A revised version printed in Duncan
McFarland ed. The Russian Revolution and
the Soviet Union: Seeds of 21st Century Socialism, Changemaker
Publications. http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/chsngemaker
Harry Targ, Professor, Department of Political
Science, Purdue University
Understanding
Revolutions: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations
The phenomena of revolution has long been a subject of
interest to scholars and activists. The original curiosity about revolution has
its roots in histories and analyses of “the great revolutions,” the English
Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Russian
Revolution, and the Chinese Revolution. Subsequent to early studies of the
great revolutions scholars and activists have conceptualized historical transformations
in Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria, Iran and other cases as possible candidates for
studies of revolution.
Perhaps undergirding the study of societal changes in
the twentieth century, interest and concern about the Russian Revolution stands
out as a motivation for such research and speculation. A substantial hidden
motivation for this concern has been an implicit bias against the consequences
of the Russian Revolution for other societies, for order and stability, for
civilization, for the future of humankind. This bias includes various defenders
of traditional regimes and cultures and sectors
of left opposition to them who have been as vociferous opponents of the Russian
Revolution and its consequences as the avowed enemies of revolution.
This essay briefly surveys the social science study of
revolution, identifies key moments in the history of the former Soviet Union
(which was officially constituted in 1922, five years after the revolution)
from the vantage point of the anti-Soviet left, and proposes ways in which the
Russian Revolution and its aftermath has contributed to social change in the
twentieth century and continues to make contributions for the building of a
twenty-first century socialism. This is a difficult and controversial subject,
but one that needs to be confronted if a socialist agenda for the twenty-first
century is to be meaningful.
The
Social Scientific Study of Revolution
The subject of revolution has intrigued modern social
science research and theory. Jack Goldstone (“Toward a Fourth Generation of
Revolutionary Theory,” Annual Review of
Political Science, 2001:4, 139-187) provides a wide-ranging survey of the
twentieth century literature on the subject. He addresses the definitions of
revolution; types of revolutions: the causes of revolution; the role of states,
elites, ideology, mobilizations for and against revolution, foreign influences
and factors such as leadership and gender shaping revolutions. Each of these
sets of factors have generated research, discussion, and debate about this
thing called revolution.
The literature surveyed has several interesting
general features that characterize the way the phenomena has been studied. First, the concept of revolution, which was
first derived from interest in a handful of cases has expanded to include all
kinds of transfers of power; including Nicaragua, Iran, Afghanistan, and as
some data sets suggest hundreds of cases of the transfer of power. Second, as
Goldstone suggests, scholars have identified many “types” of revolutions: elite
led power shifts, grassroots mobilizations, worker-led versus peasant-led
forms, and unplanned disintegrations of political institutions. Third, the
literature, Goldstone indicates, addresses the causes of revolutions. Here too
there are a myriad of explanations from foreign intervention, the declining
legitimacy of elites, intra-elite factionalism, crises in the distribution of
resources among the population, unsustainable population growth, and stagnating
economies.
An additional designation of revolution addresses
various processes that generate the transformation that is being described.
Some research on revolution concentrates on the formation of oppositional
groups from unions to political parties, networking among opponents of regimes,
leadership skills, the building of
identities, and ideologies. In addition, some perspectives include a discussion
of culture, from value systems to popular manifestations of protest. Also
attention is paid to leadership skills and style. In recent years, studies have
addressed the role of gender in revolutionary processes. Further, “rational
choice” models assess the individual and
group costs and benefits of participating in some effort at systemic
transformation of the political and/or economic system.
As to the consequences of revolution, Goldstone
suggests the research is more sparse. “The outcomes of revolutions have
generated far less scholarly inquiry than the causes, with the possible
exception of outcomes regarding gender. This may be because the outcomes of
revolutions are assumed to follow straightforwardly if the revolutionaries
succeed. However, such research as we have on outcomes contradicts this assumption:
revolutionary outcomes take unexpected twists and turns” (Goldstone, 167). The
research that has been done, he said, shows little long-term economic
development or democratization after revolutionary occurrences. While China and
the Soviet Union experienced short-term industrialization neither “has
succeeded in generating the broad-based economic innovation and
entrepreneurship required to generate sustained rapid economic advance.” He refers to an edited collection by D.Chirot,
(The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline
of the Left: the Revolutions of 1989, 1991, University of Washington Press)
on this point.
