Not just "great writers"
Alexander · Solzhenitsyn died on August 4, 2008.
Of Russian writers since the 20th century, and possibly the entire Russian intelligentsia since the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn can be included in the list of the most influential. He became famous as a writer, and his works such as "A Day in the Life of Ivan · Denisovich", "Cancer Ward", and "The First Circle" are undoubtedly masterpieces of the "thawing literature" of the Khrushchev era in the Soviet Union. As a result, he became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers. His rise to fame is also indicative of the fact that he later won the Nobel Prize for Literature, rather than the Peace Prize for human rights activists and dissidents such as Lutuli, Sakharov, Mandela, and Aung San Suu Kyi.
However, the vast majority of Nobel laureates (and even similar high honors) are awarded on the basis of their work or social activism, which is the culmination of their lifetime achievement, and they do little more as "celebrities" after that. Soon is one of the very few who remain: the literary work that led to his 1970 award, and the title he received as a result ("Famous Writer"), is nothing compared to his subsequent writings (such as The Gulag Archipelago, which began in 1973) and the roles he played. Although these writings are considered by some critics from the perspective of "pure literature" to be "literary", it is undeniable that the impact of these writings far exceeds that of their pre-award works. You can not admit that this is a great "work of literature", but you cannot but admit that it is a great document of intellectual history.
Indeed, the two multi-volume tomes of Solzhenitsyn's life, which were the most laborious and shocking of his life, and which established his position in the cultural-intellectual world, the three-volume Gulag Archipelago, written before his exile, and the 10-volume (30-volume) Red Wheel, which was written decades during his exile and never published until his death, can hardly be called "literary creations", at least Solzhenitsyn himself never called these two large books "novels" or even "reportage".
He called The Gulag Archipelago a "literary inquiry," while The Red Wheel was called a "panoramic history" of the Russian War and the revolutionary era. Although from a literary point of view, these two books also demonstrate outstanding linguistic skills. He skillfully uses a large number of rich expressions from classical to folk, from elegant to secluded, or vulgar to "rude", and expresses his distinctive values, attitudes towards life, political stance, and views on many major issues between laughter and anger. However, there are many different literary works that indirectly express the author's ideas through "literary images" (including works such as "Ivan. Solzhenitsyn "created" a large number of vivid words or new meanings of old words in it, such as "archipelago", "indigenous", "sewer", "current", "cancer spread", "horn", and even the titles "Gulag Archipelago" and "Red Wheel", which are now popular as new political-social terms, but these two large books do not create any "literary image", neither "protagonist" nor bizarre plots, they use real names, place names, time, space and events, he directly narrates and comments on the actual historical process that took place, and integrates his praise and disapproval of various ideological and cultural traditions of Russia and the West, past and present. In fact, these are two works of historical and political theory with rich ideological connotations and vivid expressions. The kind of indignation that speaks for the times reminds people of the famous words of Song Confucianism Zhang Zai in the mainland: "Establish a heart for heaven and earth, aspire to the people, continue to learn for the saints, and open peace for all generations."
The writing style of "The Red Wheel".
The Red Treatise, which Solzhenitsyn called "the most important work of my life" and "the desire to find some kind of highest cosmic meaning in the catastrophe of Russian history", wrote in the Soviet Union that "no one has hitherto been allowed to write in his own way". However, some readers who have read "The Red Wheel" do not have a high opinion of the book, and some people in the intellectual circles who once gave great hope to the book feel that it is necessary to work hard and devote their whole lives to such a "great work" that no one can read patiently. Indeed, it is a bit reluctant to call "Red Wheel" a "historical novel" with "multiple voices", and it is not so much a "novel" as a picture of Russian history from a personal perspective. If it is classified as a novel, as the reader senses, there is no protagonist throughout the book, there is no complete plot and characters, and contrary to Hollywood's "storytelling" that attracts people with gripping and bizarre stories, the characters who appear have no beginning and end, and even because the historical threads involved are too complicated, the chapters are not arranged entirely chronologically. If you read it as a novel, you will be confused and disappointed, as a fictional character of the novel, it is more like a "serial transition" designed to connect major events or a "scene reproduction" with a virtual identity. Chinese readers are accustomed to reading works like Mr. Yao Xueyin's "Li Zicheng" to read "Red Wheel", and it is easy to fall into misunderstandings, because China's multi-volume history is long, and it is not without tens of millions of words, but the characters and story lines in the center of fiction are very clear, and there is no phenomenon that the characters in such a scene are not related to each other, and there are few writing techniques in which the characters in such a scene are not related to the characters in another background. And Solzhenitsyn's original intention was not to tell a story, let alone to write a book for the thrill of curious readers. As we all know, literary critics have always criticized Solzhenitsyn's writings from the perspective of "aesthetic pure literature", and he himself has never positioned his works as "novels".
