>the nature of the Bolshevik movement was that it implied a cultural revolution, because it meant peasants leaving the land and coming into mines, factories, cities; sometimes sending money home, sometimes returning to home to help bring in the harvest but at the same time buying into an idea of modernisation – hyper-modernisation, really; that the answer to Russia's backwardness and poverty was to sweep away the old peasant world.
The cultural revolution rapidly (in a span of few decades) lifted Russia from a rural state to an urban one, and brought a changed cultural consciousness. Strong state institutions like schools, councils, enterprises, and theatre furthered the social progression.
>As a nation, Russians are the last victims of their own revolution. It's very difficult for Russia to become a nation, because it has this imperial legacy and because it was the 'Russian' Revolution – so they can't[, like other post-Soviet nations], blame 'the Russians' for their revolution. That's why, I think, the centenary is going to be so quiet: it's not a history that the Russians can use to go anywhere; it doesn't have any positive uses for them. In Latvia they can celebrate liberation, in Ukraine they can celebrate independence; but in Russia it's very hard to do that.
The most critical observation of the article. Other states like Germany, France, typically deflect previous revolutions that aren't compatible with the current model of their state. Russia does no such thing, in no small part because:
>what happened in 1991 was just collapse; there wasn't any democratic revolution to create a new state. All that happened was that the Soviet state collapsed and new political elites, largely made up of the old ones, found themselves back in power. Putin's state is still essentially the inheritor of the Soviet state, in every aspect – in its attitude to power, in its attitude to the country – and that means that many of the old reflex-attitudes of Russians – the unquestioning acceptance of authority, the acceptance of the need for the state to use violence, the protective role of the Cheka/KGB/FSB – are all still there. For Russia to become a democracy will not really happen until Russians begin properly to reconsider what the revolution meant in terms of its legacies, in terms of those deep cultural aspects of thinking. And I don't see that happening.
I really enjoyed Mr. Figes book on the Russian Revolution because his writing style is wonderfully accessible and compassionate.
Unfortunately it has been accused of having many pages of plagiarized content and poor sourcing. Which has made me weary of his writings and commentary.
I really hate to color a person with a single brush but my impression is that the problems were significant. Either error on its own would be forgivable but combining plagiarism and inaccurate sourcing points to a sloppiness with history in an effort to create narrative. To me, a historian most break away from narrative and commit to rigor.
Looking at this from a national point of view is a mistake.
In my mind, we're still dealing with the blowback resulting from the end of the victorian world order, which was gutted by the events of the First World War, of which the 1917 revolution was a part.
Russia has always been a bridge between east and west. I think as we've spent the last 50 years exporting the wealth of the west, we're approaching a similar changing of eras.
>Looking at this from a national point of view is a mistake.
>In my mind, we're still dealing with the blowback resulting from the end of the victorian world order, which was gutted by the events of the First World War, of which the 1917 revolution was a part.
Asimov in the Foundation caught it very well - the more populous and dense the world and the more it is tightly interconnected ("globalization" of today) - the more tribalistic/nationalistic/xenophobic the internal communities at all levels get, even when the communities are like just 2 adjacent city blocks of the same city like in the case of the Empire's very densely populated capital city covering the whole planet with the differences between the city blocks viciously enforced and cultivated by the respective communities itselves.
You can see that process starting in Europe with Jan Hus on one side and the French nationalism rising during the 100 years war on the other side. The 100 year war started as some adjustment of power lines between high lords of practically the same language and culture, and ended as the national freedom movement. Next was Luther, i.e. the German nation forming and waking up. And so forth...
The WWI can be seen as earthquake style resolution of the tension (built-up during previous peaceful decades) between significantly grown up nationalistic movements and the old trans-ethnic empires power lines in Europe. And naturally most of those empires disappeared as result of the war.
The process didn't obviously stopped with WWI. It is naturally continues today and into tomorrow. The diversity celebrating all-accepting globalized society of our dreams is probably just a dream.
> What happened very quickly in 1917 was the development of committee power, so the development of local, direct democracy in terms of local committees, soldiers� committees and, of course, the Soviets. And I think that those institutions need not have become the instruments of class war, which is what the Bolsheviks used them for, or encouraged them to do. You could have had, as some in the Bolshevik Party, in the Left-Menshevik wings, were thinking, a combination of local soviet-style structures with a national parliament.
There are a lot of silly ideas contained in the last two sentences.