After summarizing the myriad of studies of revolution,
Goldstone does say that despite their failures to achieve sustained economic
development and democratization they have been “remarkably successful in
mobilizing populations and utilizing the mobilization for political and
military power.” And these results, he claims, are attributable to strong
leadership. In terms of international relations, revolutions have had consequences:
stimulating others to revolt, causing threatened states to engage in conflict
with the new regimes, and stimulating new states to engage in aggressiveness
(for example the warlike behavior resulting from the Nazi “revolution”).
This survey of the social scientific study of
revolution suggests many weaknesses. First, what is called “revolution” is
defined in so many ways that all different transfers of power from Russia,
China, Germany, Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, to Cuba are all contenders
irrespective of their radically different aims and bases of support.
Second, the lack of definition affords social
scientists the opportunity to disaggregate every conceivable variable that
might be part of the phenomena such that the historical and dialectical character
of the revolutionary process is totally excluded from the analysis. Mindless
empiricism replaces subtle historically-grounded judgement.
Third, and as a result of the second, leadership,
organization, ideology, class, economic and political context, the cultural
backdrop, and the international dimensions are all disassembled in such a way
as to mask the reality behind the process.
Fourth, the analyses tend to be “presentist,” that is
the history that led up to the transfer of power and the long-term domestic and
international impacts of the revolution are eliminated from the analysis. And
to the contrary, commentators and activists who have been part of revolutionary
struggles provide a lens on the process that is usually deeply embedded in the
country’s history, the long-term prospects for organizing aggrieved groups, and
a vision of a “better future” that takes account of various setbacks, patterns
of resistance, and regime errors. Social scientists have little or no
sensitivity to revolution as an historic project.
And it is for these reasons that assessments of the
Russian Revolution, 100 years later, requires an historical and dialectical
assessment that goes beyond conventional scholarship.
Historical
Materialists Analyses of the Post-1917 Post Soviet Experience:
Left critics of the former Soviet Union (and by
implication often the Russian Revolution) have historicized the revolutionary
process as they have assessed its impacts. If there is an historical narrative
it is “declension,” or a step-by-step set of decisions that led to a betrayal
of the vision of the revolution. The categorization of experiences of decline
include the bureaucratization of the state, the centralization of power,
Stalinism, and the transition from socialism to Soviet Social Imperialism. Each
of these critiques is the result of political disputes between key political
actors and/or nation-states as they engage with or confront the former Soviet
Union. For some, the emerging conflicts have their roots in the Russian
Revolution itself, particularly after the death of Lenin.
Looking at critical historical junctures, left critics
of the Russian Revolution identify at least six moments in the declension.
First, the Soviet leadership debated the direction of economic planning in the
post-Civil War period shifting from “war communism” to the New Economic Policy.
The latter reflected the need to slow down the process of moving from a
capitalist to a socialist economy, recognizing the ongoing role of markets, and
protecting private property, central to the outlook of the peasantry. For some,
the NEP adopted by Lenin, constituted a shift away from the socialist project.
Pragmatism replaced principle.
Second, with the death of Lenin, Stalin emerged as the
new leader of the Soviet Union. He moved to collectivize agriculture, shifted
more in the direction of a command economy, isolated his enemies, and escalated
repression of dissent. What became known as Stalinism was a metaphor for
totalitarianism. Totalitarian societies, critics suggested, were those in which
the minds and behaviors of its members were controlled by a top-down
administrative apparatus.
Third, the Soviet/Nazi Pact of 1938 is presented as
proof that the similarities between fascism and Soviet-style communism
outweighed any differences that were claimed by each. It showed, the critics
said, that Stalin was willing to make a pact with any regime to maintain
himself in power. At the state level the construction of socialism was replaced
by traditional conceptions of national interest.
Fourth, the consequences of Stalinism were proclaimed
in Nikita Khrushchev’s famous Twentieth Party Congress speech in 1956. It
condemned the loss of life during the collectivization of agriculture, the
trial and execution of Stalin’s enemies in the late 1930s, and criticized Stalin’s efforts to control the
political life of allies in Eastern Europe.
Fifth, the Soviet Union practiced “great power
chauvinism,” intervening in other countries when the latter seemed to be
pursuing an independent path of economic and political development. This was
most visible as Soviet troops crushed rebellions in Budapest in 1956 and Prague
Spring in 1968. In both cases, workers and students sought more political
autonomy within the Socialist camp.
