Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution is the historical threshold behind several of the book’s central conflicts: it gives rise to a system of political supervision, sends political memory into exile, and leaves later generations to fight over the meaning of the Soviet inheritance. The narrative does not recount the Revolution as a continuous sequence of events. Instead, it follows its afterlife—in family history, émigré anecdotes, recovered public memory, and the competing claims of post-Soviet politics.

Revolution and the machinery of supervision

The book traces one institutional legacy to the Civil War immediately following the Revolution. As commander of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky had to use professional soldiers and weapons specialists from the former imperial forces, whom the regime regarded as politically unreliable. He placed political commissars alongside them to supervise their actions, countersign orders, and shoot them if they resisted. This arrangement, described as the principle of double administration, required one person to perform a task and another to ensure that it conformed to Marxism-Leninism. Once extended from the army to society, it generated an escalating chain of supervision: the supervisor needed a supervisor of his own, and so on.

Venyamin Savenko appears as a modest functionary within that system, responsible for supervising, controlling, and reporting. The narrator cautions against turning this position into evidence of spectacular personal cruelty: during the war, Venyamin had served as an NKVD orderly stationed in front of a factory. In peacetime, as a junior lieutenant, he organized leisure and cultural activities for soldiers, including dances on Red Army Day. He played guitar, liked to sing, and put clear polish on his nails. The Revolution’s aftermath thus enters family history not only through repression but through the ordinary lives and roles formed inside its institutions.

Exile and the survival of revolutionary stories

The Revolution also persists in the memories carried by Russian émigrés. Novoye russkoye slovo, a Russian-language daily founded in 1910, becomes a small archive of that history. Its elderly editors include men who emigrated after the Revolution; the eldest recalls Trotsky visiting the paper before the upheaval. His anecdote follows Trotsky from a Bronx life of public lectures and unpaid restaurant visits to the abrupt reversal in which a man once pursued over installment-plan furniture ended up commanding the army of the largest country in the world. For Eduard, who had grown up hearing Trotsky condemned as an enemy of humanity, the story makes the scale and drama of his life difficult to ignore.

That inherited past is not presented as a settled account. At the newspaper, Eduard also listens to Porphyry, who began the war in the Red Army, later joined the Vlasov Army, and guarded a camp in Pomerania. Porphyry speaks plainly about having killed people and tells Eduard that, with one’s back to the wall, a person might do the same. The recollections around the Revolution and its aftermath therefore sit alongside later histories of war and political allegiance: they complicate the clean divisions through which a revolutionary past might be remembered.

Glasnost and the return of suppressed history

Decades later, the Revolution reappears as the anniversary setting for a consequential change in public memory. At a gathering marking the October Revolution’s seventieth anniversary, Mikhail Gorbachev used the term glasnost and called for the blank pages of history to be filled in. The narrator distinguishes Gorbachev’s apparent expectation of limited, controllable concessions from what followed: once public truth began to emerge, the larger political structure proved vulnerable. Gorbachev referred to hundreds of thousands of Stalinism’s victims, while the actual toll ran into the tens of millions.

From 1988, works previously available only to an intellectual elite through samizdat or smuggled foreign editions began appearing publicly. Large print runs sold out, and readers queued at dawn for books that had been forbidden. The reading rush moved from Doctor Zhivago to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, George Orwell’s 1984, and Robert Conquest’s histories of collectivization and the purges. The Revolution’s official story, once protected by enforced silence, now faced testimony and literature that restored events to public discussion.

The Memorial Society, founded by dissidents under Andrei Sakharov’s patronage, gave that recovery a concrete purpose: to name victims who had been killed and then erased from memory. At first the group hesitated to use the word millions; once it did, the scale of repression became something people could say aloud. In the book’s account, the Revolution’s legacy is therefore bound not only to the state’s institutions but to the struggle over whether its victims can be remembered at all.

Revolutionary inheritance in post-Soviet politics

After the Soviet Union’s collapse, revolutionary and Soviet legacies become material for new political movements rather than distant history. Anna Politkovskaya defended forty National Bolshevik Party militants convicted after occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices. She described them as courageous people of integrity who offered hope for their country’s moral future. Yelena Bonner likewise supported the militants, despite the unsettling associations of their party’s name. The narrator’s surprise at finding such defenders exposes a political contradiction: figures he regarded as fascists could also be treated by prominent democrats as opponents of authoritarian rule.

That unexpected convergence helped prompt the narrator to choose Eduard Limonov as the subject of a new magazine. Several months later, The Other Russia coalition was taking shape under Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Kasyanov, and Limonov, bringing together a chess champion, a former prime minister, and a writer who seemed, by the narrator’s own political criteria, an improbable associate. What had changed, the narrator suggests, was not necessarily Limonov himself but the position he occupied in the country.

The National Bolshevik Party turned revolutionary inheritance into a youth movement and a program of action. At its convention, several hundred delegates came from around Russia, though the party claimed seven thousand members in total. Venues had repeatedly withdrawn permission, apparently after police intervention, and organizers feared a bomb scare, harassment, or an outright ban. The gathering went ahead. Limonov addressed provincial adolescents and young women who had found identity and purpose in the party, while arguing that the moment was not yet ripe for taking power. He urged them instead to direct their activity toward former Soviet republics, where he claimed Russians had been abandoned and marginalized, and proposed fostering insurgencies and separatist republics. His appeal drew a hundred volunteers for a proposed tour of Central Asia.

The movement’s revolutionary posture met the realities of the post-Soviet state. Before the presidential election, the Ministry of Justice passed a law banning extremism and fascism while reserving the right to define those terms. After the National Bolshevik Party’s registration was refused, Limonov argued that a party with seven thousand adherents would be driven underground and that young people might be pushed toward extremism and terrorism. The book presents this not as proof that the party was simply a continuation of the Revolution, but as a conflict over who could organize political opposition and who had the authority to label it illegitimate.

An inheritance contested, not resolved

The political struggle also appears in the public’s response to the post-Soviet period. Five years after Boris Yeltsin had declared the Communist Party illegal, polls showed that many Russians were prepared to vote for it, disillusioned by democracy, the market, and the injustice accompanying them. Gennady Zyuganov’s cautious campaign emphasized fighting corruption, national pride, and Russian Orthodoxy rather than a return to the Gulag or the Berlin Wall. The result complicates any simple account of revolutionary history as a past that society had decisively rejected: Soviet political language could return as a vehicle for protest against the new order.

The narrator’s final comparison between Limonov and Vladimir Putin brings that struggle into sharper focus. Putin, in the narrator’s account, appealed to people who felt that their parents’ and grandparents’ lives, beliefs, and sacrifices had been dismissed along with communism. He condemned terrible acts committed under communism while rejecting its equivalence with Nazism, and presented the Soviet experience as capable of having been grand, heroic, and beautiful. Limonov, meanwhile, wrote against Putin’s tyranny but found himself cast as a defender of democracy and human rights alongside people whose values he had long despised. The Russian Revolution’s afterlife remains unsettled in this final contrast: its symbols and moral claims can be used by the state, by its opponents, and by those who oppose the state without embracing the principles that opposition publicly represents.