in exile: Lenin in Zurich, Trotsky in New York, Stalin and Kamenev in Siberia. “The revolution won’t happen in my lifetime,” reflected Lenin — just before it did: in the early hours of March 2, Nicholas abdicated.

There was nothing inevitable about what happened next. Ruling for the next six months, a “provisional government” planned full democracy with elections to a constituent assembly but Russia remained at war with Germany and Berlin despatched a “sealed train” — to transport Lenin back to Russia like a bacillus. Clever in the short-term, history offers few better examples of catastrophic blowback. Lenin, a fanatical Marxist and maestro of political expediency, proved the decisive influence of individuals: on his return his comrades did not believe the time for revolution was ripe but Lenin browbeat them into seizing power in the Great Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.

“A revolution without firing squads is a waste of time,” wrote Lenin, a student of the French Terror. His decision to execute not just the ex-tsar and tsarina but their five innocent teenage children launched the century of blood. Worse would come but it was the original crime of the diabolical ideologies that self-righteously changed the world by killing.

Lenin founded the first secret police of modern times, the Cheka (later OGPU, NKVD, KGB and FSB), which enforced his rule with mass-killings. Property was nationalised, the upper-classes decimated. His successor was even more extreme: Stalin relaunched the Revolution in 1927, collectivising the countryside at a cost of 10 million lives, then in 1934-8 shot a million of his Communist elite, ultimately killing maybe 20 million with 18 million entering slave labour camps.

Western intellectuals, contemptuous of their own flabby democracies, hero-worshipped Stalin, citing achievements in education, health, equality (Lenin had called such supporters “useful idiots”). Yet killing as a political tool was the foundation of the Revolution. “Ours is a system of bloodletting,” said Stalin, who was also a Great Power realist who ruled like a Red Tsar, carving Europe into spheres of influence, with Hitler in 1939 then Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta.

The Revolution ended with Stalin’s death in 1953 but his Second World War victory, creating a nuclear superpower, granted the Revolution such prestige that the Soviet Union lasted until 1991 and still retains the glamour of triumph.

Marx joked that “history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce”. Nonetheless, today’s ferocious world, stripped of bourgeois international morality, is one spawned by 1917. Putin regards the Soviet Union’s fall as “the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century”, and though he is no fan of the ideological Lenin he respects Stalin as a great tsar. Putin’s style is a merging of two worlds of 1917 — the majesty of the Romanov tsars and the grim grandeur of Stalinist imperium, both inspired by Russia’s exceptional mission.

His ruling cabal are mostly KGB graduates, heirs of the Cheka metamorphosed into the new nobility (the dictatorships of Assad in Syria and Kim Jong-Un in North Korea are coarser heirs of revolutionary autocracy).

The Revolution produced the movies of Eisenstein but its real achievements were the works of brave writers who opposed it — Mandelstam, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn. Yet Russia’s revolutionaries were so certain of the righteousness of their project that any means were justified: they deployed language to lie instead of enlighten. If Lenin was around today, he (or Trotsky, who coined pretweets such as “You belong in the dustbin of history”) would surely have posted the sort of tweets Trump uses, not to speak of deploying hacking and false news to befuddle his enemies.

Putin’s autocracy is admired by his new set of “useful idiots”, from Jeremy Corbyn to Donald Trump, who sees himself as a US tsar heading a radical movement. As Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, explains: “I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, that’s my goal too.” The real lesson of 1917, expressed by Lenin, is the alchemy of power practiced by Putin and Trump: “Kto kovo?” — who controls whom?”

The Romanovs 1613-1918, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, is out in paperback on February 1.

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