Six Views of the Russian Revolution

Author(s): James H. Billington

Source: World Politics , Apr., 1966, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Apr., 1966), pp. 452-473
Published by: Cambridge University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2009765

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SIX VIEWS OF THE

RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

By JAMES H. BILLINGTON

F a central problem for any nineteenth-century thinker was that

of defining his attitude toward the French Revolution, a cent
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 i9I7 are even more force-
fully mobilized and tangibly powerful than those called into being
by the French Revolution of I789 and the "age of the democratic
revolution." Thus, as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the
Revolution of I9I7 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.
The Russian Revolution offers a fascinating kaleidoscope: a genuine
"insurgency" from below (the February Revolution that overthrew
Tsardom) followed by a coup d'etat from above (the October Revolu-
tion) and a protracted internal war (the Civil War of i9i8-I920). With
the Revolution, there vaulted into power a relatively new institution
of governmental authority (the Soviets), a new type of political party
(the Bolshevik "party of a new type"), and some brilliant new
leaders claiming to speak for hitherto forgotten social classes.
However conflicting the varying testimonies and histories, there is l
doubt that there was a tangible revolution in the Russia of I9I7 that
fully satisfies the current dictionary definition of an "overturn and
fundamental change in political organization." Some have, to be sure,
spoken of the "real" revolution that occurred earlier in the minds
of men; of a "second" revolution occurring later under Stalin during
the forced collectivization and industrialization of I929-I932; or of
revolutions that are "unknown," "unfinished," "permanent," or pos-
sessed of a special "soul."' But the center of all this brooding and pre-
1 See, for instance, the book written by Moissaye Olgin while the events of I9I7 were
still unfolding, The Soul of the Russian Revolution (New York I9I7). A now out-
dated but still useful history by the Western economic historian James Mavor, The
Russian Revolution (London I928), suggests that the real revolution in economic and
social matters was yet to come, and thus anticipates the concept of the "second Revolu-
tion" that many contend began with the launching of the first five-year plan the fol-
lowing year-"the year of the great change" (god velikogo pereloma) as Stalin cal

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VIEWS OF THE REVOLUTION 453

occupation remains the indelibly revolutionary events centered on

I9I7. None who participated in these events disputes the applicability
of the often overused word "Revolution"; no one questions the use
of a capital "R"; most could perhaps agree on a skeletal description of
the Revolution as the seizure, extension, and defense of state power
throughout most of the old Russian Empire, then in a state of near
anarchy, by substantial elements of the unpropertied classes under the
leadership of a disciplined, new political organization consecrated to
a new philosophy of history and social organization.
Providing a chronological frame for this Revolution immediately
involves one, however, in controversy. Official Soviet historians recog-
nize that the "Great October Revolution" began earlier than that
month (with the destruction of Imperial authority in the precedent
February Revolution) and was not even provisionally completed
until later (with the promulgation of a formal constitution for
the first and largest of the new Socialist republics, the Russian, in July

it. Still the best of the many attempts to trace the Revolution to prior Russian thought
and culture is Nicholas Berdyaev's The Origin of Russian Communism (New York
I937). Vsevolod Eichenbaum (Voline), La Re'volution inconnue (Paris I947), 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 "perma-
nent revolution" was first set forth in an article in his volume Nasha revoliutsiia (St.
Petersburg i906), abridged and slightly altered as Our Revolution (New York i9i8).
Trotsky's later and more full-blown three-volume work The History of the Russian
Revolution (New York I936) has among other distinctions that of inspiring a gigantic
pictorial "History of the Russian Revolution," 33 by I4 feet in size, by the fashionable
"pop" artist Larry Rivers (see the reproduction in Time, December I7, i965, 70-71).
Adam Ulam's The Unfinished Revolution (New York i960) 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 i965) 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 Vernon Snow, "The Concept of Revolution in Seventeenth-
Century England," The Historical Journal, ii, No. 2 0957), i62-74. Already in
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'etats qui n'aient
eu leurs Revolutions; mais aucun n'en presente d'aussi extraordinaires, d'aussi rapides,
et d'aussi multipliees que la Russie" (Jacques Lacombe, Histoire des revolutions de
l'empire de Russie [Paris I760], iii). 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 two-
volume comprehensive history of the French Revolutionary era by Robert R. Palmer
(Princeton I959, i964), which has as yet no single parallel dealing with the Russian
case.

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454 WORLD POLITICS

i9i8).2 Non-Soviet historians generally attach more significance to

the February Revolution and to precedent agitation for reform in the
late Imperial period, but do not for the most part challenge some
such chronological frame. Some view events in early i9i8 (the dissolu-
tion of the Constituent Assembly or the attainment of peace at Brest-
Litovsk)' as the logical cutoff point; others extend the date to the
adoption of the final constitution for the entire USSR in I923.4
My proposed general definition of this revolution suggests a chrono-
logical frame somewhere between the two extremes, in which, how-
ever, Revolution and Civil War are not separated. Mine would be a
four-year frame from March I9I7 to March I92I: from the month in
which the old order collapsed to the time at which the last mass-based
internal opposition within the major centers of power (the Kronstadt
sailors and the Workers' Opposition) were forcibly silenced (during the
historic Tenth Party Congress). Only by the latter date was it com-
pletely clear (a) that the Leninist oligarchy's hold on state power was
not to be modified by the Soviets or by the party rank and file within
any more than by sworn enemies without, and (b) that concessions in
internal and foreign relations necessary to consolidate power did not
imply any basic renunciation of the ideological convictions that made
this a "universal" and not merely a "parochial" revolution.5 This
2 See the first part of section i of Michael P. Kim, ed., Istoriia SSSR: Epokha
sotsializma 1917-1957 [History of the USSR: The Epoch of Socialism I9I7-I957]
(Moscow I958). His chronological frame will apparently also be that of the popular his-
tory being prepared by the Institute of History of the Soviet Academy of Science,
Istoriia velikoi oktiabr'skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii [History of the Great October
Socialist Revolution], as announced and described in Novye Knigi, No. 42 (i962), 48-
49. The new six-volume documentary collection Velikaia oktiabr'skaia sotsialisticheska
revoliutsiia. Dokumenty i materialy [The Great October Socialist Revolution: Docu
ments and Materials], prepared by the Academy (Moscow I957-I962), begins with the
overthrow of Imperial power in February I9I7 and ends with the coup in October.
3 Raphael Abramovitch sees the dissolution of the Assembly as the "point of no
return" in his The Soviet Revolution 1917-1939 (New York i962); it is also the
terminal point of the high Stalinist collection, Lenin and Stalin, The Russian Revolu-
tion (New York I938). John S. Curtiss and Fran~ois Coquin see Brest-Litovsk as the
cutoff point in their respective studies, The Russian Revolutions of 1917 (Princeton
I957) and La Revolution russe (Paris I962).
4 This is the terminal point of Edward Hallett Carr's magisterial three-volume
The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923 (London I950-I953).
5This distinction is basic to the neglected analysis of revolutions made by A. M.
Onu, "Sotsiologicheskaia priroda revoliutsii" [The Sociological Nature of Revolution],
in Sbornik statei posviashchennykh Pavlu Nikolaevichu Miliukovu 1859-1929 [Collec-
tion of Articles Dedicated to Paul Nikolaevich Miliukov] (Prague I929). According to
this view, the Revolution of I848, 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 I929) by specialists of the Russian Revolu-

