
The legacies of 1917 - lermontov
http://www.eurozine.com/the-legacies-of-1917/
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temp-dude-87844
> _the nature of the Bolshevik movement was that it implied a cultural
> revolution, because it meant peasants leaving the land and coming into
> mines, factories, cities; sometimes sending money home, sometimes returning
> to home to help bring in the harvest but at the same time buying into an
> idea of modernisation – hyper-modernisation, really; that the answer to
> Russia 's backwardness and poverty was to sweep away the old peasant world._

The cultural revolution rapidly (in a span of few decades) lifted Russia from
a rural state to an urban one, and brought a changed cultural consciousness.
Strong state institutions like schools, councils, enterprises, and theatre
furthered the social progression.

> _As a nation, Russians are the last victims of their own revolution. It 's
> very difficult for Russia to become a nation, because it has this imperial
> legacy and because it was the 'Russian' Revolution – so they can't[, like
> other post-Soviet nations], blame 'the Russians' for their revolution.
> That's why, I think, the centenary is going to be so quiet: it's not a
> history that the Russians can use to go anywhere; it doesn't have any
> positive uses for them. In Latvia they can celebrate liberation, in Ukraine
> they can celebrate independence; but in Russia it's very hard to do that._

The most critical observation of the article. Other states like Germany,
France, typically deflect previous revolutions that aren't compatible with the
current model of their state. Russia does no such thing, in no small part
because:

> _what happened in 1991 was just collapse; there wasn 't any democratic
> revolution to create a new state. All that happened was that the Soviet
> state collapsed and new political elites, largely made up of the old ones,
> found themselves back in power. Putin's state is still essentially the
> inheritor of the Soviet state, in every aspect – in its attitude to power,
> in its attitude to the country – and that means that many of the old reflex-
> attitudes of Russians – the unquestioning acceptance of authority, the
> acceptance of the need for the state to use violence, the protective role of
> the Cheka/KGB/FSB – are all still there. For Russia to become a democracy
> will not really happen until Russians begin properly to reconsider what the
> revolution meant in terms of its legacies, in terms of those deep cultural
> aspects of thinking. And I don't see that happening._

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DubiousPusher
I really enjoyed Mr. Figes book on the Russian Revolution because his writing
style is wonderfully accessible and compassionate.

Unfortunately it has been accused of having many pages of plagiarized content
and poor sourcing. Which has made me weary of his writings and commentary.

I really hate to color a person with a single brush but my impression is that
the problems were significant. Either error on its own would be forgivable but
combining plagiarism and inaccurate sourcing points to a sloppiness with
history in an effort to create narrative. To me, a historian most break away
from narrative and commit to rigor.

~~~
topranks
Damn your first line had me ready to go buy the man's books....

I yearn for historical writing with a good narrative, but you're 100% right,
if you need to sacrifice the flow or the facts, sacrifice the flow.

~~~
benbreen
I really enjoyed the first volume of Kotkin’s Stalin biography, if you’re
looking for something in a similar vein: [https://www.amazon.com/Stalin-
Paradoxes-1878-1928-Stephen-Ko...](https://www.amazon.com/Stalin-
Paradoxes-1878-1928-Stephen-Kotkin/dp/0143127861)

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Spooky23
Looking at this from a national point of view is a mistake.

In my mind, we're still dealing with the blowback resulting from the end of
the victorian world order, which was gutted by the events of the First World
War, of which the 1917 revolution was a part.

