The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967 by Isaac Deutscher 1967
What is the significance of the Russian revolution for our generation and age? Has the revolution fulfilled the hopes it aroused or has it failed to do so? It is natural that these questions should be asked anew now that half a century has passed since the fall of Tsardom and the establishment of the first Soviet government. The distance which separates us from these events seems long enough to yield an historical perspective. Even so, the distance may well be too short. This has been the most crowded and cataclysmic epoch in modern history. The Russian revolution has raised issues far deeper, has stirred conflicts more violent, and has unleashed forces far larger than those that had been involved in the greatest social upheavals of the past. And yet the revolution has by no means come to a close. It is still on the move. It may still surprise us by its sharp and sudden turns. It is still capable of re-drawing its own perspective. The ground we are entering is one which historians either fear to tread or must tread with fear.
To begin with, there is the fact, which we all take for granted, that the men who at present rule the Soviet Union describe themselves as the legitimate descendants of the Bolshevik Party of 1917. Yet this circumstance should hardly be taken for granted. There is no precedent for it in any of the modern revolutions that bear comparison with the upheaval in Russia. None of them lasted half a century. None of them maintained a comparable continuity, however relative, in political institutions, economic policies, legislative acts and ideological traditions. Think only of the aspect England presented about fifty years after the execution of Charles I. By that time the English people, having lived under the Commonwealth, the Protectorate and the Restoration, and having left the Glorious Revolution behind them, were trying, under the rule of William and Mary, to sort out, and even to forget, all this rich and stormy experience. And in the fifty years that followed the destruction of the Bastille, the French overthrew their old monarchy, lived under the Jacobin Republic, the Thermidor, the Consulate and the Empire; saw the return of the Bourbons and overthrew them once again to put Louis Philippe on the throne, whose bourgeois kingdom had, by the end of the 1830s, used up exactly half of its lease on life — the revolution of 1848 was already looming ahead.
By its sheer duration the Russian revolution seems to make impossible the repetition of anything like this classical historical cycle. It is inconceivable that Russia should ever call back the Romanovs, even if only to overthrow them for a second time. Nor can we imagine the Russian landed aristocracy coming back, as the French came under the Restoration, to claim the estates, or compensation for the estates, of which they had been dispossessed. The great French landlords had been in exile only twenty years or so; yet the country to which they returned was so changed that they were strangers in it and could not recapture their past glories. The Russian landlords and capitalists who went into exile after 1917 have died out; and surely by now their children and grandchildren must have parted with their ancestral possessions even in their dreams. The factories and mines their parents or grandfathers once owned are a tiny fraction of the Soviet industry that has since been founded and developed under public ownership. The revolution seems to have outlasted all possible agents of restoration. Not only the parties of the ancien régime but also the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who dominated the political stage between February and October of 1917, have long ceased to exist even in exile, even as shadows of themselves. Only the party that gained victory in the October insurrection is still there in all its Protean power, ruling the country and flaunting the flag and the symbols of 1917.
But is it still the same party? Can we really speak of the revolution’s continuity? Official Soviet ideologues claim that the continuity has never been broken. Others say that it has been preserved as an outward form only, as an ideological shell concealing realities that have nothing in common with the high aspirations of 1917. The truth seems to me more complex and ambiguous than these conflicting assertions suggest. But let us assume for a moment that the continuity is a mere appearance. We have still to ask what has caused the Soviet Union to cling to it so stubbornly? And how can an empty form, not sustained by any corresponding content, endure for so long? When successive Soviet leaders and rulers restate their allegiance to the original purposes and aims of the revolution, we cannot take their declarations at their face value; but neither can we dismiss them as wholly irrelevant.
