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Tuesday 7 November 2017

Hundred years to the Russian Revolution

Kremlin
It is one hundred years to Russian Revolution today. When I was around 17 or 18 I read John Reed's "Ten days that shook the world" and it gave me goosebumps. It was like reading a thriller.  Then Gorky's "Mother", Ostrovsky's "How to temper the steel" to  Sholohov and Yuri bonderyev's stories make me admire the revolution more and more.

I told my daughters today morning.
"you know if Lenin did not do that revolution in 1917 there would be no Soviet union. I probably would not have got that scholarship and went to study in Soviet union. That means I may never have come to England. I may not even met your mother, my wife. You would not have been born. That's how it affected us."

But then, I had another choice to study in Sri Lanka. I may or may not ended up doing higher studies in another country and I may have met german wife there and then.My wife ia avid traveler and she may have  come to Sri lanka we could have ended up meeting each other. We may or may not have met in any of these places.

Difficult to guess really what would have happened. But I always know what happened. But, does my individual choice is important in this? Not really. This whole event and subsequent 70 years were bigger than one person. Bigger than entire nation. It affected the whole world. It changed the cause of the history.

Dmitri Volkogonov says this in his book "The rise and fall ofthe Soviet Empire".

"For seven decades of the twenties century, the soviet union followed the path mapped out by Lenin. it became a military superpower feared by the rest of the world, and it built a mighty technological, industrial, military and scientific economy. But it failed to make its people wither happy or free. It was the first country to send a man into space but it did nothing to improve human rights for its citizens.the people who carried out the 'Great October Socialist Revolution', who won the 'Great Patriotic War' and who advanced towards the 'Great Constructions of Communism' gained neither liberty nor prosperity for their efforts. 'Shoulder to shoulder' they marched along the Leninist path which had room for the masses only, elbowing the individual out of the way.

- Dmitri Volkogonov

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