Review essay - What’s Left? Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 5 new books on the Russian Revolution
October: The Story of the Russian
Revolution by China Miéville
The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 by Mark D.
Steinberg
Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis,
1890 to 1928 by S.A. Smith
The Russian Revolution: A New History by
Sean McMeekin
Historically Inevitable? Turning Points of
the Russian Revolution by Tony Brenton
For Eric Hobsbawm, the
Russian Revolution – which occurred, as it happens, in the year of his birth –
was the central event of the 20th century. Its practical impact on the world
was ‘far more profound and global’ than that of the French Revolution a century
earlier: for ‘a mere thirty to forty years after Lenin’s arrival at the Finland
Station in Petrograd, one third of humanity found itself living under regimes
directly derived from the [revolution] … and Lenin’s organisational model, the
Communist Party’. Before 1991, this was a fairly standard view, even among
historians who, unlike Hobsbawm, were neither Marxists nor Communists. But
finishing his book in the early 1990s, Hobsbawm added a caveat: the century
whose history he was writing was the ‘short’ 20th century, running from 1914 to
1991, and the world the Russian Revolution had shaped was ‘the world that went
to pieces at the end of the 1980s’ – a lost world, in short, that was now being
replaced by a post-20th-century world whose outlines could not yet be
discerned. What the place of the Russian Revolution would be in the new era was
unclear to Hobsbawm twenty years ago, and largely remains so to historians
today. That ‘one third of humanity’ living under Soviet-inspired systems before
1989-91 has dramatically dwindled. As of 2017, the centenary of the revolution,
the number of Communist states in the world is down to a handful, with China’s
status ambiguous and only North Korea still clinging to the old verities.
Nothing fails like
failure, and for historians approaching the revolution’s centenary the
disappearance of the Soviet Union casts a pall. In the rash of new books on the
revolution, few make strong claims for its persisting significance and most
have an apologetic air. Representing the new consensus, Tony Brenton calls it
probably one of ‘history’s great dead ends, like the Inca Empire’. On top of
that, the revolution, stripped of the old Marxist grandeur of historical
necessity, turns out to look more or less like an accident. Workers – remember
when people used to argue passionately about whether it was a workers’
revolution? – have been pushed off stage by women and non-Russians from the
imperial borderlands. Socialism is so much of a mirage that it seems kinder not
to mention it. If there is a lesson to be drawn from the Russian Revolution, it
is the depressing one that revolutions usually make things worse, all the more
so in Russia, where it led to Stalinism.
This is the kind of
consensus that brings out the contrarian in me, even when I am to a large
extent part of it. My own The Russian Revolution, first published
in 1982 with a revised edition coming out this year, was always cool about
workers’ revolution and historical necessity, and made a point of being above
the political battle (mind you, I wrote the original version during the Cold
War, when there was still a political battle to be above). So it’s not in my
nature to come out as a revolutionary enthusiast. But shouldn’t someone do it?
That person, as it
turns out, is China Miéville, best known as a science fiction man of leftist
sympathies whose fiction is self-described as ‘weird’. Miéville is not a
historian, though he has done his homework, and his October is
not at all weird, but elegantly constructed and unexpectedly moving. What he
sets out to do, and admirably succeeds in doing, is to write an exciting story
of 1917 for those who are sympathetically inclined to revolution in general and
to the Bolsheviks’ revolution in particular. To be sure, Miéville, like
everyone else, concedes that it all ended in tears because, given the failure
of revolution elsewhere and the prematurity of Russia’s revolution, the
historical outcome was ‘Stalinism: a police state of paranoia, cruelty, murder
and kitsch’. But that hasn’t made him give up on revolutions, even if his hopes
are expressed in extremely qualified form. The world’s first socialist
revolution deserves celebration, he writes, because ‘things changed once, and
they might do so again’ (how’s that for a really minimal claim?). ‘Liberty’s
dim light’ shone briefly, even if ‘what might have been a sunrise [turned out
to be] a sunset.’ But it could have been otherwise with the Russian Revolution,
and ‘if its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them.’
Mark Steinberg is the
only one of the professional historians writing on the revolution to confess to
any lingering emotional attachment to it. Of course, revolutionary idealism and
daring leaps into the unknown tend to result in hard landings, but, Steinberg
writes, ‘I admit to finding this rather sad. Hence my admiration for those who
try to leap anyway.’ But even Steinberg – whose study of the ‘lived experience’
of 1917, based largely on the contemporary popular press and first-person
reports, is one of the freshest of the recent books – has largely abandoned his
earlier interest in workers in favour of other social ‘spaces’: women, peasants,
the empire and ‘the politics of the street’.