Here again the historic precedents are instructive. In France at a similar remove from 1789 it would not have occurred to the men in office to present themselves as the descendants of Marat and Robespierre. France had nearly forgotten the great creative role that Jacobinism had played in her fortunes — she remembered Jacobinism only as the monster that had stood behind the guillotine in the days of the Terror. Only a few socialist doctrinaires, men like Buonarotti (himself a victim of the Terror), worked to rehabilitate the Jacobin tradition. England was long gripped by her revulsion against all that Cromwell and the Saints had stood for. G M Trevelyan, to whose noble historical work I here pay my respectful tribute, describes how this ‘negative passion’ swayed English minds even in the reign of Queen Anne. Since the end of the Restoration, he says, the fear of Rome had revived; yet ‘the events of fifty years back were responsible for an answering fear of Puritanism. The overthrow of the Church and of the aristocracy, the beheading of the King, and the rigid rule of the Saints had left a negative impression almost as formidable and permanent as the memory of “Bloody Mary” and James II.’ The force of the anti-Puritan reaction showed itself, according to Trevelyan, in the fact that in the reign of Queen Anne, ‘The Cavalier and Anglican view of the Civil War held the field; the Whigs scoffed at it in private, but only occasionally dared to contradict it in public.’ [1] True, Tory and Whig went on arguing about the ‘revolution'; but the events they referred to were those of 1688 and 1689, not those of the 1640s. Two centuries had to pass before Englishmen began to change their view of the ‘Great Rebellion’ and to speak about it with more respect as a revolution; and even more time had to elapse before Cromwell’s statue could be put up in front of the House of Commons.
The Russians are still daily flocking, in a mood of quasi-religious veneration, to Lenin’s tomb at the Red Square. When they repudiated Stalin and ejected him from the Mausoleum, they did not tear his body to pieces as the English had torn Cromwell’s and the French Marat’s remains; they quietly reburied him under the Heroes’ Wall at the Kremlin. And when his successors decided to disown part of his legacy, they professed to be going back to the revolution’s spiritual fountainhead, to Lenin’s principles and ideas. No doubt all this is part of a bizarre Oriental ritualism, but underneath there runs a powerful current of continuity. The heritage of the revolution survives in one form or another in the structure of society and in the nation’s mind.
Time is, of course, relative even in history; half a century may mean a great deal or it may mean little. Continuity too is relative. It may be — indeed, it is — half real and half illusory. It is solidly based yet it is brittle. It has its great blessings, but also its curses. In any case, within the framework of the revolution’s continuity sharp breaks have occurred, which I hope to examine later. But the framework is massive enough; and no serious historian can gloss it over or remain uninfluenced by it in his approach to the revolution. He cannot view the events of this half-century as one of history’s aberrations or as the product of the sinister design of a few evil men. What we have before us is a huge, throbbing piece of objective historic reality, an organic growth of man’s social experience, a vast widening of the horizons of our age. I am, of course, referring mainly to the creative work of the October revolution, and I make no apologies for this. The February revolution of 1917 holds its place in history only as the prelude to October. People of my generation have seen several such ‘February revolutions'; we saw them, in 1918, in countries other than Russia — in Germany, Austria and Poland, when the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs lost their thrones. But who will speak nowadays of the German revolution of 1918 as a major formative event of this century? It left intact the old social order and was a prelude only to the ascendancy of Nazism. If Russia had become similarly arrested in the February revolution and produced, in 1917 or 1918, a Russian variety of the Weimar Republic — what reason is there to assume that we should have remembered the Russian revolution today?
And yet quite a few theorists and historians still view the October revolution as an almost fortuitous event. Some argue that Russia might well have been spared the revolution if only the Tsar had been less obstinate in insisting on his absolute prerogatives and if he had come to terms with the loyal Liberal opposition. Others say that the Bolsheviks would never have had their chance if Russia had not become involved in the First World War or if she had withdrawn from it in time, before defeat reduced her to chaos and ruin. The Bolsheviks, according to this view, triumphed because of the errors and miscalculations committed by the Tsar and his advisers or by the men who took office immediately after the Tsar’s downfall; and we are asked to believe that these errors and miscalculations were chance occurrences, accidents of individual judgement or decision. That the Tsar and his advisers committed many foolish mistakes is, of course, true. But they committed them under the pressure of the Tsarist bureaucracy and of those elements in the possessing classes who had a stake in the monarchy. Nor were the governments of the February regime, the governments of Prince Lvov and Kerensky, free agents. They kept Russia in the war because, like the Tsarist governments, they were dependent on those powerful Russian and foreign centres of finance-capital which were determined that Russia should remain to the end a belligerent member of the Entente. The ‘errors and miscalculations’ were socially conditioned. It is also true that the war drastically exposed and aggravated the fatal weakness of the ancien régime. But it was hardly the decisive cause of that weakness. Russia had been shaken by the tremors of revolution just before the war; the streets of St Petersburg were covered with barricades in the summer of 1914. Indeed the outbreak of hostilities and the mobilisation swamped the incipient revolution and delayed it by two years and a half, only to charge it eventually with greater explosive force. Even if Prince Lvov’s or Kerensky’s government had contracted out of the war, it would have done so under conditions of a social crisis so profound and severe that the Bolshevik Party would probably still have won, if not in 1917 then some time later. This is, of course, only a hypothesis; but its plausibility is now reinforced by the fact that in China Mao Tse-tung’s party seized power in 1949, four years after the end of the Second World War. This circumstance throws perhaps a retrospective light on the connexion between the First World War and the Russian revolution — it suggests that this connexion might not have been as clear cut as it appeared at the time.