And finally, many Communists around the world embraced
the Chinese evaluation of the Soviet Union as a case of Soviet Social
Imperialism, that is socialist in name but capitalist and imperialist in
reality. And the Chinese embraced Mao’s “theory of three worlds.” One of the
world’s poles, consisted of the United States and the Soviet Union. This pole
represented the pursuit of global hegemony at the expense of most countries in
the international system. The vast majority of countries were from the “Third
World.” European countries, east and west, constituted a Second World.
Consequently, with China in the lead, the countries and peoples of the Third
World, needed to band together to challenge
the domination of the two imperial powers and their client states.
The theorists who articulated one or many of these six
moments came from the Communist or Socialist left. Contrary to the social
scientists, these analysts derived their positions from historical analyses.
Several of the theoretical positions on the Russian Revolution in decline came
from the prioritizing of these historical moments; whether embracing the NEP,
the rise of Stalinism, the Soviet-Nazi Pact, the revelations of Khrushchev, the
invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, or the Sino/Soviet split. But while
these analyses use history to make their case against the historic project of
the Russian Revolution they do so in a one-sided and ultimately ahistorical
way. Whereas the social scientists atomize their subject, the left critical
theorists derive simplistic historical lessons from their analyses.
Contextualizing
the Russian Revolutionary Project
In 1916, Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik party that
would seize power in 1917 and establish a state commonly referred to as Communist,
wrote an essay: “Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism.” In it he
described the latest stage of capitalist development as consisting of an
economic system in each developed country of industrial and financial
monopolies increasingly pursuing investment and trade opportunities in other
countries. Sometimes powerful capitalist countries cooperated with each other,
accepting spheres of influence where each would dominate. Other times powerful
capitalist states would compete with each other for access to land, labor,
resources, and investment opportunities. These last circumstances could lead to
war. And, for Lenin, World War One was a direct result of capitalist
competition and conflict.
One year after Lenin published his essay Lenin’s
political party seized state power in Russia and created the new Soviet Union,
the first state generally defined as Communist. President Wilson of the United
States and his Secretary of State began to speak of the new danger of Communism
to the prospects for creating democracies and market-oriented economies across
the globe. The animosity to the new regime in Russia was manifested in several
ways. Armies from at least fifteen countries sent troops to support a
counter-revolutionary campaign against the new Soviet government. The
counter-revolution supported by the United States continued until 1933 as it
refused to diplomatically recognize the Soviet regime. When President Franklin Roosevelt assumed
office in 1933, the Soviet Union was finally recognized.
During the 1930s, fascist movements gained power in
Germany, Italy, Japan, and across central Europe. The Soviet Union, now led by
Joseph Stalin, engaged in programs of rapid industrialization in part out of
fear of the rise of German fascism. With the emergence of a fascist assault on
democracy in Spain, relative isolationist policies in the United States, and
acquiescence to fascism among European powers, the Soviet Union signed a
controversial peace pact with Nazi Germany. The Germans also signed an
agreement at Munich with Great Britain, France, and Italy promising
non-aggression. This promise was short lived as their army invaded Poland in
1939. In 1941 they rescinded the Soviet/German agreement by invading the Soviet
Union. The United States began to supply western nations fighting Germany with
war material and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States
declared war on Japan and Germany. World War Two ensued.
During the war an “unnatural” but necessary alliance
was formed between the United States and Great Britain, the new capitalist
giant and the declining capitalist colonial power, and the Soviet Union, the
center of the Communist political and ideological universe. After four years of
devastating war in which 27 million Soviet citizens died and the Red army
confronted 90 percent of Germany’s armies, the Nazi war machine was defeated in
Europe. United States and British forces defeated Japanese militarism in Asia.
The leaders of the wartime anti-fascist alliance, President Roosevelt, Winston
Churchill of Great Britain, and Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union met at Yalta
on the Crimean Sea in February, 1945 and reached agreements on the
establishment of a post-war world order. Just before the war ended in Europe,
April, 1945, the new United Nations held its first meeting in San Francisco.
The “spirit of Yalta” was short-lived as escalating
tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union developed over a
variety of issues as when to hold Polish elections, Soviet support of a
separatist movement in Iran, and the Greek Civil War, where an anti-communist
government was trying to repress the former Greek resistance dominated by Greek
Communists. The struggle was over what kind of post-war government should be
created. The British, who had supported a repressive Greek government, urged
the United States to step in, help the faltering Greek government, and save
Greece from Communism. In a meeting held in February, 1947 to develop a
recommendation for President Harry Truman, key diplomats and politicians
endorsed the idea of United States financial and military support for the
beleaguered Greek government. The Republican chairperson of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg, advised President Truman that he better
“scare hell out of the American people” if the President would want to build
support for a global policy of opposition to the Soviet Union.