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VIEWS OF THE REVOLUTION 455

four-year period was one in which both of the ingredients that

Wladimir Weidle considers necessary for a true revolution-the "shock
element" and the "system element"-had come into full play. Russia
had yet to survive the terrifying famine of I92I-22 and the debilitating
lassitude of the NEP period. The prospects for the regime might still
have been in doubt; but the process of revolutionary change had been
essentially completed.6
The efforts to describe this Revolution-whether set in a larger or
smaller chronological frame than is here suggested-are now legion.
Almost every partisan point of view has found an articulate spokes-
man;7 new controversy and questioning among the legatees of the
Revolution have brought to light ever more material from the
archives;8 and a number of relatively detached observers have pro-
duced more complex and comprehensive histories in recent years. The
much-needed task of providing a comprehensive historiography of the
Revolution awaits a specialist far more deeply read in these events
than I-someone who might give the layman at least a provisional

tion. For other attempts to compare major revolutions see Crane Brinton's Anatomy
of Revolution (New York 1938) 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, Alexandre B. Zevaes, written in July
I9I7 in the midst of the upheaval, La revolution russe (Paris I9I7), I56-69; Henry
Rollin, La revolution russe, 2 vols. (Paris I931); and Isaac Deutscher in Russia in
Transition, rev. ed., paper (New York ig60), i63-77. 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
World-Historical Significance of the Great October Socialist Revolution] (Moscow
'957), 3-
6Weidle, Russia Absent and Present (New York I952). The I9I7-I92I framework
is used by William Henry Chamberlin in his two-volume History of the Russian
Revolution (New York I935), which is still in many ways the best comprehensive
narrative of events during the period. Deutscher also uses I92i as the cutoff point in his
The Prophet Armed (London I954), 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.
7Particularly valuable in this genre is the three-part first volume of the unfinished
history by the liberal leader Paul Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi russkoi revoliutsii [History
of the Second Russian Revolution] (Sofia I92I-I924), the text of which was largely
completed by August i9i8. Also useful are the last two chapters of Miliukov's Russia
Today and Tomorrow (New York I922), which stimulated other reformists and
radicals to write their own accounts, and General Anton Denikin's excellent five-
volume Ocherki russkoi smuty [Sketches of the Russian Tumult] (Paris and Berlin,
I92I-I926), which provided much information and notably lifted the level of apolo-
getics among the more conservative White emigres.
8The 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 I959), I5ff,

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456 WORLD POLITICS

appraisal of methodology, assessment of accuracy, and comparison

of insights of the many gifted figures who have written about the
Revolution.9 In the meantime, however, it might be useful to winnow
out for the general reader the basic attitudes or frameworks of
interpretation that historians have mixed, often unconsciously, with
their empirical investigations, and by this to discover what philo-
sophical attitudes twentieth-century man has taken toward perhaps the
most important single event of this century.10

i. The first basic attitude toward the Revolution may be charac-

terized as the accidental-pathetic view. This outlook is common to all
those who see in the Revolution no deep meaning, but view its out-
come with the same sense of bewilderment and helpless outrage one
feels at the interjection of a senseless natural calamity into human af-
fairs. Use of terms like "catastrophe" and "disaster," or metaphors like
"flood" and "storm" are characteristic trademarks of pathetic-acci-
dentalists. Bewilderment is resolved into a feeling of pathetic regret
and intellectual inquiry focused on random detail and occasionally
animated by the belief or suggestion that what happened might some-
how have been avoided.
9 A valuable account and itemization of the early histories of the Revolution has been
provided by Michael Karpovich in "The Russian Revolution of I9I7," Journal of Mod-
ern History, II (June I930), 258-80; more recent studies of Soviet work are Robert H.
McNeal, "Soviet Historiography on the October Revolution: A Review of Forty Years,"
American Slavic and East European Review, xvii (October I958), 269-92; and Serge
Utechin, "The Year I9I7: New Publications in Party History," Survey, No. 2I-22
('957), 5-II.
Attempts to collate various testimonial and historical accounts to provide paperback
historiographical readers on the Revolution include Arthur Adams, The Russian
Revolution and Bolshevik Victory (Boston i960); McNeal, The Russian Revolution:
Why Did the Bolsheviks Win? (New York I959); and Gilbert Comte, La Revolution
russe par ses temoins (Paris i963).
Among many interesting Soviet collections, see that of contemporary Western diplo-
matic dispatches interpreting to their governments the events leading up to the October
Revolution, in Krasny Arkhiv, xxiv (1927), i08-63; for an overall bibliographical guide
to documentary publications, see E. N. Gorodetsky, ed., Velikaia oktiabr'skaia sotsial-
isticheskaja revoliutsiia: Bibliografichesky ukazatel' dokumental'nykh publikatsii [The
Great October Socialist Revolution: A Bibliographical Index of Documentary Publica-
tions] (Moscow i96i); for a critical Soviet survey of German work, see V. Salov,
"Germanskaia istoriografiia velikoi oktiabr'skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii" [German
Historiography of the Great October Socialist Revolution], Novaia i Noveishaia Istoriia,
IV (I957), 239-49-
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 Paul H.
Anderson, The Attitude of the American Leftist Leaders Toward the Russian Revolu-
tion I9I7-I923 (Notre Dame I942); Christopher Lasch, The American Liberals and
the Russian Revolution (New York i962); Leonid Strakhovsky, American Opinion
About Russia 19I7-I920 (Toronto i96i); and David Caute, Communism and the
French Intellectuals (New York i964).