We need not assume that the course of the Russian revolution was predetermined in all its features or in the sequence of all its major phases and incidents. But its general direction had been set not by the events of a few years or months; it had been prepared by the developments of many decades, indeed of several epochs. The historian who labours to reduce the mountain of the revolution to a few contingencies, stands as helpless before it as once stood the political leaders who sought to prevent its rise.
After every revolution its enemies question its historic legitimacy — sometimes they do so even two or three centuries later. Allow me to recall how Trevelyan answered the historians who still wondered whether the Great Rebellion was really necessary:
Was it then impossible for Parliamentary power to take root in England at a less cost than this national schism and appeal to force...? It is a question which no depth of research or speculation can resolve. Men were what they were, uninfluenced by the belated wisdom of posterity, and thus they acted. Whether or not any better way could have led to the same end, it was by the sword that Parliament actually won the right to survive as the dominant force of the English Constitution. [2]
Trevelyan, who follows here in Macaulay’s footsteps, renders precise justice to the Great Rebellion, even while he underlines that it left the nation ‘poorer and less noble’ for a time, which is, unfortunately, in one sense or another true also of other revolutions, including the Russian. In stressing that England owed its parliamentary constitution primarily to the Great Rebellion, Trevelyan takes the long-term view of the role of the Puritans. It was Cromwell and the Saints, he says, who established the principle of Parliament’s supremacy; and even though they themselves were in conflict with the principle and appeared to obliterate it, the principle survived and triumphed. The ‘good deeds’ of the Puritan revolution outlasted its follies.
Mutatis mutandis, the same may be said of the October revolution. ‘Men acted as they did because they could not act otherwise.’ They could not copy their ideals from Western European models of parliamentary democracy. It was by the sword that they won for the Councils of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies — and for socialism — ‘the right to survive as the dominant force’ in the Soviet constitution. And although they themselves then reduced the workers’ councils to a shadowy existence, those councils, the soviets, and their socialist aspirations, have remained the most significant parts of the message of the Russian revolution.
As for the French revolution, its necessity was questioned or denied by a long line of thinkers and historians, from Burke, fearful of the Jacobin contagion, to Tocqueville, distrustful of any modern democracy, and Taine, horrified by the Commune of Paris, down to Madelin, Bainville and their disciples, some of whom laboured after 1940, under Marshal Pétain’s encouraging gaze, to lay the ghost of the revolution. Curiously, of all those writers Tocqueville has recently enjoyed the greatest vogue in English-speaking countries. Quite a few of our learned men have tried to model their conception of contemporary Russia on his L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution. They are attracted by his argument that the revolution had made no radical departure from the French political tradition, that it merely followed the basic trends that had been at work under the ancien régime, especially the trend towards the centralisation of the state and the unification of national life. Similarly, the argument runs, the Soviet Union, in so far as it has any progressive achievement to its credit, has merely continued the work of industrialisation and reform that had been undertaken by the ancien régime. If Tsardom had survived, or if it had been replaced by a bourgeois-democratic republic, that work would have gone on; and progress would have been more orderly and rational. Russia might have become the world’s second industrial power without having to pay the terrible price the Bolsheviks have exacted, without having to endure the expropriations, the terror, the low standards of living, and the moral degradation of Stalinism.
