An Ideology in Power

Reflections on the Russian Revolution

Bertram Wolfe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315303130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1969 and representing a quarter of a century's work of one of the USA's most respected scholars in Soviet affairs, this volume discusses the question of what happens to an ideology in power, by focusing on the evolution and uses of Marxism in Soviet practice. As well as analyzing totalitarian behaviour, the author offers advice for Western policy from analysis of the past.

PART I

The Ideology: From Marxism to Marxism-Leninism

I MARXISM AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION^*

Historically, Marxism is an offshoot of the idea of Revolution, an idea comparatively new in history. The idea was born in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and has dominated much of the thinking of the nineteenth and twentieth.

Contrary to what Marxism in all it varieties holds, the idea of revolution arose unexpectedly, unplanned, unthought of, taking its leading actors by surprise, creating for itself an explanation and an ideology or a complex of conflicting ideological fragments only after the fact.

Some would locate the starting point of the idea in North America in 1776. But the inherited English freedoms and physical sources of liberty in America were already the matter of European utopian dreams long before Franklin arrived in Paris or Lafayette came to the rebellious colonies and before the celebrated “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence were proclaimed to mankind. The freedoms of the English colonies from the outset and the social conditions of a continent where unoccupied land seemed limitless, poverty no longer a God-ordained state, and careers were open to talents without limitations of estate or caste—these, and not national independence, were what made the New World seem new to Europe.¹

Moreover, the American was never a proper revolution to capture the imagination by scenes of unforgettable drama. At best it was a revolution manquě. It had no fascinating engine in the public square that by mere force of gravity could make men shorter by a head; no emotion-choked reign of terror to chew up rich and poor, men and women, young and old, and finally devour the revolution’s own children; no dramatic extermination of generals and factions during the revolution; no sequel of purge and Thermidor and Bonapartism. It did not dream of beginning the world afresh with a new calendar and history starting with the year one. At its end, impenitent Loyalists went off freely to Halifax; leaders of American “factions,” Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Daniel Shays, lived out their lives to die a natural death, a death most unnatural for French or Russian revolutionaries.

Even the War between the States, the bloodiest in military history up to its time, was not a proper civil war: as the stillness descended upon Appomattox, the voice of General Grant could be heard saying to the Confederate cavalry “Keep your horses, boys, you’ll need them for the spring planting,” while the leaders of the rebellion, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, were to live out the remainder of their lives in peace and die in bed.

Not in the Marxian but in a narrow and literal sense there was an economic connection between the American War for Independence and the Revolution in France. The French monarch had been so generous in his aid to the American colonists that at our revolution’s end his treasury was empty and the monarchy bankrupt. Not the rise of a new social class nor dire poverty in France, but a bankrupt treasury in a prospering land opened, unexpectedly to all, a period of revolutions.

In 1787 the king of this powerful, prospering country called together an Assembly of Notables to listen to a shocking report of royal bankruptcy and to approve suggested reforms whose main purpose would be to tax the notables who had not been taxed before, in order to replenish the empty coffers of their king. The nobles had no more far-reaching intention than that of defending their privileges against these incursions and of finding fault with Calonne for permitting the greatest treasury on the continent to go bankrupt. But their year-long resistance to the finance minister’s plans was the first in a series of revolutions which, in retrospect, are lumped together as the Great French Revolution. It was this révolte nobiliaire and not some action of the petty, insignificant, and un-self-confident industrial bourgeoisie of France that opened what Marxists and Marxist-Leninists, and many historians along with them, persist in calling “the bourgeois revolution.” If by bourgeoisie is meant a “rising social class” begotten by industrial capitalism, its wealth largely invested in industry and the employment of industrial labor, with its values derived from “capitalism,” with a special and distinct “relationship to the forces of production,” and a distinct more or less uniform psychology and will, such a class nowhere appears upon the scene throughout the great drama. Neither initiator nor actor nor chorus, it did not “come to power,” nor displace another “ruling class,” nor substitute its values for the prevailing ones, either during the revolution or at its end, nor gain substantial benefits from it, nor win from it free room for industrial development.

The chief beneficiaries of the Revolution were the new and expanded bureaucracy; the landed proprietary groups that got the biens nationaux at bargain prices; and the peasants. Then Napoleon, Jacobin child of the Revolution, established a new nobility, requiring a landed endowment of anyone he raised to the peerage and forbidding him or his heirs to alienate the land except in exchange for other lands. The old values that gave more prestige to land than to trade and industry continued to prevail in France after the Revolution was over and after Napoleon’s fall from power. The enormously expanded bureaucracy continued to be the real ruler of France all through the nineteenth century and into the second half of the twentieth, through volatile periods of French political life when ministries and governments changed so frequently that, were it not for the stable rule of the bureaucracy, France would have been in a state of perpetual chaos. As to the third beneficiary of the Revolution, the peasant, his acquisition of a family farm left him without the need or urge to crowd into the cities so that French industrialization was delayed by the lack of a free-floating labor reserve.