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VIEWS OF THE REVOLUTION 457

Such a view is implicit in two important groups of writing: (a) the

retrospective appraisals of many high-principled but perplexed figures
who served in (or identified with) the original February Revolution,
but were engulfed by the subsequent torrent of events; and (b) the
monographs of most Anglo-American scholars and commentators,
whose skeptical empiricism inclines them to reject deeper patterns or
forms of explanation, and whose native political traditions subtly in-
cline them to regard sudden and convulsive change as a distasteful
aberration from the norm in human events.
The major preoccupation of pathetic-accidentalists tends to be a
continual replaying of the hand, dwelling on turning points at which
events might have gone the other way. The anguished former leaders
of the provisional government (group a) tend toward intramural
recrimination, which was, of course, one of their principal problems
when they stood briefly at the helm between February and October.
They can be petulantly self-justificatory like Kerensky, who sees
I9I7 as a capricious unfolding of calamities abetted by the "inertia of
human intellect" in the fourth Duma, Miliukov's "lack of political
intuition," Kornilov's "insanity," the stupidity of the Allied Military
Mission, and the Germans' support of Lenin.1" The desire to replay
the hand may be more scholarly and imaginative-as with Miliukov,
for whom the demons are often less obvious: the second-rate political
advisers around Kornilov or the compulsive revolutionary dogmatism
of the Russian intellectuals. Nevertheless, Miliukov's pioneering his-
tory trails off sharply from a penetrating and ranging introduction
and first section into a verbose chronicle of events within the provisional
government in which "the pathetic" Kerensky emerges repeatedly as
the villain.12
Anglo-American academic empiricists (group b) have of course
been encouraged to adopt the pathetic-accidentalist viewpoint by the
many liberal and reformist emigres who took refuge in the democratic
11 Alexander Kerensky, The Catastrophe (New York I927), and also his recent
Russia and History's Turning Point (New York i965).
12 Miliukov, Istoriia, i, Part i, 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 gen-
erally echoed in the eclectic but basically accidental-pathetic reading of the Revolution
in Alan Moorehead, The Russian Revolution (New York I958), 9: "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
P. Mel'gunov, Kak Bolsheviki zakhvatili vlast' [How the Bolsheviks Seized Power],
written in 1937 (Paris I953).

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458 WORLD POLITICS

West and helped organize and conceptualize the study of Russian

history there. This view, however, harmonizes well with an academic
ethos that tends subtly to encourage suspended judgments-the keep-
ing of one's credentials intact, as it were, for the eventual mediation
of controversy. Historians no less than politicians in the Anglo-Amer-
ican world seem to seek to become purveyors of a consensus of other
monographic investigations (an attitude that can be more readily
defended as "objective"-and will surely be so by the graduate stu-
dents who are often bonded to it by assigned Ph.D. subjects) rather
than of an interpretation, which is a more lonely labor that others can-
not help perform, and which the historian will have none but purely
intellectual reasons for defending from the inevitable charge of sub-
jective bias.
Being human, even academic pathetic-accidentalists end by making
judgments. The refusal to make broader judgments merely canalizes
this instinct into the same detailed bickering over incidents and per-
sonalities in which the ex-participants mire themselves. Oliver Rad-
key, for instance, one of the most learned American scholars of
the entire events and literature of the revolutionary period, mars his
impressively detailed history of the Socialist Revolutionary party
during the Revolution with diffuse, carping criticisms of these be-
wildered also-rans, proving perhaps that the maintenance of a critical
attitude towards one's subject matter does not guarantee any newer
perspective or fuller understanding than does an uncritical apologetic
tone." Anglo-American scholarship has produced more urbane and
epigrammatic writing, more balanced judgments on minor questions
than those of Radkey. What is perhaps surprising and disappointing
is that this well-subsidized and well-populated area of scholarship has
produced so few works of comparable scholarly thoroughness and de-
tail. In view of the profession's apparent dedication to an approach
that resolves all larger questions into a large number of smaller and
more prosaic ones, one might hope for more of the kind of genuinely
definitive investigation that Radkey has conducted. Suspended judg-
ment does not, however, seem to guarantee that scholars are working
in the meantime on those major studies of minor problems that might
prepare the way for eventual consideration of higher questions.
Flourishing materially in societies largely unaffected by wars and
revolutions, the skeptically empirical Anglo-American historian tends
13 Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism (New York I958), covers the Socialist
Revolutionaries from March to October I9I7, and The Sickle Under the Hammer
(New York i963) continues and rounds off the Socialist Revolutionaries' story.

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VIEWS OF THE REVOLUTION 459

to feel no compelling need to account f

he finds it interesting to continue wri
2. A second and opposite view is the heroic-inevitable view of the
Revolution. This is, of course, the official Soviet view: The Revolu-
tion represents the predestined vindication of all that is good and
that could not have happened otherwise. The prototype for this view
is the ecstatic report in medias res by a former Harvard cheerleader
John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, in which the falling of
pure white snow, the "great throbbing cities rushing faster and
faster," and the "unrolling pageant of the Russian masses" all interact
in a chronicle of cosmic liberation.14 The USSR rejected this over-
emotional picture in its official chronicling, but accepted its basic image
of history reaching a kind of compressed climax in "Great October."
The mythic image of a new epiphany was transposed and dramatized
most effectively in pageants and movies, particularly after the celebra-
tions of the tenth anniversary of the Revolution in 1927.
The official myth requires the image of inevitability as well as that
of heroism in order to secure the authority and support the policies
of the epigones in power. The myth can be changed in detail but not
in kind; and it has come to contain certain constant falsifications
and dramatic distortions: a deification of the personal role of Lenin
(particularly at the expense of the still almost unmentionable role
of Trotsky) and of the clairvoyance of the Communist Party, of the
form the October coup actually took, and of the nature and extent
of foreign intervention during the Civil War. The Revolution emerges
as a work of transcendent heroism in which each development was
necessary for the good of the besieged fortress of human aspirations,
and was wisely ordained by the custodian of these aspirations within
the magic citadel of the Communist Party leadership.
The heroic-inevitable and accidental-pathetic views are direct op-
posites of one another. Yet, in a curious sense, each justifies itself
largely as a necessary corrective to the other. Just as the pathetic-acci-
dentalists see themselves as the only constant foe of bogus generaliza-
tion and myth-making, so the heroic-inevitabilists view themselves as
the guardians of the only true alternative to a world view of meaning-
less chance and despair.
If the pathetic school sees the Revolution as the chance intrusion
of a natural calamity subject to some small measure of ex post facto
14 (New York I9I9), 4I, i6. Reed's career and his disillusionment prior to his death in
192i are discussed by Bertram Wolfe, "The Harvard Man in the Kremlin Wall,"
American Heritage (February i960), 6-9, 94-I03.

