Two November revolutions: Another Russia-Trump connection
By Andrew O'Hehir, Salon
Amid the numbing and relentless onslaught of news — much of it baffling or disturbing, and some of it occasionally even encouraging — a pair of momentous anniversaries passed us by during the last week. It isn’t quite true that they went unnoticed, but in this atmosphere of permanent national crisis we couldn’t do much more than wave at them as they flew past.
One year ago on Nov. 8, of course, was the Election Day That Shook the World, with the flukish or fateful outcome that literally nobody expected. I won’t bother trying to dig up the news stories, but people in Donald Trump’s campaign told reporters that afternoon it would take a miracle for their candidate to win the election. Medieval theologians no doubt had a word for that kind of miracle, one in negative form, wrought by diabolical rather than divine forces. What happened on that day last November, and why it happened, are still subjects of such intense dispute that I’m tempted to say we don’t understand the outcome of the 2016 election any better than we did when we woke up the next morning in disbelief. (For some, in shock; for others, rapture.)
Ninety-nine years before the morning of Trump’s victory, on Nov. 9, 1917, came the culminating moment of the Russian Revolution, when the socialist militant faction known as the Bolsheviks captured the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and seized state power in the name of the working class, a social group that barely existed in that country at that time. They didn’t use the term “communist” until much later; that referred only to a hypothetical future society with no social classes and no state. To make matters more confusing, their history-shaping insurrection is known as the October Revolution because of the calendrical misalignment between Russia and the West; by our reckoning it occurred in November.
There’s no way I can remotely do justice to either of those perplexing events — let alone the tenuous, tangential historical relationship between them, which has elements of echo and elements of parody — in a column cranked out in a few quiet hours on Friday evening, after a week that has included Roy Moore, Louis C.K., Kevin Spacey, the thickening cloud of the Russia investigation and the coast-to-coast Democratic sweep in what would ordinarily have been a nearly meaningless off-year election. Here’s my verdict on the Russian Revolution: Really complicated! It changed the world, all right, but not in the ways anyone expected, and its ultimate lessons about human nature and power relations were not edifying. You’re welcome!
https://www.salon.com/2017/11/11/two-november-revolutions-another-russia-trump-connection/Read the whole thing! Great article.
