十月革命百年：普京何以无动于衷？ | 纽约客

Why Putin Won’t Be Marking the Hundredth Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution

On November 7th, the dwindling tribe of Communist Party loyalists and nostalgists will commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Vladimir Putin, however, has made it clear that the centenary is not an occasion for state celebration. While the foreign press has published countless perspectives on Lenin and Trotsky, Soviet Communism, and the global influence of those revolutionary days, as far as the Kremlin is concerned, November 7th in Russia should be an ordinary working day. Why that’s so is at the very center of Putin’s political outlook and his view of the history of the Russian state.

11月7日，共产主义日益稀少的忠诚者和怀旧者将纪念布尔什维克革命一百周年。然而弗拉基米尔·普京表明，百年并非国家的庆祝时刻。尽管外国媒体发表无数观点文章，评论列宁、托洛茨基、苏共和那些革命岁月的全球影响，可对克里姆林宫而言，俄罗斯的11月7日只是一个普通的工作日，原因是普京政治观的核心和他对俄国历史的看法。

John Reed, the American journalist who is buried in the necropolis of the Kremlin wall, called his classic account of the Bolshevik Revolution “Ten Days That Shook the World.” It was indeed a colossal upheaval. In 1917, the Romanov dynasty was overturned, and the Bolsheviks prevailed over less radical factions; by the following year, the three-hundred-year-old Russian Empire was over. The Bolsheviks executed Nicholas II and his family. They set out to exterminate the peasantry, the nobility, and the clergy; they uprooted Russian traditional national identity and faith. The Bolsheviks enforced a new, “classless” society and a new ideological culture in place of imperial Russia.

埋葬在克里姆林宫墙坟场中的美国记者约翰·里德将布尔什维克革命称作“震撼世界的十天”，堪称经典。那的确是一场剧变。1917年，罗曼诺夫王朝被推翻，布尔什维克战胜了其他不甚极端的派别；翌年，三百年的俄罗斯帝国不复存在。布尔什维克处决了尼古拉斯二世和他的家人。他们着手消除农奴、贵族和教士，他们将俄罗斯传统民族身份和信仰连根拔起。布尔什维克缔造了“没有阶级”的新社会，取代了沙皇俄国，建立了新的意识形态文化。

In the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik revolution became a foundational myth complete with a founding father, Lenin, who, despite his mortal expiration in January, 1924, was officially declared “forever alive” and put on display in the mausoleum outside the Kremlin walls. The Revolution’s formal name was the Great October Socialist Revolution, or Veliky Oktyabr’ (“Great October”). In the first grade, a child became an Oktyabrionok, a descendant of Oktyabr’; as primary-schoolers, we all wore a star-shaped pin with an image of Lenin as a curly-headed little boy. Seven-year-olds across the eleven time zones of the Soviet state sang, “We are happy kids / October kids / We are given this name / in honor of the October victory.”

在苏联，布尔什维克革命成为神话，其国父列宁，尽管在1924年1月生命终结，可官方宣布其“永生”，将他置于克林姆林宫墙外的纪念堂供人瞻仰。革命的正式名称是“伟大的十月社会主义革命”或“伟大的十月”。一年级时，孩子们就成为“十月的传人”，小学生都戴着列宁像红星纪念章，列宁是个卷发小男孩。横跨苏联11个时区的七十岁老头如今还会唱：“我们是快乐的孩子，十月的孩子，我们因此得名，纪念十月的胜利。”

Each year on November 7th, the Great October anniversary was commemorated all over the Soviet Union. (A calendar reform was one of many revolutionary transformations.) Even as late as the nineteen-seventies and eighties, as Communist ideology was fading, we celebrated the Revolution with parades and rallies. Streets and squares were renamed not just after the Revolution itself but after its anniversaries: in Moscow, we had Ten Years of October Street and Fifty Years of October Street; in 1977, a plaza near the Kremlin was renamed Sixty Years of October Square. Most of these names are still around today.

一度每年11月7日，苏联全国都会纪念十月革命。（日历改革是众多革命转型之一。）即便在七八十年代共产主义意识形态褪色的年代，我们也游行集会纪念革命。街道和广场重新命名，不仅以革命本身，还以周年纪念日命名：在莫斯科，我们有十月革命十年街、十月革命五十年街；1977年，克林姆林宫附近的广场被命名为十月革命六十年广场。大多数名字沿用至今。

Lenin’s embalmed body is still in the mausoleum, and countless statues of him remain standing. And yet the Bolshevik Revolution has been all but absent in the official discourse. This process of disappearing began not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1996, Boris Yeltsin stripped the November 7th holiday of its origin, renaming it the Day of Accord and Reconciliation, but the new name sounded meaningless amid the discord and turmoil associated with his rule. In 2004, Putin cancelled the holiday altogether. In this centenary year, discussion of “Great October” is limited almost entirely to academic conferences and small intellectual venues, and Russian officials avoid the subject. Last week, Dmitri Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said that the Kremlin is planning no Revolution-related events. “What’s the point of celebrating, anyway?” he added.

