Fernando Damso, 8 November 2017 — In these days of November, in the absence of more important occupations, the Cuban Government has taken on the task of being the apologist for the October Revolution, something that even the Russian Government itself has not done.
Nobody denies that what happened in Russia in 1917 was not momentous or moved the world at that time, but soon it was shown that theory was one thing and practice was another: arbitrariness, repressions, impositions, crimes, genocides of entire populations, backwardness, misery, lack of freedoms and other evils were enthroned in the distant country, until the experiment disappeared seventy years later, for the good of the subjected countries of Eastern Europe and for humanity.
Today’s Russia, and the countries that formed the former Soviet Union, are something else entirely. The Russian Revolution is simply ancient history and lacks validity in the current era, except for the eternal dreamers of global communism.
It is striking, that official speeches and writings only refer to the so-called “heroic years” of the experiment, and say nothing about the many black years that were imposed on millions of citizens with arbitrary arrests, deportations, forced labor. and summary executions, all in the name of the “luminous communist future.”
Much is said and excerpts from the book of the American communist writer John Reed’s “Ten Days That Shook the World” are published, where the “heroic stage” of the revolution is related, but it is not told what happened to the writer and his Russian wife, when they were forbidden to leave the country, although for political convenience their remains are located at the foot of the walls of the Moscow Kremlin.
It would be helpful, if one wanted want to know the true story of the experiment, to read “Doctor Zhivago,” the novel by the Russian writer Boris Pasternak, which tells the cruel reality of those difficult years, from the perspective of ordinary citizens.
