Introduction
Finding a Focus for Memory and Experience
The people's army takes up position. Orders are telephoned. Movement in the streets. . . The Red Army encloses the Winter Palace in a ring of steel . . . . A demand for surrender to avoid bloodshed is written and carried to the Winter Palace by messengers with a white flag. A woman soldier receives it and passes it into the building. Waiting. . .
Agitators from Smolny penetrate into the Winter Palace . They enter through cellars, past electric cables, up stairways, along elaborate galleries with chandeliers. . . . The agitators reach the Cossacks in the inner courtyard and begin talking to them. . . . A sailor in the gallery of the Winter Palace throws a grenade among the cadets. The Cossack artillery gallops out of the Palace, deserting the Government. But still no answer to the ultimatum.
The envoys with the white flag return from the Palace and firing begins. . . . The cruiser Aurora opens fire on the Winter Palace. The Mayor of Petrograd at the head of the bourgeois Committee of Salvation crosses a bridge to parley with the workers and is held up by pickets of sailors. . . . While the Mensheviks are still protesting, midnight strikes, and the Bolsheviks set the people's army on the attack of the Winter Palace. The attack begins. . . .
The people pour up through the palace . . . and drive out the women soldiers, who surrender with the other troops. . . . The Ministers are arrested in their council room. By 2 a.m. . . . the Provisional Government is overthrown and Lenin announces the news.[1]
Many of us know the storming of the Winter Palace from the enactment in Sergei Eisenstein's Ten Days That Shook the World, which is summarized above. The great event began with a salvo from the battleship Aurora —the shot heard round the world—and by the time it was over the world had been transformed by revolution. The account,
which is filled with a human drama and historical sweep that have fired the imaginations of generations, is no less gripping for its being imprecise. The historical storming was something of a letdown. The palace housed a powerless and ineffectual cabinet; it was seized a day after the Bolsheviks had taken power; and it was never really stormed. Eisenstein was not in Petrograd for the October Revolution and can be excused for the embellishments. Far from detracting from the event, he improved on it, focused it, and, for many contemporaries, made it seem more truthful than before.
The inspiration for Eisenstein's film was, in fact, a mass spectacle performed at a festival on the third anniversary of the event. If he seemed unduly inspired by the battle, it was because the spectacle was as thrilling as history claimed the storming to have been. Thousands of angry Red Guardsmen, led by Lenin and whipped on by centuries of oppression, charged across the vast square and seized the destiny that history decreed was theirs. There were more soldiers struggling, more ammunition fired, and probably as many injuries suffered during the theatrical re-creation as during the historical event. A hundred thousand spectators witnessed it from the square. It occurred at the stroke of midnight—a much more dramatic setting than the drizzly, gray, typically dreary Petrograd morn of 1917—and banks of floodlights illuminated the progress of the battle.
Bold, colorful, and striking, mass dramatizations were memorable features of the culture of the Russian Revolution, and they came to symbolize the era to many contemporaries. Yet why, one might ask, did the regime make such an investment? Politicians sacrificed valuable time to organize and participate in the festivals; the press gave them central coverage, even when the Civil War hung in the balance. The festivals were deemed so important that essential funds and manpower were diverted to them during a time of economic disaster. In the midst of famine, valuable foodstuffs were distributed almost freely; and during a housing and heating crisis, lumber and fuel were appropriated for decorations and parade floats. And why did the festivals prove so memorable? Revolutionaries, Comintern delegates, foreign dignitaries, and incidental bystanders all remembered the celebrations years afterward. Yet these were minor incidents in an axial era: a world war divided the nation; three hundred years of Romanov rule were overthrown; the October Revolution swept the country and launched it into civil war. Social, economic, and political life were shaken to the core; still, everyone remembered the holidays. The impression was often so strong, as in
the case of the Winter Palace spectacle, that the recollections of original participants were overridden. Nikolai Podvoisky, a member of the troika that commanded the Palace Square attack in 1917, was so enamored with the dramatic version that he sponsored Eisenstein's 1927 film and incorporated its dramatism into his memoirs. His enthusiasm was testimony to the plasticity of human memory.
