Orange October?

It’s a long holiday weekend here in Russia. Nov. 4 marks the third “National Unity Day,” when Russians celebrate the overthrow of the “Polish Yoke” in 1612 in a ‘spontaneous’ uprising of the leaderless Russian people against foreign aggression. The holiday was conjured up a few years ago to replace the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, celebrated on Nov. 7. The theme of foreign interference has been a dramatic subtext of late. On Sunday, we watched on the TV-Tsentr channel Postscript with Alexei Pushkov, which featured two rather incredible segments. First was a report about the Katyn Forest massacre, the 1940 Soviet slaughter of up to 26,000 Polish officers being held prisoner. Because of where and when this happened, there was much finger-pointing and plausible deniability about whether it was more a Nazi or a Soviet atrocity, but the matter was cleared up to the satisfaction of most serious researchers by the late 1980s. The incident is the subject of a new movie by Polish director Andrzej Wajda, and the Postscript team went to report about “the ends that don’t quite meet.” So we were treated to interviews with several Russian chauvinist “historians” who were filmed walking around the Katyn site and offering their theories, much of which I gathered revolved around how the Red Army was too incompetent and inefficient at the time to kill that many people in so short a time. Postscript wasn’t done yet. There followed an article about the Bolshevik Revolution which really earned some innovation points. It focused on the fact that Imperial Germany had funded and enabled Lenin’s transportation from Switzerland to St. Petersburg in 1917. Nothing new about this, but Postscript pondered whether this proves the revolution was, in fact, “Orange.” In today’s Russia, the word “Orange” is practically a swear word. It refers to the December 2004 pro-democracy protests against rigged Ukrainian elections. But in Russia’s warped worldview, it refers solely to when western NGOs agitate where they don’t belong and convince dupes to take to the streets to foment trouble on behalf of NATO, the EU, the US, or whoever. The idea strikes paranoid terror throughout Russia’s ruling class. The report speculates whether the Bolsheviks were an “Orange virus,” but they are too clever for themselves. In Russia’s media it is no longer kosher to be ashamed of the Soviet past, so they had to leave the implications of the question hanging. They limply concluded that all revolutions are unfortunate whenever the powers that be overlook the people’s will.