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Six Views of the Russian Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

James H. Billington
James H. Billington
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Faculty Associate of the Center
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Extract

IF a central problem for any nineteenth-century thinker was that of defining his attitude toward the French Revolution, a central one for contemporary man is his appraisal of the Russian Revolution. The latter problem is even more critical, for nearly one billion people explicitly claim to be heirs and defenders of the Russian Revolution. Forces called into being by the upheaval of 1917 are even more forcefully mobilized and tangibly powerful than those called into being by the French Revolution of 1789 and the “age of the democratic revolution.” Thus, as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution of 1917 and the volume of writings threatens to reach avalanche proportions, it might be well to take a critical look at the historical studies and reflections that have been called forth in what might well be called the age of the totalitarian revolution.

Type
Research Article
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World Politics , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , April 1966 , pp. 452 - 473
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Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1966

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References

1 See, for instance, the book written by Olgin, Moissaye while the events of 1917 were still unfolding,The Soul of the Russian Revolution (New York 1917).Google Scholar A now outdated but still useful history by the Western economic historian Mavor, James, The Russian Revolution (London 1928)Google Scholar, suggests that the real revolution in economic and social matters was yet to come, and thus anticipates the concept of the “second Revolution” that many contend began with the launching of the first five-year plan the following year—“the year of the great change” (god velikogo pereloma) as Stalin called it. Still the best of the many attempts to trace the Revolution to prior Russian thought and culture is Berdyaev's, NicholasThe Origin of Russian Communism (New York 1937).Google ScholarEichenbaum, Vsevolod (Voline), La Révolution inconnue (Paris 1947)Google Scholar, equates the “unknown revolution” with the genuinely popular uprisings that coincided with the revolution but were crushed by the Bolshevik leadership. Trotsky's theory of “permanent revolution” was first set forth in an article in his volume Nasha revoliutsiia (St. Petersburg 1906)Google Scholar, abridged and slightly altered as Our Revolution (New York 1918).Google Scholar Trotsky's later and more full-blown three-volume work The History of the Russian Revolution (New York 1936)Google Scholar has among other distinctions that of inspiring a gigantic pictorial “History of the Russian Revolution,” 33 by 14 feet in size, by the fashionable “pop” artist Rivers, Larry (see the reproduction in Time, December 17, 1965, 70–71).Google ScholarUlam's, AdamThe Unfinished Revolution (New York 1960)Google Scholar is a ranging inquiry on the Marxist and Communist influence in the modern world; his The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (New York 1965)Google Scholar comes closer to being a history of the Revolution.

The term “revolution” has been used in a variety of often contradictory ways since its introduction in early modern times. Basically derived from astronomy, it was frequently used to describe an essentially conservative restoration: the “revolving” of a political or social body toward traditional normality after an aberrant period of violent change. See Snow, Vernon, “The Concept of Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England,” The Historical Journal, 11, No. 2 (1957), 162–74.Google Scholar Already in the mid-eighteenth century, before the great Pugachev rebellion among the peasantry or the formation of the modern revolutionary tradition among the “Pugachevs from the universities,” a visiting Frenchman said of Russia: “II n'y a point d'états qui n'aient eu leurs Révolutions; mais aucun n'en présente d'aussi extraordinaires, d'aussi rapides, et d'aussi multipliés que la Russie” (Lacombe, Jacques, Histoire des révolutions de l'empire de Russie [Paris 1760], iiiGoogle Scholar). Russians themselves still tend to use sui generis terms like perevorot (cataclysmic overturn) or perelom (sudden change, in the sense of a breaking point in a fever or a divide in stairs) in their discussion of revolutions.

The Age of the Democratic Revolution is, of course, the general title of the twovolume comprehensive history of the French Revolutionary era by Palmer, Robert R. (Princeton 1959, 1964)Google Scholar, which has as yet no single parallel dealing with the Russian case.