Beyond that, I must leave it to the Marxists of various stripes to torture the image of the independent peasant, owner of his land and implements and the product of his toil, into some semblance of a “bourgeoisie.” I leave, too, to the self-appointed spokesmen of the proletariat the task of falsely flattering the bourgeoisie by calling the Rights of Man and the all too slow widening of democratic suffrage and parliamentarism “bourgeois freedoms.” I can only think that their purpose is not so much to exalt the bourgeoisie as to belittle the freedoms.

Far from opening up a period of rapid industrialization, the French Revolution left French industry feeble, backward, and confined by all sorts of limitations inherited from the Empire. French industry remained stagnant, French banking investment remained limited to loans to governments and speculation in currencies for well over a half century after the “bourgeois” revolution. The long period of economic stagnation was broken only in the sixties when Isaac Péreire introduced the first industrial investment bank, the Credit Mobilier. Then an upsurge of industrialization began, not under “bourgeois” auspices, but under the auspices of a group of bankers and entrepreneurs who were ideological followers of the utopian socialist Saint-Simon.

Thus it took fervent adherents of a socialist creed to weaken somewhat, and then only partially, the dominion of the aristocratic proprietary and rentier tradition which felt that to invest in commerce—and still more so in industry—was to lose one’s ease and dignity.

“THE DREAM OF REASON”

The year-long resistance of the nobles compelled the monarch to convoke an Estates-General, a time-honored device of bankrupt monarchs, but one which had not had to be used since 1610. Naively, the king made the democratic gesture of asking the people of France for advice on how the Estates-General should be constituted. It was this, and not the growth of a new rising class with a new ideology, that opened the floodgates to a spate of ever more sweeping proposals.

Inditers of addresses to the king and of proclamations and editorials in new provincial and urban journals; orators in a flowering of clubs and meetings, assemblies, communes, parlements, and accidental mobs; new baked pamphleteers; authors of resolutions and cahiers de doléances; obscure provincial lawyers and journalists who had never had an audience or a voice in political life—all of them might have taken as their common device: “I know nothing about it, therefore I can speak freely.” One has only to hearken to this confusion of voices, and ponder these shiny new proposals for making the world afresh, to realize that they were anything but the voice of political experience or the expression of the interests of any estate or “social class,” least of all of the careful calculations of the bon bourgeois.

The stream of suggestions grew in number and fury like a spring flood. The révolte nobiliaire “taught the Third Estate the language, tactics, and gallantry of opposition.” And, once the floodgates were open, each suggestion overreached its predecessor. “What this interpretation restores,” as the historian George Taylor observes, “is the sense of an unplanned, unpremeditated revolution that in many and startling ways exceeded the aims expressed in the cahiers de doléances.” ²

Thus an essential feature of a revolution is that it gains in unplanned momentum and constantly overreaches itself until it takes the form of the idea that the world can be swept clean of all that exists, all that time, experience, tradition, custom, habit, law and the slow organic growth of society have engendered and “history can begin anew.” Nothing at that moment is to be examined for the purposes of improving or reforming it, correcting some specific abuse or some obsolescent feature. That would not be revolution but “reformism,” and there are no more abusive epithets in a revolutionary’s vocabulary than the words reformist or reformism. What a revolution needs, Marx wrote on the eve of the upheavals of 1848, was “destruction and dissolution” and “the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions.” In the space made clean and empty by the iron broom of revolution, a totally new world would be created. Thus the day comes, as it did on September 22, 1792, when the very calendar is scrapped and time itself begins anew with the First Day of the Year One of the New World in creation. At this point man becomes as God, and replaces the old God in the temple by enshrining there his own Reason to be worshiped. And, as the Devil reminded Ivan Karamazov, “There is no law for God . . . all things are permitted, and that’s the end of it.” With that “all things are permitted,” the history of contemporary nihilism begins. It is fulfilled in the terror of the French Revolution; in the attempt to exterminate whole classes of the population and the blood-purges of the Russian Revolution; in the crematoriums of Hitler’s Germany and projected European revolution. Said Talleyrand of the French Revolution, “It was made by builders of theories for an imaginary world.” According to Robespierre, it was accomplished “by putting into laws the moral truths culled from the philosophers.” To these striking formulae we need only add the wry comment of the artist, Goya: “The dream of reason produces monsters.”