This book describes the mass festivals and spectacles celebrated by revolutionary Russia in the years 1917–20 and their impact on the memory and experience of revolution. Experience is a welter of chaotic, often conflicting impressions, which require sorting and interpretation. We are guided in this task by our culture, which provides clues as to what should be perceived as "real," what should be ignored, and how the acknowledged impressions should be arranged in a construction of reality. The revolutions of 1917 shook Russian political culture to the foundation and discredited the alternatives that appeared. A hoary tradition of discourse on political power and legitimacy, revolving around religion, bloodlines, and fealty, was effaced; the democratic language spawned by the February Revolution was discredited by hunger, disorder, and continuing war; the Marxist idiom remained incomprehensible and alien to most of the population. Mass festivals helped fill the vacuum of public debate that ensued. Public spectacles were a medium that allowed for the enactment of revolutionary stories. Recent and remote history could be picked through and molded to reflect the most attractive sides of the Bolshevik uprising and to animate the historical vision that lay at its center.
The Bolsheviks were fortunate, though not always pleased, to have some of the century's most talented artists eager to help them. The festivals were often aesthetic triumphs. Artists were given entire cities as their canvases: Marc Chagall covered Vitebsk buildings with murals; Nathan Altman redesigned Petrograd's Palace Square. Theater directors were given thousands of actors and vast urban expanses for mass spectacles, which culminated in the Winter Palace spectacle of 1920. The festivals realized artists' wildest dreams: they had the trust of the state, almost unlimited funds, and audiences that could approach one hundred thousand people. Art once again mattered, and artists met the challenge with verve and creativity.
The spectacles generated considerable scholarly excitement in their own day, with fortunate and unfortunate results. Our good fortune is that the firsthand accounts of many perceptive witnesses were recorded, which give a rich and variegated picture of how the spectacles were made
and perceived. However, these impassioned critics were often themselves directors, whose observations were skewed by subjective involvement. Detailed descriptions were often prejudiced by partisan judgment and aesthetic evaluations influenced by political considerations. Although the spectacles purported to speak with the people's voice, accounts of spectator reaction usually reflected the tastes of the commentator, not the audience. This bias made the rare dispassionate observer, like the Hungarian journalist René Fülöp-Miller, even more valuable.
Dispassionate analysis was rarely the aim of critics during the Revolution. Nevertheless, almost everyone—Formalists, Marxists, advocates of proletarian culture, materialist sociologists, refined aesthetes, and cultural activists, even foreign visitors—found mass festivals and spectacles worthy of attention. All, including the most discerning, were impressed. Some of the finest critics, who were situated in Leningrad's State Institute of Art History (GIII), produced a series of rich monographs on mass festivals that are still among the best sources available.[2] With deep erudition they traced the origins of public spectacles and festivals back through the Renaissance, Middle Ages, and classical world. Although they saw the Russian Revolution as the start of a new epoch, they did not believe it unique in world history, and they examined parallels in all civilizations. Perhaps for political reasons, they neglected two important precedents, Russian dynastic celebrations and popular festivals; and they often found in ancient festivals a class consciousness that was not there. Yet their learning and perception led to essential insights on why festivals are celebrated and how they shape culture. Of particular import was the critics' broadening of the notion of theater to include other performative activities like rituals, game playing, parades, and demonstrations. Many of the critics, notably Adrian Piotrovsky, a young poet, translator, playwright, and director, were artists in their own right, and they provided invaluable information on how the mass spectacles were made.
Fêtes, as well as criticism on the subject, suffered a precipitous decline under Stalin. Vast outdoor entertainments were celebrated throughout the 1930s in Moscow, but they lacked all spontaneity.[3] The Great War and postwar reconstruction made festivals a distant memory. Few authors wrote on the Civil War festivals for thirty years, and those who did were too busy apologizing for revolutionary excess to say much of value.[4]
Interest did not revive until the Thaw of the mid-1950s. The moderate reforms initiated by Khrushchev compelled propagandists to develop forms of political education that enlisted citizen compliance
through means other than force. They looked to the Revolution as a model; and cultural forms like festivals associated with the Revolution experienced a revival that continued through the Brezhnev years. Leading directors like Georgy Tovstonogov produced mass spectacles; the Krupskaia Institute of Culture in Leningrad established a curriculum for mass-festival cadres. New celebrations and rituals for weddings, induction into the army, and granting internal passports were developed, and old holidays like the winter solstice were revived. There were several objectives for the new festivals and rituals. They were meant to reinvigorate popular support for Soviet socialism; as one festival organizer said, "Mass festivals reflect the unity of the Soviet people and their support for the Communist Party and Soviet government."[5] Religious sentiment was growing among the population, and socialist festivals were thought to counterbalance the compelling beauty of the Russian Orthodox service.[6] The festivals also fed on nostalgia for the Revolution's spontaneous enthusiasm, something long absent from Soviet public life.