So can "The Red Wheel" be classified as a history book? Although, according to Soon himself, "all the historical figures who appear in the book bear their real names and use all the precise and specific details of their life and deeds, and the chapters that summarize the historical figures and the passages that describe the major events are all based on strict facts". However, the author's attempt to restore the real relationship between time and space and historical narration does not mean that it is a set of tome monographs of historical research, if we look at the methodology of history, "Red Wheel" does not distinguish between different interpretations of the most important events in the entire Russian history in the 20th century, does not involve any different points of view, has no quotation notes, no archival sources, no references, no research, analysis, argumentation, summary and other conventional research routines, it is completely like Solzhenitsyn's "personal narrative" of Russian history. Many readers wonder how exactly they should read this work. Read it as history or as a novel? Is it a "historicization" of fiction or a "novelization" of history?
Write down the "things that must be said."
When it comes to Soon's writing technique, we must start with the development of the Russia literary paradigm. In fact, since Pushkin wrote works such as "The Captain's Daughter" and "Peter the Great's Black Slave", Russian literary creation has opened a mode of writing based on historical events, and it has since broken away from the classification of European literary novels, poems, essays, and documentary reports, and has created a "form of work" without certain rules, or what some people call "eccentric historical novels" and "psychologically torturous panoramic explorations".
Solzhenitsyn's mode of writing comes from Tolstoy. Tolstoy's original intention in writing War and Peace was to tell the story of a family in the changing times under the title of "1805", but in the process of collecting materials and writing, Tolstoy's interest shifted to the Russo-French War of 1812, and he felt that such a magnificent historical background and extremely rich historical materials could no longer be accommodated by a traditional historical novel. Tolstoy was very puzzled by this, he was caught in a dilemma, limited to the story of the characters, the grand perspective of history was limited, and the dilution of the plot of the characters in the historical picture scroll also talked about the compactness of the storytelling, and many of his own summative philosophical deepenings were precisely outside the narrative. Tolstoy said: "I am tempted to express in detail everything I know and feel about that time, but I know that it is impossible, and sometimes I feel that the simple, vulgar, literary language and literary device of the novel are so incompatible with the grandeur and multifaceted content, that I often lament that I am desperate that I cannot tell what I want to say but must say." Because Tolstoy was often entangled in the positioning of the form of his work in the early stages of his creative process, he knew that what he wrote would be a "four dislikes", which did not conform to any form of literary creation, neither long nor long poem, neither historical research nor documentary work, and finally after a lot of troubles and pains, he decided to put aside all his worries, not to bother with the work to be classified, just to write down those things that he thought he "had to say". Why can't we put literature on a broader stage? So in the end, we saw "War and Peace", a "subversive" historical epic.
