The Fiftieth Anniversary of the October Revolution (1967) – a Generational Turnover and the Politics of Memory of the USSR
The Fiftieth Anniversary of the October Revolution (1967) – a Generational Turnover and the Politics of Memory of the USSR

Summary/Abstract: Celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution revealed important changes in the politics of memory pursued by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. With the use of methodology of research on memory, in the article I put forward the thesis that the utopian project began on 7 November 1917 (N.S.) and faith in the final achievement of its goal set by Lenin’s party began to be overshadowed. The events which took place in Petrograd and on which collective memory had focused for last fifty years, did not have in the 1960s such a strong symbolic impact, being able to mobilise the people to achieve goals set by the Communist Party as the Great Patriotic War. From the time of reactivation of the official celebrations of the Victory Day in 1965 the October Revolution began gradually to diminish in importance and lose its central place in social memory of the Soviet people.The most important cause of this process of evolution of collective memory is, in my opinion,a generational change of the sixties. I also indicate some other significant factors that contributed to the politics of memory of the Communist Party: the problem of attitude towards the Stalinist period, conflict with China, and relations with the Western states.

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