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460 WORLD POLITICS

geological analysis, the heroic

natural necessity suitable for unlimited choral celebration. The hy-
potheses of the geologists change as frequently as the verses of the
choristers (and the Communist chorus is now sung in many different
tongues and keys) but the need to remake and celebrate this one pure
event grows even more compelling as the reputations of individual
leaders and the wisdom of individual policies become increasingly
subject to divisive debate.
In the more critical post-Stalinist atmosphere, the need grows to
find in the origins of the new regime a kind of heroic purity: a
popular-or, more accurately, a populist-sanction for a regime that
dispensed alike with hereditary and parliamentary authority. Since
the USSR is now described as an "all people's state" rather than a
"dictatorship of the proletariat," it has become psychologically im-
portant to emphasize those chapters of history (the Revolution-Civil
War period and the Second World War) in which all the people did
participate with some degree of spontaneity rather than those chapters
in which the ruling oligarchy was the main driving force. The Revolu-
tion and the War are the two events consistently referred to as "the
great" in Soviet historical terminology; and it seems appropriate that
historical-heroical writing on these two events markedly accelerated
precisely at a time in I955-56 when many shibboleths of Soviet ideology
and many figures of Soviet history were being suddenly subjected to
criticism that was tending to degrade the entire quarreling leadership
of the Soviet state.
Mikoyan in the very speech that launched the public denigration
of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in I956 took the lead in
calling for a short and comprehensive text on the October Revolution.
He was not only bewailing the absence of one, but, in effect, was
also seeking some new form of holy writ to replace the discredited
"short course" of the Stalin era.15 Nor were the posthumous venerators
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 Revolu-
tion 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 I905 provided a kind of anticipatory
model for the cinematic tributes that accompanied the celebration in I927 of the
tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, so the celebration of the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the Revolution of I905 in I955 helped precipitate a dramatic increase in his-
torical and documentary collections. Both the two volumes edited by a committee under
the late Anna M. Pankratova, Pervaia russkaia revoliutsiia i mezhdunarodnoe
revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie [The First Russian Revolution and the International Revolu-
tionary Movement] (Moscow I955, I956), which trace the impact of the Russian up-
rising on such places as Mexico and Ireland, and the vast collection Revoliutsiia 1905-

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VIEWS OF THE REVOLUTION 461

of Stalin, the Chinese, to surrender their claim to the legacy of

October. Mao himself came to Moscow in I957 on the occasion of the
fortieth anniversary of the Revolution, and hailed the Revolution as
the most important in all world history, while Liu Shao Chi affirmed
at the concurrent festivities in Peking that "the Chinese revolution
is a continuation of the Great October Revolution.""
There is, of course, an inherent tension between emphasis on the
heroic and on the inevitable. Some histories that must be included in

1907 gg. v Rossii. Dokumenty i materialy [The Revolution of I905-I907: Documents and
Materials] (Moscow I955- ), 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 (refer-
enced 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 Robert P. Browder and A. F. Kerensky (Stanford i96i).
16 Cited from official English translations of texts in Current Background, American
Consulate General (Hong Kong), No. 480 (November I3, I957), i, 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, i963, in Peking Review (November I3, i963), I5. The Chinese also periodically cite
(particularly on their own anniversaries) the formulation apparently first made on
July I, I95i, at the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist
Party, that "the prototype of the revolution in capitalist countries is the October Revolu-
tion; the prototype of the revolution in colonial and semi-colonial countries is the
Chinese Revolution" (cited in David Gilula, Counter-Insurgency Warfare [New York
i964], I39). Lin Piao, in his famous statement of September 3, i965, on "People's
War" appears to have found a synthesis with his contention that "the October Revolu-
tion 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, i965, 2). The closest ap-
proach to a detailed Chinese discussion of the October Revolution appears to be Chung-
kuo jen-min ch'ing-chu shih-yfieh-ko-ming ssu-shih-chou-nien chi-nien wen-chi [A Col-
lection of Commemorative Articles by Chinese People in Celebration of the Fortieth
Anniversary of the October Revolution] (Peking 1958), discussed with other material
in T. A. Hsia, "Demons in Paradise: The Chinese Images of Russia," Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science, 349 (September i963), 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 an-
niversary of the Revolution in I947 (just before the final success of the Chinese Revo-
lution became apparent), see Ivar and Marion Spector, Readings in Russian History
and Culture (Boston i965), 29I-300. 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 Yu. Frantsev, "The Human Race Took Heart," cited
from Izvestiia, November 6, I965, in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, December i,
I965, 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 bound-
aries as well."

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462 WORLD POLITICS

this heroic-inevitable catego

element; others, the more d
basically impersonal forces
Marxism and the long rule of
having preceded and, in man
USSR have all led to an exag
at the expense of the deter
Mints, who has been a court
and since the Stalin era has
the party line in his innum
the revolutionary victory wit
Lenin and the toiling masses
ian term podvig (heroic dee
Russian warrior-saints and m
Revolution as the "world-hi
Russia."17
Much more interesting are two outstanding histories which stress-
in part through their cool professionalism and mastery of detail-in-
exorable and deterministic forces. The first of these is Michael Pokrov-
sky's two-volume Ocherki po istorii oktiabr'skoi revoliutsii (Essays
on the History of the October Revolution), still the best attempt to
apply Marxist forms of analysis to the events of I9I7. Particularly
brilliant is the third and last section, which analyzes the events be-
tween the February and October Revolutions not in terms of rival
programs and personalities, but in terms of two basic objective factors
(the internal economic situation and the international political position
of Russia) which "stripped the Wilsonian mask from the Provisional
Government" and led to the Bolshevik victory."8 This was inevitable
not so much because of the "electric charges of will power" attributed
by other historians to the heroic leadership of Lenin and Trotsky or
because of any popular "will" or "collective wisdom of the people,"'9
but because Bolshevik leadership was, objectively speaking, the only
17 Velikaia oktiabr'skaia sotsialisticheskaia revoliutsiia i ee mezhdunarodnoe znachenie
[The Great October Socialist Revolution and Its International Meaning] (Moscow
i955), 5. The phrase quoted is the heading for an entire section in this work, which
is distributed in a typically enormous printing of I70,000 copies.
18 (Moscow and Leningrad I927), II, 447.
19 The first phrase was used by the Socialist Revolutionary leader Victor Chernov
in The Great Russian Revolution (New Haven I936), 445; the second, by the Cadet
leader Miliukov in his Istoriia, I, Part I, 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 I9I7.