When Tolstoy published War and Peace, he thought that literary critics and readers would be arguing and confused about the categories of his works, and people would wonder why he would violate the narrative rules of the novel by describing the background of the times in large paragraphs or interfering with the narrative process of the story with long arguments that were sensitive. There are even some pedantic commentators who have dismissed these philosophical arguments as "an unnecessary piece of fat in the perfect body that can be discarded altogether." In order to avoid speculation, Tolstoy said in an article published in the magazine "Russian Archive" in 1868 that "Russian literary thought cannot be constrained by the paradigm of the European novel, and I am exploring a new paradigm of expression". Herzen also argues that in Russia, "literature is the only forum in which one can hear the cry of one's own anger and conscience," and that it is therefore required to carry a burden that exceeds its own capacity. Herzen thus tended to introduce political, philosophical, and historical content into literature, making literature a carrier of introspection and resistance with life experience, a tool for "soul torture" and self-improvement, a weapon against power, a position for thinkers to exercise their questioning ability, and a spiritual heritage like an "apocalypse" that made people feel enlightened, and Russia literature needed to explore a new creative path of its own and create a concept of "big literature" that covered other disciplines. These ideas contributed to Tolstoy's "literary revolution" and became the blueprint for Solzhenitsyn's writing style in The Red Treatise.
Since then, the "big literature", "big narrative" and "big care" that have mixed various disciplines in the humanities have become a development direction of Russia's creative style, and later in Russia's literary creation, the "creative principle" that does not have to rigidly abide by certain rules has become a "creative style", and even deliberately ignores the boundaries of the subject matter, and writing that adopts a confusing and jumping structure has begun to emerge, and the innovative system of "mixing and matching styles" that includes various creative forms in a work has come to the fore. In many literary works, if the functions of aesthetics and goodness, literature and thought, pleasure and edification, fun and spiritual salvation cannot be taken into account, the author is often willing to weaken the former rather than abandon the latter. In the second half of the 19th century, the good works of the "golden age" of Russia literature were always ideological over artistic, they all reflected the spirit of social mission, philosophical depth, historical thinking, humanitarian concern and moral awakening, and the vividness and readability of the works took a back seat. So at that time, the writer was also a thinker, a philosopher, and an "enlightener". After Tolstoy, the "historicization" of novels in which Russia writers pondered the fate of Russian history was also out of control. The well-known Russia Nobel laureates in literature, such as Pasternako's "Doctor Zhivago", Sholokhov's "Silent Don" and A. Tolstoy's "The Course of Suffering" are all in this form of "history + novel" works that reflect the great social changes in a realistic tone, of course, the biggest difference between them and Solzhenitsyn is that these works are still within the category of literature, and their literary aesthetic value is still highly evaluated. It's more about the storyline.
Write a book that everyone who cares about the fate of Russia should read
Influenced by the spring and autumn penmanship of Tolstoy's descending Russia literature, Solzhenitsyn has always had a desire to write an epic work that reflects the history of the first half of the 20th century, a work that can surpass the peak of the literature of the 19th century "Golden Age", a work that restores the "panoramic history", a work that is completely different from the official interpretation system of the Soviet era, breaks the "obscuration and tailoring" of the Soviet "narrative of party history and power", and writes a work that integrates his understanding of Russia and the West. The works of praise and disapproval of various ideological and cultural traditions of the past and present, writing a book that everyone who cares about the fate of Russia must read, and thus the creative process of "Red Wheel" was born. He believes that people are born with insufficient time to see everything that happens around them, and under the Soviet system, even if they can capture the immediate "fragments of reality", they cannot show a panoramic view. Solzhenitsyn said, "I have a sacred relationship with writing, my writing is the fulfillment of some kind of obligation", "my job is to find out the real facts and weave them tightly together, there are no gaps, no room for argument, all the truth is together, I can reduce the appearance of fictional characters, in order to portray historical figures as if they were my own, I have selected dozens of people and portrayed them as if they were people I knew in my life".
It should be said that from the point of view of the writing form of "The Red Wheel", Solzhenitsyn is more off-line than the "historicization" trend of Tolstoy and others' novels. Those who know his mental journey know that Solzhenitsyn not only had a perverse personality, but most importantly he was a thoroughly "anti-Westernized" "postmodern" theorist, which can also be called a "backward-looking" and "pre-modern" theorist. Solzhenitsyn was deeply worried and disgusted by "marketization" and "modernization", and he believed that the deterioration of the natural environment caused by industrialization and urbanization was linked to the deterioration of human nature, and that the market economy and the era of free competition in the West had replaced all previous forms of domination with the rule of money, and that the cold calculation of money was the result of the development of rationalism. In this kind of society, you don't know why you feel terrible, you wonder if you have actually achieved the ideal. Is this the end? Where is the Lord, you ask? Soon's writing never takes into account the market, nor does he take into account the feelings of most "people", let alone what the finished product is, he is confident that as long as he writes "little-known secrets", his works can be "immortal".
