The centenary of the Russian revolution comes at a strange moment. It is not being officially marked let alone celebrated in Putin’s Russia. The collapse and demise of communism in 1991 appears to have consigned it ironically to what Trotsky termed the dustbin of history.

Certainly, it has not been one hundred years of solitude, though the luminescent magic realism of hope, as in Latin America in the last few decades, has often shifted its paradigm as much as its narrative into long spells of bestiality, brutishness and barbarism since the first and the second world war, echoing Walter Benjamin’s prophetic words that all history of human civilization is the history of barbarism. Since the revolution through the bullet, the paradigm shift in Latin America in the last decades has been significant with the era of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro yet again unleashing a new rainbow of hope.

Latin America moved from protracted guerilla struggles and ‘revolution by the bullet’ against oligarchies, drug cartels, looters and plunderers, and tinpot dictators backed by American imperialism in various banana republics, to the successful syndrome of ‘revolution through the ballot’. They pitched a totally different political economy, mainly socialist in essence and fiercely independent, aligned to each other and the developing countries, outside the American exploitative liberalized structures, or the IMF and World Bank; they liberated themselves partially from the yoke of banana republics, and set up new, egalitarian political formations, like the first indigenous president of Bolivia, Evo Morales. Or, the popular working-class hero, Lula in Brazil, and, later, former communist guerilla, Dilma Rousseff as president, finally hounded out by corrupt lobbies working for the relentless American establishment, after a long and protracted struggle within the electoral and party system of Brazil.

And, yet, the rainbow coalitions of solidarity across Latin America continues to inject hope across the Left paradigm, and teaches multiple lessons to the multiple communist currents across the world, dying, dead, resurrected and alive in various geographical regions, about changing strategies and tactics, shifts in theory and praxis, the infinite difficulties of armed as much as peaceful capture of power, and the possibilities of the resurrection of an alternative stream of consciousness of human liberation.

However, one hundred years after the Great October Revolution in Soviet Russia, led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Bolshevik-communists, among other revolutionaries, history keeps coming back in multiple spirals, like a rectangular dialectic with many thresholds, moving into a contrary montage of not only farce and nightmare, but also as bitter realism and dogged, stoic optimism. The dialectic, surely, has been turned upside down a million times to discover the ‘rational kernel’, as Karl Marx reinterpreted the speculative, metaphysical ‘quest’ of Hegel in the 1840s of Europe.

It’s just that the kernel seems to lose its rationality so often; that humanism, or communism itself, becomes a tragic and bloody victim at the stakes, as the world has witnessed under Adolf Hitler’s fascism, the concentration camps, gas chambers and the holocaust, or during Joseph Stalin’s war and victory against fascism, the conquest of Berlin and the suicide of Hitler as the Red Army defeated the Nazis, while millions of Russians sacrificed their bodies and souls defending the ‘motherland’ against Hitler’s army, amidst mass hunger, dying and death in a frozen and cruel landscape.

This incredible reality, often camouflaged by the CIA’s well-oiled culture and political industry, and the western propaganda machine, however, cannot run away from the Gulags, the Siberian death and labour camps, the mass purging of party leaders, artists, writers, dissenters and Red Army commanders and the mass murders of innocents, including thousands of ethnic Soviet and Polish citizens, led by a psychopath called Stalin. Between the defeat of fascism and the purges, the vision of ‘Utopia’, trapped in the Cold War, became an incomplete and broken MarxistLeninist dream which is still struggling to survive and come to terms with its bitter past.

The truth is that Karl Marx is and was the greatest political philosopher of radical transformation and humanism the world has ever seen – till this day. “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it," he wrote famously. He also wrote in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (EPM), that a man who cannot love, cannot create love, is an unobjective being, an impotent being. The truth is also the fact that he (like Lenin, later) expected a revolution in the heart of Europe, perhaps with its roots in Germany, and not in Tsarist Russia, with its opulent and obscene palaces, its vast poverty, its oppressed peasantry, and an incipient working class, so classically depicted in the classics of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Instead, with the Great Depression, and Germany’s humiliation post-World-War 1, it was the rise of fascism and the Holocaust which ravaged Europe.

That is, Lenin (like Mao, who led the Long March of impoverished peasants in an agricultural society, ravaged by warlords and dynasties) reinterpreted Marxism and ushered in a revolution in a quasiindustrial society which continued for years, and not only with the toppling of the Tsar. Perhaps that he would have preferred, the ‘organiser’ Leon Trotsky, as his trusted successor, instead of Stalin; Trotsky being a non-dogmatic scholar, tactician and mobiliser par excellence. Lenin died too young and too early, and since then the history of Soviet Russia, surrounded by the ‘Iron Curtain’ and a scheming CIA etc, could never be the same, until its collapse post ‘Perestroika’ and ‘Glasnost’ initiated in a hurry with no theoretical or pragmatic preparation by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, much to the glee of the American and Western capitalist and military machine.

Surely, both Perestroika and Glasnost marked a big learning landmark for the ‘evolutionary’ Chinese Communist Party (CPC), which, effectively, dumped Mao, adopted the ‘little bottles’ of Deng, and moved from one rigid totalitarian principle to another, becoming an advanced capitalist and military machine which has given American imperialism a run for its money. Xi Jinping’s ‘four comprehensives’ is the latest to celebrate yet another onedimensional Chinese chapter of the ‘Great Leap Forward’ — no questions asked.

One hundred years after the October revolution, and on the 50th anniversary of Che Guevara’s murder by the CIA in Bolivia, even while the brave and resilient young are showing the way, will India write another new resolution of a rainbow coalition, stopping at nothing but the defeat of fascism? In dark times, as Brecht said, we should not only write poetry and songs of liberation, we should be ready to drink all the poison of differences and contradictions, and make a united scaffolding which defeats the fascists both on the ground, on the streets, as well in electoral politics. Finally, indeed, there is no alternative but continuous and relentless mass movements; a peaceful movement which is innovative, imaginative, incredible in its flexibility and stoicism, and which can become a rainbow coalition of a million mutinies.

Look back in anger. Look back with a new political consciousness. Look back with new doors of perception. New windows of enlightenment and resistance. Old cliches will not work. Neither will bureaucratic leftism. Nor will sectarian dogmatism.

It is time to embroider and stitch a new Persian carpet of alliances. It is time to weave new narratives of tactics, strategies and hope. It is time to go the ground and join the silent upsurge; carve a new language of theory and Praxis. It is time to hold hands with the young, and wave the flag at the barricades, and derive inspiration from young faces fighting the fascists. It is time to walk again and again on the streets shouting slogans and songs. It is time to meet and resolve and find a synthesis of currents and counter-currents, a new synthesis of political dialogue and perennial contradictions, outside the incestuous ego factories of the past, and the lethargic and stagnating pools of static consciousness. It is a moment of dynamic resurrection which history has provided to India; the Left and progressive forces should grab it, wave it for all to see, and walk to the barricades with a song on their lips. There is nothing to fear; there is nothing to lose but our shackles.

In the times of fascism, as in India, surely, there can’t be one October revolution. There has to be many, many more, each learning and unlearning; consolidating each other. Or else, there will be no time to regret. Indeed, no time to look back in anger or shock or awe or introspection; it will be too late.