The rebirth of festivals has led to a salutory revival of scholarship on the subject. Collections of materials have been published;[7] the memoirs of survivors of the revolutionary years have been published;[8] a large critical and theoretical literature on the subject has developed.[9] There is controversy in Russia over what festivals accomplish and how they should be conducted, yet several general themes emerge, all of which underscore the educational role of festivals rather than their immediate political context. Festivals enable citizens to celebrate and experience the values of society in ways that other forms of discourse do not allow. They are spontaneous civic manifestations, and citizens understand their message directly. Political orthodoxy has often led commentators to overstate claims of spontaneity and political-education impact, but some, notably A. I. Mazaev, are capable of subtle commentary. Mazaev notes the unique features of the festival world, and he is aware that festivals have served many purposes in many societies.
Western scholars, led by anthropologists, have arrived at the topic of mass celebration along a somewhat different route—through an interest in culture and symbolic analysis. Festivals have proved a particularly fertile topic. They demonstrate how a system of beliefs can mobilize a population, either to support the status quo or to undermine the present social structure.[10] Public celebrations become particularly meaningful during times of revolutionary change, when societies not only must project themselves into the future but must grapple with the legacy of
their past. Historians of the French Revolution, which the Russians saw as a model for their own, have produced fascinating accounts of how festivals and symbols were used to replace the old regime's hierarchical culture with an egalitarian, revolutionary culture.[11]
An erosion of the totalitarian model of the socialist state and society has also led those who study Russia to a shift in focus that makes festivals a fertile topic. The belief that the Soviet system rested solely on institutions of power and that its foundation was a systematic ideology has been shaken, allowing historians to reach a more layered and nuanced understanding. Cultural studies have contributed to the revision; revolutionary Russia has come to be seen as a participatory, if not democratic, society, where competing myths and ideas were exchanged by the population and leaders. Official culture used to be dismissed as political hackwork, yet under scrutiny it has yielded many insights into the society that produced it.[12] Attention has been devoted to the revolutionary propaganda and utopian enthusiasm that underlay popular support for the Bolsheviks during the war;[13] the flexible application of the "cult of Lenin," which guided the party through various phases of its development;[14] and the traditions, tastes, and myths that constituted socialist realism.[15] There has been considerable interest in Soviet festivals: scholars have examined them as a theatrical phenomenon,[16] as a source of the emerging Soviet culture,[17] and as a means of cultural management in post-Stalinist Russia.[18]
The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of mass festivals during the Civil War (1917–20) and to discuss some of the theoretical issues raised by their study. The intended audience is broad: it includes specialists in the history and culture of the country; lovers of the theater, particularly the rich Russian theater of this century's first quarter; historians interested in revolutionary cultures and cultures undergoing rapid change; anthropologists and sociologists interested in symbolic performance and communication.
Combining the roles of historian and theoretician has been difficult; the chapters are arranged chronologically but with the intent of building a theoretical argument at the same time. The narrative begins not with the Marxist ideology that inspired the Revolution, not with the needs and aims of the Bolshevik regime, but with the legacy of mass celebration active in 1918. The tradition, which seemed democratic back then, was in parts authoritarian and often contrary to Bolshevik doctrine. Its sources included the French Revolution, the Russian autocratic tradition, and the February Revolution. Festivals were integral to
the utopian tradition that animated Bolshevism; ideas were borrowed from Tommaso Campanella, Thomas More, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Festivals had been a centerpiece of the French Revolution;[19] and they were deemed a supreme art form by continental reformers of theater and society such as Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Romain Rolland. The Russian symbolists Viacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Bely had devoted considerable attention to the topic, as had the Bolsheviks Anatoly Lunacharsky, Vladimir Friche, Platon Kerzhentsev, and Aleksandr Bogdanov. Holidays were, in fact, instrumental to revolutionary history. The February Revolution was sparked by an International Women's Day demonstration; and later in 1917 the Bolsheviks used Petrograd Soviet Day, declared by themselves on October 22, as a dry run for taking power.