Taking Vandenberg’s advice, President Truman spoke to
the Congress and the nation on March 13, 1947 announcing his famous Truman
Doctrine. He declared that the United States was going to be involved in a long
war against a diabolical enemy, the Soviet Union. He said it must be the role
of the United States to defend free peoples everywhere against the spread of
International Communism. With that speech, warning of the Communist threat and
need of the U.S. to resist it, the
general features of United States foreign policy for the next forty years were
proclaimed.
“The
Free World” Battles “International Communism” Over the 45 years between the end of World War Two and the beginnings of the collapse of Soviet bloc Communist states, tensions, threats of war, proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union ensued. The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Central America, and Southern Africa involved super power troops and/or military assistance to support their side in the Cold War. Historians have debated the root causes of United States foreign policy toward the Soviet Union. Some claim, as President Truman articulated, that the spread of International Communism, primarily through Soviet expansion, required a bold aggressive U.S. foreign policy. Others argued that the U.S./Soviet conflict was not too dissimilar from most big power conflicts in world history. Finally, the historical revisionists developed the most compelling case claiming that U.S. foreign policy was about the interests of global capital. The spread of Communism, ever since the initiation of the Russian Revolution was seen as a threat to the pursuit of investment, trade, cheap labor, access to natural resources and, in total, corporate profits.
Irrespective of the root causes of U.S. and allied
foreign policies, they were explained in terms of the Communist threat. Pundits
referred in a simplistic way to writings of Marx or Lenin or Mao Zedong to
prove that Communist regimes sought to expand their power and control. This
theme exacerbated political conflicts within the United States as the Communist
issue was used to promote conservative politicians and public policies. The
decade of the 1950s is often identified with the Wisconsin Senator Joseph
McCarthy who claimed that the successes of Communist regimes such as the Soviet
Union and China occurred because of subversive Communist individuals and groups
in or close to the United States government who were committed to weakening
American institutions including government, popular culture, the education
system, and even the military. While anti-communism had been deeply embedded in
the American political culture ever since the rise of the labor movement in the
19th century, it grew in 1917, and flourished after World War Two.
Being a Communist became associated with liberal domestic policies and supporting
peaceful relations with Communist states.
Soviet fear of the west had its roots in the
interventions of western and Japanese armies on the side of
counter-revolutionaries during the Russian civil war. Statements from U.S.
presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan about the threat the Soviet
Union represented exacerbated Soviet fears. And paralleling Truman’s warning of
the danger of International Communism to Ronald Reagan’s conceptualization of
the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,” the Soviet Union consolidated its
control of Eastern Europe, sought to keep up with the west in the arms race,
and supported allies in the Global South who were challenging the rule of
pro-western governments. The concept of
Communism in the west and capitalist imperialism in the east fueled an
escalating arms race, the profusion of nuclear weapons, and periodic crises
that brought the two big powers into direct conflict. From the Berlin Blockade
to the Korean and Vietnamese Wars to the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the building
of the Berlin War, the Cold War always had within it the danger of escalating
to hot war, maybe even nuclear war. The impacts of this ideological
contestation led to wasted military expenditures on both sides, wars in the
name of fighting Communism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; domestic
repression in both the Western and Soviet orbit, and always the fear of nuclear
war lurking in the background.
Conflicts
Within the Communist World
Key foreign policy decision-makers in the United States
and many spokespersons for Communist countries and movements portrayed the Communist
world as one based on solidarity and harmony. For the West, ironically, this
perceived unity was the basis of the threat Communism meant for the so-called
free world. However, while many states, and parties outside the Communist
orbit, shared in a general Marxist/Leninist outlook, geopolitical conflicts
diminished the harmony that simplistic outsiders believed existed among Communists.
The most significant and long-standing geopolitical
and violent conflict among Communist nations involved the two largest, most
powerful, and most engaged Communist countries; the Soviet Union and China. The
so-called Sino-Soviet split which became visible to the world in the late 1960s
had its roots in troubled relations between Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union
and Mao Zedong of the Chinese Communist Party going back as far as the 1920s.