Russia is accustomed to looking for a "prophetic" figure to lead the spiritual life at every stage of history, and the 20th century was none other than Solzhenitsyn. You can disagree with Solzhenitsyn's views and his "arrogance" and "arrogance", but it is true that you cannot ignore this ideological trend among the Russia people. As for whether "Red Wheel" is literature, history, or documentary? What you read it as a work is entirely up to the individual reader. Moreover, Solzhenitsyn believed that only those who could "settle" their hearts, who were reverent to nature, who cared about spiritual life, who were both familiar with and concerned about the fate of Russia, could resonate with his works, and he did not expect that the busy and impetuous "profit-seekers" and "curiosity seekers" in urban life could understand his works.
With his characteristic "Russia spiritual thinking," Solzhenitsyn believes that his works have never been known for their literary nature, that his writing is neither to please readers, nor to satisfy the needs of the market, and that all writers who take these two as their guiding ideology are nothing more than "rootless" shallow literati who "eat together" and are not worthy of being the spiritual successors of Russia. The flood of pragmatism has long obscured the appearance of majestic things, and it is impossible for people who cater to ordinary people to be "ordinary people", and it is impossible to understand the redemptive importance of pursuing spiritual sublimation, and those who satisfy the market are equivalent to canceling their inner pursuits, and those who cannot resist the temptation of modern rational tools, and utilitarian writing is nothing more than a "foreign product" sold by the Western "cultural garbage source", a "secular" life that goes with the flow, This is not at all what these "sufferers" who want to embody the fate of humanity have to consider. Like Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn saw his entire writing process as a visceral "voluntary experience." In his opinion, "Red Wheel" is both a key to Russia and a key to open the "door of the heart" for himself.
At first, Lao Suo thought that this work would take 7-10 years, but the more he wrote, the larger the scale, and the more he wrote, the farther it exceeded the plan. He himself said that the work "is completely unclear on what scale, where it is going, and what the next steps will be." At any time, it can be said that the book is finished, or it can be said that it is not finished, and it can be thrown off, or it can be continued as long as it is alive, until the calf's top oak tree is broken and falls to the ground." Solzhenitsyn rarely compromised in his life, did not care what others thought of him and his works, he wanted to leave a written legacy for Russia, and the more painful the history, the more profound the meaning, this is the logic of the Russian "Messiah", as Likhachev said, "we should make history a monument to the future". Solzhenitsyn himself positioned "The Red Wheel" as a "grand narrative" of "panoramic history".
Solzhenitsyn's "Reinterpretation of History"
Solzhenitsyn began to conceive of the "big product" in his mind before World War II, the initial plan was not so large, and it was not named "Red Wheel", there is no doubt that the historical conception increased the complexity of writing and the extension of ideas, the author spent a lot of energy to collect information, in the process, he studied in depth the vast historical documents, archives, notes, correspondence, testimonies and oral materials, with the continuous expansion of data collection, the length of writing became larger and larger, and the battle line became longer and longer. The project is so vast that it is difficult for any one person to complete it. The first volume of these three books was completed in 1965 and published in 1971, and the collections published at that time were named after their chronology, for example, the first volume was titled "August 1914", the three books in the second volume were published in 1983, and the second volume was titled "October 1916". After Solzhenitsyn left the country, he made a lot of additions to the second volume that he had already completed, and at the same time, he took advantage of the convenience of being abroad to read a large number of materials on the Belarusian diaspora that no one paid attention to in the Soviet Union, and his extended reading abroad strengthened Solzhenitsyn's determination to write in this way. Since then, he has written and published abroad. The three volumes and eight books released in the early stage caused a great sensation overseas, and unlike the context after the upheaval, almost no one read it as a "literary creation" at that time, especially the four books in the third volume related to the February Revolution and Lenin's various unknown contents, although these were not surprising in the West during the "Cold War" era, but the detailed description and logical extension were still like the explosion of a bombshell, and its shock was beyond imagination, and Solzhenitsyn presupposed "subversive" Originally, he didn't intend to be limited to the field of literature, and his expectations were not disappointed.
