Russia's Identity Crisis on Parade

What were all those funnily dressed, heavily armed chaps doing in Red Square today?

Depends who you ask.

Left wingers and old people were celebrating the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, while Kremlin supporters were celebrating….a day in 1941 celebrating the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Granted, November 7th was always a confusing day to commemorate a Socialist Revolution that actually occurred in October, 1917.

But since Soviet times, when Revolution Day was the biggest holiday of the year, things have taken a turn for the utterly bizarre.

After 1991, Revolution Day ceased to be an official holiday. Yet it remained a thorn in the side of the Yeltsin and Putin administrations for continuing to attract large crowds, many of whom were communists and other regime critics.

Yeltsin tried to deal with this by creating a rival Russian Independence Day (independence from itself?),  an affair in June that, for all its very Russian absurdity, nevertheless failed to catch on.

Putin cunningly crafted Russian Unity Day for November 4, commemorating a bizarre and obscure victory over some Poles in 1612, figuring it was close enough to the original Revolution Day that no one would notice.

But the crowds stubbornly kept coming out on the 7th, a holiday whose original meaning is becoming increasingly appealing for many in the wake of the financial crisis. (Seventy-nine percent of Russians said they would welcome state regulation of prices and 58 percent felt it would be useful to nationalise big private companies).

Moreover, a growing number of people, 38 percent,  say they still see Nov. 7 as Revolution Day ‚ a 9-point increase from 2005

To counter such real memories, Putin commissioned a $12 million propaganda film about Unity Day, called 1612, to ensure that Russians “didn't regard it as something that happened in ancient history but as a recent event…that they felt the link between what happened 400 years ago and today”.
In order to drive home that link with modern Russia, the film featured unicorns. (no joke).

To add a further post-modern twist to today's proceedings: not only were the troops in Red Square marking, essentially, Revolution Day Day (Revolution Day 1941, when Stalin sent troops directly from the parade to the front), but they were also dressed in all kinds of random historical garb, for absolutely no discernable reason!!!

As a bemused Daily Telegraph hack Adrian Blomfield reports,

Many of the servicemen in the parade wore white camouflage just as their predecessors had done during the bitter winter of 1941, when many soldiers froze to death.

Earlier epochs were represented too, with some soldiers clad in the uniforms of Catherine the Great's imperial guard. They were joined by soldiers on horseback dressed in the medieval garb of the bogatyrs, fictional heroic warriors similar to Sir Gawain and the knights-errant of British legend.

Ironically, amidst all this phantasmagoria, some things never change; as an old joke from the Soviet era, about a phone in on the fictional ‘Armenian Radio’, shows:

‘Is it possible, an eager caller asks, to foretell the future? ‘Yes,’ comes the weary answer. ‘No problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past: that keeps changing’.