The Russian Revolution (2 page)

A second issue that must be considered is the nature of Stalin's `revolution from above' that ended NEP in the late 192os. Some historians reject the idea that there was any real continuity between Stalin's revolution and Lenin's. Others feel that Stalin's `revolution' does not deserve the name, since they believe it was not a popular uprising but something more like an assault on the society by a ruling party aiming at radical transformation. In this book, I trace lines of continuity between Lenin's revolution and Stalin's. As to the inclusion of Stalin's `revolution from above' in the Russian Revolution, this is a question on which historians may legitimately differ. But the issue here is not whether 1917 and 1929 were alike, but whether they were part of the same process. Napoleon's revolutionary wars can be included in our general concept of the French Revolution, even if we do not regard them as an embodiment of the spirit of 1789; and a similar approach seems legitimate in the case of the Russian Revolution. In common-sense terms, a revolution is coterminous with the period of upheaval and instability between the fall of an old regime and the firm consolidation of a new one. In the late 1920s, the permanent contours of Russia's new regime had yet to emerge.

The final issue of judgement is whether the Great Purges of 1937-8 should be considered a part of the Russian Revolution. Was this revolutionary terror, or was it terror of a basically different type-totalitarian terror, perhaps, meaning a terror that serves the systemic purposes of a firmly entrenched regime? In my view, neither of these two characterizations fully describes the Great Purges. They were a unique phenomenon, located right on the boundary between revolution and postrevolutionary Stalinism. This was revolutionary terror in its rhetoric, targets, and snowballing progress. But it was totalitarian terror in that it destroyed persons but not structures, and did not threaten the person of the Leader. The fact that it was state terror initiated by Stalin does not disqualify it from being part of the Russian Revolution: after all, the Jacobin Terror of 1794 can be described in similar terms.' Another important similarity between the two episodes is that in both cases revolutionaries were among the primary targets for destruction. For dramatic reasons alone, the story of the Russian Revolution needs the Great Purges, just as the story of the French Revolution needs the Jacobin Terror.

In this book, the timespan of the Russian Revolution runs from February 1917 to the Great Purges of 1937-8. The different stagesthe February and October Revolutions of 1917, the Civil War, the interlude of NEP, Stalin's `revolution from above', its `Thermidorian' aftermath, and the Great Purges-are treated as discrete episodes in a twenty-year process of revolution. By the end of that twenty years, revolutionary energy was thoroughly spent, the society was exhausted, and even the ruling Communist Party' was tired of upheaval and shared the general longing for a `return to normalcy'. Normalcy, to be sure, was still unattainable, for German invasion and the beginning of Soviet engagement in the Second World War came only a few years after the Great Purges. The war brought further upheaval, but not more revolution, at least as far as the pre-1939 territories of the Soviet Union were concerned. It was the beginning of a new, postrevolutionary era in Soviet history.

Writings about the revolution

There is nothing like revolutions for provoking ideological contestation among their interpreters. The bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989, for example, was marked by a spirited attempt by some scholars and publicists to end the long interpretative struggle by consigning the Revolution to the dust-heap of history. The Russian Revolution has a shorter historiography, but probably only because we have had a century and a half less in which to write about it. In the Select Bibliography at the end of this book, I have concentrated on recent scholarly works, reflecting the burgeoning of Western scholarship on the Russian Revolution in the past ten to fifteen years. Here I will outline the most important changes in historical perspective over time and characterize some of the classic works on the Russian Revolution and Soviet history.

Before the Second World War, not much was written on the Russian Revolution by professional historians in the West. There were a number of fine eye-witness accounts and memoirs, of which John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World is the most famous, as well as some good history by journalists like W. H. Chamberlin and Louis Fischer, whose insider's history of Soviet diplomacy, The Soviets in World Affairs, remains a classic. The works of interpretation that had most long-term impact were Leon (Lev) Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and the same author's The Revolution Betrayed. The first, written after Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union but not as a political polemic, gives a vivid description and Marxist analysis of 1917 from the perspective of a participant. The second, an indictment of Stalin written in 1936, describes Stalin's regime as Thermidorian, resting on the support of an emergent Soviet bureaucratic class and reflecting its essentially bourgeois values.