It seems to me that Tocqueville’s disciples do an injustice to their master. Although he belittled the creative and original work of the revolution, he did not deny its necessity or legitimacy. On the contrary, by placing it within the French tradition, he sought to ‘adopt’ it, on his own conservative terms, and to ‘incorporate’ it into the national heritage. His imitators show greater zeal for belittling the original and creative work of the Russian revolution than for ‘adopting’ it, on whatever terms. But let us consider the Tocquevillesque argument more closely. Of course, no revolution creates ex nihilo. Every revolution works in the social environment that has produced it and on the materials it finds in that environment. ‘We are building a new order’, Lenin liked to say, ‘out of the bricks the old order has left us.’ Traditional methods of government, vital national aspirations, a style of life, habits of thought, and various accumulated factors of strength and weakness — these are the ‘bricks’. The past refracts itself through the innovating work of the revolution, no matter how bold the innovations. The Jacobins and Napoleon continued indeed to build the unitary and centralised state that the ancien régime had up to a point promoted. No one emphasised this more forcefully than Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire, which appeared some years before Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime. And it is equally true that Russia had made a real start in industrialisation in the reign of the last two Tsars, without which the rapid entry of her industrial working class upon the political stage would not have been possible. Both countries thus achieved under the ancien régime some progress in various directions. This does not mean that the progress could go on in an ‘orderly’ manner, without the gigantic ‘disturbance’ of revolution. On the contrary, what was destroying the ancien régime was precisely the progress achieved under it. Far from making the revolution superfluous, it made it all the more necessary. The forces of progress were so constricted within the old order that they had to burst it. The French striving for the unitary state had been in chronic conflict with the barriers set to it by particularisms of feudal origin. France’s growing bourgeois economy needed a single national market, a free peasantry, free movement of men and commodities; and the ancien régime could not satisfy these needs, except within the narrowest of limits. As a Marxist would put it: France’s productive forces had outgrown her feudal property relations, and could no longer be contained within the shell of the Bourbon monarchy, which conserved and protected those relations.
In Russia the problem was similar but more complicated. The efforts made in Tsarist times to modernise the fabric of national life were blocked by the heavy residuum of feudalism, the underdevelopment and weakness of the bourgeoisie, the rigidity of the autocracy, the archaic system of government, and, last but not least, by Russia’s economic dependence on foreign capital. The great Empire was, in the reign of the last Romanovs, half empire and half colony. Western shareholders owned ninety per cent of Russia’s mines, fifty per cent of her chemical industry, over forty per cent of her engineering plants, and forty-two per cent of her banking stock. Domestic capital was scarce. The national income was far too small in relation to modern needs. More than half of it came from farming, which was utterly backward and contributed little to the accumulation of capital. Within limits the state provided, out of taxation, the sinews of industrialisation — it built the railways, for instance. But in the main it was on foreign capital that industrial expansion depended. Foreign investors, however, had no continuous interest in ploughing back their high dividends into Russian industry, especially when the vagaries of a self-willed bureaucracy and social unrest deterred them. Russia could achieve the industrial ‘take off’, to use Professor Rostow’s term, only by drawing on the resources of her agriculture and through the extraordinary exertions of her own workers. None of these requirements could be fulfilled under the ancien régime. The Tsarist governments were too strongly dependent on Western finance-capital to assert Russia’s national interests against it; and they were too feudal in their background and social connexions to release farming from the paralysing grip of the landed aristocracy (from whose milieu came even the Prime Minister of the first republican government of 1917!). And none of the pre-Bolshevik governments had the political strength and moral authority to obtain from the working class the exertions and sacrifices that industrialisation demanded in any circumstances. None had the outlook, the determination and the modern mind that the task required. (Count Witte, with his ambitious schemes for reform, was the exception that confirmed the rule; and he, as Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, was almost boycotted by the Tsar and the bureaucracy.) It seems inconceivable that any regime not inherently revolutionary should have been able to raise a semi-illiterate peasant nation to anything approaching the present level of Soviet economic development and education. Here again, the Marxist will say that Russia’s productive forces had advanced just far enough under the old regime to burst the old social structure and its political superstructure.