First off committees like those mentioned have sprung up in every revolution since the French Revolution. Back then they were Les Enrages, the sans-culottes, and they have emerged in revolutions since then up into the 20th century, be they called councils or soviets or whatever. The notion that "those institutions need not have become the instruments of class war" is preposterous, because workers taking control over their own lives and halting the exproporiation of their surplus labor time is the centrality of class warfare. If workers had control over their own labor time, instead of punching a clock at some corporation owned by heirs, which directed their work and expropriated surplus labor time from them, then there would be no classes. The only way to prevent workers managing their own affairs in local committees from not being engaged in class warfare would either be to dissolve the committees, or alternatively neuter them to where they were completely powerless.
In terms of the idea of a national parliament and local soviets being the basis of a government, that is exactly the situation Russia was in in February 2017 - what was called dual power. It's an untenable situation. Up until April 1917 the idea was generally that socialists might be able to take power, but should instead subordinate themselves to the bourgeoisie, in a society where the capitalists would rule through a modern bourgeois parliament.
Lenin spells out why this was not done at the beginning and end of his April Theses: one of the main things that made him realize the time for socialists to stop subordinating themselves to capitalists and bourgeois parliaments was it was leading to the degradation of the socialist parties, the center-piece of which was German social-democrats supporting entry into World War I. The option Lenin saw being handed to him was - support World War I, pitting Russian workers against German workers (including left-wing pacifistic German socialists), or turn completely against the government. Lenin chose the latter course. Figes neglects to mention this - Lenin's only real alternative to taking the path he took would be to support Russia's continuation of World War I.
Class warfare doesn't seem inevitable if locally organized committees in a time of revolution prioritize something else in life more than class concerns. Consider Iran where, as the shah’s regime crumbled, there was a lot of organization not in favour of the Communists, but rather to try to bring bring Khomeini back from exile and usher in an Islamic regime. Similarly, some of the other revolutions in and around World War I were driven more by a desire to marginalize ethnic groups other than the workers’ own than to marginalize the bourgeoisie.
I'm not sure it could have worked out perfectly, but I'm sure, minus the Bolshevik influence on such committees pre-October, and their wholesale takeover of them afterwards, those same committees could have acted with a bit more sense and purpose.
I don't think the author is wrong to point out that they had more potential than they lived up to. He's not, I think, saying they add up to a cohesive strategy for a successful state.
> You could say that the Utopian nature of the revolution developed out of the idea of Russia being a tabula rasa, a blank canvas onto which revolutionaries could project their utopian ideals of human transformation. That was part of a tradition in Russian revolutionary thinking – not just for the Bolsheviks and anarchists, but more importantly for populists in the 19th century, who thought that because Russia was not developed, in a western sense, with political institutions, civil society, an advanced economy, it could sort of ‘leap over’ the West by becoming a new form of democracy or socialism.
If that were true, then if Communism were to succeed anywhere, it should have succeeded in Russia. (Note, however, that Marxist theory says that it is not true, as the article says later.)
> Revolution is, by its nature, an improvisation – there are no rules...
Interesting. Yes, that seems right for a revolution. You're revolting against the way things are, and the current rules, and you can throw out any rules that you want.
> ... so they are desperately looking for examples from previous revolutions of what will happen, and of what it is to be a revolutionary.
And, having no rules, they find themselves completely adrift, except for the one requirement: It has to work to overthrow the existing order. (Not it has to work to produce something functional afterwords.) So they look for something that will give them some guidance - some rules, almost - on how to proceed. Ironic, that.
Not for no reason were Soviet general secretaries sometimes called the Red Tsars. There is most certainly a civilizational continuity between imperial Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. This particular civilizational continuity makes the prospect of democratic rule problematic. It does not sit comfortably within Russian civilizational parameters. Some explain in this way the failed attempt to instill a democratic order in Russia in the 1990s, i.e., that what democratic rule presupposes is absent in Russian society, rendering it foreign and "unnatural".
Among scholars specializing in civilizations, Feliks Koneczny[0] stands out in particular. Specifically, he identifies Russia as an example of Turanian civilization (one of several present within the West, though perhaps what is most prototypically Western is what he called Latin civilization). The author of the article mentions some of the markers of Turanian civilization, viz., "the unquestioning acceptance of authority" and "the acceptance of the need for the state to use violence".
Their idea of "a western, French revolution" is pure fantasy. The French revolution started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but quickly turned into the unelected tyrant Robespierre holding absolute authority.
History is very complicated and full of contradictions. Imperial Russia is often dubbed as a semi-medieval state, yet it was able to build the Trans-Siberian Railway which was a massive engineering feat.