Soviet/Chinese diplomatic tensions intensified in the late 1950s when Soviet
and Chinese policy-makers disagreed about the appropriate development model the
latter should adopt, whether the Soviets should provide the Chinese with
nuclear weapons, and whether the Soviet Union should be negotiating with the
capitalist enemy, the United States.
By the 1960s, Mao Zedong was declaring that the
Peoples Republic of China, not the Soviet Union, represented the hub of an
International Communist movement of poor countries. Mao declared that the
Soviet Union was a state capitalist, and therefore imperialist, power and as
much a threat to most of the world as the United States. The Nixon
Administration, for the first time recognizing the Sino/Soviet split, began to
play one Communist giant off against another. The president reopened relations
with and visited China and signed trade and arms agreements with the Soviet
Union. This increased the fears the Soviets and the Chinese had of each other,
making them more cooperative with the traditional enemy, the United States.
The growing conflict between the Soviet Union and
China reverberated around the world. On the Indochinese peninsula, the Soviet
Union supported the newly unified Vietnamese government in its disputes with a
new regime in Cambodia. The Chinese supported the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia
and invaded Vietnam in 1978. The Soviets and the Chinese supported different
political groups in the long civil war in Angola. And in general, Communist
regimes and parties felt compelled to side with one Communist giant against
another.
These internecine conflicts weakened the Communist
world and the Communist movement as a force in world history. The Sino/Soviet
split was vital to understanding the collapse of the Soviet bloc between 1989
and 1991 and the shift of the post-Cold War international system to one based
on globalization. What is clear is that the role of the vision, the ideology,
and the practice of Communism was made more complicated and ultimately was
contradicted by geopolitics in international relations.
Assessing
the Russian Revolutionary Project in the Twentieth Century
Social scientists have contributed to the discussion
of revolutionary processes by studying political organizations, leadership,
ideology, mass-based support, regime types, and external interventions. Left
critics of the Russian Revolution and the former Soviet Union, provide useful
analyses of weaknesses in efforts to build socialism in the former Soviet
Union. At the same time there is a danger in these intellectual traditions in
that they underestimate the extraordinary contributions the Russian Revolution
and the Soviet Union made to the advance of socialism as a world historic
project. And by marginalizing this history, millennial activists lack the tools
to learn from the twentieth century about theory and practice, finding
themselves groping for an understanding of where modern exploitation and
oppression have come from and thinking about ways to challenge them.
First, the Russian Revolution was the singular event
in modern history where a radical overthrow of a reactionary regime occurred,
in which the new leadership represented the interests and perspectives of the
working class. Its leaders embraced an anti-capitalist agenda and articulated a
vision of building socialism, in both Russia and the entire international
system.
Second, for oppressed people around the world (Lenin
estimated that 1/7 of the world’s population lived under colonialism) the
Russian Revolution stood for the overthrow of rule by the small number of
capitalist powers. Within a decade of the solidification of the Revolution,
anti-colonial activists from every continent began to dialogue about developing
a common struggle against the great colonial empires of the first half of the
twentieth century. And Third World revolutionary and anti-colonial activists,
such as Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, looked to the Russian experience as a guide
and source of support for their struggles.
Third, the experience of the Russian workers,
paralleled by workers movements in the United States and other countries, gave
impetus and inspiration to class struggles. Leaders of the Industrial Workers
of the World (IWW) for example and many Debsian Socialists saw the Russian
Revolution as a stepping-stone for the overthrow of capitalist exploitation of
the working class in the United States.
Fourth, the Bolshevik Revolution stimulated new
currents in struggles of people of color, particularly in the United States. Black Nationalist leaders of the African Blood
Brotherhood and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance began to see a
connection between racism and capitalist exploitation. Cyril Briggs, Harry
Haywood, and others of the ABB were early founders of the Communist Party USA.
Many saw in the evolving Soviet experience a commitment to oppose all forms of
national oppression, including anti-Semitism, and over the decades prominent
artists, intellectuals, and activists such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois
spoke to the connections between capitalist exploitation, national oppression
and colonialism, racism, and war. In each
of these cases the image of the Russian Revolution, if not the reality,
contributed mightily to global struggles against capitalism, imperialism, and
racism.