2 See the first part of section I of Kim, Michael P., ed., Istoriia SSSR: Epokha sotsializma 1917–1957 [History of the USSR: The Epoch of Socialism 1917–1957] (Moscow 1958).Google Scholar His chronological frame will apparently also be that of the popular history being prepared by the Institute of History of the Soviet Academy of Science, Istoriia velikpi oktiabr' skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii [History of the Great October Socialist Revolution], as announced and described in Novye Knigi, No. 42 (1962), 48–49.Google Scholar The new six-volume documentary collection Velikaia oktiabr'skaia sotsialisticheskaia revoliutsiia. Dokumenty i materialy [The Great October Socialist Revolution: Documents and Materials], prepared by the Academy (Moscow 1957–1962)Google Scholar, begins with the overthrow of Imperial power in February 1917 and ends with the coup in October.

3 Abramovitch, Raphael sees the dissolution of the Assembly as the “point of no return” in his The Soviet Revolution 1917–1939 (New York 1962)Google Scholar; it is also the terminal point of the high Stalinist collection, Lenin, and Stalin, , The Russian Revolution (New York 1938).Google ScholarCurtiss, John S. and Coquin, François see Brest-Litovsk as the cutoff point in their respective studies, The Russian Revolutions of 1917 (Princeton 1957)Google Scholar and La Revolution russe (Paris 1962).Google Scholar

4 This is the terminal point of Carr's, Edward Hallett magisterial three-volume The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923 (London 1950–1953).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 This distinction is basic to the neglected analysis of revolutions made by Onu, A. M., “Sotsiologicheskaia priroda revoliutsii” [The Sociological Nature of Revolution], in Sbornik statei posviashchennykh Pavlu Nikolaevichu Miliitkovu 1859–1929 [Collection of Articles Dedicated to Paul Nikolaevich Miliukov] (Prague 1929).Google Scholar According to this view, the Revolution of 1848, for instance, although physically widespread was only a series of parochial revolutions, judged by both regional focus and class interest, whereas the English Revolution of the seventeenth century was, for all its confinement to a small region, universal in both its aspirations for reform and its social inclusiveness.

Onu's work considers both the generalizations of Western sociologists and the special histories and controversies written (up to 1929) by specialists of the Russian Revolution. For other attempts to compare major revolutions see Brinton's, CraneAnatomy of Revolution (New York 1938)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Karsavin's work (cited here in n.32).

Among many stimulating comparisons of the French Revolution with the Russian, see that of the French historian of socialism, Zévaès, Alexandre B., written in July 1917 in the midst of the upheaval, La révolution russe (Paris 1917), 156–69Google Scholar; Rollin, Henry, La révolution russe, vols. (Paris 1931)Google Scholar; and Deutscher, Isaac in Russia in Transition, rev. ed., paper (New York 1960), 163–77.Google Scholar A. distinction between “local” and “universal” significance is also made by Iliodor A. Doroshev who, however, applies the latter term only to the October Revolution as the most important event of human history; see his introduction to the symposium which he edited under the title Vsemirno-istoricheskoe znachenie velikoi oktiabr'skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii [The World-Historical Significance of the Great October Socialist Revolution] (Moscow 1957), 3.Google Scholar

6 Weidlé, , Russia Absent and Present (New York 1952).Google Scholar The 1917–1921 framework is used by Chamberlin, William Henry in his two-volume History of the Russian Revolution (New York 1935)Google Scholar, which is still in many ways the best comprehensive narrative of events during the period. Deutscher also uses 1921 as the cutoff point in his The Prophet Armed (London 1954)Google Scholar, the second half of which remains one of the most successful and vivid attempts to tell the story of the Bolshevik accession to power through the career of one of its leaders.