No automatic economic mechanism, however, produces the final disintegration of an old established order or assures the success of a revolution. An obsolete social system may be declining in the course of decades, and the bulk of the nation may be unaware of it. Social consciousness lags behind social being. The objective contradictions of the ancien régime have to translate themselves into subjective terms, into the ideas, aspirations and passions of men in action. The essence of revolution, says Trotsky, is ‘the direct intervention of the masses in historic events’. It is because of that intervention — a phenomenon so real and so rare in history — that the year 1917 was so remarkable and momentous. The great mass of the people were seized by the most intense and urgent awareness of decay and rot in the established order. The seizure was sudden. Consciousness leapt forward to catch up with being, and to change it. But this leap too, this sudden change in the psychology of the masses, did not come ex nihilo. It took many, many decades of revolutionary ferment and of a slow growth of ideas — it took the birth and the withering away of many parties and groups — to produce the moral-political climate, the leaders, the parties and the methods of action of 1917. There was little or nothing fortuitous in all this. Behind this last half-century of revolution there loomed a whole century of revolutionary endeavour.
The social crisis under which Tsarist Russia laboured manifested itself in the stark contrast between her status and importance as a great power and the archaic weakness of her social structure, between the splendours of her empire and the wretchedness of her institutions. This contrast was laid bare for the first time by Russia’s triumph in the Napoleonic wars. Her boldest spirits were aroused to action. In 1825 the Decembrists rose in arms against the Tsar. They were an aristocratic, intellectual élite; but they had the bulk of the nobility against them. No social class in Russia was capable of promoting the nation’s progress. The towns were few and mediæval in character; the urban middle classes, unlettered merchants and artisans, were politically negligible. The peasant-serfs rebelled sporadically; but since Pugachev’s defeat there had been no large-scale action aiming at their emancipation. The Decembrists were revolutionaries without any revolutionary class behind them. This was their tragedy; and this was to be the tragedy of all successive generations of Russian radicals and revolutionaries almost till the end of the nineteenth century — in different forms the tragedy was to project itself into the post-revolutionary epoch as well.
Let me recapitulate briefly its main acts and motifs. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, new radicals and revolutionaries, the Raznotchintsy, made their appearance. They came from the slowly growing middle classes; many were children of civil servants and priests. They too were revolutionaries in search of a revolutionary class. The bourgeoisie was still negligible. The civil servants and priests were terrified of their rebellious sons. The peasantry was apathetic and passive. Only a section of the nobility favoured some reform, namely, the landlords who, eager to adopt modern methods of farming or to engage in industry and trade, wished to see serfdom abolished and the administration of the state and education liberalised. When Alexander II, yielding to their persuasion, abolished serfdom, he thereby secured for the dynasty the peasantry’s unwavering allegiance for decades ahead. The 1861 Act of Emancipation thus isolated again the radicals and the revolutionaries and, in effect, postponed revolution by over half a century. Yet the land problem remained unresolved. The serfs had been freed, but had received no land; and they had to contract heavy debts and servitudes, and to become sharecroppers, in order to be able to till the land. The nation’s way of life remained anachronistic. This state of affairs and the oppressiveness of the autocracy drove ever new men of the intelligentsia to revolt, to produce new ideas, and to experiment with ever new methods of political struggle.