While writing abroad, Solzhenitsyn also kept an eye on the dissident movement in the Soviet Union. Don't be afraid! Don't forgive! "You can't live in vain!" There was a great encouragement to Soviet intelligentsia. Of course, there are also people who accuse him of "standing and talking without pain in his waist", and that he enjoys the free air and great glory of a democratic country with both fame and fortune abroad, and what qualifications he has to act as the "leader" of the opposition movement and "point fingers" at the difficult struggle in the oppressive environment at home. But there is no doubt that the shock wave of the new "system of interpretation" of Soviet Russian history caused by the publication of Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheel is incalculable in its impact on the "orthodox historiography" in the Soviet Union, which is set by the official ideology. Roy · Medvedev, a leading figure in the dissident movement but part of the direction of social democracy, disagreed with many of Solzhenitsyn's views, and even so, he admitted that Solzhenitsyn's book dealt a "fatal blow" to the system and that he had "played an unparalleled role in this." In addition, with the gradual declassification of archival materials in Gorbachev's later period, people found that those histories that had become classic fragments of the golden rule had too many fictional and forged elements in them, and the generation that grew up in the preaching of "The History of the Communist Party of the Communist Party" saw Solzhenitsyn's commentary (at that time there were not many people in the Soviet Union who had access to Soon's overseas works) and the Soviet history revealed from the archives, "like waking up from a lasting nightmare". In the face of this challenge initiated by Solzhenitsyn, under the training of orthodox ideology, the huge official historiographical circles did not have the slightest ability to parry, and according to incomplete statistics, there were as many as 150 major projects in the Soviet Union that were required to fill the "historical blank spots" at that time. From 1987 to 1990, more than a million people were rehabilitated, including all the important figures in the history of the CPSU, who were undoubtedly portrayed as "hideous" in the past, and the question was asked: how much credibility is there in the history of the Soviet Union? Did we live in real history or were we deceived in the past? Solzhenitsyn, who was the initiator of this wave, was therefore commented as "a man who triumphed with a pen over a totalitarian system that transcended the great powers."
Writers write about the two extremes of history
Several novels made Solzhenitsyn a "great writer", and The Gulag Archipelago made him a representative of dissidents and a "fighter against totalitarianism", both of which have made Solzhenitsyn famous all over the world. But what consumed the fire of Suo Weng's life the most, and what he valued the most, was the "Red Wheel" that was not released until his death. Since "Archipelago" has become popular in the Chinese world and "Red Wheel" is not well known, it is necessary to emphasize it.
Although the two great books "Archipelago" and "The Red Wheel" are not "historiographic" works that conform to "academic norms", there is an interesting tradition in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, that is, literature and even art are particularly concerned with history, not to mention novels like "War and Peace" and painters like Surikov. Even the largest work of official imperial historiography of the Stalin era, the multi-volume History of the Civil War in the Soviet Union, was written by Gorky, an official writer appointed by Stalin.
It is interesting to compare The History of the Civil War with The Red Wheel: both books are decades old. Due to repeated processing according to the intentions of the leaders, Gorky had died when the first volume of "History of the Civil War" was published in 1938, and Stalin was also dead when the last fifth volume was published in 1960.