7 Particularly valuable in this genre is the three-part first volume of the unfinished history by the liberal leader Miliukov, Paul, Istoriia vtoroi russkoi revoliutsii [History of the Second Russian Revolution] (Sofia 1921–1924)Google Scholar, the text of which was largely completed by August 1918. Also useful are the last two chapters of Miliukov's, Russia Today and Tomorrow (New York 1922)Google Scholar, which stimulated other reformists and radicals to write their own accounts, and General Anton Denikin's excellent fivevolume Ocherki russkoi smuty [Sketches of the Russian Tumult] (Paris and Berlin, 1921–1926)Google Scholar, which provided much information and notably lifted the level of apologetics among the more conservative White émigrés.

8 The tradition that interpretations of the Revolution become involved in political power struggles began with the furor over Trotsky's “Lessons of October,” published in the fall of 1924 as a preface to a collected volume of his speeches and writings of 1917. See the discussion in Deutscher's, The Prophet Unarmed (London 1959), 151ff.Google Scholar

9 A valuable account and itemization of the early histories of the Revolution has been provided by Karpovich, Michael in “The Russian Revolution of 1917,” Journal of Modern History, 11 (June 1930), 258–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; more recent studies of Soviet work are McNeal, Robert H., “Soviet Historiography on the October Revolution: A Review of Forty Years,” American Slavic and East European Review, XVII (October 1958), 269–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Utechin, Serge, “The Year 1917: New Publications in Party History,” Survey, No. 21–22 (1957). 5–11.Google Scholar

Attempts to collate various testimonial and historical accounts to provide paperback historiographical readers on the Revolution include Adams, Arthur, The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik Victory (Boston 1960)Google Scholar; McNeal, , The Russian Revolution: Why Did the Bolsheviks Win? (New York 1959)Google Scholar; and Comte, Gilbert, La Révolution russe par ses temoins (Paris 1963).Google Scholar

Among many interesting Soviet collections, see that of contemporary Western diplomatic dispatches interpreting to their governments the events leading up to the October Revolution, in Krasny Arkhiv, XXIV (1927), 108–63Google Scholar; for an overall bibliographical guide to documentary publications, see Gorodetsky, E. N., ed., Velikaia oktiabr' skaia sotsialisticheskaia revoliutsiia: Bibliografichesky ukazatelé dokumental' nykh publikatsii [The Great October Socialist Revolution: A Bibliographical Index of Documentary Publications] (Moscow 1961)Google Scholar; for a critical Soviet survey of German work, see Salov, V., “Germanskaia istoriografiia velikoi oktiabr'skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii” [German Historiography of the Great October Socialist Revolution], Novaia i Noveishaia Istoriia, IV (1957), 239–49.Google Scholar

10 Some study has been made of Western attitudes toward the Russian Revolution, though these studies are generally focused on a relatively small group of writers and deal more with polemic literature than with serious historical writing. See Anderson, Paul H., The Attitude of the American Leftist Leaders Toward the Russian Revolution 1917–1923 (Notre Dame 1942)Google Scholar; Lasch, Christopher, The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution (New York 1962)Google Scholar; Strakhovsky, Leonid, American Opinion About Russia 1917–1923 (Toronto 1961)Google Scholar; and Caute, David, Communism and the French Intellectuals (New York 1964).Google Scholar

11 Kerensky, Alexander, The Catastrophe (New York 1927)Google Scholar, and also his recent Russia and History's Turning Point (New York 1965).Google Scholar

12 Miliukov, Istoriia, 1, Fart 1, 48, gives an acerbic characterization of the kind of “pathetic order” that Kerensky issued, with “the pathos” of his political ineptitude “harmonizing badly with the prose of the Revolution.” This characterization is generally echoed in the eclectic but basically accidental-pathetic reading of the Revolution in Moorehead, Alan, The Russian Revolution (New York 1958), 9Google Scholar: “In the end the revolution slips by him almost accidentally. … He leaves the tragedy in much the way he entered it in the beginning, terror and violence all around him, handsomely and honorably knowing nothing.” A better accidental-pathetic account, which seeks “not to explain but to concretize” events that it collectively calls a “flood” is Sergei Mel'gunov, P., Kak Bolshevihi zakhvatili vlast' [How the Bolsheviks Seized Power], written in 1937 (Paris 1953).Google Scholar

13 Radkey, , The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism (New York 1958)Google Scholar, covers the Socialist Revolutionaries from March to October 1917, and The Sickle Under the Hammer (New York 1963)Google Scholar continues and rounds off the Socialist Revolutionaries' story.

