The 90th anniversary of the February Revolution of 1917 which toppled the tsar and briefly made Russia “the freest republic in the world,” sparked an interesting intellectual discussion in Moscow recently.

The anti-government liberal groups tend to praise the February revolution as a positive event, which ended a long period of autocracy in Russia. The more conservative pro-government circles view this revolution as a rather negative development, which cut short the step-by-step reforms introduced by the tsarist regime and plunged the country into chaos instead. In their view, the liquidation of the old tsarist police and firing of the old governors without any replacement exposed the country to the violence of radical fringe groups, including the Bolsheviks, who ultimately seized power in October 1917. These conservatives found an ally in the famous dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose article Reflections on the February Revolution was published by Rossiyskaya Gazeta in millions of copies.

It should be noted that in this debate the liberals are on the defensive and do not present many new arguments, except pointing to the “paralysis” of the tsarist regime and its lack of communication with society. The organizers of the February Revolution, namely liberal Duma members, leaders of socialist movements and conspiring generals, are presented as progressive, enlightened individuals, who at some point just lost control over the situation.

“And now we continue the traditions of the February Revolution of 1917, the traditions of democratic Russia,” Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of the Yabloko party, wrote in the daily newspaper Izvestia.

Yavlinsky and other critics of Putin’s regime like to point to its similarities with the tsarist regime in its period of crisis between 1905 and 1917, stressing both structures’ rigidity and over-centralization, which prevented them from reacting to the challenges of modernity.

Their opponents, however, counter that the liberal-socialist opposition, which came to power after February 1917, proved to be much more irresponsible and unable to govern than the tsarist regime and there are no indications that Putin’s current opposition will do any better.

Vyacheslav Nikonov, the head of the foundation Unity in the Name Of Russia, which serves as the main think tank of the governing United Russia party, compiled a special 40-page report on the revolution and its consequences, where he largely draws the same conclusions as Solzhenitsyn, calling the toppling of monarchy “a sad day in Russian history, when in just a few days Russian statehood was destroyed leading to the destruction of a great country.” Here he echoes Solzhenitsyn who called the same events “spiritually abhorring,” adding that “our unripe and dysfunctional February democracy revealed the future weakness of flourishing old democracies, their blind defeatism vis-?-vis the extremist kinds of socialism.”

Both Solzhenitsyn and Nikonov, however, had certain political agendas. Solzhenitsyn’s article, written 25 years ago as a part of his famous Red Wheel epic, reflects the author’s support for a tough stand of the Western world against the leftist regimes, including the then Soviet Union. Nikonov makes even more clear parallels with the concerns of the Russian authorities of today.

“The revolution was prepared and conducted by a group of the elite, by oligarchs and intellectuals, who used the hardships of the [first world] war in order to establish its power without having any idea about the nature of state power and the country this elite intended to rule,” Nikonov wrote.

It is easy to see in this a swipe at today’s Russian liberal opposition, which sometimes does not shy away from using the money and moral support of oligarchs and foreigners in its fight against Putin’s regime.

Continuing a string of parallels, Nikonov accuses the liberal provisional government of destroying “the vertical of power,” Putin’s term for a stringently disciplined executive. In a clear allusion at Putin’s decision last year to cancel direct elections of governors, Nikonov quotes the Provisional government’s first Prime Minister Dmitry Lvov, who said: “The Provisional government fired the old governors and it will not appoint new ones. The new ones will be elected by locals…The future belongs to people, which revealed its genius in these historic days.”

Arguing against the idea of giving full power to the uneducated, unprepared masses, Nikonov and other intellectuals of the pro-government camp point to the passivity of the workers and peasants during the February coup, which was in fact a result of a string of conspiracies, culminating in the tsar’s abdication. Nikonov denies the democratic character of Lvov’s laisser-faire attitude, since it ultimately led to the seizure of power by a “marginal party,” the Bolsheviks, in October 1917.

“The idea of giving to uneducated, homeless, marginal individuals equal power with responsible citizens is profoundly wrong and dangerous,” said Andronik Migranyan, a well known political scientist and a member of the discussion club of Unity in the Name of Russia. “Such a person can only bring on himself and the rest of society the worst kind of dictatorship. We saw it in 1917.”

The fact that the Bolshevik regime that lasted from 1917 to 1989 was exactly this kind of dictatorship is rarely argued against in modern Russia, except in minds that have a strong inclination to paradox. For example, Vitaly Tretyakov, while speaking at a discussion of Nikonov’s report asked the audience: “Why do you think Solzhenitsyn carved the piece about the February revolution out of his Red Wheel and published it separately? Because a reader of this article inevitable comes to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks saved the country from collapse in October 1917. And this conclusion was out of place inside the otherwise anti-Bolshevik Red Wheel.”

So where is the truth? As often happens, both sides have enough facts to prove their theories. Calling the February Revolution “a string of conspiracies” is a little far fetched; even Solzhenitysn admits that it was a result of a long and profound spiritual crisis of society. However, one has to admit that the provisional government’s methods of ruling Russia also proved to be ineffective. The search for compromise between paralysis of power and collapse of state in Russia has continued – and continues now. And so do discussions about the February Revolution.