列宁的防腐遗体还躺在纪念堂里，无数的雕像依然矗立各处。可官方话语中已没人再提布尔什维克革命了，其消失自苏联解体不久后就开始了。1996年，鲍里斯·叶利钦抽去了11月7日的起源，重新命名其为“一致与和解日”，可他治下世道混乱不和，使这个新名字听起来毫无意义。2004年，普京干脆取消了该节日。一百年后，讨论“伟大的十月”的只有学术会议和少部分学术场所，俄国官员都避而不谈。上周，普京的发言人德米特里·佩斯罗夫表示，克里姆林宫没有计划举办与革命有关的活动。“总之，为什么庆祝？”他补了一刀。

The crucial political point here is that, while the Communist-era narrative and Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev hailed the revolutionary rupture—the abrupt destruction of the ancien régime and the advent of the brave new world–– Putin is deeply averse to any abrupt political shifts. He is a distinctly anti-revolutionary conservative, deeply apprehensive of any grassroots challenge. To Putin, all signs of independent public activism and protest are a challenge to stability––specifically, the stability of his rule.

俄国核心的政治观是，尽管共产主义的时代叙事和从列宁到戈尔巴乔夫的苏联领导人，为革命断裂叫好，欢呼旧政权的崩溃和美丽新世界的到来，普京却厌恶任何政治突变。他显然是个反对革命的保守主义者，打心底里担心来自草根的挑战。对普京而言，公民独立行动和抗议，所有这些迹象都是对稳定的挑战，尤其对他的稳固统治。

“Too often in our national history, instead of an opposition to the government, we faced opposition to Russia itself,” Putin said in 2013. “And we know how that ends. It ends with the destruction of the state itself.”

“在国家历史上，我们面对的并非反对政府，而是反对俄罗斯本身，”普京在2013年说。“我们知道结果会如何。结果就是国家本身被摧毁。”

Back in 1989, as a K.G.B. officer stationed in Dresden, Putin experienced the decline of Soviet power with great alarm. Once in power himself, he watched unrest in Georgia, Ukraine, Central Asia, and the Middle East end in the overthrow of even the toughest-seeming authoritarian governments. He saw these examples of political tumult as warnings. When protesters came out in force in 2011, demanding a “Russia Without Putin,” Putin made it plain that he would show little tolerance. Putin’s goals—to keep Russian society quiescent and demobilized; to make sure that Russian élites remain loyal to him—are at the root of his evasive stance on divisive issues of Soviet history and his near silence on the Bolshevik Revolution.

回到1989年，作为驻德累斯顿的克格勃军官，普京对苏联权力的衰落感到震惊。本人当权后，他看到格鲁吉亚、乌克兰、中亚和中东地区的动荡导致最强硬的专制政府被推翻。他认为这些政治动荡是一种警示。2011年抗议者走上街头，要求一个“没有普京的俄国”。普京直截干脆，绝不手软。普京的目标是让俄国社会死水一潭，确保俄国精英忠诚于他，这是他对苏联历史避而不谈和对布尔什维克革命几乎保持沉默的根本原因。

The history here is tricky. After 1991, as the Yeltsin government tried to build a post-Soviet Russian nation on anti-Communist grounds, the Revolution of 1917 was commonly referred to as a “tragedy” and a “catastrophe.” Liberal intellectuals and journalists insisted that Russia come to terms with the past by exposing the evils of the Communist regime. This initiative, which was somewhat similar to “truth and reconciliation” efforts in post-apartheid South Africa, failed dramatically. Instead of reconciling Russian society, the process exacerbated political divisions, which ran deeper than many had imagined. These ideological divides, coupled with the many economic and political failures of the Yeltsin era, helped pave the way to the rise of Putin and stability as the ultimate political value.

俄罗斯的历史有点复杂。1991年后，叶利钦政府努力建立一个反共产主义的后苏联俄国，1917年革命被指为“悲剧”和“灾难”。自由派知识分子和记者坚持认为，俄国揭露了其共产主义政权的邪恶，从而同过去达成了和解。这一倡议，同南非后种族隔离时代的“真相与和解”有几分相像，但却完全失败了。它非但没有让俄国社会和解，反倒恶化了政治分裂，且比许多人想象得都要深重。这些意识形态的分裂，加之叶利钦时代经济和政治的失败，为普京上台铺平了道路，稳定成为终极政治价值。

In 1999, Putin inherited a Russia that was in a state of misery, exhaustion, and turmoil—as Putin put it, “in a condition of division, internally separated.” He opted for a different means of reconciliation: instead of taking a “let’s talk about it” approach, he resorted to a remedy of obfuscation and oblivion. Public discussions about divisive and disquieting subjects—the roles of Lenin and Stalin in Soviet history, the Communist dictatorship, mass repressions––became increasingly marginalized in the official discourse of political life and in the media. The Kremlin’s official stance on these issues grew blurred.