After the Revolution, the regime created a new holiday calendar of its own, which for several years coexisted and competed with the extensive calendar of Orthodox religious holidays. The Bolshevik celebrations combined tradition with innovation. A demonstration was usually the central moment. In prerevolutionary times, working-class demonstrations were an expression of animosity toward the rich and powerful; they were illegal and thus an act of civil disobedience. After the February Revolution they became legal, and after the October Revolution they received full state sponsorship. Grim manifestations became celebratory parades; days of struggle became holidays. Festival participants carried brightly colored banners through decorated streets and squares; they were greeted from tribunes by local and national leaders. Puppet booths were set up on sidewalks; wandering actors performed skits about revolution and class struggle; party orators addressed marchers from impromptu platforms. The banners were usually made by workers in their factories, and the artwork was prepared only days before the celebration; thus, alongside works that have entered art history, much was crude and amateurish. This only contributed to the mood of spontaneity that enlivened the earliest festivals. After the demonstrations, theaters and variety houses were thrown open at discount prices; tickets were distributed in Soviet enterprises, but it was easy enough to buy a ticket from a scalper. On occasion, restaurants and cafés offered cheap hot meals to the starving population (they often shut down again the next day). If money was available and the local authorities were so inclined, the celebration could be crowned by a fireworks display or even a mass spectacle.
Many traditions brought together in the revolutionary festivals were
transformed by new social purposes. The most important factor in remaking celebrations was a new function: propaganda. The use of public spectacles to explain intricate political principles moved the Bolsheviks into a dialogue with a cultural tradition that was in many ways alien to their goals. Drawing an idiom from traditional popular culture, liturgical rites, and even tsarist ceremonies was expedient because that vocabulary was most familiar to the people. Yet these symbols and spectacles shifted attention away from ideology, the Bolsheviks' fundamental claim to power.
The spectacles had a tangled, and surprisingly unrevolutionary, genealogy. Before the Revolution, many Bolsheviks were fascinated by the prospect of socialist mass celebrations; and several of them, most prominently Lunacharsky, held sufficient power after 1917 to sponsor festivals. Yet, oddly, these enthusiasts could take little credit for revolutionary festivals, particularly after 1919. Responsibility for the festivals—for their shape, content, and the message they conveyed to spectators—belonged more to artists and directors than to politician/sponsors, who offered little concrete guidance. The directors sifted the Bolshevik program, ideology, and history for elements that would fit the festive tradition and suit dramatic presentation. They selected what was appropriate for a revolutionary celebration; in doing so, they reshaped the Revolution. This is not to say that the festivals were nonpolitical. Rather, it confirms the substantial influence of two outside factors: the aesthetics of festivity and the Russian artistic tradition.
What makes a festival festive is not its politics but the fact that it stands apart from everyday existence. Festive time can be compressed or expanded; the setting can be universalized or minutely compacted. Festivals can be celebrated by deists and atheists, conservatives and revolutionaries, the rich and the poor; but they must, above all, feel different. Frequent attempts have been made to associate aspects of the festival aesthetic with certain messages and certain social groupings. Carnivals, which offer a compact, immediate experience of reversed hierarchy, have been associated with the lower classes and their aspirations. Stately rites, which span breathtaking expanses of time to commemorate the past, have been ascribed to ruling orders and their dominant ideologies. But this theory has flown in the face of the evidence, particularly in Russia. Revolutionaries observed rites as solemn and pompous—if not as sumptuous—as the Romanovs; and Russia's merriest urban carnivals were sponsored by the imperial dynasty on the square right next to the palace. Rather than forcing festivity into the straitjacket of ideology or
class and asking how certain groups celebrated certain ideas, it is more productive to reverse the question and ask what happened to ideas when they were celebrated.
The festive environment is segregated from surrounding time and place by decorative markings. The marking system—an artistic style—informs and shapes the content of the festival. Some artistic styles decorate better than others. The realism dominant in late nineteenth-century Russia was uniquely inappropriate to the task. Realists drew or wrote about things, they filled their work with ideas, they frowned on playfulness—all of which are designed to spoil a festival. The fin-de-siécle symbolist movement reacted to realism with consternation. How, the symbolists asked, can truth be depicted realistically, when it is intangible, objectless, ethereal? Eventually, with the arrival of a second generation of symbolists, the antirealist impulse bred an interest in older styles of theater associated with festivals and fairgrounds. These forms included medieval mystery plays, Italian commedia dell'arte, and eventually even Russian fairground entertainments. The analogy proved fertile; from these experiments, prerevolutionary directors, most prominently Vsevolod Meyerhold and Nikolai Evreinov, learned the rudiments of what would become mass theatrical art after the Revolution.