To understand the
current scholarly consensus on the Russian Revolution, we need to look back at
some of the old controversies, notably the one about inevitability. For
Steinberg, this isn’t a problem, as his contemporary worm’s-eye view ensures
that the story is full of surprises. But other writers are almost excessively
eager to tell us that outcomes were never set in stone and things might always
have gone differently. ‘There was nothing preordained about the collapse of the
tsarist autocracy nor even of the Provisional Government,’ Stephen Smith
writes, in his sober, well-researched and comprehensive history. Sean McMeekin
seconds this, affirming that ‘the events of 1917 were filled with
might-have-beens and missed chances’ while at the same time tipping his hat to
show who the intellectual enemy is: these events were ‘far from an
eschatological “class struggle” borne along irresistibly by the Marxist
dialectic’. In other words, the Marxists, Western and Soviet, were all wrong.
Historically
Inevitable?, an edited
collection, addresses the question of necessity directly by offering a series
of ‘what if?’ studies of key moments of the revolution. In his introduction
Tony Brenton asks: ‘Could things have gone differently? Were there moments when
a single decision taken another way, a random accident, a shot going straight
instead of crooked … could have altered the whole course of Russian, and so
European, and world, history?’ But Dominic Lieven is surely speaking for the
majority of the volume’s contributors when he writes that ‘nothing is more
fatal than a belief that history’s course was inevitable.’ To be sure, those
contributors see contingency as playing a greater part in the February and
October revolutions than in the post-October path towards terror and
dictatorship. Orlando Figes, author of a widely read study of the revolution,
The People’s Tragedy (1996), devotes a lively essay to showing that, had a
disguised Lenin not been admitted without a pass to the Congress of Soviets on
24 October, ‘history would have turned out differently.’
In play here are
various politically charged arguments about Soviet history. First, there is the
question of the inevitability of the collapse of the old regime and the Bolshevik
triumph. This is an old Soviet article of faith, hotly disputed in the past by
Western and, particularly, Russian émigré historians, who saw the tsarist
regime on a course of modernisation and liberalisation that the First World War
interrupted, plunging the country into disarray and making the previously
unimaginable Bolshevik victory possible (Lieven, in one of the most
sophisticated essays in the volume, characterises this interpretation of
Russia’s situation in 1914 as ‘very wishful thinking’). In the context of past
Sovietological debate on the revolution, raising the question of inevitability
was interpreted not just as a Marxist claim but as a pro-Soviet one, since the
implication was taken to be that the Soviet regime was ‘legitimate’. Contingency,
conversely, was the anti-Marxist position in Cold War terms – except,
confusingly, when the contingency in question applied to the revolution’s
Stalinist outcome, as opposed to its onset, in which case conventional wisdom
held that a totalitarian outcome was inevitable. Figes holds the same view:
while contingency played a big role in 1917, ‘from the October insurrection and
the establishment of a Bolshevik dictatorship to the Red Terror and the Civil
War – with all its consequences for the evolution of the Soviet regime – there
is a line of historical inevitability.’
In an attack on the
whole ‘what if?’ genre of history, Richard J. Evans has suggested that ‘in
practice … counterfactuals have been more or less a monopoly of the Right’ with
Marxism as target. That’s not necessarily true of the Brenton volume, despite
the inclusion of right-wing political historians like Richard Pipes and the
absence of any of the major American social historians of 1917 who were Pipes’s
opponents in the bitter historiographical controversies of the 1970s. Brenton
himself is a former diplomat, and the last sentence of Historically
Inevitable? – ‘We surely owe it to the many, many victims [of the
revolution] to ask whether we could have found another way’ – rather endearingly
suggests a diplomat’s propensity to try to solve problems in the real world, as
opposed to the professional historian’s habit of analysing them.
Pipes, who served as
Reagan’s Soviet expert on the National Security Council in the early 1980s, was
the author of a 1990 volume on the revolution that took a particularly strong
line on the basic illegitimacy of the Bolshevik takeover. His argument was
directed not only against the Soviets but also against revisionists closer to
home, notably a group of young US scholars, mainly social historians with a
special interest in labour history, who from the 1970s objected to the
characterisation of the October Revolution as a ‘coup’ and argued that in the
crucial months of 1917, from June to October, the Bolsheviks had increasing
popular, notably working-class, support. The 1917 revisionists’ work was
solidly researched, usually with information from Soviet archives which they
had been able to access thanks to newly established official US and British
student exchanges; and much of the field held it in high regard. But Pipes saw
them as, in effect, Soviet stooges, and was so contemptuous of their work that,
in defiance of scholarly convention, he refused even to acknowledge its
existence in his bibliography.
