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printHundred Years of Wars and Revolutions. The Epoch Continues?
Oganisyan Yu.S.,
Dr. Sci. (Hist.), Prof., Leading Researcher, Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, dorunat@gmail.com
elibrary_id: 491400 |
DOI: 10.17976/jpps/2017.01.04
For citation:
Oganisyan Yu.S. Hundred Years of Wars and Revolutions. The Epoch Continues? – Polis. Political Studies. 2017. No. 1. https://doi.org/10.17976/jpps/2017.01.04
Abstract
On the occasion of the centenary anniversary of the Russian revolution, the author raises a number of challenging questions about its origin, content, and historical significance. The author’s evaluations and conclusions are based on well-known facts, judgments of participants of those historical events (both leaders and followers of the revolution and their adversaries), as well as on the up-to-date research. Such retrospective reveals these issues from a new angle. For example, it is stated that the origins of the Russian revolution, its global impact are not limited to the social contradictions: there are also geopolitical, civilizational, national, ethical, religious, and axiological factors that shaped this dramatic event. The interaction of these factors is specific during each of the stages of the revolution development. Moreover, the latter is itself a highly controversial process: it is deeply ethnical, hence international. The messianic idea of humankind salvation that emerged in the Russian Orthodoxy was inextricably connected with the Marxist ideology of proletariat liberation mission brought from the West. The Bolshevik dictatorship developed in a favored mental context: the last century has proved that neither revolution, nor civil war and socialism development could overwhelm the statist orientation, which was formed in Russians’ collective consciousness during the centuries of the tsarist empire. After revolution, this orientation transformed into autocratic regimes. The same tradition is a starting point of the social illusion of “bright future”, the death of which brought the end to socialism and Soviet state in Russia. Such is the dialectic (or, one can say, metaphysics) of the Russian revolution. The author points out that Russia’s return to capitalism only means that one of the models of social world restructuring has failed. The other model is successfully developed in China, and it is basically this model that was meant by Lenin’s NEP policy and Bukharin’s opposition.
Keywords
the Russian revolution; Bolshevism; violence; war; social illusion; socialism.
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Content No. 1, 2017
See also:
Pantin I.K.,
Russian revolution as a problem of political philosophy. – Polis. Political Studies. 2011. No5
Rozov N.S.,
Crisis and Revolutions: Fields of Interaction, Actors’ Strategies, and Trajectories of Conflict Dynamics. – Polis. Political Studies. 2017. No6
Rozov N.S.,
The Vector of Russian 1917 Revolution: Modernization or Counter-Modernization?. – Polis. Political Studies. 2017. No2
Pantin I.K.,
To the question of the character of the October revolution. – Polis. Political Studies. 2013. No6
Yerokhov I.A.,
The Revolution, Which Will Never Happen Again. – Polis. Political Studies. 2016. No6
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