14 (New York 1919), 41, 16. Reed's career and his disillusionment prior to his death in 1921 are discussed by Wolfe, Bertram, “The Harvard Man in the Kremlin Wall,” American Heritage (February 1960), 6–9, 94–103.Google Scholar

15 Mikoyan's speech is referenced and discussed in McNeal, “Historiography,” which also provides an account of official Communist efforts to write histories of the Revolution up to that time (1958).

Just as the production of Sergei Eisenstein's famous film Potemkin in 1925 for the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution of 1905 provided a kind of anticipatory model for the cinematic tributes that accompanied the celebration in 1927 of the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, so the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution of 1905 in 1955 helped precipitate a dramatic increase in historical and documentary collections. Both the two volumes edited by a committee under the late Pankratova, Anna M., Pervaia russkaia revoliutsiia i mezhdunarodnoe revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie [The First Russian Revolution and the International Revolutionary Movement] (Moscow 1955, 1956)Google Scholar, which trace the impact of the Russian uprising on such places as Mexico and Ireland, and the vast collection Revoliutsiia 1905–1907 gg. v Rossii. Dokumenty i materialy [The Revolution of 1905–1907: Documents and Materials] (Moscow 1955- )Google Scholar, twelve volumes at this writing, have provided the physical model for (and exceeded the length of) comparable volumes begun slightly later in connection with the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution (referenced in n.2). Another new collection of relevant documentary material from a quite different perspective is the three-volume work The Russian Provisional Government, 1917; Documents, edited by Browder, Robert P. and Kerensky, A. F. (Stanford 1961).Google Scholar

16 Cited from official English translations of texts in Current Background, American Consulate General (Hong Kong), No. 480 (November 13, 1957)Google Scholar, 1, 6. Lavish praise and festivities in honor of the October Revolution have continued in China unaffected by the acute Sino-Soviet conflict of recent times, or by Chinese denigration of Russian historical experience generally. The Chinese emphasis remains however on the need “to carry forward and develop the glorious traditions of the October Revolution and carry the world revolution through to the end” (People's Daily editorial of November 7, 1963, in Peking Review (November 13, 1963), 15. The Chinese also periodically cite (particularly on their own anniversaries) the formulation apparently first made on July 1, 1951, at the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, that “the prototype of the revolution in capitalist countries is the October Revolution; the prototype of the revolution in colonial and semi-colonial countries is the Chinese Revolution” (cited in Gilula, David, Counter-Insurgency Warfare [New York 1964], 139Google Scholar). Lin Piao, in his famous statement of September 3, 1965, on “People's War” appears to have found a synthesis with his contention that “the October Revolution opened up a new era in the revolution of the oppressed nations,” but principally by building “a bridge between the Socialist revolution of the proletariat of the West and the national-democratic revolution of the colonial and semi-colonial countries of the East.” The Chinese revolution alone has solved the decisive problem of the age: “how to link up the national democratic with the Socialist revolution in the colonial and semi-colonial countries” (New York Times, September 4, 1965, 2). The closest approach to a detailed Chinese discussion of the October Revolution appears to be Chungkuo jen-min ch'ing-chu shih-yüeh-ko-ming ssu-shih-chou-nien chi-nien wen-chi [A Collection of Commemorative Articles by Chinese People in Celebration of the Fortieth Anniversary of the October Revolution] (Peking 1958)Google Scholar, discussed with other material in Hsia, T. A., “Demons in Paradise: The Chinese Images of Russia,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 349 (September 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 33–34.

