Rethinking the Russian Revolution

“We have imagined how things would have been at that time if there was an Internet and people were using social media,” said Mikhail Zygar, creator of the biggest ever interactive historical website. It is called “1917: Free History,” and is a quietly subversive attempt to make Russians think about how they ended up where they are now.
Zygar is one of Russian’s best journalists. He was editor in chief of Dozhd (Rain), the only independent TV news channel in the country, until he resigned — or more likely was force to resign — last year. He is back with an extraordinary project: To relive the events leading up to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution as if the people involved, from statesmen to private citizens, had been posting daily on social media.
More than 100 journalists, historians and web professionals worked for a year, trawling through letters, diaries and archives to come up with authentic material written by people who were living the history one day at a time.
The characters include all the big figures, from the tsar and Grigori Rasputin to Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, but also artists, writers, soldiers, workers and housewives. They were all following current events closely because it was the middle of World War I.
There are 1,500 characters, each posting Facebook-style updates on their activities and impressions, their hopes and fears, all drawn from what they actually wrote at the time. You can “like” specific characters and follow them on a regular basis. You can even ask them questions and send them messages.
“1917: Free History” has no obvious political stance. It offers no conclusions, and the comments of the various characters come without any interpretation. The public justification for this massive undertaking is simply that next year is the centenary of the Bolshevik (Communist) Revolution, the biggest turning point in modern Russian history.
Yet Zygar is a very political man, a liberal who has consistently resisted the lies and manipulations of the regime of President Vladimir Putin. So what is he really up to? What would Zygar like people to conclude after their 15-month journey through Russia’s hundred-year-ago history?
All he will say is: “Everything that happened to us in the 20th century and is happening now is a consequence of the events of 1917.” That includes not only the crimes and tragedies of the Soviet era, but also what “is happening now.” And now is not a good time in Russia either.
Russians are not enthusiastic readers of history, but any intelligent Russian who follows “1917” through to the end will know that while the first (democratic) revolution in March that year was probably inevitable given the tsar’s gross mismanagement of the Russian war effort, the second revolution was not inevitable at all. It was a fluke, a highly improbable event that happened anyway.
The October Revolution that brought the Communists to power was not a revolution at all. It was a coup d’etat led by a small group of ruthless Bolsheviks with the support of some troops in the capital.
When the election that had already been scheduled took place two weeks later, the Bolsheviks won only 175 out of 715 seats in Parliament, but that did not matter by then because the Bolsheviks immediately dissolved Parliament and ruled by decree. The point of bringing up this old history is not to prove that the Communists were bad; it is to show that they were not inevitable.
Most Russians are fatalistic about their history. They believe that it is all their own fault, because they are the kind of people they are. If you believe that, then you believe that 70 years of Communist dictatorship were inevitable, that the civil war, famines and great purges were inevitable, that tyranny, corruption and poverty are inevitable, and that Putin or somebody like him is inevitable now. None of that is true. Change just one little detail in the run up to the October Revolution (for example, what if the Germans had not shipped Lenin to Russia in the hope that he would seize power and take Russia out of the war?) and the improbable Communist seizure of power becomes impossible.
Once you have realized that the Communist coup was just bad luck and not Russia’s fate, all the subsequent bad history ceases to be inevitable too. The country just turned down the wrong road in 1917, but another turn could put it on the right road.
Is that the message Zygar is trying to get across? I suspect it is, although he is far too intelligent to believe it will have any immediate effect. It is just a drop in the bucket, but it is a pretty big drop, and eventually the bucket may overflow.

•Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.