There was such a Bolshevik Lev Bronstein, which is better known as Trotsky. He was developing the doctrine of the founders of his ideology that one can not stop on the bourgeois-democratic revolution. In 1850-ies Marx and Engels were sure that bourgeois after conducting “their share” of revolution will be satisfied and will not go further, while proletarians must continue the revolution and make it permanent, uninterrupted. Trotsky went further and claimed that they should not stop on proletarian, socialist revolution, and they need to shake the public from time to time through a revolution to get it cleaned from its dirt. Lenin, and especially Stalin did not like the idea, and they, to put it mildly, made Trotsky to look wrong.
Egypt is now in a cycle of permanent revolution. When after two and a half years ago, the “Arab Spring” started, many people in Armenia were excited, thinking that democracy, so to speak, goes forward with big steps in that region. It turned out that revolutions are not so democratic and humanistic, some of them shouting ‘Allah-Akbar’ slaughter a Christian priest. Specifically in Egypt, in addition to all the internal and external factors, people complain about the “revolutionary” power. They say, “Ay, dear Morsi, we have come out to Tahrir Square to be good for all of us. But it just so happened that it was only good for your Muslim brotherhood, and worse for us than it was during Mubarak’s time.” The soldiers who were having accounts with the organization of Morsi, took the advantage, and the elected president was the so-called “left out of job”, and began to catch the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ members. One should not be a clairvoyant to predict that this revolution (or military coup, whichever you want to call) will not be the last one in Egypt, no matter how the President will behave and who will be ‘the one permanent’ few months later.”
In 1967, an “official” song was composed on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution (music by Vano Muradeli, words by Yuri Kamenetsky), the rhythm and the meaning of which was the following: “revolution has beginning, but no end.” During the next 20 years, the song was played during many solemn concerts where Politbureau well-fed members were sitting in the boxes, who were as far from the revolution as from the ideology in general, to which, as if, they adhere to. In the context of this stagnation, the performance of the song, of course, was hypocrisy. But the common sense, as the events in Egypt show, are right: when you start revolution, and it’s very hard to put an end.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
