Since at least the nineteenth century, scholars and politicians alike have recognized the fundamental connection between memory and the nation. While political elites invented and propagated legitimating traditions, historians objectified the nation as a unitary entity with a linear descent. At the same time, critics like Ernest Renan pointed out that forgetting—that is, forgetting alternative possible stories and alternate possible identifications—is at the heart of national self-understanding, while Nietzsche bemoaned the proliferation of “monumental” history. World War I seemed to many good enough reason to abandon nationalist chauvinism, but for others a myth of the war experience “provided the nation with a new depth of religious feeling, putting at its disposal ever-present saints and martyrs, places of worship, and a heritage to emulate” (Mosse 1990: 7). And the anemic internationalism of the 1920s was just that—inter-nationalism rather than postnationalism, based on a nebulous and misunderstood notion of “self-determination”—where the burning memory of stabs in the back and imposed settlements fanned old antipathies to new heights. Memory has long been the handmaiden of nationalist zeal, history its high counsel. Even those like Nietzsche and Renan who worried about it understood its centrality.

Even under the increasingly more open conditions of glasnost and after, the October Revolution has proven difficult for Western, Soviet, and post-Soviet historians to reconceptualize. In this essay I shall examine the reasons behind this difficulty and suggest where a reconceptualization of October might fruitfully be sought. Rethinking October from the perspective of recent research into the construction of historical or collective memory, I will argue, affords unique insights into exactly why October has proven so enduring. Focusing on the October Revolution as the crucial element in the primarily Bolshevik efforts to establish and enshrine the legitimacy of the new Soviet state during the first decade after October 1917 problematizes the event in a way that traditional approaches, deeply implicated in this issue of (il)legitimacy, are unable to do.

In his 1936 essay on Nikolai Leskov—”The Storyteller”—Walter Benjamin (1969) lamented the destruction of collective memory that was taking place with the passage from community to society. In the transformed structure of modern life, claimed Benjamin, our ability to exchange experiences has diminished, and along with it, a collective sense of meaning. While tradition collapses under the irresistible force of the development of economic production, human perception also appears to be affected and penetrated by a logic of rationalization. This logic tends to annul more than past traditions and their meaning as vehicles for communal understanding; it also undermines the capacity for experience in general. In the modern world of machines and automatons, Benjamin feared, tradition was irreparably lost. With it there also vanished the remnants of collective dreams and aspirations that in the past had formed the humus of people’s redemptive path toward a meaningful and fulfilled life.

In 1876, there was a huge commemoration of the centennial of American independence. The year was marked in many ways, by many groups, in many parts of the country. The central event, though, was a grand International Exhibition in Philadelphia, four years in the making. Planners first met in 1872 in Independence Hall and spoke at length about the sacredness of the venue: “It is altogether fit and wise that we should take our first step and utter our first words in this hall. There sat John Hancock, presiding over that immortal body. There came Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Sherman, and Livingston presenting the sacred declaration. There lies the broken and silent bell, which at the word proclaimed liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof” (USCC 1873: 24-25). The theme was taken up by many others in many different ways. Images of the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, Washington, and Franklin were scattered throughout centennial ceremonies, buildings, poems, histories, and other documents. The revolution was used as a touchstone in talk about the exhibition and as a rich source of national symbolism.

At a ceremony held in 1986 to install a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., alongside those of other national heroes in the U.S. Capitol, former King associate Vincent Harding reminded the audience that King himself probably would have joined the demonstrators outside the Capitol protesting American policy in Central America (Thelen 1987: 436). Harding’s comment captures the tension between commemoration and dissent, or, better, between state-sponsored remembrance and state-targeted opposition that is the subject of this essay.

National identity is hegemonic among the population of Jewish descent in Israel. Zionism, modern Jewish nationalism, originated in eastern Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A national movement without a territory, Zionism naturally adopted the ethnic, or integrative, type of nationalism that prevailed in the region (for a basic typology of nationalism see Smith 1986: 79-84). In Palestine the diasporic Jewish nationalism turned into a settler-colonial nationalism. The state of Israel inherited the ethnic principle of membership and never adopted the alternative liberal-territorial principle. To this day the dominant ethos of the state is Zionist, that is, Jewish nationalist. Though Israeli citizenship is de jure equal to Jews and Arabs, a de facto distinction is easily discernible between the dominated minority and the dominant majority and its state.

In 1959, Theodor Adorno delivered a lecture whose title and theme played on Immanuel Kant’s famous essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” {Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?). Kant’s essay had begun with the statement that enlightenment is humanity’s emergence from self-imposed nonage. Called “What Does It Mean to Come to Terms with the Past?” (Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?), Adorno’s lecture takes issue with tendencies in the Federal Republic of Germany to wish away difficult legacies of the Nazi period. Evoking a parallel between Kant’s “enlightenment” (Aufklärung) and the contemporary expressions “coming to terms” or “working through” (Aufarbeitung), Adorno poses a high critical standard for German political culture. According to his diagnosis, the Federal Republic was more concerned with getting beyond the past, with avoiding difficult memory through what Adorno calls “an unconscious and not-so-unconscious defense against guilt,” than with the genuine working through that would be required to “break its spell.” The latter would demand an act of clear consciousness, a difficult process much like the work of psychoanalysis. According to Adorno, the defensive unwillingness in the Federal Republic to confront the past—at both the personal and official levels—indicated not the persistence of fascist tendencies against democracy (e.g., neo-Nazi groups) but of fascist tendencies within democracy. The latter, he argues, are much more insidious.