Russia has always been a bridge between east and west. I think as we've spent
the last 50 years exporting the wealth of the west, we're approaching a
similar changing of eras.

~~~
trhway
>Looking at this from a national point of view is a mistake.

>In my mind, we're still dealing with the blowback resulting from the end of
the victorian world order, which was gutted by the events of the First World
War, of which the 1917 revolution was a part.

Asimov in the Foundation caught it very well - the more populous and dense the
world and the more it is tightly interconnected ("globalization" of today) -
the more tribalistic/nationalistic/xenophobic the internal communities at all
levels get, even when the communities are like just 2 adjacent city blocks of
the same city like in the case of the Empire's very densely populated capital
city covering the whole planet with the differences between the city blocks
viciously enforced and cultivated by the respective communities itselves.

You can see that process starting in Europe with Jan Hus on one side and the
French nationalism rising during the 100 years war on the other side. The 100
year war started as some adjustment of power lines between high lords of
practically the same language and culture, and ended as the national freedom
movement. Next was Luther, i.e. the German nation forming and waking up. And
so forth...

The WWI can be seen as earthquake style resolution of the tension (built-up
during previous peaceful decades) between significantly grown up nationalistic
movements and the old trans-ethnic empires power lines in Europe. And
naturally most of those empires disappeared as result of the war.

The process didn't obviously stopped with WWI. It is naturally continues today
and into tomorrow. The diversity celebrating all-accepting globalized society
of our dreams is probably just a dream.

------
balance_factor
> What happened very quickly in 1917 was the development of committee power,
> so the development of local, direct democracy in terms of local committees,
> soldiersâ�� committees and, of course, the Soviets. And I think that those
> institutions need not have become the instruments of class war, which is
> what the Bolsheviks used them for, or encouraged them to do. You could have
> had, as some in the Bolshevik Party, in the Left-Menshevik wings, were
> thinking, a combination of local soviet-style structures with a national
> parliament.

There are a lot of silly ideas contained in the last two sentences.

First off committees like those mentioned have sprung up in every revolution
since the French Revolution. Back then they were Les Enrages, the sans-
culottes, and they have emerged in revolutions since then up into the 20th
century, be they called councils or soviets or whatever. The notion that
"those institutions need not have become the instruments of class war" is
preposterous, because workers taking control over their own lives and halting
the exproporiation of their surplus labor time is the centrality of class
warfare. If workers had control over their own labor time, instead of punching
a clock at some corporation owned by heirs, which directed their work and
expropriated surplus labor time from them, then there would be no classes. The
only way to prevent workers managing their own affairs in local committees
from not being engaged in class warfare would either be to dissolve the
committees, or alternatively neuter them to where they were completely
powerless.

In terms of the idea of a national parliament and local soviets being the
basis of a government, that is exactly the situation Russia was in in February
2017 - what was called dual power. It's an untenable situation. Up until April
1917 the idea was generally that socialists might be able to take power, but
should instead subordinate themselves to the bourgeoisie, in a society where
the capitalists would rule through a modern bourgeois parliament.

Lenin spells out why this was not done at the beginning and end of his April
Theses: one of the main things that made him realize the time for socialists
to stop subordinating themselves to capitalists and bourgeois parliaments was
it was leading to the degradation of the socialist parties, the center-piece
of which was German social-democrats supporting entry into World War I. The
option Lenin saw being handed to him was - support World War I, pitting
Russian workers against German workers (including left-wing pacifistic German
socialists), or turn completely against the government. Lenin chose the latter
course. Figes neglects to mention this - Lenin's only real alternative to
taking the path he took would be to support Russia's continuation of World War
I.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Class warfare doesn't seem inevitable if locally organized committees in a
time of revolution prioritize something else in life more than class concerns.
Consider Iran where, as the shah’s regime crumbled, there was a lot of
organization not in favour of the Communists, but rather to try to bring bring
Khomeini back from exile and usher in an Islamic regime. Similarly, some of
the other revolutions in and around World War I were driven more by a desire
to marginalize ethnic groups other than the workers’ own than to marginalize
the bourgeoisie.

------
AnimalMuppet
> You could say that the Utopian nature of the revolution developed out of the
> idea of Russia being a tabula rasa, a blank canvas onto which
> revolutionaries could project their utopian ideals of human transformation.
> That was part of a tradition in Russian revolutionary thinking – not just
> for the Bolsheviks and anarchists, but more importantly for populists in the
> 19th century, who thought that because Russia was not developed, in a
> western sense, with political institutions, civil society, an advanced
> economy, it could sort of ‘leap over’ the West by becoming a new form of
> democracy or socialism.

If that were true, then if Communism were to succeed anywhere, it should have
succeeded in Russia. (Note, however, that Marxist theory says that it is _not_
true, as the article says later.)

> Revolution is, by its nature, an improvisation – there are no rules...

Interesting. Yes, that seems right for a revolution. You're revolting against
the way things are, and the current rules, and you can throw out any rules
that you want.

> ... so they are desperately looking for examples from previous revolutions
> of what will happen, and of what it is to be a revolutionary.

And, having no rules, they find themselves completely adrift, except for the
one requirement: It has to work to overthrow the existing order. ( _Not_ it
has to work to produce something functional afterwords.) So they look for
something that will give them some guidance - some rules, almost - on how to
proceed. Ironic, that.