One aspect of symbolism's philosophical heritage that proved durable was the belief that theater could remedy the ills of modern society. The thread ran back at least to Wagner, whose dramatic vision was inspired by the social upheaval of 1848. Wagner believed that theater and society had been fragmented by industrialization. Nineteenth-century theater was divided: actors were separated from spectators by the proscenium arch, and patrons were segregated by ticket price. Reformers strove to return the theater to its festive origins: the audience, chosen from all levels of society, would celebrate its most cherished myths and find respite from the alienation of modern life. Participants and spectators could then transport the experience outside the theater walls and reform society.
The vision was both naive and dictatorial, and augured terrible consequences under state patronage. A desire for social harmony was commendable, but the quest for unanimity hid a distrust of diversity. The unforeseen repercussions were later represented by the bone-chilling Festival of Unanimity in Evgeny Zamiatin's dystopian novel We:
At the beginning all arose, and the Hymn, like a solemn mantle, slowly waved above our heads. Hundreds of tubes of the Musical Tower, and millions of
human voices . . . All eyes were directed upward; in the pure morning blue, still moist with the tears of night, a small dark spot appeared. Now it was dark, now bathed in the rays of the sun. It was He, descending to us from the sky, He—the new Jehovah—in an aero, He, as wise and as lovingly cruel as the Jehovah of the ancients. Nearer and nearer He came, and higher toward Him were drawn millions of hearts.[20]
Festivals, as Zamiatin notes, are a powerful tool of social manipulation. They engage spectators in a symbolic, yet highly tangible, vision of reality. Clearly, the Bolsheviks invested valuable resources in festivals for the purpose of indoctrinating the population with new ideas and legitimizing the October Revolution. Subsequent commentators have taken the intention as the result. A 1981 book by a western sociologist calls the Soviet festivals part of "the arsenal of means to exert social control employed by political elites," "a means to structure and maintain power relations," and "the behavioral dimension of ideology."[21] Intention, though, should not be mistaken for execution; that position presupposes a systemic consistency never present in Russian society, certainly not during the Revolution. It assumes the existence of a single, monolithic ideology; a knowledge of that ideology by local festival makers; the willingness of artists to transmit the message objectively; the capacity of festivity to convey a political ideology without distortion; the absence of alternative interpretations of the message; the ability or willingness of the spectators to understand it.
All these assumptions ignore the vagaries of symbolic communication, the subjectivity injected into the process by the audience, and the chaos and confusion of Civil War Russia. Propaganda was a dialogue, with the audience as the silent interlocutor. It was a living interaction in which audience and maker were in constant communication. Agitators read the latest decree from a rostrum; newspapers were read aloud to a group or performed in skits; pamphlets were delivered by "agit-trains" that penetrated the dark corners of the country. Each new presentation faced a new audience; and the messages that reached deepest into the people's consciousness were those that targeted the audience best. The interaction was idiosyncratic, fluid, elusive; propaganda rarely conveyed a single message but offered potential messages on many levels. Sometimes they were contradictory. Spectators rejected and distorted particular symbols and ideas; and their stubborn habits of misinterpretation often thwarted understanding between state and people.
The frustration that confronted the Bolsheviks in their quest to reform their country and the measures taken to bridge the communication gap
speak eloquently about the dynamics of state/society communications and the popular dimension of the Revolution. Though the need to understand these dynamics makes the lack of reliable sources on popular reception even more regrettable, information is available with a bit of decoding. Popular reaction was rarely recorded in the press, yet its imprint was discernible in the lengths to which organizers went to control audience response. The struggle to shape spectator impressions often was waged over words and symbols: newspapers provided acceptable reactions, while alternative interpretations were suppressed; photos were cropped to draw the proper focus; old icons were forcibly reinterpreted.
Ultimately, the conventions and rules of the performance conditioned audience response, providing clues to the role of popular participation. Commentators then and now have acquired the habit of calling all the celebrations rituals, but that term is perilously inexact. Ritual is only a single form of festive performance, one employing hieratic, hermetic symbols that allow for compact communication and encourage interpretative unanimity among spectators. This language is highly conventionalized; because its interpretive code exists prior to the performance, it addresses an exclusive audience. In revolutionary times, when the regime was presenting its program to new and unfamiliar people with whom it shared no political language, ritual was of limited utility. Forums in which many people of different classes and opinions could be addressed and in which the dynamism and intrigue of revolution could be conveyed offered greater advantage. Performance modes like drama and play, which were native to the festive environment and offered communicative properties unavailable in rituals, became increasingly popular as the Revolution progressed and the ambitions of directors expanded. Directors eschewed several constricting properties of ritual—audience participation, narrative disjunction—and cultivated dramatic properties that could project powerful myths to hundreds of thousands of citizens. Revolutionary commentators often claimed to recognize rituals in the mass spectacles, but they were likely incorrect. The misperception was telling; it indicated an unfamiliarity with popular spectators and a failure to recognize their autonomy.