The first volume of the book, August 1914, and the second volume, October 1916, were first published in Paris in 1971 and 1984 respectively, and the third volume, March 1917, was also published in Paris in 1986 by the YMCA publishing house. The Russian version of the volume was not published in Russia until 2000, and an English version is not yet available. Although the plan for 10 volumes and 30 volumes of the book has been announced long ago, many people, including the author, have always felt that Soon will not be able to finish it in his lifetime. (Recently, I heard that it was actually completed and published, but the third volume and the following volumes have not yet been seen.) However, some of the chapters in the book and the abbreviated articles of the main ideas caused heated discussions as soon as they were published. His outline essay for Volume 3, Reflections on the February Revolution, was republished on the anniversary of the February Revolution in 2007 and was highly praised by the Putin government. Putin even sent the article as a document to government officials for "study". But the criticism of it by Russian liberals and socialists has also been rampant.
Thus, "History of the Civil War" and "Red Wheel" are the official "cultural projects" of the imperial government, the other is the bloody work of free thinkers, one mobilizes a huge writing team backed by the state's financial resources, and the other is a completely personal work. The former is already "outdated" as soon as it is published, while the latter has already had a huge impact before it is published. However, the two great books with such stark contrasts have one thing in common: they are both highly integrated writers who participated in social change and summed up history in the process of change.
If "The Gulag Archipelago" is a profound exposure of Stalin's totalitarian reality, "Red Wheel" is a historical reflection on how such a system could arise on Russia's soil. As far as the former is concerned, Solzhenitsyn's role is universally recognized. Although the claim that "one man defeated the totalitarian system of a superpower with his pen" is exaggerated, it is clear that the Soviet authorities considered Sakharov and others to be expelled from the country even though they wanted to expel him from the country. But in the case of the latter, the reviews are much more divided. It is difficult for both traditional "Soviet" historiography and liberal historiography to agree with Solzhenitsyn's interpretation of history.
Whether criticizing reality or reflecting on history, Solzhenitsyn's concerns ultimately translate into his vision of Russia's future. It was at this point, however, that Solzhenitsyn disappointed many. In particular, in recent years, as the "dream of a right-wing power" in the Putin era has led to the "retrogression" of the democratic process and a certain "conservative" tendency of Slavophilism to oppose "Westernization," there is a certain agreement with Soon's thoughts, and he and Putin also had many mutual cheers in his deathbed, so some public opinion on the mainland has hyped up "Solzhenitsyn has repented." In fact, according to Solzhenitsyn's last wishes, he was buried in the cemetery he had chosen in advance, the Don Monastery in Moscow, where many important figures of the anti-Stalin rule were buried, and Solzhenitsyn was to be with them after his death, which shows that he did not waver in the slightest in his break with the system. The reason why Solzhenitsyn named his monumental work "The Red Wheel" itself has the meaning of "reversing the red wheel". "Reversing the path taken by Russia" comes from the opinion of the Russian philosopher Rozanov (1856-1919) and the "road signposters", who both believed that the road of the "red wheel" "eventually led Russia into a dead end of political society, and Russia into an alley that should not be entered", where Russia "did not find its home", so they cried "turn it back, turn back, the country".
Those who know Solzhenitsyn's heart know that he rebelled against the Soviet system from the point of view of the Slavic-Orthodox tradition, and as early as the 70s of the 20th century, he had the famous "Soa-Shar controversy" with Sakharov, who represented liberal and "Westernized" tendencies among the dissidents of the time. Later, Solzhenitsyn, as always, adhered to a culturally conservative position, complaining about the "Westernization" of Russia. If it is said that more than a decade after the collapse of the totalitarian system, he made some criticisms that "the present is not as good as the past" can be understood as a new evaluation of the Stalin era, and this "rightist Stalin" embodies not the tradition of Lenin, still less Marx, but the tradition of the tsar. In Solzhenitsyn's view, Lenin was much worse than Stalin, and it was Lenin's "fatal mistake" of betraying democracy that led to the spread of the evils of Stalin's autocracy. The relationship between the two was "a teacher-student relationship", as Roy ·Medvedev put it, some people believe that Solzhenitsyn is both anti-Western capitalism and anti-communist autocracy, and the antipathy to both is equal, he said, "No, Solzhenitsyn's main agitation is precisely for the opposition to socialism and communism", he is only dissatisfied with capitalism, "communism is his main enemy". Stalin, of course, was also worse than the traditional tsar. Putin, on the other hand, was pinned on Solzhenitsyn's high hopes for reviving the old Russian traditions, so he was very optimistic.