For a series of Soviet statements on the impact and significance of the October Revolution in the Orient, made in connection with celebrations of the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolution in 1947 (just before the final success of the Chinese Revolution became apparent), see Ivar and Spector, Marion, Readings in Russian History and Culture (Boston 1965), 291–300.Google Scholar For a recent Soviet analysis which includes an apparent riposte to the Chinese position (characteristically offered as a position which “no one doubts any more”), see Frantsev, Yu., “The Human Race Took Heart,” cited from Izvestiia, November 6, 1965Google Scholar, in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, December i, 1965, 3–4: “Now, no one any longer denies that it was the October Revolution that provided the experience in combining the proletarian revolution with the colonial revolution within countries. This experience was later demonstrated beyond its boundaries as well.”

17 Velikaia oktiabr'skaia sotsialisticheskaia revoliutsiia i ee mezhdunarodnoe znachenie [The Great October Socialist Revolution and Its International Meaning] (Moscow 1955), 5.Google Scholar The phrase quoted is the heading for an entire section in this work, which is distributed in a typically enormous printing of 170,000 copies.

18 (Moscow and Leningrad 1927), 11, 447.

19 The first phrase was used by the Socialist Revolutionary leader Chernov, Victor in The Great Russian Revolution (New Haven 1936), 445Google Scholar; the second, by the Cadet leader Miliukov in his Istoriia, 1, Part 1, 6. Both illustrate how the concept of irresistible forces of wills played on the minds of rival claimants for the allegiance of revolutionary passions in the year 1917.

20 Pokrovsky, 11, 448.

21 I, v.

22 Ibid., 100. This view is offered somewhat tentatively at the end of Part I as a conclusion that “may well have been true“; but the author's analysis here and subsequently suggests that this is his general view of almost all major Bolshevik policies.

23 The phrase was a favorite of Wrangel, Baron Peter N.; see his Memoirs (London 1929).Google Scholar

24 See Churchill, Winston, The Aftermath (New York 1929), 63–66Google Scholar, for his famous rhetorical characterization of Lenin as “the Great Repudiator.”

25 Bely, Andrei, Khristos voskres (Moscow 1918).Google Scholar For Blok's ecstatic essays of 1918 that provided prose accompaniment to “The Twelve” see his The Spirit of Music (London 1946).Google Scholar

26 Visionary futurists were free to speak much more honestly and openly about their actions. Karl Radek, for instance, who was close to Trotsky in both intellect and temperament, felt no need for qualms or even prudence in declaring that “Marxism was never really practically brought face to face with the question of force. … Dictatorship without terror is the last refuge of the bourgeoisie” (Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism [Detroit n.d.], 36, 56).

27 Rolland is writing in response to the appeals addressed to him early in 1928 by the Russian émigré writers Constantine Balmont and Ivan Bunin, as cited in Drabovitch, Wladimir, Les Intellectuels français et le bolchévisme (Paris 1937), 151–52.Google Scholar

28 The Russian Revolution, and Leninism or Marxism, paper (Ann Arbor 1961).Google Scholar A similar tragic view of the Revolution (in which the tragic flaw of the Bolsheviks is found in their sponsoring an elitist break with the democratic traditions on which Marxian socialism was to build) was taken even earlier by the founding figure of Russian Marxism, George Plekhanov, shortly before his death in May 1918. See his God na rodinu [A Year in the Fatherland] (Paris 1921), 11Google Scholar, 257–68. For another early tragic interpretation that blames the Russians' very lack of philistinism for their confusion and suffering, see Paquet, Alfons, “Die russische Revolution als tragisches Ereignis,” in Der Geist der russischen Revolution (Leipzig 1919), 69–109.Google Scholar

29 Ot fevralia po oktiabr' 1917 g. [From February to October 1917] (Berlin-Milan n.d.), 128–29.

30 The memoir of the Revolution by the leader of the Duma, Rodzianko, Michael, The Reign of Rasputin (New York 1927)Google Scholar, is almost obsessively focused on this figure, not just as a symptom but as a kind of root cause of the entire crisis.

