普京为何回避十月革命百年庆典？

On November 7, the Communist party of the Russian Federation will celebrate the centenary of the 1917 revolution with a festive march and a gala reception. But President Vladimir Putin will be absent from the procession, and the evening event will take place at the Renaissance Moscow Monarch Centre, a nondescript conference hotel far from the Kremlin.

11月7日，俄罗斯联邦的共产党将庆祝1917年革命100周年，举行一场节日游行和一场欢庆招待会。但俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔•普京(Vladimir Putin)将缺席游行活动，而晚间活动将在距离克里姆林宫很远的一家毫无特色的会议酒店——莫斯科蒙那多中心万丽酒店(Renaissance Moscow Monarch Centre)举行。

For Mr Putin, removing himself so far from a momentous historical anniversary is out of character — under his presidency, history has become an ever more important ideological tool for strengthening national unity and rallying public support.

对普京而言，让自己距离一次重大的历史性周年纪念活动这么远，不符合他的个性。在他担任总统期间，历史已成为一件越来越重要的意识形态工具，被用来加强民族团结和动员公众支持。

Over the past decade, “Russia has taken to a cult of the past,” says Gennady Bordyugov, a historian and senior official at the Association of Researchers of Russian Society, which monitors public sentiment about the revolution.

过去10年来，“俄罗斯变得很崇拜历史，”历史学家、俄罗斯社会研究人员协会(Association of Researchers of Russian Society)高官根纳季•布尔久戈夫(Gennady Bordyugov)说。该协会监测公众对1917年革命的情绪。

Indeed, Mr Putin has marked the victory over Nazi Germany with ever more pomp including massive military parades on Red Square, speeches emphasising the role of the Soviet Union over western powers in defeating Hitler and invoking pride in the people’s strength and sacrifices in the second world war.

的确，普京以越来越大的排场纪念击败纳粹德国的胜利，包括在红场(Red Square)举行规模浩大的阅兵式，发表强调苏联在击败希特勒过程中的作用大于西方大国、号召俄罗斯人对前辈们在二战期间的力量与牺牲感到自豪的演讲。

On the president’s instructions, a broad range of history textbooks with widely diverging interpretations of events such as the revolution were replaced with just a few, based on a standardised interpretation.

在这位总统的授意下，对1917年革命等事件的解读各不相同的众多版本历史教材，被换成了基于一种标准化解读的少数几个版本。

Last year, Mr Putin argued that Russia’s recent economic weakness — partly triggered by western sanctions over the annexation of Crimea — was insignificant in the grand sweep òf history.

去年，普京辩称，俄罗斯近期的经济疲软——在一定程度上是由吞并克里米亚之后西方出台的制裁措施引发的——在历史长河中是无足轻重的。

“The country may lag behind in some respects, but it has a thousand-year history, and Russia will not trade its sovereignty for anything,” he said. “这个国家也许在某些方面落在后面，但俄罗斯有1000年的历史，绝不会为了任何东西而出卖主权，”他说。

Andrei Kolesnikov, a political analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Centre, says the Kremlin’s heavy use of history has been convenient in legitimising Mr Putin’s regime. “The elites and pro-Putin majority identify with that and identify with the help of the past ‘who we are and where we come from’.”

莫斯科卡內基中心(Moscow Carnegie Center)政治分析师安德烈•科列斯尼科夫(Andrei Kolesnikov)表示，克里姆林宫大量利用历史为普京政权提供合法性。“精英和支持普京的大多数民众认同这种做法，认同‘我们是谁，我们从哪里来’的历史所提供的帮助。”

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has been seeking answers to those questions. For many other former Soviet republics, many of them dominated by ethnic groups other than Russians, gaining independence in itself was a strong basis for national identity. But in the minds of many citizens of the Russian Federation, the day their country became independent they lost more than they gained — an empire, global power status, a state in which for decades they had been taught to take pride.

自1991年苏联解体以来，俄罗斯一直在寻找这些问题的答案。对于其他许多前苏联加盟共和国而言，其多数人口并非俄罗斯人，获得独立本身就是民族认同的强大基础。但在俄罗斯联邦的很多公民看来，他们在国家独立的那一天所得到的小于所失去的——一个帝国、全球强国地位、他们受了几十年灌输要为之骄傲的一个国家。

“That’s why history politics has become so important: What’s needed is clear heroes that inspire people, narratives that can help with reconciliation in society,” says Mr Kolesnikov. “The 1917 revolution is useless for that because the frontlines that played a role then are irrelevant today.”

“这就是历史政治变得如此重要的原因：我们需要的是鼓舞人民的完全正面形象的英雄，以及有助于社会和解的叙述，”科列斯尼科夫说，“就此而言，1917年革命毫无用处，因为当时曾扮演角色的前线如今是无关的。”

Mr Putin himself has made his ambivalent attitude to the October Revolution very clear.