Based on this realization, Solzhenitsyn in his later years not only hated the "October Revolution" as always, believing that it was contrary to human civilization from the day it was born, but also resented the February Revolution of 1917, which led to the "October". Twenty years ago, he wrote a compendium for the third volume of The Red Wheel, Reflections on the February Revolution, and in the preface to the reissue of the article in 2007, in the same tone, that is, he vigorously opposed "radicalism", while pointing out that the social ills that led to radical ideology still exist today, and that the specter of "revolution" will still linger if it is not eliminated by change (which he is vague about, but clearly not Leninist or Yeltsinian – both of whom he sees as "Westernized" – change).
In this article, Solzhenitsyn argues that both the February Revolution and the October Revolution were part of the "Westernization" that destroyed Russia's traditions, and that the former was almost as radical as the latter, and that it led directly to the latter. In connection with his other statements, we see that he actually gives the "two-line struggle" in Russia's history that breaks the boundaries between "left and right" and "ism": the Orthodox-Slavophile-Putin "Russia road" and the Herzen-Lenin-Yeltsin "Westernized" road. The 1917 revolution that led to the establishment of the Soviet Union was the scourge of "Westernization", as was the Yeltsin reforms that buried the Soviet Union. So didn't the late Tsarist Russia, denied in 1917, and the late Soviet Union, denied by Yeltsin, become symbols of the "Russia tradition"? And if Yeltsin and Putin, who have inherited each other, belong to the "two lines" diametrically, then why is it no wonder that Lenin and Stalin are also different: the former is, of course, a heinous "Westernized" faction, while the latter now seems to have some kind of "Slavic characteristics" ambiguously. This argument is in line with the rhetoric that I mentioned a decade ago in which Russia praised Stolypin after the upheaval, and it is also very similar to the conservatism in mainland China in recent years, which has strung together May Fourth, the Enlightenment, and the 1949 Revolution and even the Cultural Revolution.
The "rupture" of the course of Russian history
However, this view is in conflict with the Soviet narrative that the February Revolution was a "bourgeois-democratic revolution" and the "October Revolution" was a "socialist revolution", but it is also very different from the attitude of the mainstream liberal intelligentsia in the post-Soviet space that rejects the October Revolution and considers itself the successor of "February democracy". If Solzhenitsyn's argument in the 90s of the 20th century did not have much impact when there were different opinions at the beginning of the ban, then today, when the contradictions between Putin and the liberal democrats are deepening, and when Putin and Solzhenitsyn praise each other and advocate "conservatism", this argument seems to have gradually become the mainstream and official discourse, and at the same time has caused fierce debate. The rejection of "February" and "October" in one pot is not accepted by the Russian Communist Party, the successor of the "October Revolution," but is also refuted by the liberal democrats in today's Russia, the successor of "February democracy." Yavlinsky, the leader of the opposition liberal Yabolu League, pointed out that in February 1917 the Russian absolutist monarchy collapsed because it could not adapt to progress, and the people chose democracy without violence and bloodshed and began to build a modern, European-style constitutional state. Although the Bolsheviks later violently destroyed her, the spirit of February democracy was restored to glory in the 1990s, which was not something that Putin's government could reverse. Let us celebrate the festival of February freedom and never abandon the banner of "Februaryism".
Vyacheslav · Nikonov, chairman of the Solidarity Foundation in the Name of Russia, who supported Putin, countered that "February 1917 was not a day to celebrate: it destroyed a great country in just a few days," and was therefore the source of all subsequent misfortunes. As for the Russian Communist Party's proposition of defending the "October Revolution," its influence has diminished due to the lack of new ideas. On the contrary, some left-wing populists are dissatisfied with both Solzhenitsyn's conservative and Yavlinsky's liberal interpretations. Sergei · Schelling, for example, argues that both Solzhenitsyn and Yavlinsky exaggerate the role of the intellectual class out of an elite position. And he believed that the fate of Russia in 1917 was decided by the general public. However, Schelling also makes no distinction between "February" and "October".