THE MYTH OF THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION

In historical terms, then, Marxism may be defined as an elaborate misunderstanding of the French Revolution, of the role of “classes,” and of the very nature of revolution. Marx took as his initial axioms—self-evident truths that seemed to him in no need of proof. The first axiom holds that a revolution begins as a consequence of a social transformation of society and takes on overt political form only when a new class has grown ripe enough to challenge an old “ruling class,” take power itself, and make over the world in its image. But we have seen how unexpectedly revolutions come, how they take their initiators and principal actors by surprise, how they create their ideologies in torrents only after the fact, and how these ideologies compete, displace each other, overreach themselves, until society, which cannot live forever at fever heat and under perpetual tension, disorder, and confusion, welcomes a subsidence of excitement and a relapse into quiet, even if order is brought about by the same guillotine that symbolized the culmination of disorder, even if order is brought about by a Bonaparte or a Stalin, even if the new despot coninues and enlarges disorder from above but no longer demands or permits that it arise from below.

Marx’s second axiom took it for granted that the French Revolution could be meaningfully defined as a bourgeois revolution, its ideological dreams and nightmares described as bourgeois ideologies, and its driving force and victor could be termed the revolutionary bourgeoisie. Each of these “axioms” dissolves in the face of empirical examination of the events, the leaders, the roles, the ideas, and the actions of the revolution.

The same dogmas were taken for granted and given yet cruder formulation by the Marxist epigones and notably by Russian Marxists of all schools. Russian worshippers of the poetry of the machine and of technology might look to Germany as the model to follow, as Germany had looked to England, and as later many lands, including Bolshevik Russia, would look to America. But however far behind the French economy might be, when it came to revolution, France was the land to follow. In the workshop of French history there was a mode for every taste: 1789, 1793 and 1794, 1799, 1804, 1830, 1848, 1870 and 1871. The France they dreamed of and lived by was a France seen through the prism of the writings of Marx, more real to them than the France of history.

Almost every figure on the Russian political stage wore a costume tailored in Paris. Tsarism was the ancien régime. Vyshnegradskii, Witte, and Stolypin were the Turgot, Calonne, and Necker. Lenin was a Jacobin—his opponents said this to denounce him, and he repeated it after them with pride. He was a Russian Robespierre—on this too both he and his opponents agreed. And he was as well a Russian Blanqui. In a gentler mood, he called his rivals Girondins or the Swamp; when harsher, Cavaignacs.³ Trotsky dramatized himself as the Marat of the Revolution, later as it Carnot. To the sailors of Kronstadt, whose hands were stained with the blood of their officers, he said in the summer of 1917 that they were “the flower of the Revolution” and their deeds would be copied all over Russia until every public square would be adorned by a replica of that famous French invention “which makes the enemies of the people shorter by a head.” Trotsky and Stalin in their debates hurled at each other the epithet “Bonapartist.” Stalin’s regime Trotsky branded as “Thermidor.” When Tsereteli in 1917 proposed to disarm the Bolshevik Red Guard lest they overthrow the Provisional Government, and Lieber supported him (Mensheviks both), from his seat another Menshevik leader, Martov, hurled the epithet versalets! (Versaillist).⁴

As the French revolutionaries had donned imaginary togas and fancied themselves ancient Romans, so Russian revolutionaries sought to reenact the scenes and roles of revolutionary France. Much ink would be spilled, and in the end much blood, to determine Russia’s place on the French revolutionary calendar (was she on the eve of her 1789 or 1793, her 1848, or her 1870?). The soviets were pictured by Lenin as enlarged replicas of the “Paris Commune type of state.”⁵ After the Bolsheviks took power, the ink and blood would be poured out in combat with the ghosts of “Bonapartism” and “Thermidor” while the real problems were those arising out of an entirely new formation, totalitarianism, which had no exemplar in French revolutionary history.

In justice to the Marxists it should be said that they were not alone in their use of the formulae, “bourgeois revolution” and “revolutionary bourgeoisie.” Whole generations of historians, most of them non-Marxist or only tenuously Marxist in outlook, took the same terms for granted. But recently, particularly in the last decade, the French...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• PART I. The Ideology: From Marxism to Marxism-Leninism
• PART II. War as the Womb of Revolution
• PART III. Permanent Dictatorship and the Problem of Legitimacy
• PART IV. Proletarian Dictatorship as a Higher Form of Democracy
• PART V. The Conditioning of Culture
• PART VI. Problems of Foreign Policy
• INDEX