November 7 in Putin's Russia

Vladmir Putin has put an end to the November 7 day celebrations in Russia from this year. It was a quiet day in Moscow this time. GPD puts into historical perspective a day whose significance went far beyond Russia.

All the military might of the “first socialist state” was on display on this day. It was a military might which evoked a special sense of security and meaning.

It was this might which challenged and kept under control the hegemonism of one power, i e, the US. Now that the American hegemonism has become the sole determinant or the defining characteristic of the international system it should be easy to see what a countervailing force the Soviet power was and has always been. The parade in the Red Square was in a sense a promise, a promise made to the struggling people around the globe. The number of liberation struggles that were aided and assisted by the then Soviet Union is legion.

He compares this with the way the Chinese look back at October 1, the day of the Chinese Revolution in 1949:

Contrast this with what the Chinese do. There is no let up in the centrality and significance of October 1. China is in festive mood throughout the first week of October. Beijing is all lit up. It is a carnival of a kind. It needs hardly to be stated that the distance separating today’s China and Stalinist or Maoist socialism is in no way smaller than Putin’s from Stalinism. But there is awareness that whatever else might have been wrong with Chinese socialism, it was the revolution put China on the map of the world. It was no longer “a heap of sand” as Sun Yat-sen had described it once. It had stood up literally to the world. This historical memory simply cannot and should not be wiped out. The celebrations of October 1 have historical and power significations which should not be lost sight of.