The Russian working
class was an object of intense interest for historians in the 1970s. This
wasn’t only because social history was in fashion in the profession at the
time, with labour history a popular sub-field, but also because of the
political implications: did the Bolshevik Party in fact have working-class
support and take power, as it claimed, on behalf of the proletariat? Much of
the revisionist Western work on Russian social and labour history despised by
Pipes focused on workers’ class consciousness and whether it was revolutionary;
and some but not all of its practitioners were Marxist. (In the non-Marxist
wing, I annoyed other revisionists by ignoring class consciousness and writing
about upward mobility.)
The authors of the
centenary books all have their own histories that are relevant here. Smith’s
first work, Red Petrograd (1983), fitted the labour history
rubric, although as a British scholar he was somewhat removed from American
fights, and his work was always too careful and judicious to allow for any
suggestion of political bias; he went on to write a fine and underappreciated
study, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative
History (2008), in which the workers and labour movements continued to
play a central role. Steinberg, a US scholar of the next generation, published
his first book on working-class consciousness, Proletarian Imagination,
in 2002, when social history had already taken the ‘cultural turn’, bringing a
new emphasis on subjectivity with less interest in ‘hard’ socio-economic data.
But this was more or less a last hurrah for the working class in writing on the
Russian Revolution. Pipes had rejected it outright, holding that the revolution
could be explained only in political terms. Figes in his influential People’s
Tragedy focused on society rather than politics, but minimised the
role of the ‘conscious’ workers, emphasising instead a lumpen proletariat
raging in the streets and destroying things. In their new works, Smith and
Steinberg are both uncharacteristically reticent on the subject of workers,
though street crime has entered their field of vision.
McMeekin, the youngest
of the authors here, set out to write a ‘new history’, by which he means an
anti-Marxist one. Following Pipes, but with his own twist, he includes an
extensive bibliography of works ‘cited or profitably consulted’ that omits all
social histories except Figes. This includes Smith’s and Steinberg’s earlier
books, as well as my own Russian Revolution (though it is
cited on p.xii as an example of Marxist, Soviet-influenced work). It could be
argued that McMeekin doesn’t need to read the social histories since his focus
in The Russian Revolution, as in his earlier work, is on the
political, diplomatic, military and international economic aspects. He draws on
a multinational archival source base, and the book is quite interesting in
detail, particularly the economic parts. But there’s a whiff of right-wing
nuttiness in his idea that ‘Marxist-style maximalist socialism’ is a real
current threat in Western capitalist countries. He doesn’t quite call the whole
revolution, from Lenin’s sealed train in April 1917 to the Rapallo Treaty in
1922, a German conspiracy, but that’s more or less what his narrative suggests.
The end points people
choose for their histories of revolution reveal a lot about their assumptions
of what it was ‘really about’. Rapallo is, appropriately, the end point for
McMeekin. For Miéville it’s October 1917 (revolution triumphant), for Steinberg
1921 (not so much victory in the Civil War, as you might expect, as an open end
with revolutionary business unfinished), and for Smith 1928. The last is an
awkward choice in terms of narrative drama, as it means that Smith’s book ends
with two whole chapters on the 1920s, when revolution was on hold under the New
Economic Policy, a retreat from the maximalist aims of the Civil War period
made necessary by economic collapse. It’s true, something like NEP might have
been the outcome of the Russian Revolution, but it actually wasn’t, because
Stalin came along. While the two chapters on NEP, like the rest of the book,
are thoughtful and well-researched, as a finale it’s more of a whimper than a
bang.
This brings us to
another highly contentious issue in Soviet history: whether there was essential
continuity from the Russian/Lenin Revolution to Stalin, or a basic disruption
between them occurring around 1928. My Russian Revolution includes
Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’ of the early 1930s, as well as his Great
Purges at the end of the decade, but that is unacceptable to many
anti-Stalinist Marxists. (Not surprisingly, Miéville’s annotated bibliography
finds it ‘useful … though unconvincingly wedded to an “inevitabilist”
Lenin-leads-to-Stalin perspective’.) Smith’s cohort of 1917 social historians
generally felt much like Miéville, partly because they were intent on defending
the revolution from the taint of Stalinism; but in this book, as on many
issues, Smith declines to take a categorical position. Stalin certainly thought
of himself as a Leninist, he points out, but on the other hand Lenin, had he
lived, would probably not have been so crudely violent. Stalin’s ‘Great Break’
of 1928-31 ‘fully merits the term “revolution”, since it changed the economy,
social relations and cultural patterns more profoundly than the October
Revolution had done’ and moreover demonstrated that ‘revolutionary energies’
were not yet exhausted. Still, from Smith’s standpoint it’s an epilogue, not an
intrinsic part of the Russian Revolution.
