Abstract
The October Revolution was fought and won most enduringly not by force of arms on the streets of Moscow or in the hallways of the Winter Palace in Petrograd in late 1917, but in newspapers, in halls and on speaking platforms all across the former Russian Empire both before and after this formal change of political power. Well into the 1920s, battle was joined energetically at the symbolic, artistic, political and aesthetic levels simultaneously, involving the deployment of what Keith Michael Baker has called, with regard to an earlier revolution, ‘ideological arsenals’.1 The battle was over the broader story that the events of October 1917 would come to convey. It was epitomized by the immediate contestation amongst the political players over whether the events of late October 1917 in fact constituted a true revolution (revoliutsiia) or an illegitimate conspiracy or plot (zagovor). This contestation over meaning is the focus of the present paper.
‘Est-ce donc une révolte?’
‘Non, Sire, c’est une révolution!’
(Louis XVI to Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, after the storming of the Bastille)
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Notes
This idea has been particularly upsetting to historians of the Holocaust, who have been rightly loath to provide any ammunition for the so-called revisionists and have offered some of the most insistent affirmations of the inviolability of historical fact: ‘writers and readers of Holocaust narrative have long insisted that it literally deliver documentary evidence of specific events, that it come not to stand for the destruction, or merely point toward it, but that it be received as testimonial proof of the events it embodies’ (James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington, 1990), p. 10). Even among those historians who would concede that the written word is structured and edited by narrative conventions, as one scholar points out, the all-important oral testimony is still regarded as unmediated truth (Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, ‘Representing Auschwitz’, History & Memory, v. 7, no. 2 (1996), p. 135).
On this, see the interesting comments by Robert Braun, ‘The Holocaust and Problems of Historical Representation’, History and Theory, v. 33, no. 2 (1994), pp. 172–97.
Fitzpatrick refers to a ‘reclassing’ of society, involving not only the ascription of class categories, but also the framing and construction of the bodies of information upon which historians would draw for their analyses of this society (Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Ascribing Class: the Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia’, Journal of Modern History, v. 65 [1993], pp. 745–70).
‘October was a workers’ revolution’, writes Stephen Kotkin, ‘because notions of class and workers were institutionalized and became the basis for conceiving and justifying the new state’s policies’ (Stephen Kotkin, ‘“One Hand Clapping”: Russian Workers and 1917’, Labor History, v. 32, no. 4 (1991), pp. 618–19).
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© 2000 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Corney, F.C. (2000). Narratives of October and the Issue of Legitimacy. In: Hoffmann, D.L., Kotsonis, Y. (eds) Russian Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288126_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288126_9
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