Russia's Long Anti-Revolution of Constitutionalism

Abstract

The hundredth anniversary of the 1917 revolutions was a strangely muted affair in Russia. Once considered one of the great turning points in human history, the Great October Socialist Revolution (to use Soviet parlance) is now considered at best an irrelevance, and at worst a spectacular example of an ill-conceived and brutally executed social experiment. This has given rise to one of the consistent foundational positions of Putinism, the repudiation of revolution as a mode of political change, let alone of development. The core of Vladimir Putin's philosophy is anti-revolutionism. Thus when the anniversary came round, the administration did not…