Even-handedness is the
hallmark of Smith’s solid and authoritative book, and I’m uneasily conscious of
not having done justice to its many virtues. Really the only trouble with it –
and with many of the works being published in this centenary year – is that
it’s not clear what impelled him to write it, other than perhaps a publisher’s
commission. He identified this problem himself in a recent symposium on the
Russian Revolution. ‘Our times are not especially friendly to the idea of
revolution … I suggest that while our knowledge of the Russian Revolution and
the Civil War has increased significantly, in key respects our ability to understand –
certainly to empathise with – the aspirations of 1917 has diminished.’
Other
contributors to the symposium were similarly downbeat, the Russian historian Boris
Kolonitsky noting that, while finding out the truth about the Russian
Revolution had seemed enormously important to him back in Leningrad in the
1970s, interest in the topic is now ‘falling drastically’. ‘I sometimes wonder:
who cares now about the Russian Revolution?’ Steinberg asks sadly, while Smith
writes on the first page of his Russia in Revolution that ‘the
challenge that the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 posed to global
capitalism still reverberates (albeit faintly).’
In purely scholarly
terms, the 1917 revolution has been on the back burner for some decades now,
after the excitement of the Cold War-fuelled arguments of the 1970s. The days
are long gone when the late imperial era could be labelled ‘pre-revolutionary’
– that is, interesting only in so far as it led to the revolutionary outcome.
That started to change in the 1980s and 1990s, with social and cultural
historians of Russia starting to explore all the interesting things that didn’t
necessarily lead to revolution, from crime and popular literature to the
church. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the revolution
shrivelled as a historical subject, revealing behind it the First World War,
whose significance for Russia (as opposed to all the other belligerents) had
previously been remarkably under-researched. That same collapse, by stripping
away the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union, brought questions of empire
and borderlands to the fore (hence Smith’s subtitle, ‘An Empire in Crisis’, and
Steinberg’s chapter on ‘Overcoming Empire’).
In the 1960s, it was
self-evident to E.H. Carr, as well as to his opponents like Leonard Schapiro,
that the Russian Revolution mattered. It mattered to Schapiro because it had
imposed a new political tyranny on Russia that threatened the free world, and
to Carr because it had pioneered the centralised state-planned economy that he
saw as a portent of the future. Coming to the subject in the 1970s, I concluded
that, along with the many ‘betrayals’ of socialist revolution pointed out by
Trotsky and a host of others, there were also many achievements in the realm of
economic and cultural modernisation, notably state-sponsored rapid
industrialisation in the 1930s. Hobsbawm made a similar point on a wider canvas
when he noted that ‘Soviet-based communism … became primarily a programme for
transforming backward countries into advanced ones.’ The modernisation point
still seems right to me, but it has been tarnished by the fact that, on the
economic side, it is a kind of modernisation that no longer looks modern. Who
cares now about building smoke-stack industries, except in a context of
polluting the environment?
Brenton’s confident
summation has a free-market triumphalism that, like Fukuyama’s End of
History, may not stand the test of time, but it reflects the negative
verdict of much current writing on the Russian Revolution:
It has taught us what does not work. It is hard to see Marxism making any sort of comeback. As a
theory of history the revolution tested it, and it failed. The dictatorship of
the proletariat did not lead to the communist utopia, but merely to more
dictatorship. It also failed as a prescription for economic governance. No
serious economist today is advocating total state ownership as the route to
prosperity … not the least of the lessons of the Russian Revolution is that for
most economic purposes the market works much better than the state. The rush
away from socialism since 1991 has been Gadarene.
If the Russian
Revolution had any lasting achievement, he adds, it is probably China. Smith,
in more cautious terms, makes a similar assessment:
The Soviet Union
proved capable of generating extensive growth in industrial production and of
building up a defence sector, but much less capable of competing with
capitalism once the latter shifted towards more intensive forms of production
and towards ‘consumer capitalism’. In this respect the record of the Chinese
Communists in promoting their country to the rank of a leading economic and
political world power was far more impressive than that of the regime on which
it broadly modelled itself. Indeed, as the 21st century advances, it may come
to seem that the Chinese Revolution was the great revolution
of the 20th century.
Now that’s a
conclusion that Putin’s Russia – still uncertain what it thinks of the
revolution, and therefore how to celebrate it – needs to ponder: the ‘Russian
Revolution’ brand is in danger. Perhaps by the time of the bicentenary Russia
will have worked out a way to salvage it, as the risk of losing a chapter in
the world history of the 20th century is surely one that no patriotic regime
should ignore. For the West (assuming that the extraordinarily resilient
dichotomy of ‘Russia’ and ‘the West’ survives into the next century), it is
bound to look different as well. Historians’ judgments, however much we hope
the opposite, reflect the present; and much of this apologetic and deprecatory
downgrading of the Russian Revolution simply reflects the – short term? –
impact of the Soviet collapse on its status. By 2117, who knows what people
will think?