Fifth, International Women’s Day was first celebrated
by the newly created Russian government on March 8, 1917, and it became a
national holiday in the Soviet Union after the Bolsheviks seized power in
November, 1917. As in reference to marginalized people, workers, people of
color, ethnic minorities, the Russian Revolution sent a message that human
liberation for all was possible. In the case of women, the new regime declared
its commitment to women at a time when struggles for women’s suffrage were
occurring in Great Britain and the
United States.
Sixth, the
first decade of the Russian Revolution was a time of experimentation in the
arts and culture. Poster art, literature, music, alternative theories of pedagogy
were stimulated by the revolutionary atmosphere. The support for cultural
experimentation was stifled in the 1930s with the rise of the fascist threat
and Stalinism at home but the linking of political revolution and cultural
liberation became etched in the consciousness of revolutionaries everywhere. The
literacy campaigns in Cuba and Nicaragua many years later may have been
inspired by cultural dimensions of revolution inspired by the Russian
Revolution.
Seventh, the rise of fascism in Europe and Asia created
the necessity of anti-fascist states mobilizing for war. The Soviet Union
assumed a major burden and thus became a leader in the anti-fascist struggles
that engulfed the world by the late 1930s. Sensing impending German aggression,
the creativity of the revolution was transformed into a mass mobilization of
workers to rapid industrialization in preparation for German aggression.
Germany invaded Poland in 1938 and the former Soviet Union in 1941. From the
onset of World War II until its end, vast stretches of the Soviet homeland were
laid waste and over 27 million Russians died in war. Without the Soviet
sacrifice, fascism would have engulfed Europe.
Eighth, in the Cold War period, the Soviet Union and
its allies were confronted with an anti-Soviet, anti-communist coalition of
nations committed to the “rollback” of International Communism. What began as
the first step down the path to socialism became a great power battle between
the east and the west. And despite the enormity of resources the Soviets
committed to their side of the arms race, they still supported virtually every
anti-colonial, anti-imperial campaign around the world; from Asia, to Africa,
to the Middle East, and Latin America. They gave Vietnam and Cuba as lifeline;
they supported the African National Congress and South African Communist Party;
the MPLA in Angola; and they supported nationalists leaders such as Gamal Abdul
Nasser in Egypt.
Ninth, until the Sino/Soviet split rent asunder the
socialist camp, the Soviet Union provided a check on the unbridled advances of
western capitalism. After the split in international communism in the 1960s,
Soviet influence in the world began to decline. This split had much to do with
the dramatic weakening of socialism as a world force in the 1990s. One can only speculate what the twenty-first
century would have looked like if the Soviet Union had survived? Would the wars
on Afghanistan and Iraq have occurred? Would the Libyan regime have been
overthrown? Would the countries of the Global South have had larger political
space in world politics inside and outside the United Nations?
Lessons
Learned: Assessing the Revolutionary Project
It is important, one hundred years after the Russian
Revolution, to think about its contribution to human history, (and for many of
us to twenty-first century socialism). First, it is important to conceptualize
revolution as a multi-dimensional historical process, a process which sets off
numerous collateral responses, positive and negative. This means that all the
variables articulated by social scientists are part of an explanation of what
revolution means. Also the history of shortcomings and the historical contexts
are part of this process.
Second, when we revisit the Russian Revolution (and
the Soviet Union which has to be seen as an extension of the revolutionary
project) several features, often ignored, need to be stressed. The Russian
Revolution planted the seeds for workers struggles everywhere. The Russian
Revolution inspired anti-racist campaigns, particularly developing the links
between class and race. The Russian Revolution provided a modest dimension to
the historic process of women’s liberation. And putting all this together the
Russian Revolution, and the material support of the former Soviet Union, gave
impetus to the anti-colonial movements of the last half of the twentieth
century. And we must remember that virtually all these dimensions were actively
opposed by western imperialism, particularly the United States.
Having recognized all this, and other contributions as
well, twenty-first century advocates of socialism need to revisit the history
of socialism, of revolution, to find the roots of today’s struggles. The
intellectual formulations of today, as well as debates about them, go back at
least one hundred years. The intellectual connections revolutionaries today
make with their past can be liberating in that they suggest continuity with
common historic struggles. And they provide an opportunity to relive, study,
critique, embrace or reject, ideas, strategies, tactics, and organizational
forms of the past.
As a former leader of the Chinese Communist movement,
Zhou Enlai is alleged to have said in response to a journalist’s request for an
evaluation of the French Revolution, Zhou said, “it’s too early to say.”