Of histories written in the Soviet Union before the war, pride of place must be given to a work written under Stalin's close supervision, the notorious Short Course in the History of the Soviet Communist Party published in 1938. As the reader may guess, this was not a scholarly work but one designed to lay down the correct `party line'-that is, the orthodoxy to be absorbed by all Communists and taught in all schools-on all questions of Soviet history, ranging from the class nature of the Tsarist regime and the reasons for the Red Army's victory in the Civil War to the conspiracies against Soviet power headed by `Judas Trotsky' and supported by foreign capitalist powers. The existence of a work like the Short Course did not leave much room for creative scholarly research on the Soviet period. Strict censorship and self-censorship was the order of the day in the Soviet historical profession.

The interpretation of the Bolshevik Revolution that became established in the Soviet Union in the 193os and remained enthroned at least until the mid-1950s might be described as formulaic Marxist. The key points were that the October Revolution was a true proletarian revolution in which the Bolshevik Party served as the vanguard of the proletariat, and that it was neither premature nor accidental-its occurrence was governed by historical law. Historical laws (zakonomernosti), weighty but usually ill-defined, determined everything in Soviet history, which meant in practice that every major political decision was right. No real political history was written, since all the revolutionary leaders except Lenin, Stalin, and a few who died young had been exposed as traitors to the Revolution and become `non-persons', that is, unmentionable in print. Social history was written in class terms, with the working class, the peasantry, and the intelligentsia as virtually the sole actors and subjects.

In the West, Soviet history became a matter of strong interest only after the Second World War, mainly in a cold war context of knowing the enemy. The two books that set the tone were fiction, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (on the Great Purge trials of Old Bolsheviks in the late 1930s), but in the scholarly realm it was American political science that dominated. The totalitarian model, based on a somewhat demonized conflation of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia, was the most popular interpretative framework. It emphasized the omnipotence of the totalitarian state and its `levers of control', paid considerable attention to ideology and propaganda, and largely neglected the social realm (which was seen as passive, fragmented by the totalitarian state). Most Western scholars agreed that the Bolshevik Revolution was a coup by a minority party, lacking any kind of popular support or legitimacy. The Revolution, and for that matter the prerevolutionary history of the Bolshevik Party, were studied mainly to elucidate the origins of Soviet totalitarianism.

Before the 1970s, few Western historians ventured into the study of Soviet history, including the Russian Revolution, partly because the subject was so politically charged, and partly because access to archives and primary sources was very difficult. Two pioneering works by British historians deserve note: E. H. Carr's The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, the beginning of his multi-volume History of Soviet Russia, of which the first volume appeared in 1952, and Isaac Deutscher's classic biography of Trotsky, of which the first volume, The Prophet Armed, appeared in 1954.

In the Soviet Union, Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 and the partial de-Stalinization that followed opened the door for some historical revaluation and a raising of the level of scholarship. Archive-based studies of 1917 and the 192os began to appear, although there were still constraints and dogmas that had to be observed, for example, on the Bolshevik Party's status as vanguard of the working class. It became possible to mention non-persons like Trotsky and Zinoviev, but only in a pejorative context. The great opportunity that Khrushchev's Secret Speech offered historians was to decouple Lenin and Stalin. Reform-minded Soviet historians produced many books and articles on the 192os arguing that `Leninist norms' in different areas were more democratic and tolerant of diversity and less coercive and arbitrary than the practices of the Stalin era.

For Western readers, the `Leninist' trend of the 196os and 1970s was exemplified by Roy A. Medvedev, author of Let History judge. The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, published in the West in 1971. But Medvedev's work was too sharply and overtly critical of Stalin for the climate of the Brezhnev years, and he was unable to publish it in the Soviet Union. This was the era of the blossoming of samizdat (unofficial circulation of manuscripts within the Soviet Union) and tamizdat (illegal publication of work abroad). The most famous of the dissident authors emerging at this time was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great novelist and historical polemicist whose Gulag Archipelago was published in English in 1973.

