DAWN, Pakistan — THE winter of our discontent sprouted legs last Saturday. It may have a long way to run. Sooner or later, though, it is bound to be overtaken by a spring of some sort. Pakistan is hardly a stranger to sudden seasonal variations; its past is peppered with provisional constitutional orders and other comparable means of sidelining the country’s basic laws. Even so, it’s difficult to pluck one’s attention away from what the army chief has described as an attempt to prevent the nation from committing suicide.

Sounds like a worthy endeavour, but why pick a method that undermines the intent? Anyhow, enough said. The strictures introduced against freedom of expression – another staple of authoritarian clampdowns – limit the likelihood of a frank assessment making it into print, after one of the present regime’s few redeeming features lost its validity at the weekend. Back in the bad old days of Zia-ul-Haq, writers on national affairs developed circuitous means of evading the censors. It may now be necessary to recultivate those habits. Let’s hope not.

There is, as far as this column goes, an easier way out: I shall stick to the topic I had originally picked for this week. It happens to involve an audacious power-grab as well as instances of press censorship, and it could be argued that its lessons haven’t exactly lost their relevance for this and countless other countries.

I refer to the second Russian Revolution of 1917, which was set in motion 90 years ago this Wednesday. The anniversary isn’t likely to be widely commemorated, partly because most of the regimes that traced their lineage to that event ceased to exist almost two decades ago. In the overwhelming majority of cases, it requires no more than two words to pass judgement on this development: good riddance. The October Revolution – thus called because Russia followed a marginally different calendar at the time – cannot so peremptorily be dismissed, although a veritable platoon of historians has, over the decades, devoted its energies to deriding it as a monumental – and unequivocal – tragedy.

Quite a few of them succumb to the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy: they hold that the murderous excesses of the Stalin era and the stagnation in its aftermath effectively define the Soviet Union, and because these two periods followed the Bolshevik Revolution, they must necessarily be a consequence of it.

To be fair, the argument that Josef Stalin was in many ways Vladimir Lenin’s natural heir isn’t altogether absurd. State terror, after all, wasn’t exactly off the agenda during the brief phase of Lenin’s helmsmanship. Lenin, too, frowned on dissent and emphasized party discipline. It’s significant to recall, however, that in its early years the revolution was struggling for survival against seemingly impossible odds that included subversion at home and aggression from abroad. Its preservation, for better or for worse, required extraordinary measures.

It does not follow that these measures were in all cases justified. The point, however, is that Stalin’s terror was unleashed, almost exactly 20 years after the revolution, in substantially different circumstances. It was directed, in the most egregious cases, against the cadres and leadership of what was by then known as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. By 1940, every single surviving member of Lenin’s central committee – including Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky – had been eliminated.

The military hierarchy suffered a similar fate. Partly as a result, when Adolf Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Nazis were able to get within a stone’s throw of Leningrad and Moscow. A despondent Stalin is said to have contemplated suicide, which makes it all the more bizarre that those who continue to exalt him as an exemplary leader – yes, they do exist, mostly in the new Russia –  base that conclusion primarily on his role during the war years. There can be no question that Russian soldiers as well as ordinary folk fought most valiantly to push back the German invaders, but under a more competent and less paranoid leadership, the sacrifices they were called upon to make may well have been considerably smaller.

Meanwhile, those – admirers and detractors alike – who seek to portray Stalin as one of the architects of the revolution can draw little consolation from American journalist John Reed’s vivid eyewitness account of that heady interregnum, Ten Days That Shook the World. Stalin scores only two mentions in the book: his name figures in the list of commissars, and then there is a Declaration on the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which, in his capacity as chairman for nationalities, he co-signed with Lenin. (Almost every clause in that brief but worthy declaration – guarantees of equality, sovereignty and the free development of national minorities – was violated under Stalin and his successors.)

In contrast, Trotsky and Lenin pop up every few pages, frequently (but not always) amid thunderous applause. “His thin, pointed face was positively Mephistophelean in its expression of malicious irony,” Reed says of Trotsky. He describes Lenin as “a short, stocky figure, with a big head set down in his shoulders, bald and bulging … Dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers much too long for him. Unimpressive to be the idol of a mob, loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been. A strange popular leader – a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colourless, humourless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies – but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms.”

Reed invaluably conveys a sense of the confusion that reigned in Petrograd (as St Petersburg was known at the time) in the wake of the Bolshevik takeover. With not only the wealthier sections of society but also most of the other socialist parties implacably opposed to them, it was widely assumed that the Bolsheviks would be swept aside within days. They did, however, enjoy growing support among two crucial segments: the industrial working class and ordinary soldiers. Reed’s description of how Lenin won over the initially sceptical peasant delegates from across the sprawling country offers a fascinating glimpse of his powers of persuasion and the audience’s determination not to betray the collective hopes of millions. Meanwhile, the stature of the Bolsheviks among rank-and-file soldiers, large numbers of whom refused to obey their officers, was critical to the preservation of power. There’s an important lesson in there somewhere.

Those who posit an equivalence between the two forms of totalitarianism that in some ways defined the 20th century, fascism and communism, often can’t tell the difference between the storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd and the burning of the Reichstag in Berlin. As a result, they are unable to understand why the hammer-and-sickle insignia isn’t universally reviled on the same level as the swastika.

The answer, in fact, is disarmingly simple. The impulses behind Nazism are all as indefensible as the consequences of the ideology. On the other hand, for all the foibles, follies and crimes against humanity committed by communist regimes, the concept of a society of equals where exploitation isn’t the norm and the primary focus is on the common good of all rather than on profits, remains a powerful idea.