Anna Arutunyan

Special to USA TODAY

MOSCOW — Tuesday marks the centennial of the Russian Revolution, one of the most significant political events of the 20th century. Yet President Vladimir Putin's government is barely acknowledging it — apparently because anything to do with "revolution" hits too close to home.

Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the Kremlin has no plans to commemorate the centennial, which ushered in seven decades of Communist rule. “What is there to celebrate?” Pravda.ru quoted him as saying.

Some scholars say a government that has increasingly suppressed political freedoms does not want to plant the idea of revolt in its citizens.

"There was no way it could pretend the centennial did not exist, but the last thing an authoritarian regime feeling its foundations wobble wants to do is celebrate revolution,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian politics and security at the Institute of International Relations in Prague.

While Putin has embraced nationalist fervor recently and longs for the days when Russia was a superpower before the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991, he recently became critical of repression under Communist rule.

He has called the breakup of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” but then last year accused revolution leader Vladimir Lenin of placing a “time bomb” under the Russian state.

“This terrible past must not be erased from our national memory and cannot be justified by anything,” Putin said Oct. 30 at the dedication of the Wall of Grief monument, which commemorates millions of victims of Soviet brutality.

Andrei Galkin, a college history graduate, who placed flowers at the monument, said Putin doesn't want people to feel empowered. “Revolution is the voice of the people and the people shouldn’t have a voice," he said.

Galkin, 22, whose great-great-grandfather was shot by Soviet authorities, said it was time the government paid attention to its own repression of activists and media critical of Putin's rule. “They’ve kept all the worst aspects, there are political prisoners,” he said.

There have been recent mass protests in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who plans to run against Putin in next year’s presidential elections despite government moves to keep him off the ballot. Navalny has been arrested several times, and his supporters are routinely detained, beaten and harassed.

A still-active Communist Party is holding its own commemorative events across the country, and has criticized the Kremlin for ignoring the centennial.

“It’s clear that to celebrate or even seriously discuss this topic is undesirable for the Kremlin,” said Oleg Smolin, a senior party lawmaker. “To me this is wrong: we should learn lessons from past revolutions.”

Oleg Lebedev, another Communist lawmaker, accused the Kremlin of acting like "an ostrich hiding its head in the sand.”

The Russian Revolution began in February 1917 with a mass revolt against the oppressive rule of the czarist dynasty and forced Nicholas II to abdicate in March.

A second revolution on Nov. 7 (according to the modern Gregorian calendar) that was led by Vladimir Lenin overthrew the provisional government and transferred power to the Soviets, or workers’ councils.

The revolution triggered a civil war that claimed millions of lives and ended in 1922 with the establishment of the Soviet government.

Soviet authorities celebrated the revolution each year with mass parades on Nov. 7, but under Putin, the holiday has been changed to a politically neutral “Day of National Unity.”

“This is our history, you can’t just scratch it out,” said Nadezhda Burova, 60, who attended the unveiling of the Wall of Grief monument. "I don’t know if we should celebrate it, but we should commemorate it as something that transformed the lives of several generations.”

Public opinion is mixed on the revolution’s legacy: 34% of respondents said Russia need not dwell on it, while 44% said the country needed to learn more about it to avoid repeating mistakes, according to a March 2017 poll by the independent Levada Center.

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“Today the Kremlin tends to view the Soviet period as complex but largely positive,” said Alexei Chesnakov, a former Kremlin official and head of the Moscow-based Center for Current Politics. “But the revolution is seen as negative because it is a sudden political cataclysm that contradicts the conservative ideological trend that has come to be dominant in recent years.”