“Lenin lived! Lenin lives! Lenin will live on!”

An excited orator cried out Mayakovsky’s line from the stage at St Petersburg’s vast October Concert Hall on Friday night, and brought rapturous applause from the nearly 4,000-strong audience, most of whom had red ribbons pinned to their lapels.



The event, organised by Russian Communist party, brought together communist delegations from Russia and abroad to mark the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, a coup by a small but determined band of Vladimir Lenin’s followers that would forever alter the course of Russian and world history.

In the foyer, delegates queued up to take selfies in front of a stylised photograph of a decidedly hipsterish Lenin, standing with a knotted scarf in front of the Winter Palace and asking: “Shall we storm it?”



But outside the confines of the Communist party events, there is little celebration taking place for the revolution’s centenary, the exact date of which falls on Tuesday.

During the Soviet period, 7 November was a public holiday and one of the biggest state celebrations of the year, with round numbers marked with particular pomp. In modern Russia, however, the day is an ordinary working day, and the public holiday has been moved to 4 November, which is designated the National Unity Day.

A military parade on Red Square on Tuesday will commemorate not the revolution itself, but the October Revolution parade held on the square in 1941, from which Soviet soldiers went straight to the front line.

The message of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin on the 100th anniversary has been a muted condemnation of revolution as a political tool. Even if the later Soviet Union – especially victory in the second world war – is seen as a source of pride, the events of 1917 are harder to bring into the narrative of Russian historical glories.



“When we look at the lessons from a century ago, we see how ambiguous the results were, and how there were both negative and positive consequences of those events,” said Putin, speaking last month. “We have to ask the question: was it really not possible to develop not through revolution but through evolution, without destroying statehood and mercilessly ruining the fate of millions, but through gradual, step-by-step progress?”

The Bolshevik seizure of power was the second of two revolutions in 1917, with Tsar Nicholas II abdicating the throne earlier in the year amid popular unrest. While there are still many elderly communists who revere Lenin, there is also a growing sympathy for the imperial family.

In recent months, scandal has erupted over Matilda, a film that portrays an affair between the future Nicholas II and a ballerina. The Russian Orthodox Church has made the last tsar and his family saints, and there are even some who call for the restoration of the monarchy.

Boris Kolonitsky, a leading Russian historian of the revolutionary period, said it was possible to discern a distaste for Lenin among Putin’s rare comments on the first Soviet leader and the October Revolution, but that the Russian president has to calibrate his words carefully.



An image of Vladimir Lenin projected on a building as part of celebrations marking the centenary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Photograph: Peter Kovalev/TASS

“The memory of the revolution is not a usable historical resource for Putin. For the broad consensus Putin requires, he needs to keep onside both the people who think the revolution was a tragedy and those who are sympathetic to communist ideas and nostalgic for the Soviet Union.”

Kolonitsky said this explained the lack of discussion of the history and lessons of the revolution during the centenary year, but said even he had been surprised at just how little public interest there had been.

“It’s fairly ridiculous that the biggest political discussion around the revolution is about a film that has little to do with either revolution and is quite anti-historical,” he said, referring to the scandal about Matilda, which portrays events that take place in the 1890s and has been accused of multiple historical inaccuracies.

In St Petersburg, the old imperial capital and the setting for both revolutions, there are several exhibitions looking back at the events of 1917. The Hermitage, a vast art gallery housed in the tsarist Winter Palace, was the scene of the arrest of the ministers of the provisional government on the night of 7 to 8 November 1917.

Inside the palace, the room in which Red Guards and soldiers made the arrests still contains a Soviet-era marble inscription noting that “the counter-revolutionary bourgeois provisional government” was arrested there. A new exhibit in the museum attempts to tell a more nuanced story, chronicling the history of the building in the fateful years leading up to the revolution and features a portrait of Tsar Alexander II, his face perforated by the bayonets of the Bolsheviks during the takeover.

The Aurora, the tsarist battleship that has long served as a symbol of the revolution, is still moored on the Neva river in central St Petersburg as it has been since 1948, but the museum exhibits inside were overhauled last year. Now, instead of just focusing on 1917, when the ship’s sailors mutinied and then fired on the Winter Palace in what was considered the signal for the Bolshevik takeover to begin, the exhibits cover the whole history of the tsarist and Soviet fleet. The final exhibit is a photograph of Putin at sea, peering through binoculars.

Russian television will mark the anniversary week with an eight-part high-budget series about the life of Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s co-conspirator, who was later written out of the Soviet history books by Joseph Stalin. Later in November, the state-run Channel One will also show a docu-drama based on the lives of ordinary Russians caught up in the revolutionary events of 1917.



“We realised we had to mark the revolution centenary because it’s one of the most important events of the 20th century, but we also see that there is little interest among the audience,” said Konstantin Ernst, the powerful head of Russia’s Channel One, and a producer of the Trotsky series. “Over the last year we’ve released various trial products, and there was no real reaction from the audience.”

In the end, even the communist celebration in St Petersburg was less about glorifying the events of 1917, and more about providing the older generation of Russians with nostalgia for their youth. Most of the costumed song and dance routines covered victory in the second world war and the achievements of late communism, not the October Revolution itself.



Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the Russian Communist party, said: “7 November will always remain a celebration for us. Today’s Russia is a different place, but they can’t take away our whole lives from us.”