31 See Russia Leaves the War (Princeton 1956), 4Google Scholar, for this citation amidst a magnificent word picture of Petersburg. The foreboding arising from the coronation of Nicholas was stressed in Mr. Kennan's opening lecture in a course on the age of Nicholas II given at Princeton University in the spring of 1964. It was also emphasized in Radziwill, Catherine, “The Great Revolution,” in her Rasputin and the Russian Revolution (New York 1918), 193ff.Google Scholar

32 Miliukov, Istoriia, 1, Part 1, 11ff. Denikin, Peter Struve, Mel'gunov, and many others also likened the revolutionary upheaval to those of the seventeenth century. For a less-known work, see Lokot', Timofei V., Smutnoe vretnia i revoliutsiia. Politic hesfcia paralleli 1613–1917 gg. [The Time of Troubles and the Revolution: Political Parallels 1613–1917] (Berlin 1923).Google Scholar The Eurasian theorist L. P. Karsavin refers to the smuta and the Revolution as “the two Russian revolutions” in his interesting and undeservedly neglected “Fenomenologiia revoliutsii” [The Phenomenology of Revolution], Evraziiskii Vremennik, V (1927), 28–74, esp. 72–73.Google Scholar

33 Chernov, 444. See also Moorehead, 29: “It is a climate and topography that call for extremes and idealism, not for liberalism and compromise.”

34 (London 1952), ix-x.

35 Niebuhr, X.

37 Ibid.

37 See Deutscher's rebuke of Carr for the insufficient consideration paid by Carr to “Lenin the revolutionary dreamer” in his historiographical review article of 1954 reprinted in Russia in Transition, 201–20.

38 Miliukov, 1, Part 1, 6, 11.

39 Lourié, , La Révolution russe (Paris 1921), 105–6Google Scholar, 110–11, 109. A similar conclusion is reached in the rambling but frequently stimulating and bibliographically useful discussion by Meyendorff, Baron Alexander, The Background of the Russian Revolution (New York 1929)Google Scholar, esp. 141–42.

40 Goly God [The Naked Year], first published in 1920, cited here from Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works] (Moscow and Leningrad 1929), 1, esp. pp. 97–103.Google Scholar

41 Wolfe, , Three Who Made a Revolution, paper (Boston 1955)Google Scholar; Sukhanov, Nicholas, The Russian Revolution 1917 (London 1955)Google Scholar, an abridged version of his seven-volume Zapiskj o revoliutsii [Notes on Revolution] (Berlin 1922–23)Google Scholar; and Daniels, , The Conscience of the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).Google Scholar

42 The Origin of the Communist Autocracy (London 1955).Google Scholar

43 The Life of Lenin (New York 1965).Google Scholar

44 Park, Alexander, Bolshevism in Turkestan, 1917–1927 (New York 1957)Google Scholar; Pipes, Richard, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).Google Scholar

45 (New York 1958), esp. 461, 518–19. Pasternak's view of the Revolution and the more general applicability of the concept of irony to modern Russian history are discussed in my The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Modern Russian Culture (New York 1966).Google Scholar

46 “‘October’: Myths and Realities,” New Leader (November 4, 1957), 22—an excellent article. See also in the same issue Karpovich's “Russia's Revolution in Focus,” 14–17, which adds to the author's vigorously anti-inevitabilist argument an ironic perspective with a strong suggestion that the losers of 1917 will ultimately prove vindicated.

47 Cited in Denikin, 1, 48–49.

48 Cited before the introduction to Plamenatz, John, German Marxism and Russian Communism (London 1954), IXGoogle Scholar; compare this with the almost identical statement of Engels in 1885 (appropriately cited in the introduction to Daniels, p. 4) about the impossibility of revolutionaries' predicting or controlling the course of the revolutions they themselves initiate. The same citation from Engels is featured in the ironic conclusion of Deutscher's short history, “The Russian Revolution,” which appears as Chapter 14 in The New Cambridge Modern History, XII (Cambridge 1960)Google Scholar; see esp. 412–15.