Each successive group of revolutionaries drew its strength only from itself; for each an impasse waited at the end of its road. The Narodniks or Populists, inspired by Herzen and Bakunin, Chernyshevsky and Lavrov, were objectively the peasantry’s militant vanguard. But when they appealed to the muzhiks and tried to open their eyes to the fraud of the emancipation and to the new manner in which the Tsar and the landlords kept them in subjection, the ex-serfs refused to budge or even to listen; not rarely they delivered the Narodniks into the hands of the gendarmes. An oppressed social class, with great revolutionary potentialities, thus betrayed its own revolutionary élite. The successors of the Narodniks, the Narodnovoltsy, abandoned the apparently hopeless search for a revolutionary popular force in society. They decided to act alone as the trustees of an oppressed and mute people. Their politically inspired terrorism took the place of the agrarian Populism of their predecessors. The propagandist or agitator of the previous era, who ‘went out to the people’ or even tried to settle among the peasants, was replaced by the lonely, taciturn, heroic conspirator, with the suggestion of a Superman, who, determined to vanquish or perish, took upon himself the task the nation was unable to accomplish. The circle whose members assassinated Alexander II in 1881 consisted of fewer than two score of men and women. Six years later only a dozen young people, among them Lenin’s elder brother, formed the group that planned an attempt on the life of Alexander III. These tiny conspiratorial bodies held the huge empire in suspense, and made history. Yet, if the failure of the Populists of the 1860s and 1870s had demonstrated the unreality of the hope that the peasantry might be moved to rise, the martyrdom of the Narodnovoltsy of the 1880s exposed once again the impotence of a vanguard which acted without the support of any of the basic social classes. These negative experiences taught invaluable lessons to the revolutionaries of the next decades — and in this sense they were not fruitless. The moral drawn by Plekhanov, Zasulich, Lenin, Martov and their comrades was that they must not act as an isolated vanguard, but must look for support to a revolutionary class — and must look beyond the peasantry. By now, however, the beginning of Russia’s industrialisation was solving the problem for them. The Marxist propagandists and agitators of Lenin’s generation found their audience among the new factory workers.
We should note the transparent dialectics of this protracted struggle. There is first of all the contradiction between social need and social consciousness. No social need or interest could have been more elementary than the peasants’ hunger for land and freedom; and no social consciousness could have been more false than the one that allowed them to content themselves, for half a century, with an Act which, while freeing them from chattel slavery, denied them land and freedom — a consciousness that induced generations of muzhiks to hope that the Tsar-Batiushka would right their wrongs. This discrepancy between need and consciousness lay at the root of the many metamorphoses of the revolutionary movement. The logic of the situation produced these opposite models of organisation: the self-sufficient conspiratorial élite on the one hand, and the mass-oriented movement on the other, the dictatorial and the democratic types of the revolutionary. We should note also the special, exclusive and historically effective role that the intelligentsia played in all this — in no other country do we find anything like it. Generation after generation, they stormed the Tsarist autocracy and smashed their heads against its walls, preparing the way for those who were to come after them. They were inspired by an almost Messianic faith in their, and in Russia’s, revolutionary mission. When at last the Marxists came to the fore, they inherited a great tradition and a unique experience; they assessed both critically and used them effectively. But they also inherited certain problems and dilemmas.
The Marxists started out, as they had to, with the negation of the Populist and terrorist traditions. They rejected ‘agrarian socialism’, the sentimental idealisation of the peasantry, the radical versions of Slavophilism, and the quasi-Messianic idea of Russia’s unique revolutionary mission. They repudiated terrorism, the self-glorification of the radical intellectual, and the self-sufficient conspiratorial élite. They opted for the democratically oriented organisation, the party and the trade unions, and for modern forms of proletarian mass action. This attitude, ‘strictly’ or even exclusively proletarian and distrustful of the peasantry, was characteristic of the beginnings of the entire Russian Social-Democratic Party; it was to remain typical of the Mensheviks in their best period. But the movement, as it passed to action, could not rest on the abstract negation of the native revolutionary traditions — it had to absorb what was vital in them and transcend them. It was Bolshevism that accomplished this task, and it did so long before 1917. The Bolsheviks inherited from the Populists their sensitivity towards the peasantry, and from the Narodnovoltsy their concentrated aggressiveness and their conspiratorial determination. Without these elements Marxism in Russia would have remained an exotic plant, or at best, a theoretical outgrowth of Western European socialism, as it was in Plekhanov’s brilliant opus and in some of Lenin’s youthful writings. The Russian acclimatisation of Marxism was, above all, Lenin’s achievement. He produced the synthesis of the doctrine with the native tradition. He insisted on the need for the workers, the leading force in the revolution, to gain allies in the peasants; and he assigned to the intellectuals and the revolutionary élite a weighty, educative and organising role in the workers’ mass movement. This synthesis epitomised the century of Russian revolutionary endeavour.