普京本人很清楚地表达了他对十月革命的矛盾态度。

“We see how ambiguous its results were, how closely the negative and positive consequences of those events are intertwined,” he said last week. On the one hand, he argued that gradual, evolutionary development would have served Russia much better than the upheaval of 1917 with its “ruin of statehood and the ruthless destruction of millions of human lives”.

“我们看到那场革命的结果是多么模糊，那些事件的消极后果和积极后果是多么紧密地交织在一起，”他在上周表示。一方面，他辩称，相比1917年那场“毁掉了国家，无情地夺走数百万人生命”的剧变，渐进式、进化式的发展本来对俄罗斯会好得多。

Mr Putin’s abhorrence of the turmoil of 1917 reflects a broader anxiety over revolutionary ferment that has shaped his outlook. He prides himself in having returned Russia to stability after the turbulent 1990s. For more than a decade, he has railed against the overthrow of regimes whether in Ukraine, Egypt or Syria, readily seeing them as western plots that might one day extend to Russia itself.

普京对1917年混乱的憎恶，反映了他在整体上对革命狂热感到的焦虑，这种情绪塑造了他的世界观。他为自己让俄罗斯在经历动荡不安的1990年代之后恢复稳定感到自豪。10多年以来，他谴责推翻政权的事件或企图，无论是在乌克兰、埃及还是叙利亚，往往把它们看做西方的阴谋，有朝一日也许会用到俄罗斯身上。

But then he credited the Soviet Union with raising living standards, creating a powerful middle class, reforming the labour market and boosting human rights, and claimed it had helped in advancing these positive developments in the west as well.

但在另一方面，他承认苏联提高了生活水平，打造了一个强大的中产阶层，改革了劳动力市场，以及改善了人权状况。他还声称，这一切也曾帮助推动了西方发生这些积极改变。

Mr Putin’s conflicted attitude towards the Soviet Union has long puzzled western observers. In 2005, he memorably called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. The phrase was misread by many in the west as praise of the USSR, but was more a reflection of the trauma a majority in the Russian public feels, and a warning of the risks created by the crumbling of a global power.

长期以来，普京对苏联的矛盾态度一直令西方观察人士感到困惑。2005年，他令人难忘地把苏联解体称为“20世纪最大的地缘政治灾难”。这一说法被西方很多人误解为普京在赞颂苏联，其实这在更大程度上反映出俄罗斯大部分公众感受到的创伤，以及对于一个全球强国瓦解所引发风险的一个警告。

The Russian president’s view of the revolution’s protagonists is equally ambivalent. On the one hand, he blamed Lenin himself for the Soviet Union’s eventual demise, saying that the revolutionary leader had put a “time bomb” under the state he founded by drawing borders along ethnic lines, He called Lenin a traitor for starting a civil war when Russia was already fighting external enemy in the First World War.

这位俄罗斯总统对革命主角的看法同样很矛盾。一方面，他谴责列宁本人要对苏联的最终灭亡负责——他说，这位革命领袖以民族界线划定边界，从而为他创立的国家埋下一枚“定时炸弹”。普京还把列宁称为叛徒，因为在列宁在俄罗斯已经在第一次世界大战中与外敌交战的情况下发起了内战。

But Mr Putin has also defended dictator Josef Stalin for making a pact with Nazi Germany, and fiercely criticised neighbouring states for removing monuments glorifying the Soviet army or Lenin. 但普京也为独裁者约瑟夫•斯大林(Josef Stalin)跟纳粹德国签订互不侵犯条约辩护，并激烈抨击了邻国移除苏军或列宁纪念碑的做法。

Fresh research conducted on the eve of the revolution’s centennial shows that with this seemingly contradictory stance, the Russian president stands firmly among the mainstream.

在十月革命100周年前夕进行的最新调查显示，这一看似矛盾的立场使俄罗斯总统坚定地站在主流中间。

A poll by the pro-Kremlin Russia Public Opinion Research Centre (VCIOM) conducted last year found that 45 per cent believe that the October Revolution represented the will of the Russian people, while 43 per cent disagreed. In 1990, on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse, 36 per cent had agreed and 37 per cent disagreed.

去年，亲克里姆林宫的俄罗斯舆论调查中心(VCIOM)在调查中发现，45%的人认为十月革命代表了俄罗斯民众的意愿，而43%的人不同意这一看法。在苏联解体前夕的1990年，赞同和反对这一看法的比例分别为36%和37%。

“The civil war is long over, but the discussion about it is not,” says VCIOM general director Valery Fyodorov. “The proportion of people who don’t know how to answer has shrunk, showing that people understand more about the revolution than they used to. But the rift is as deep as ever.”

“那场内战结束很长时间了，但对于它的讨论没有结束，”俄罗斯舆论调查中心负责人瓦列里•费奥多罗夫(Valery Fyodorov)说。“不知如何回答的受访者的比例降低了，这显示出人们对十月革命的理解相比过去更深刻。但分歧仍跟以往一样深。”