While the works of some dissident Soviet scholars started to reach Western audiences in the 1970s, Western scholarly work on the Russian Revolution was still treated as `bourgeois falsification' and effectively banned from the USSR (though some works, including Robert Conquest's The Great Terror circulated clandestinely along with Solzhenitsyn's Gulag). All the same, conditions had improved for Western scholars. They were now able to conduct research in the Soviet Union, albeit with limited and strictly controlled access to archives, whereas in earlier times conditions had been so difficult that many Western Soviet scholars never visited the Soviet Union at all, and others were summarily expelled as spies or subjected to various kinds of harassment. As access to archives and primary sources in the Soviet Union improved in the late 197os and t98os, increasing numbers of young Western historians chose to study the Russian Revolution and its aftermath; and history, especially social history, started to displace political science as the dominant discipline in American Sovietology.

A new chapter in the scholarship began in the early 199os, when most restrictions on access to archives in Russia were lifted and the first works drawing on previously classified Soviet documents began to appear. With the passing of the cold war, the field of Soviet history became less politicized in the West, to its great advantage. Russian and other post-Soviet historians were no longer isolated from their Western counterparts, and the old distinctions between `Soviet', `emigre', and `Western' scholarship largely vanished: among the scholars whose work had most influence in Russia and outside were the Moscow-based `Russian' (actually, Ukrainianborn) Oleg Khlevnyuk, a pioneer in archive-based study of the Politburo, and Yuri Slezkine, a Moscow-born former emigre, resident in the United States since the 198os, whose Jewish Century offered a major reinterpretation of the place of Jews in the Revolution and the Soviet intelligentsia.

New archive-based biographies of Lenin and Stalin appeared, and topics like Gulag and popular resistance, previously inaccessible to archival work, attracted many historians. Responding to the break-up of the Soviet Union and the emergence of independent states on the basis of the old Union republics, scholars like Ronald Suny and Terry Martin developed Soviet nationalities as a historical field. Regional studies flourished, including Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain on Magnitogorsk in the Urals, which argued for the emergence in the 1930s of a distinctive Soviet culture ('Stalinist civilization') that was implicitly the product of the Revolution. Social historians discovered a wealth of ordinary citizens' letters to authority (complaints, denunciations, appeals) in the archives, contributing to a rapidly development of scholarship on everyday life that has much in common with historical anthropology. In contrast to the 198os (and reflecting general developments within the historical profession), the current generation of young historians has been drawn as much to cultural and intellectual history as social, using diaries and autobiographies to illuminate the subjective and individual side of Soviet experience.

Interpreting the revolution

All revolutions have liberte, egalite, fraternite, and other noble slogans inscribed on their banners. All revolutionaries are enthusiasts, zealots; all are utopians, with dreams of creating a new world in which the injustice, corruption, and apathy of the old world are banished forever. They are intolerant of disagreement; incapable of compromise; mesmerized by big, distant goals; violent, suspicious, and destructive. Revolutionaries are unrealistic and inexperienced in government; their institutions and procedures are extemporized. They have the intoxicating illusion of personifying the will of the people, which means they assume the people is monolithic. They are Manicheans, dividing the world into two camps: light and darkness, the revolution and its enemies. They despise all traditions, received wisdom, icons, and superstition. They believe society can be a tabula rasa on which the revolution will write.

It is in the nature of revolutions to end in disillusionment and disappointment. Zeal wanes; enthusiasm becomes forced. The moment of madness? and euphoria passes. The relationship of the people and the revolutionaries becomes complicated: it appears that the will of the people is not necessarily monolithic and transparent. The temptations of wealth and position return, along with the recognition that one does not love one's neighbour as oneself, and does not want to. All revolutions destroy things whose loss is soon regretted. What they create is less than the revolutionaries expected, and different.