The urge to dramatize the Revolution, represented by the shift away from ritualism, inspired a new mythology of revolution that was enacted in the mass spectacles. Each spectacle presented a new understanding of the revolutionary past, which suggested new needs in the present and new paths into the future. To label the festivals mere propaganda, and point out that the history in them was distorted, is to miss the
point. Historical drama usually "distorts" history, and it is always partisan: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Schiller, as well as their predecessors and successors, turned to the past not to discover precisely what happened but to draw from it a message for the present. This was also the design of revolutionary spectacles; the past was probed to define who, precisely, were the ancestors of the Bolshevik revolution. The fact that Marx was rarely mentioned, while Stepan Razin, the Cossack rebel, was frequently brought up, reveals an evolution of the Bolshevik's public image and perhaps even of their self-conception. Mass dramas grouped the Bolsheviks at one time or another with Spartacus, the French Revolution, the Cossack rebels Razin and Emelian Pugachev, the Paris Commune, even the Decembrists. Each association threw a different light on the Revolution and suggested a different destination.
In the process of communicating their program to the people, the Bolsheviks shaped and changed themselves. The myths created and projected in mass festivals were constantly changing, and the party program was rarely, if ever, the central theme. It would therefore be wiser to concentrate less on what the message or myth was and more on how it came into being, what context it appeared in, and to what uses it was put. The cultural process was dynamic and creative, like the revolution it sought to represent. New socialist practices sprang to life in celebrations; and the Bolshevik mythos continually evolved. Festivals, along with the other propaganda media, allowed the party to develop new identities that would legitimize its rule and assist its difficult transition from a revolutionary underground inspired by ideology to a ruling power.
In many ways, the Bolsheviks' ideology impeded their consolidation of power. To undermine the legitimacy of the monarchy and then of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks had rejected the old culture and spoken of the redistribution of power and a social order that would transcend national boundaries. In doing so, they weakened the legitimacy of all authority. Festivals countered this tendency by shaping the past into a myth of destiny. The Bolsheviks were associated with the most progressive elements of Russian and world history, which created a hierarchy of events. The October Revolution stood at its summit. History was a highly political issue. To make the October Revolution the sole heir of progressive history was to legitimize Bolshevik power.
When the Bolsheviks celebrated their revolution, they did not seem to be a party emerging from the underground and split by ideological conflicts; they were united by a clear historical mission stretching from the
beginnings of civilization to its culmination in communism. The process was not simply a matter of propagandists choosing a new identity and foisting it on the population. The decision was hardly conscious, and it was not made by the party alone. Artists, directors, marchers, actors, and political sponsors all took part; give-and-take, not command from above, was the norm. This interaction involved a complicated and often frustrating dialogue between the sponsors' needs and the artists' abilities; factors as varied as the Russian festival tradition, artistic and dramatic form, audience comprehension—as well, of course, as socialist ideology—had to be taken into account. The result was that the Bolsheviks joined the tradition of fledgling regimes using festivals to propagate legitimizing genealogies. Pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom had to establish their descent from the gods; the Stuarts and Medicis claimed an ancient royal bloodline. What is remarkable about the Bolsheviks is not that they pursued this time-honored practice, but that the mythic past was for them only several years prior.
The immediate past was, during the Revolution, undergoing constant change as it was asked to reflect the present. As our understanding of the October Revolution and of abrupt historical transformation becomes ever more intricate and as the historical tapestry is increasingly woven together from politics, society, and culture, we must question the primacy of politics. If the revolutionary festivals did ultimately serve to strengthen Bolshevik power—which is not at all clear—they did so because artists displayed their magic according to their own rules. Politicians did not make the festivals, just as the artists could not have run the state. What is fascinating is to observe their interaction and their influence on one another. Artists were given opportunities that they could not have dreamed of before and that would soon cease to exist; politicians saw their program and movement imagined in new, often salutory, ways. The Revolution was not, contrary to the Marxism current during that time, a historically determined occurrence; it underwent constant redefinition, and the leading actors were not always aware of the script. In that sense, the mass festivals were, as leading proponents fancied, vast improvisations, where revolutionaries, artists, soldiers, and simple citizens reenacted the past in the hope it might yield images of the future.