The Russian Revolution Read Free Page A

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.
    Beyond the generic similarity, however, every revolution has its own character. Russia's location was peripheral, and its educated classes were preoccupied with the country's backwardness vis-a-vis Europe. The revolutionaries were Marxists who often substituted ,the proletariat' for `the people' and claimed that revolution was historically necessary, not morally imperative. There were revolutionary parties in Russia before there was a revolution; and when the moment came, in the midst of war, these parties competed for the support of ready-made units of popular revolution (soldiers, sailors, workers in the big Petrograd factories), not the allegiance of a milling, spontaneous, revolutionary crowd.
    In this book, three motifs have special importance. The first is the modernization theme-revolution as a means of escaping from backwardness. The second is the class theme-revolution as the mission of the proletariat and its `vanguard', the Bolshevik Party. The third is the theme of revolutionary violence and terror-how the Revolution dealt with its enemies, and what this meant for the Bolshevik Party and Soviet state.
    The term `modernization' has begun to sound passe in an age often described as postmodern. But that is appropriate for our subject, since the industrial and technological modernity for which the Bolsheviks strove now seems hopelessly outdated: the giant smokestacks that clutter the landscape of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe like a herd of polluting dinosaurs were, in their time, the fulfilment of a revolutionary dream. Russian Marxists had fallen in love with Western-style industrialization long before the revolution; it was their insistence on the inevitability of capitalism (which primarily meant capitalist industrialization) that was the core of their argument with the Populists in the late nineteenth century. In Russia, as was later to be the case in the Third World, Marxism was both an ideology of revolution and an ideology of economic development.
    In theory, industrialization and economic modernization were only means to an end for Russian Marxists, the end being socialism. But the more clearly and single-mindedly the Bolsheviks focused on the means, the more foggy, distant, and unreal the end became. When the term `building socialism' came into common use in the 1930s, its meaning was hard to distinguish from the actual building of new factories and industrial towns currently in progress. To Communists of that generation, the new smokestacks puffing away on the steppe were the ultimate demonstration that the Revolution had been victorious. As Adam Ulam puts it, Stalin's forced-pace industrialization, however painful and coercive, was `the logical complement of Marxism, "revolution fulfilled" rather than "revolution betrayed" '.8
    Class, the second theme, was important in the Russian Revolution because the key participants perceived it as such. Marxist analytical categories were widely accepted in the Russian intelligentsia; and the Bolsheviks were not exceptional, but representative of a much broader socialist group, when they interpreted the Revolution in terms of class conflict and assigned