Press Release, 10.11.2022

A round table dedicated to the 105 years since the October 1917 coup was held at Yabloko. Its participants – historians and politicians – spoke about the lessons to be learned from the October coup.

The round table was opened by Nikolai Rybakov, Chairman of the Yabloko party. According to Rybakov, despite the fact that 7 November, the date of the coup, had gone from our life as a Soviet holiday and a special day, the traditions remained, and it was these traditions that served as a basis for all modern politics in Russia. Rybakov noted the stance rooted in Russia, when the people were considered as expendable supplies for solution of the highest national tasks.

“We have a lot of work to do in order to build a state which will be rooted not on the Bolshevik principles: the rejection of the values ​​of human life and human rights, but will be built on completely different foundations and beliefs. Unfortunately, the past 30 years have not helped much in this. But there is no other way. This path must begin with an assessment of the events that took place in 1917 and conclusions that have to be drawn from them,” Nikolai Rybakov said.

“The lessons of the October 1917 coup consist in outlining a programme of reforms that would make it possible to implement the ideas of the February 1917 [bourgeois-democratic] Revolution and overcome the legacy of the October coup and the Soviet project”. This opinion was expressed by Andrei Medushevsky, Doctor of Philosophy and Professor at the Higher School of Economics. Speaking about the October coup in the context of other revolutions, he noted that revolutions always occur in societies that embark on the path of modernisation. Andrei Medushevsky conducted a detailed analysis of the communist experiment in his book “The Political History of the Russian Revolution: Norms, Institutions, and Forms of Social Mobilisation in the 20th Century.”

Alexander Shubin, Doctor of Historical Sciences and chief researcher at the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, recalled that the events of 1917 were motivated by the fatigue from the First World War, economic and social collapse, as well as the understanding that state institutions work against people. “Most of the people making the October Revolution were not inspired by the communist myth, but by questions of land and peace. The Bolsheviks took advantage of this,” Shubin noted.

Kirill Alexandrov, Candidate of Historical Sciences, noted one of the main features of the political system that emerged as a result of the October coup. According to Alexandrov, this system could only exist by coercion to hypocrisy and lies.

Olga Malinova, Doctor of Philosophy and professor at the Higher School of Economics, noted that modern interest in the topic of 1917 is built through the prism of the collapse of the USSR. According to Malinova, now it is high time to talk about the unspoken revolution of 1993.

Konstantin Morozov, Doctor of Historical Sciences and professor at the Free University, noted that the Bolsheviks had been always afraid of fair elections and democracy. Such was the result of a “birth trauma” from the defeat of the Bolsheviks in the elections to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917.

“The key lesson of October is that this coup did not allow people to believe in the power of “self-organisation”. Self-organization of people is still in its infancy,” Vladimir Buldakov, Doctor of Historical Sciences and Chief Researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, stressed.

Sergei Mitrokhin, a member of the Yabloko Political Committee and an MP of the Moscow City Duma, argueing with Andrei Medushevsky, expressed the opinion that the October Revolution was an example of counter-modernisation. “Today, all the modernisation was virtually abolished, only the archaic was left. We will have to rake it up,” Mitrokhin added.

It should be noted that the round table “The Lessons of the October 1917 Coup and the Present” was held within the framework of the Yabloko Party University. All the speeches will be published as a separate brochure.