There were no red banners in Navalny’s largely teenage and twenty-something audience. But if Russia has any revolutionary energy left, it isn’t to be found among Stepakhno’s ‘left patriotic youth’, but here, among Navalny’s supporters. Not that 1917 itself is much of a marker these days: young people are taught next to nothing about the October Revolution, said Violetta Grudina, who heads Navalny’s small but active Murmansk cell. ‘The very word “revolution” has been branded extremist. Better not to talk about it – what if people find out that it’s possible?’ [A Russian] Diary
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51