I. The Historical Perspective

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 a 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 quasireligious 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 to-day?

And yet quite a few theorists and historians still view the y October revolution as , . . . . . . . . . . . . [ . . . . . . . . . . ]

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