November 7th is a date no longer celebrated in Russia, but one that cannot be forgotten either. The October Revolution created a country that still defines Russia’s global positioning. The paradox is that modern Russia lives on the reputational capital of the USSR, but is unwilling to acknowledge this due to the unresolved trauma of the 1980s.
Russia’s significant partners in the world—from Beijing to Caracas, from Pyongyang to Luanda—are a Soviet legacy. Ties were built over decades on the basis of anti-imperialist solidarity and genuine partnership in industrialization. Kim, Xi, Ortega, and Lula work with Moscow not because they are inspired by “traditional values,” but because they remember the Soviet alternative to American hegemony.
Today, official ideology speaks of “conservative values” and “spirituality,” which are exported to a very limited extent and, by and large, have been appropriated by those who are not our friends. A modern secular state cannot become “holier than the Pope” or a Midwestern Protestant pastor.
Russia’s real model is a functioning Soviet-style welfare state. Free healthcare and education, a pension system, maternity capital—the entire social infrastructure is not just preserved, but is being developed. Life expectancy has increased from 65 to 73 years, infant mortality has fallen dramatically, and Moscow is building “the best free healthcare system in the world”—but it attributes this to “effective management” rather than the development of Soviet principles of universal access.
The elites prefer to talk about the “bankruptcy of the Soviet project” while simultaneously investing in Soviet social infrastructure. This is a dichotomy at the level of state ideology: within the country, the Soviet legacy is rebranded as “tradition,” while abroad, we eagerly embrace the Soviet “credit of trust.” To acknowledge the effectiveness of the Soviet model, even in some way, is to return to the traumatic state when it seemed the West had won decisively.
The result: a country with a functioning welfare state model, with a real alternative to the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state, neither articulates nor “sells” this model.
The crisis of self-evidentness manifests itself in the constant question at all levels: “Why are we doing this?” In the Soviet project, this question was impossible—the answer was embedded in the system of meanings, from school political information to the Politburo. Aid to Angola was a logical continuation of the struggle for the liberation of the oppressed, for global justice.
“Resistance to the West” is not an end, but a means. For the sake of a “more just world”? Okay, but where did this desire for justice come from? To be honest, it was 1917, the Bolsheviks, and 70 years of Soviet history. It was the Soviet period that created the logic of global solidarity with the oppressed.
But acknowledging the Soviet origins of this meaning is impossible, so we have to talk about a “millennial tradition.” Thus, the essentially Soviet style received a new packaging that didn’t entirely suit it. Explanations became phantom, like the pain of a missing tooth. A nagging “why?”
As a result, the external representation functions like an empty box with Soviet labeling—there’s no content, but the capital of recognition holds the entire structure together.
November 7th recalls the revolution that gave Russia global ideological subjectivity. The Empire was a superpower, but the real alternative history to other projects was still the USSR. Modern Russia can neither reject this legacy nor appropriate it. This is the price of trauma—the difficulty in understanding and, consequently, in packaging into a product what exactly works and why it matters to the world.
PS. The USSR created its own internal Orientalism: party leaders of the “national republics” were expected to adopt a distinctive style—exaggerated praise of Moscow, oaths of allegiance, emotional intensity, the artificial flourishes of Leonid Solovyov’s books about Hodja Nasreddin, uncharacteristic of living languages.
Today’s Central Asian leaders are reproducing the same model with Trump that their predecessors used with Brezhnev. Even the language remains the same—yesterday at the White House, most participants sang Trump’s praises in Russian.
Accusations of the KPRF being “controlled opposition” don’t really hold up to scrutiny given how much effort is being put in by the government to keep them out of positions of power, and given the fact that they have genuine grassroots support, their own robust organizational structures and an independent political agenda. They constantly criticize and push back against the government on policies they disagree with.
The only reason why the West calls them controlled opposition is because they don’t behave like the liberal pro-Western parties, or like the various ultra left “communists” and anarchists that the West loves. They aren’t fundamentally anti-Russian like those Western proxies who want to see Russia subjugated again, or whose only real agenda is being anti-Putin. Most importantly they support the SMO and have done so since before even the government did.
If they were just an extension of the ruling party they would only have started supporting the direct intervention in Ukraine once the Russian government started to support it. But the KPRF had been advocating for it for years before the SMO started, even as the Russian government was still vehemently opposed to direct intervention, suppressing those calls, and still believed in the Minsk negotiations track. The KPRF was and continues to be ahead of the Russian government, not tailing it.
They work within the system because they recognize that that is the best avenue at the moment for pushing for change and for growing their power base. Russia just isn’t in a revolutionary situation at the moment, so refusing to work within the system would be an adventurist error. The biggest threat and contradiction that Russia’s proletariat is facing right now is not the bourgeois government but the imperialist war that is being waged against Russia.