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VIEWS OF THE REVOLUTION 463

way to avoid "the colonization of Russia

which presumably would have occurred u
modernizing, reformist leadership.
The second of these outstanding heroic
lution to stress the impersonal and inexorable forces behind it is
E. H. Carr's monumental Bolshevik Revolution. Here the emphasis
follows not from a rigid Marxist commitment, but from Carr's pro-
fessed intention "to write the history not of the events of the revolution,
but of the political, social, and economic order that emerged from
it."'2' Less rigidly deterministic than Pokrovsky and more willing to
recognize the role of individual leaders, Carr nevertheless tends to
identify virtue with success, to neglect non-Bolshevik sources and sub-
jective accounts and factors generally, and to bring negative value
judgments in unilaterally against the "unholy alliances" and suspect
motivations of the Bolsheviks' opponents. The work is scrupulously
honest and thorough in detail, but the perspective of the whole re-
mains that of a restrained but admiring recording secretary of the
Leninist Central Committee. Carr chronicles the building of the new
order from the point of view of one reasonably persuaded "that Lenin's
policy was the only conceivable one in the empirical terms of current
Russian politics."22 It is not too much to expect that a more rational
and demythologized successor regime in the USSR will some day adopt
a text very much like that of Carr for general use, just as Carr's work
is even now very much respected and consulted by specialists within the
Soviet Union.
Hard as the acknowledgment is for the Anglo-American mind,
which is so heavily opposed to deterministic interpretations, it is diffi-
cult to resist the judgment that these works by Pokrovsky and Carr
remain the most powerful scholarly accomplishments in the entire
glutted field.

In addition to these two views of the Revolution-the accidental-

pathetic and heroic-inevitable-there is another pair of interpretations
that differ in subtle but important ways from the first pair, but are also
directly opposite to each other. These may be characterized-for want
of better terminology-as the nostalgic-traditionalist and the visionary-
futurist views. These two views differ from the first pair in that these
both view the revolutionary period with genuine ideological passion
20 Pokrovsky, II, 448. 21 I, V.
22 Ibid., i00. This view is offered somewhat tentatively
conclusion that "may well have been true"; but the author's analysis here and sub-
sequently suggests that this is his general view of almost all major Bolshevik policies.

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464 WORLD POLITICS

and weigh its significance by

ciety that has greater meanin
societies the October Revoluti
3. The nostalgic-traditionalis
Revolution as a sustained disa
loyalties and of an ultimately
Proponents of this view-whether priests, soldiers, peasants, or even
neo-Victorian moralists-differ from the pathetic-accidentalist op-
ponents of the Revolution in that they condemn the Revolution en
bloc and yet see in it the inevitable, logical outcome of the general
moral decay of European society. The traditionalists also tend to view
the ideological pretensions and compulsions of the revolutionaries with
greater seriousness than do the perennially skeptical accidentalists.
Since traditionalists generally incline toward an organic view of
society, their image of the Revolution tends to be one of a spreading
disease or malignancy that the organism cannot afford to let go un-
checked. It was the Revolution's rejection of all tradition that made
the more articulate Whites such as Wrangel fight on "always with
honor" after all possibility of success was gone;23 it was the chain re-
action of repudiation that made a very few Western observers such as
Churchill immediate, unequivocal (and, in Churchill's case, most
eloquent) in urging the immediate destruction of the Bolshevik
"plague bacillus."24 The retrospective writings of such men as Wrangel
and Churchill-along with those of other traditionalists, particularly
Central European Roman Catholic thinkers-are unified both in their
sense of all-European involvement in the Bolshevik Revolution and in
their rejection of the Revolution for its very act of cutting loose
the moorings of established social and political life.
4. The visionary-futurist view is, of course, the opposite of the tradi-
tionalist. Like its opposite, it is a passionate reaction, based on faith
in something beyond the immediate events and alternatives of the rev-
olutionary period. In the futurist case, however, it is faith in the coming
millennium and a concomitant joy in liberation from past loyalties.
This was the prophetic, poetic view represented in Alexander Blok's
famous poem of January i9i8, "The Twelve," in which Christ appears at
the head of a revolutionary band entering Petersburg, or in Bely's book
of the same year, Christ Is Risen.25 In less rapturous form, the visionary-
23 The phrase was a favorite of Baron Peter N. Wrangel; see his Memoirs (London
I929).

24See Winston Churchill, The Aftermath (New York I92

rhetorical characterization of Lenin as "the Great Repudiator."
25Andrei Bely, Khristos voskres (Moscow i9i8). For Blok's ecstatic essays of i9i8

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VIEWS OF THE REVOLUTION 465

futurist view attracted many of the intellectual supporters of the Rev-

olution: the former "God-builders," the romantic "Scythians" and Left
Socialist Revolutionaries, and the all-important mezhraiontsy (inter-
region) group whose adherence to the Bolshevik cause in the prepara-
tory months of I917 provided a critical increment of intellectual talent
to Lenin's party. The most nearly perfect spokesman in historical
prose for this visionary-futurist view was the leading mezhraionets
convert to Bolshevism in i917, Leon Trotsky. Like the brooding tradi-
tionalists, the exultant Trotsky saw the Russian Revolution as only the
first stage of a continuing process of social transformation that would
grow ever deeper within and ever more extensive without-in his
terminology, "permanent revolution." This coming new order was
for Trotsky as unequivocally good as it was evil for the counterrevolu-
tionary. But both Trotsky and Churchill saw violence, duplicity, and
repudiation as logical and inescapable parts of the coming new order.
Indeed, such developments perplex only the accidentalists, and require
dissimulation and varnishing over only for the heroic mythologists.26
Rituals, pretense, organization-all are irrelevant; revolutionaries are
justified by faith alone, faith in the absolute reality of the coming
utopia.
Traditionalists and futurists both tend to use the metaphor of new
birth for the Revolution; but whereas traditionalists follow Churchill
in viewing it as a potential monster to be smothered in the cradle,
futurists follow rather the path of agonizing rapture pointed out by
Romain Rolland:

This order is all bloody and soiled like a human baby just wrested
from his mother's womb. In spite of disgust, in spite of the horror
of ferocious crimes, I go up to the child, I embrace the newly-born:
he is hope, the miserable hope of the human future. He is yours
in spite of you!27

The traditionalist and the futurist views draw strength from the

that provided prose accompaniment to "The Twelve" see his The Spirit of Music
(London 1946).
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.... Dictator-
ship 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 I928 by
the Russian emigre writers Constantine Balmont and Ivan Bunin, as cited in Wladimir
Drabovitch, Les Intellectuels franfais et le bolchevisme (Paris I937), I5I-52.

