ABSTRACT
Ernest Renan suggested that people need not only to be able to remember their common past, but also to forget divisive events, whose memory would only serve to reproduce old conflicts in present-day society.1 For Russia, commemorating the centenary of the 1917 revolution was particularly challenging, in part because this was an event not only of significance for Russian domestic politics, but one that reverberated across the globe. For that reason, the marking of this event took place not only in Russia, but also in countries across the globe. Of course, other revolutions, notably the French Revolution, have also had global resonance.2 The key difference of course is that the values that propelled the Bolshevik Revolution, while similarly universalistic, are today harder to defend: the revolution gave birth to an ideology that is now roundly condemned and even placed on a par with Nazism in some countries. More recently, the various ‘coloured revolutions' in the former Soviet space, starting with the ‘Orange’ revolution in Ukraine in 2004, highlighted the Kremlin's deep disquiet regarding revolutions – in particular those which are seen to be orchestrated or encouraged by external forces, while the Arab revolutions reconfirmed the Kremlin's view that revolutions only lead to chaos and instability. The domestic implications for Russia's current regime were clear, given the protests that took place in Moscow in December 2011 shortly after the Arab uprisings.
