Révolutions et révolutionnaires en Russie Entre rejet et obsession

Till the perestroika, the 19th-century Russian revolutionary movement and the Revolution of October 1917 were the centerpiece of Soviet historiography. At the end of the 1980s, the “model” of the revolution had started eroding. In Russia, revolutionary phenomena are now seen in terms of violence and destruction. Changes in the way of looking at the country’s revolutionary past since perestroika are analyzed through the discourses of the ruling class and the historiography. Evoked constantly in politics and intellectual debates, the revolutionary past is still controversial — this keeps historians from stepping back from the subject under study. On the eve of the centennial of 1917, a new view seems to be taking shape, at least in history books. This view of the “Great Russian Revolution”, which lumps together February and October 1917 and the civil war, focuses on the tragedy of these events but claims that Russia came out stronger in the form of the USSR.