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466 WORLD POLITICS

existence of one another, just as the contrasting pathetic and heroic

views do. These are the views of the loyal knight and the armed prophet
prepared to enter combat wherever they may meet. But, accordingly,
these views have become increasingly remote and unfashionable as
the events recede; as visions fade, the battle subsides and the captains
and kings depart.

There remain two positions that are less shallow than the first two
views, less monolithic than the last pair. These views are also properly
bracketed with one another, but for the different reason that they are
similar to (though subtly different from) one another. These are the
tragic and the ironic interpretations.
5. The tragic view is held by those who in some sense accept with
Lenin the necessity for a radical new start and who yet believe that
path to have been foredoomed by some higher and more irresistible
force. The most genuinely tragic perspective on the Revolution is that
of those who followed Lenin because they nobly viewed his path as
the only one possible for bringing into being in Russia the freedoms
and rights that had been developed in the bourgeois West. This is
the view, often poorly expressed, of many driven at the time by suffer-
ing and compassion to the sincere belief that Leninist means and dem-
ocratic ends were somehow related. This is the view common to all
those who at some point in the struggle for power lent aid to the
cause of Lenin and Trotsky, and yet, at another, rebelled at the ration-
alizations for interim tyranny or pretense of party infallibility. Its
most searching formulation probably lies in the last writings in prison
of Rosa Luxembourg, reflecting on the course of the Russian Revo-
lution.28
This tragic view of the revolution was shared by many of the Men-
sheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries who collaborated initially
in the belief that a true start toward freedom and democracy might be
made through a government of the Soviets; and perhaps also by many
inarticulate grass-roots supporters of the original coup who later sup-
ported the Democratic Centralist or Workers' Opposition programs
28 The Russian Revolution, and Leninism or Marxism, paper (Ann Arbor i96i). 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 i9i8. See his
God na rodinu [A Year in the Fatherland] (Paris I92I), II, 257-68. For another early
tragic interpretation that blames the Russians' very lack of philistinism for their
confusion and suffering, see Alfons Paquet, "Die russische Revolution als tragisches
Ereignis," in Der Geist der russischen Revolution (Leipzig i919), 69-io9.

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VIEWS OF THE REVOLUTION 467

within the Bolshevik Party and saw th

I92I. Above all, this tragic view must
garrison as it was massacred by the B
vocating substantially the same progr
them by the Bolshevik agitators at th
One of the more stimulating tragic i
Steinberg, a Left Socialist Revolutionary who collaborated briefly
with the Bolsheviks as People's Commissar of Justice and then later in
i9i8 wrote an account of the origins of the Revolution, which he fin-
ished in prison early in i919. He stresses the justice and inevitability of
the Soviet form of government, and ingeniously defends the closing of
the Constituent Assembly; but he views the Revolution as "a great
tragedy in which both the hero and the victim often appear to be the
people," who "have to contend not only with their visible enemies,"
but also with their own "naive, childlike faith" in their leaders. Al-
though speaking of the pre-October period, he seems also to be re-
ferring to the Bolsheviks in his statement that "the tragedy lies not
in that the people have blind leaders in the Revolution, but in that the
people themselves produce these leaders and in their image clumsily
struggle for their own happiness."29
Just below the level of high tragedy of those whose noble intentions
were linked to the tragic flaw of supporting dictatorship in order to
realize democracy stands a less majestic, but no less tragic, view that
might be called "the school of historical destiny." This variant of the
tragic view sees the Revolution as an event filled with high aspiration
but frustrated by foreordained forces in the Russian nature or historical
development.
At the most melodramatic level, this view finds expression in the
"curse of the Romanovs" school, which finds omens of all kinds in
the violent origins and disintegration of the dynastic family, and in
figures like Rasputin.30 Some of the most brilliant and sophisticated
students of these years, such as George Kennan, often tend to see
events unfolding against a backdrop of inexorable fate, with the Revo-
lution prefigured in such events as the confusion and casualties inci-
dental to Nicholas II's coronation, and in the history, geography, and
even the unnatural illumination of Petersburg itself-a city in which
29 Ot fevralia po oktiabr' I9I7 g. [From February to October i9I7] (Berlin-Milan
n.d.), I28-29.
30 The memoir of the Revolution by the leader of the Duma, Michael Rodzian
The Reign of Rasputin (New York I927), is almost obsessively focused on this figu
not just as a symptom but as a kind of root cause of the entire crisis.

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468 WORLD POLITICS

human relationships attain . . . a touch of premonition [and]

fingers of fate seem to reach in from a great distance, like the
beams of the sun, to find and shape the lives and affairs of individ-
uals; events have a tendency to move with dramatic precision to
denouements which no one devised but which everyone recog-
nizes after the fact as inevitable and somehow faintly familiar.3'