~~~
golergka
> If that were true, then if Communism were to succeed anywhere, it should
> have succeeded in Russia.

Isn't that exactly the case?

~~~
dragonwriter
If by Communism you mean Leninist vanguardism, then, if not “exactly the
case”, it's at least consistent with the theory.

If you mean the system described by Marx and Engels, then, no, it's directly
contrary to the theory.

If you mean some other Communist theory, well, maybe, but probably not.

~~~
owebmaster
And we might add that it indeed made Russia go from bottom to the top of any
economic índex for a long time.

------
danielam
Not for no reason were Soviet general secretaries sometimes called the Red
Tsars. There is most certainly a civilizational continuity between imperial
Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. This particular
civilizational continuity makes the prospect of democratic rule problematic.
It does not sit comfortably within Russian civilizational parameters. Some
explain in this way the failed attempt to instill a democratic order in Russia
in the 1990s, i.e., that what democratic rule presupposes is absent in Russian
society, rendering it foreign and "unnatural".

Among scholars specializing in civilizations, Feliks Koneczny[0] stands out in
particular. Specifically, he identifies Russia as an example of Turanian
civilization (one of several present within the West, though perhaps what is
most prototypically Western is what he called Latin civilization). The author
of the article mentions some of the markers of Turanian civilization, viz.,
"the unquestioning acceptance of authority" and "the acceptance of the need
for the state to use violence".

[0] [https://www.scribd.com/doc/4464979/ON-THE-PLURALITY-OF-
CIVIL...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/4464979/ON-THE-PLURALITY-OF-
CIVILIZATIONS-Feliks-Koneczny-Entire-Book)

~~~
owebmaster
What would be more democratic than the Russian society? American? Give me a
break.

------
boomboomsubban
Their idea of "a western, French revolution" is pure fantasy. The French
revolution started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but quickly
turned into the unelected tyrant Robespierre holding absolute authority.

------
thriftwy
If not for Revolution, perhaps Russia would resemble more of 300 mln strong
Sweden than of 140 mln strong Honduras as of today.

~~~
nextos
History is very complicated and full of contradictions. Imperial Russia is
often dubbed as a semi-medieval state, yet it was able to build the Trans-
Siberian Railway which was a massive engineering feat.

~~~
jscipione
There is no contradiction, medieval states regularly build massive engineering
feats including Cathedrals all over Europe.

~~~
astrodust
Pretty easy to build megastructures when you're the Church and you can squeeze
the local population for every bit of money they have.

Those things would also take several generations to build. They weren't
comparable to highways or railways that got laid down within a decade.

------
gtrubetskoy
This article over-analyzes the situation and gives Lenin and co too much
credit. What happened was very simple:

* Russia is in the midst of World War I and things are rather rough for people.

* Leftist/liberals use the situation to their advantage and pressure Nicholas into resigning in Feb/Mar 1917 ending the monarchy and instituting the "provisional govenment" which was rather weak and inexperienced. They do dumb things like pardon all prisoners.

* Germany takes advantage of the weakness and sends in Lenin to sabotage the weak government.

* In Oct 1917 this armed gang of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin takes over. Having realized how relatively easy it was, they ensure that they stay in power by publicly executing anyone who even hints at descent.

* 28 years later in 1945, Germany surrenders to Stalin, one of the very people it paid to topple Russia.

Edit: The lesson is rather simple: any however well-intentioned revolution is
most often followed by a coup whereby ruthless criminals take over and in the
end everyone suffers. The liberal parties who pushed for a constitutional
monarchy and democracy inadvertently caused over 100 million deaths and a
century of misery for their country and the world.

~~~
hamilyon2
Or maybe you cannot explain what happened on half of continent for 28 years
with 5 sentences and state it was simple. Has Lenin been armed gangster, he
wouldn't written a lot of books. Putin is less educated than was Lenin.

World can't come in terms with what was happening in russia it late 19-th and
20-th century. This is a shame, because we can learn a valuable lesson from
those events.

~~~
DubiousPusher
He was certainly more than a gangster but he seems to have been a horrible
person. He lived an acetic lifestyle and pushed that disdain of pleasure into
the party orthodoxy. He used his allies for advantage in a way that went way
beyond the political norm of the time. And he laid the groundwork for the
Soviet Gulag system. An apparatus that inflicted the equivalent of half a
dozen holocaust's worth of human suffering over its existence.