1999年，普京接手的俄国处于水深火热之中，一穷二白，动荡不堪，正如普京所言，“处于内部的分裂”。他选择了另一种和解方式：他并不主张“让我们谈谈过去”，他诉诸于糊里糊涂的遗忘疗法。公开讨论列宁和斯大林在俄国历史上的角色、共产主义专政和大规模压迫等造成分裂和忧虑的话题在政治生活和媒体官话中日渐边缘化了。克里姆林对这些问题的官方立场变得暧昧不清。

In particular, Putin played down the major upheavals of the twentieth century, from the collapse of Russian statehood, in 1917, to the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Instead, he tried to create a more expansive view of history, minimizing the turmoil of revolutionary Russia. “Russia,” he said, “did not begin either in 1917, or in 1991. We have a single, uninterrupted history spanning over a thousand years.”

普京尤其不想提起二十世纪发生的剧变，包括1917年从俄国崩溃到1991年苏联解体。相反，他努力构建跨度更大的历史观，尽可能不提革命俄国的动荡。“俄罗斯，”他说，“并非1917年开始的，也不是1991年开始的。我们有一千多年未曾间断的完整历史。”

As the hundredth anniversary of Great October drew close, Putin, in his annual address to parliament, said, “The centennial is a reason . . . to turn to the causes and the very nature of revolutions in Russia.” But, rather than elaborating on the causes of revolution, Putin switched to his perpetual theme: “We need history’s lessons primarily for reconciliation and for strengthening the social, political and civil concord that we have managed to achieve.”

十月革命百年将近，普京在俄国杜马年度演讲中说，“值此百年，有理由不忘初心，思考俄国革命的本质。”但他并未解释革命的初心，相反转到了他永恒的主题：“我们要从历史中汲取教训，主要目的是和解及加强社会、政治和民众和谐，我们设法实现了这一点。”

In Putin’s Russia, “reconciliation” means universal loyalty to the regime. As long as one pledges allegiance to the regime and shares its anti-Western and anti-liberal stance, one can be a Communist or a monarchist, an admirer of Stalin or Brezhnev or a worshipper of Nicholas II. Unlike Soviet Communism, Putin’s regime draws on ideological evasiveness, not rigidity. As a result, despite Putin’s command of the regime, his control of the media, and his intolerance of political dissent, ideas and historical perceptions vary quite widely—and the centenary has made plain to what extent Russia is not an ideological monolith. 

在普京的俄国，“和解”意味着对政权的永远忠诚。只要向政权效忠，并赞同其反对西方、反对自由主义的立场，你大可是个共产主义者或是个保皇党，尽可以仰慕斯大林或是勃列日涅夫，抑或追随尼古拉斯二世。同苏共不同，普京的政权不提意识形态，也不拘泥。结果，虽说普京掌控了政权，控制了媒体，对政治异见者也绝不手软，可国内的思想和历史观却各不相同。百年是一个契机，表明了俄国在意识形态上并非铁板一块。

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, one of the four parliamentary parties, has just launched week-long celebrations of the revolution anniversary in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The events include “the 19th international meeting of communist and workers’ parties,” a wreath-laying ceremony at Lenin’s Tomb, and a visit to the great man’s old Kremlin offices. The Party published a list of slogans for the centennial: “Long live the socialist revolution!”; “Lenin-Stalin-Victory”; “Glory to the achievements of Great October”; “Revolutions are the locomotives of history”; “Revolution has happened, Revolution is alive.” The Kremlin, of course, will not join the Communist festivities, but neither does it interfere with the Party extolling the revolution.

俄罗斯联邦共产党是杜马四大党之一，刚刚在莫斯科和圣彼得堡举办为期一周的革命百年庆祝活动。活动包括“共产主义者和工人党第十九次国际会议”，列宁墓献花圈仪式及探访这位伟人在克里姆林宫的办公室。俄共为百年纪念日发表一系列口号：“社会主义革命万岁！”“列宁-斯大林-胜利”“光荣属于伟大的十月”“革命是历史的火车头”“革命已经发生，革命永远进行。”当然，克林姆林宫不会加入俄共的庆典，但也不会干预俄共颂扬革命。

Meanwhile, the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church refers to the revolution as a “spiritual catastrophe” and is commemorating 1917 as “the beginning of an era of persecutions” and of the first assassinations of “new martyrs”—the countless clergy executed by the Bolsheviks. A reliquary of the new martyrs has been travelling around Russia in commemoration of the anniversary.

同时，俄国东正教的领袖将革命视作“精神灾难”，将1917年作为“迫害时代的开端”和“新殉道者”首造暗杀的年份加以纪念，当时无数教士被布尔什维克处决。新殉道者的圣骨匣在全俄巡游，纪念百年。

And yet, despite the profoundly different ways in which the Communist Party and the Russian Orthodox Church are treating this centenary moment, the leaders of both institutions are willing contributors to Putin’s reconciliation project. They easily dismiss their past and present differences as minor, and cordially greet each other. Both are utterly loyal to one figure: Vladimir Putin.

尽管俄共和俄东正教会对待百年的态度迥异，两个机构的领导人都是普京和解项目的自愿贡献者。他们毫无困难地认为过去和现在的不同不值一提，并真诚地向对方问好。双方都对一个人保持绝对忠诚：弗拉基米尔·普京。