Obviously, if in 1990 the debate about the 1917 revolution was "October", now the focus of the "1917" question today is "February". Both the leftists who affirmed it in February and October, and the conservative views that rejected it in February and October, are actually consistent in seeing the continuity of "February" and "October". However, the distinction between the two, as Yavlinsky did, and the affirmation of "February" and the rejection of "October" does face difficulties in interpretation. As I pointed out in an article ten years ago, although the immediate cause of the upheaval in February 1917 was the crisis caused by the war, the underlying cause was the public resentment accumulated by the "authoritarian marketization" of Stolypin's reforms. The upheaval soon turned into a wave of liquidation of Stolypin's reforms and the restoration of the "world of the Commune", which determined that it could not be "bourgeois".
But was the development of Russia after February completely continuous and without "breaks"? If, as Solzhenitsyn put it, the revolution of 1917, which included February and October, was a sharp "Westernization" that had not been reversed, what was the basis for Yeltsin's "Westernization" decades later? If Lenin is the main culprit of "Westernization", why is Yeltsin, who completely repudiated Lenin, not the savior of "tradition"? In fact, Solzhenitsyn's account already suggests that Russia seems to have returned to "tradition" after Lenin, and although Solzhenitsyn himself did not say it explicitly, conservatives who regarded Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union as "great countries" (Lenin and Yeltsin were both sinners who dismantled the "great countries") understood that the change seemed to have taken place between Lenin and Stalin (hence the so-called "repentance" of Sohren). But this argument, while somewhat similar to the official Soviet view after Khrushchev (except that Khrushchev praises and disparages today's conservatives), has little basis. Nowadays, the vast majority of people see that the systems of Lenin and Sri Lanka are basically the same, and the differences are only minor points.
If the break is not between February and October, nor between Liesi and Sri Lanka, then where is it? This is a key question in summarizing the history of 1917. In today's China, there is also the problem of "conservatism" boiling the Cultural Revolution with the May Fourth Movement, 1911 and 1949, and the cultural determinism of history that interprets history with so-called tradition and "Westernization". The recent debate on "democratic socialism" raises the question of whether leftist governments are necessarily totalitarian. The history of 1917 should provide a lesson.
Looking back 90 years later, the "February Democracy" of 1917 was undoubtedly a major event in Russia's modernization and transformation, but there was no doubt that there was a "rupture" in the course of history after it, which did not occur in October of that year, but not between Lenin and Stalin, but in January 1918. Nor was it a democratic revolution that changed from a "capitalist revolution" to a "socialist revolution" with "nothing", but the abolition of democracy (to a large extent the democracy advocated and led by the socialists, i.e. the Russian Marxists, and not "bourgeois democracy"), and its replacement by dictatorship (the dictatorship of the workers, the closure of the trade unions, and the outlawing of the Social Democratic Party, i.e. the "dictatorship of the proletariat" rather than the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat).
Today's conservatives (and Solzhenitsyn today largely belong to this wing) believe that too much "democracy" can undermine freedom and even lead to dictatorship, which is not entirely unreasonable. An example of this is the democratic election of Hitler by the Germans at the end of Weimar. As far as Russia is concerned, it is difficult to predict whether the Narodniks, who won the Constituent Assembly elections at the end of 1917, would later change their previous direction of "social-democratization" and return to the "people's dictatorship" of the Narodniks under the pretext of the chaos of the transition period.
In any case, it was not these democratically elected politicians who abolished constitutionalism, but Lenin's overthrow of the elected parliament, the imposition of totalitarianism, and the suppression of democracy. Therefore, it is unfounded to say that "February democracy" will lead to "January totalitarianism", and it is extremely imprecise to confuse the February Revolution with Lenin's totalitarianism under the concept of "Westernization" and "radicalization".
Text/Jin Yan