[In Latvia they can celebrate liberation, in Ukraine they can celebrate independence; but in Russia it’s very hard to do that. So in that sense, the legacies go on but the people really paying for it now are the Russians, rather than anyone else]
This. This is so hard to understand even to most Russians.
Funny how he then proceeds to tell about violence in Crimea. Does he imagine that people of Crimea aren't the ones who are paying, and who could be happy as a part of newly nationalistic Ukraine?
Sweden always (well, for the last 400 years or so) had a quite different way of governing and different values than Russia.
You can look at Finland which was governed by Sweden for a long time, then was a part of Russia but had its own laws etc and was a semi autonomous experimental area. During that time there were still feudal slaves in Russia. Poor farmers didn't have it easy anywhere of course.
This article over-analyzes the situation and gives Lenin and co too much credit. What happened was very simple:
* Russia is in the midst of World War I and things are rather rough for people.
* Leftist/liberals use the situation to their advantage and pressure Nicholas into resigning in Feb/Mar 1917 ending the monarchy and instituting the "provisional govenment" which was rather weak and inexperienced. They do dumb things like pardon all prisoners.
* Germany takes advantage of the weakness and sends in Lenin to sabotage the weak government.
* In Oct 1917 this armed gang of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin takes over. Having realized how relatively easy it was, they ensure that they stay in power by publicly executing anyone who even hints at descent.
* 28 years later in 1945, Germany surrenders to Stalin, one of the very people it paid to topple Russia.
Edit: The lesson is rather simple: any however well-intentioned revolution is most often followed by a coup whereby ruthless criminals take over and in the end everyone suffers. The liberal parties who pushed for a constitutional monarchy and democracy inadvertently caused over 100 million deaths and a century of misery for their country and the world.
I'm pretty sure they only pardoned all political prisoners. Which was essentially required under their new constitution because it guaranteed the freedom of speech.
The February revolution was not triggered by "Leftists". It was a popular uprising. Which, if the Tsar hadn't been a bullheaded autocrat, he could've headed off by instuting fairly moderate reforms and sharing power with the beaurocracy and the parliament.
Or maybe you cannot explain what happened on half of continent for 28 years with 5 sentences and state it was simple. Has Lenin been armed gangster, he wouldn't written a lot of books. Putin is less educated than was Lenin.
World can't come in terms with what was happening in russia it late 19-th and 20-th century. This is a shame, because we can learn a valuable lesson from those events.
He was certainly more than a gangster but he seems to have been a horrible person. He lived an acetic lifestyle and pushed that disdain of pleasure into the party orthodoxy. He used his allies for advantage in a way that went way beyond the political norm of the time. And he laid the groundwork for the Soviet Gulag system. An apparatus that inflicted the equivalent of half a dozen holocaust's worth of human suffering over its existence.
Painting Lenin only as a German spy is an oversimplification. He had his own agenda long before his dealings with the Germans, and he succeeded with it, in the end.
The cultural revolution rapidly (in a span of few decades) lifted Russia from a rural state to an urban one, and brought a changed cultural consciousness. Strong state institutions like schools, councils, enterprises, and theatre furthered the social progression.
>As a nation, Russians are the last victims of their own revolution. It's very difficult for Russia to become a nation, because it has this imperial legacy and because it was the 'Russian' Revolution – so they can't[, like other post-Soviet nations], blame 'the Russians' for their revolution. That's why, I think, the centenary is going to be so quiet: it's not a history that the Russians can use to go anywhere; it doesn't have any positive uses for them. In Latvia they can celebrate liberation, in Ukraine they can celebrate independence; but in Russia it's very hard to do that.
The most critical observation of the article. Other states like Germany, France, typically deflect previous revolutions that aren't compatible with the current model of their state. Russia does no such thing, in no small part because:
>what happened in 1991 was just collapse; there wasn't any democratic revolution to create a new state. All that happened was that the Soviet state collapsed and new political elites, largely made up of the old ones, found themselves back in power. Putin's state is still essentially the inheritor of the Soviet state, in every aspect – in its attitude to power, in its attitude to the country – and that means that many of the old reflex-attitudes of Russians – the unquestioning acceptance of authority, the acceptance of the need for the state to use violence, the protective role of the Cheka/KGB/FSB – are all still there. For Russia to become a democracy will not really happen until Russians begin properly to reconsider what the revolution meant in terms of its legacies, in terms of those deep cultural aspects of thinking. And I don't see that happening.