The fact that the 300th anniversary of the dynasty was celebrated by
a host of publications and ceremonies in 19I3, just as the nation was
plunged into war and revolution, helped make Russians during that
period uniquely conscious of that period's similarity with the chaos
and interregnum out of which the Romanov dynasty had emerged in
i6I3. Among the most historically reflective of those defeated by the
Revolution there was, therefore, a natural tendency to compare the
revolutionary era to the famed "Time of Troubles" (Smutnoe vremia),
and to look for some kind of deep national meaning-even if a tragic
one-in events of such magnitude. Thus, many defeated and rejected
emigre historians subtly drifted from the recriminating pathetic-acci-
dental view to invocations of tragic grandeur. The Revolution was
still seen as a kind of impersonal natural catastrophe; but it was no
longer so much a completely senseless flood as what Miliukov came
to call a "powerful geological upheaval" that covered over the thin
layer of recently acquired European culture with the lava of the sub-
merged masses and with fiery fragments from the forgotten thought-
world of the peasant rebellions.32
The tragic forces were geographic rather than geological for the
Eurasians, who saw Russia's submerged, autocratic Asian self reclaim-
ing the prize that an effete Europe had tried to take away through
the purgative medium of the Revolution-which in some of the more
apocalyptically minded Eurasian thinkers seems to have been seen only
as a kind of Antichrist heralding the imminent arrival of some more
31 See Russia Leaves the War (Princeton I956), 4, 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 i964. It was also emphasized
in Catherine Radziwill, "The Great Revolution," in her Rasputin and the Russian
Revolution (New York I9I8), I93ff.
32 Miliukov, Istoriia, i, Part i, iiff. 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 Timofei V. Lokot', Smutnoe vremia i revoliutsiia. Politicheskiia
paralleli i6I3-I9I7 gg. [The Time of Troubles and the Revolution: Political Parallels
i6I3-I9I7] (Berlin I923). 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], Evrazi-
iskii Vremennik, v (I927), 28-74, esp. 72-73.

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VIEWS OF THE REVOLUTION 469

far-reaching and spiritual millennium.

Karsavin predicted accurately that any post-Leninist leadership would
have to incorporate many traditional exclusivist, anti-European ideas
into its ideology in order to maintain a hold on the people. In
Chernov's history the word "tragedy" is repeatedly invoked, and the
elements themselves made to seem ultimately responsible: "Across
the plains, blizzards and storms are free to move and rage. The storm
of revolution revealed the genuine 'color and aroma' of the people's
soil . . . with all the best features of the national character and all
the savage passions and vices implanted by its history.""
6. If Soviet historians are necessarily committed to the heroic view,
Western observers tend toward the pathetic, with occasional flashes of
traditionalist empathy and futurist ardor and a constant penchant for
the evocative rhetoric of tragedy. There may, however, be available
to the Western historian another view more probing than the pathetic,
less Manichaean than the traditionalist and futurist, yet more honest
than the tragic-one that properly requires a larger measure of identi-
fication with the hopes of the Revolution and the destiny of Russia
than most contemporary Western observers can honestly hold. This
view may be called the ironic.
In his penetrating The Irony of American History, Reinhold Niebuhr
distinguishes the ironic in history from the purely pathetic "for which
no reason can be given, or guilt ascribed," and from the tragic, which
involves "conscious choices of evil for the sake of good." Irony, in
Niebuhr's view "consists of apparently fortuitous incongruities . . .
which are discovered upon closer examination to be not merely for-
tuitous."34
The record of the Russian Revolution is filled with such perplexing,
yet revealing, incongruities. There is irony in the fact that the Revolu-
tion which Marx predicted and which was to take place in his name
occurred not, as Marx had expected, in the urbanized bourgeois democ-
racies but in the autocratic and peasant East (and in a country he
particularly feared and disliked). It is ironic that a profound upheaval
made in the name of a philosophy of history that attached no real
significance to the individual was perhaps more dependent than al-
most any other revolution on one individual, Lenin.
Irony was evidenced at every turn as Russia emerged from the revo-
lutionary turmoil early in 1921. The revolutionary principle of a so-
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 i952), ix-x.

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470 WORLD POLITICS

cialized economy was giving w

economy; the "revolutionary alliance of workers with poor peasants"
was conceding to the demands of the rich peasants, the kulaks; the
interim dictatorship of the proletariat was blossoming into a giant
bureaucracy rather than withering away; the dream of international
revolution was belied by normalized state relations with the very coun-
tries-Germany and Turkey-where revolutionary hopes had once
been highest; the revolutionary promise of new rights for long-sup-
pressed nationality groups in the Russian Empire was shattered by
armed aggression against Poland and Georgia.
To draw again on Niebuhr's terminology, these incongruities reach
the level of irony since they were not purely fortuitous, but arose from
the overriding Leninist principle of making tactical concessions in the
interest of the redemptive revolutionary cause. These ironies were
made to seem temporary and transitory at the time by the sheer force
of Lenin's personality and the compelling sincerity of his convictions.
Here, too, Niebuhr's distinction seems applicable-the distinction that
"the ironic situation is distinguished from a pathetic one by the fact
that the person involved in it bears some responsibility for it. It is
differentiated from tragedy by the fact that the responsibility is re-
lated to an unconscious weakness rather than to a conscious resolu-
tion."35
A final argument for an ironic view of the Revolution is that in this
view decisions made after the end of the Revolution assume a con-
tinuing moral significance that they tend to lose in most other inter-
pretations. For "while a pathetic or a tragic situation is not dissolved
when a person becomes conscious of his involvement in it, an ironic
situation must dissolve, if men or nations are made aware of their
complicity in it. Such awareness involves some realization of the hid-
den vanity or pretension by which comedy is turned into irony. This
realization either must lead to an abatement of the pretension which
means contrition; or it leads to a desperate accentuation of the vanities
to the point where irony turns into pure evil."36 The ironic view per-
mits one to take seriously the hopes and fears that are so deeply felt
in the revolutionary period, but which accidentalists and inevitabilists
both tend to treat unfeelingly if not patronizingly.37 At the same time,
this view enjoins the historian to brood in detail over the historical
35 Niebuhr, x. 36 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 I954 re-
printed in Russia in Transition, 20I-20.