If I were to stop here, I might give you a one-sided view of the elements that went into the making of the revolution. Though it is customary in the West to treat Bolshevism as a purely Russian phenomenon, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the contribution that Western Europe had made to it. Throughout the nineteenth century Russia’s revolutionary thought and action were, at every stage, decisively influenced by Western ideas and movements. The Decembrists, belonged, no less than, say, the Carbonari, to the European aftermath of the French revolution. Many of them had been, after Napoleon’s downfall, young officers of the Russian occupation troops in Paris; and contact even with the defeated revolution was enough to set their minds ablaze. The Petrashevtsy, Belinski and Herzen, Bakunin and Chernyshevsky, and so many others were formed by the events of 1830 and 1848, by French socialism, German philosophy, especially by Hegel and Feuerbach, and by British political economy. Then Marxism, itself embodying all these influences, made its stupendous intellectual conquest of radical and even of liberal Russia. No wonder the apologists of Tsardom denounced socialism and Marxism as products of the ‘decadent’ West. Not only Pobedonostsev, the crude preacher of obscurantism and Pan-Slavism, not only Dostoevsky, but even Tolstoy repudiated the ideas of socialism in such terms. And they were not quite mistaken: whether the West wishes to remember this or not, it has invested a great deal of its own spiritual heritage in the Russian revolution. Trotsky once wrote about the ‘paradox’, that while Western Europe ‘exported its most advanced technology to the United States... it exported its most advanced ideology to Russia’. Lenin makes the same point, plainly and forcefully:
... in the course of about half a century, roughly from the 1840s till the 1890s, progressive thought in Russia searched avidly... for the correct revolutionary theory, and followed with remarkable zeal and meticulousness every ‘last word’ that came from Europe and America. Russia has indeed come to Marxism... through extreme sufferings, agonies and sacrifices... through learning, testing in practice... and engaging in a comparative study of Europe’s experience. Because Tsardom forced us to lead an émigré existence, revolutionary Russia... had at her command such a wealth of international contacts and so excellent an awareness of all the forms and theories of revolutionary movements all over the world as no one else possessed.
In 1917 and in the following years not only the leaders but also the great mass of Russian workers and peasants saw the revolution not as the business of Russia alone, but as part of a social upheaval embracing the whole of mankind. The Bolsheviks considered themselves the champions of at least a European revolution, whose battles they were waging on Europe’s eastern outposts. Even the Mensheviks had held this conviction and had eloquently expressed it. And not only the Russians saw themselves in this light. Early in this century Karl Kautsky, the leading theorist of the Socialist International, drew this perspective:
The epicentre of revolution has been moving from the West to the East. In the first half of the nineteenth century it was situated in France, at times in England. In 1848 Germany entered the ranks of the revolutionary nations... Now the Slavs... join their ranks, and the centre of gravity of revolutionary thought and action is more and more shifting... to Russia.
‘Russia, having taken over so much revolutionary initiative from the West, may now in her turn become a source of revolutionary energy for the West’, Kautsky remarked on the contrast with the situation in 1848, when the Peoples’ Spring in Western Europe was nipped by the ‘hard frost from Russia'; now the storm from Russia might help to clear the air in the West.
Kautsky wrote this in 1902 for Iskra, of which Lenin was co-editor; and his words made such an impression on Lenin that nearly twenty years later he quoted them with ironic delight against their author, now outraged by the fulfilment of his forecast. The forecast was in fact even more portentous than either Kautsky or Lenin perceived. We have seen how in our time the epicentre of revolution has shifted even farther to the East, from Russia to China. An historian with a flair for the grand generalisation might extrapolate the perspective sketched by Kautsky and draw a more sweeping line, illustrating the eastward advance of the revolution in the course of three centuries. The line might start in Puritan England, traverse the whole of Europe, sweep on to China, and finally touch the south-eastern fringes of Asia.
However, such a graph may be misleading; it may suggest too linear and too strongly predetermined a course of history. But in whatever degree the course was determined or not, it has, clearly, had its inner coherence and logic. Goethe once said that the history of knowledge is a great fugue, in which the voices of the various nations appear one after another. One might say the same of the history of revolution. It is not the world symphony some of the great revolutionaries had hoped for. Nor is it the medley of discordant solos, the cacophony the Philistines hear. It is rather the great fugue in which the voices of the various nations, each with its own hopes and despairs, enter one after another.