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VIEWS OF THE REVOLUTION 471

record, which is not as ultimately irrele

traditionalist or futurist. Finally, the i
to recognize the existence of "incongru
chance," without invoking supernatural
The ironic perspective is that of the historian who views himself
neither as seer and judge, nor as a mere news commentator, but
rather as another mortal surrounded by mystery, yet driven on by
curiosity, and tantalized by hidden and unforeseen quirks that seem
to be more than accidents yet less than fate. Scrutinizing himself as
well as the historical record, the historian of ironic perspective is
skeptical both of the total explanations so widely accepted in the nine-
teenth century and of the total absurdity so fashionable in our own.
This strong sense of irony-which is able sympathetically to pene-
trate unfamiliar human situations without suspending moral concern-
was already present in two histories published in 1921, the last year of
the revolutionary upheaval. Miliukov, in the first chapter of his Ocherki
(suitably entitled "Contradictions of the Revolution"), rises above the
antagonism of battle to acknowledge that the Revolution did arise in
response to the wishes of the masses; but he goes on to make the
ironic point that events did not in any important way serve their in-
terests. For all of its Western ideological trappings and talk of the
future, the Russian Revolution, in Miliukov's ironic view, had led
Russia back to its primitive, insular past.38 Osip Lourie, a long-time
French student of Russian life and thought, agreed in a history writ-
ten in 1921 that the Revolution had not and would not change Russia
as much as revolutionaries assumed. However, he foresaw more clearly
than Miliukov did then (and than many still do today) that "the
Russian Revolution does not continue the revolutions of Europe, it
surpasses them; its significance is not simply social and positive [but]
universal and mystical," representing the climax of the sectarian long-
ing for some new universal faith. By establishing on earth "a system
that is universal, scientific and mystical all at the same time," the Revo-
lution in Russia-however precarious its victory may have appeared in
192i-heralded the end of European civilization as decisively as Ein-
stein's revolution heralded the end of belief in a Newtonian universe.
Thus, ironically, "the fate of Lenin is less to reform Russia than to
revolutionize humanity."39
38 Miliukov, I, Part I, 6, II.
39 Lourie, La Revolution russe (Paris I92I), i05-6, iio-Ii, io9. A similar conclusion
is reached in the rambling but frequently stimulating and bibliographically useful dis-
cussion by Baron Alexander Meyendorff, The Background of the Russian Revolution
(New York 1929), esp. 141-42.

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472 WORLD POLITICS

Boris Pil'niak, one of the best of the many unorthodox writers of

the early Soviet era, in his portrayal of Russia at the end of the Revo-
lution, The Naked Year, suggests the ironic fact that the militantly
Westernizing Bolsheviks were in fact the unwitting agents of a "sec-
tarian, Orthodox, spiritual Russia" seeking revenge against "mechan-
ical Europe" which had destroyed it by means of the First World
War.40 Such an ironic perspective may someday enable us to reappraise
the ostensibly anti-Western and Muscovite figure of Stalin as the
agent (through forced social and technological changes) of the pro-
found and perhaps irreversible processes of Westernization and mod-
ernization.
A sense of irony has underlain many of the most important subse-
quent studies of the revolutionary era: Bertram Wolfe's analysis of
the leaders who prepared the Revolution, Sukhanov's valuable if dif-
fuse memoir of the year I9I7, and R. V. Daniels' study of the sad fate,
after Lenin's death, of most of those who had stood at his side during
the Revolution.4" There is an ironic frame to Leonard Schapiro's ac-
count of how Lenin's ostensibly Marxist party triumphed by, in effect,
standing Marx on his head and proving that "political power controlled
the economic form of society."42 There is irony as well in the quiet
assertion in Louis Fischer's impressive biography of Lenin that "what
commenced to wither was the idea of withering away,"43 and in both
Park's and Pipes's accounts of the frustration of the federal aspirations
of minority peoples by the Bolsheviks who had promised most to (and
benefitted much from) these groups.44 Among symbolic interpretations,
Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago contains a deeply ironic (certainly not,
as many in both East and West have contended, a counterrevolution-
ary-or, in our terminology, "nostalgic-traditionalist") reading of this
great event.45 Developed with uncommon sensitivity and contrapuntal
40 Goly God [The Naked Year], first published in I920, cited here from Sobranie
sochinenii [Collected Works] (Moscow and Leningrad I929), I, esp. pp. 97-I03.
41 Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, paper (Boston I955); Nicholas Sukhanov,
The Russian Revolution 1917 (London I955), an abridged version of his seven-volume
Zapiski o revoliutsii [Notes on Revolution] (Berlin I922-23); and Daniels, The
Conscience of the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., i960).
42 The Origin of the Communist Autocracy (London I955).
43The Life of Lenin (New York i965).
44Alexander Park, Bolshevism in Turkestan, 1917-1927 (New York I957); Richard
Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923,
rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., i964).
45 (New York I958), esp. 46i, 5I8-I9. 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).

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VIEWS OF THE REVOLUTION 473

skill, the picture is one of repeated f

failings that are more than accidental but less than tragic.
Sometimes the sense of irony is confidently polemic, as in the icono-
clastic historiographical article by the former Communist and biog-
rapher of Stalin, Boris Souvarine, who systematically compares Bolshe-
vik promises with their performance and concludes that "in order to
keep themselves in power, they gradually lost all reason for existence,
if their own doctrines are to serve as any standard."46 Sometimes the
sense of irony is perplexed and almost detached as in one who had
initially seemed to be a beneficiary of the Bolshevik takeover, Hinden-
burg's chief-of-staff, General Ludendorff: "I often dreamed of this
revolution which would so lighten the burden of our war . . . but
today the dream is suddenly realized in an unanticipated way.... Our
moral collapse began with the beginning of the Russian revolution."47
It may be that new understanding can come in the study of this
critical episode in modern history through a deepened sense of irony.
The ironic view sees in the Revolution only a particularly dramatic
example of a universal conflict between two ever-present human feel-
ings whose constant struggle makes all history ultimately unpredict-
able: the desire to discard pretense and the drive toward what Niebuhr
calls the "desperate accentuation of hidden vanities, which turns irony
into evil." To say that the latter has so far been the main path of
postrevolutionary Soviet writing is not to say that it will always re-
main so in the increasingly self-scrutinizing USSR, nor is it to deny
that there may often be an "accentuation of hidden vanities" in much
of Western writing about the Revolution. The truth of the ironic per-
spective is rather that which Montesquieu offered as a general maxim
(long before his own conservative writings became ironically influential
in the American Revolution): "Toute revolution prevue n'arrivera
jamais."48
46 "'October': Myths and Realities," New Leader (November 4, I957), 22-an
excellent article. See also in the same issue Karpovich's "Russia's Revolution in Focus,"
I4-I7, which adds to the author's vigorously anti-inevitabilist argument an ironic
perspective with a strong suggestion that the losers of I9I7 will ultimately prove
vindicated.
47 Cited in Denikin, I, 48-49.
48 Cited before the introduction to John Plamenatz, German Marxism and Russian
Communism (London I954), ix; compare this with the almost identical statement
of Engels in I885 (appropriately cited in the introduction to Daniels, p. 4) about t
impossibility of revolutionaries' predicting or controlling the course of the revolu-
tions 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 I4 in The New Cambridge Modern History, xii (Cambridge i960); see esp.
412-15.

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