Since we have already glanced
at the political, economic, and social antecedents of the Russian Revolution of
1917 and its aftermath, this chapter will be concerned with the more general
problems of Soviet civilisation: How was Marxism involved in the Russian
Revolution? What influence does it have on the Soviet Union in a human sense,
quite apart from the plans and statistics, important as they are? Amid all the
vicissitudes, constraints and shocks, what are we to make of the present and
future of Soviet, now CIS, civilisation?
From Marx to Lenin
Karl Marx’s thought fairly quickly caught the attention of intellectual
and revolutionary circles in Russia, which were favourable to the West and
therefore at odds with the Slavophile traditionalists. Thus Marxism very soon
won converts among economists and historians at the University of St.
Petersburg – partly, it was said, in opposition to its conservative counterpart
in Moscow.
Marxism as the fruit of
collaboration between Marx (1818-83) [183], the key figure, and
Friedrich Engels (1820-95) [2095] who worked with him for
forty years and survived him for twelve. With is elaborate doctrine, it marked
an essential turning-point in revolutionary thought and action in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that revolution was a natural and
inevitable outcome of modern industrialised capitalist society. It seemed to
offer an overall view of the world which closely linked social analysis and
economic explanation.
Marx’s dialectic (the search
for truth through contradictions or statement or counter-statement) was
inspired by Hegel, although it spurned his philosophy. For Hegel, things of the
spirit dominated the material world (‘mind over matter’), and consciousness was
humanity’s essential trait. For Marx, by contrast, the material world dominated
things of the spirit. ‘The Hegelian system’, he wrote, ‘stood on its head; we
have set it on its feet’. This did not prevent Marx’s dialectic taking over the
terms of successive stages of Hegel’s: (1) the thesis or statement; (2) the
antithesis or negation; (3) the synthesis or negation of the negation, i.e. the
statement of an evolving truth taking account of both thesis and antithesis,
and reconciling them.
This way of reasoning was
always in the background of Marx’s arguments. [Mnemoetechnique] As the Russian
revolutionary Alexander Herzen puts it, ‘Dialectic is the algebra of
revolution.’ It was certainly the
language of Karl Marx, a device for identifying and defining contradictions,
once they were ‘scientifically’ recognised, and then overcoming them. Marxism
has been defined as dialectical materialism. The phrase is not inaccurate,
although Marx himself never used it and, as Lenin remarked, he emphasised the
dialectic far more than the materialism. Following Lenin, others made the same
remark about historical materialism, a rather unhappy expression devised by
Engels: Marx, it was said, had emphasised the history far more than the
materialism. He undoubtedly the dialectical arguments for his revolutionary
doctrine from an historical analysis of society. That was one of the major
innovations in his work.
Western society in the
mid-nineteenth century seemed to him to be suffering from a major
contradiction, dialectical analysis of which was the basis of Marxist thought.
To summarise it briefly: work, for humanity, was a way of being freed from
Nature, of mastering it. By working, people became aware of their own nature,
which was to be part of a society, as workers among other things. In society,
which meant both work and freedom, there was both ‘human naturalism’ and
‘natural humanism’. This was the thesis, the statement about the value and
purpose of human work.
Then came the antithesis, the
negation. In the society that Marx was studying, work did not free people: it
enslaved them. They were not allowed to own the means of production (the land
or the factory) and its profits. They were obliged to sell their work, to part
with it while others enjoyed its fruits. Modern society had made work a means
of enslavement.
So what was the synthesis, the
negation of the negation, the way out of that contradiction? When capitalist
society (which entailed the selling of people’s labour) reached the stage of
industrialisation, with mass production and mass manpower, it led to the formation
of a growing class of wage-slaves, the proletariat. This automatically
sharpened the class struggle or class war, and therefore soon provoked
revolution.
Industrial capitalism, Marx
believed, was the last stage of a long historical process that had brought
human society from slavery to feudalism and then to capitalism, first
commercial and finally industrial. The world of the nineteenth century had thus
simultaneously reached the stage of industrialisation and that of revolution, which
would abolish private property. The next step would be communism.
But communism would not replace
capitalist society overnight. (‘Capitalist’, incidentally, was a word that Marx
used, at least from 1846 onwards: ‘capitalism’, although very useful, he did
not.) As he explained in 1875, there would be ‘an inferior stage of communism’
during which the new society would emerge as best it could from the old. This
stage was known as socialism: its slogan was ‘To each according to his work’.
The next and higher stage was Communism proper. It was rather like the promised
land. With it, society could proclaim on its banners: ‘From each according to
his ability (at the production stage), to each (at the consumption stage)
according to his needs.’ Manifestly, Marx’s dialectic was optimistic: it was an
‘ascendant’ philosophy, as Georges Gurvitch has written.
To Russian revolutionaries,
however, Marx’s message may well have seemed pessimistic. For the moment, after
all, he had concluded that revolution in Russia was theoretically impossible,
although he had second thoughts on the subject around 1880, when revolutionary
unrest there was once more in the news. In Russia, he thought, the industrial
proletariat had not yet fully developed: it would take years for the new
conditions created by capitalism’s productive power to operate to the full.
Only then would there be ‘a period of social revolution’. As yet, the time was
not ripe.
Marx and Engels pondered,
explored and debated this problem, using Britain as an example. When the first volume
of Das Kapital was published in 1867, Britain was already in the midst of her Industrial Revolution –
or, more precisely, in the midst of the difficulties it had caused without as
yet providing ways of overcoming them. Marx and Engels also considered the
examples of France and Germany, the latter by now only slightly behind the
former and rapidly gaining ground. All such examples, of course, were very far
removed from conditions in Tsarist Russia.
That being so, how could one
expect a social revolution in the name of Marxist principles in Russia at the
end of the nineteenth century, where industrialisation had made very little
headway and where the peasants made up 80 per cent of the population, and
industrial workers only 5 per cent?
Lenin was well aware of this
contradiction, from the time when he published The Development of
Capitalism in Russia in 1899, and still more just before
and after the Revolution of 1905. Admittedly, as a disciple of Marx, Lenin was
the prisoner of doctrines he admired and in which he felt at home. He had very
few ideas not already to be found in Marx’s writings. On the other hand,
although his real talent was for planning revolutionary action, he was far more
original, even as a thinker than is often said.
He came, in fact, from the
minor Russian aristocracy, as his voice and accent showed. He was not,
therefore, simply a ‘representative of the Russian people’, its simplicity and
its ‘practical intelligence’. Nor was he solely a man of action. In fact, when
he was accorded ‘the honour of cleaning the Second International’s Augean
Stable’, it was because he had already produced original and concrete analyses
of its problems and searching criticisms of its practice. When he went into
action, it was always after passionate and lucid thought. Wherever he differed
from Marx, therefore, it was where disagreement was to be expected: on
revolutionary strategy and tactics, which he saw in a Russian context and in
terms of relations between the ‘proletariat’ and the ‘Revolutionary Party’.
In a word, Lenin gave politics
systematic priority over economic and social matters, and the ‘Party’ priority
over the proletarian mass. He was in favour, one might almost say, of ‘politics
first’. For Marx, revolution
was the result of social explosions that were almost natural events, occurring
in their own good time under the pressure of industrialisation and the class
struggle. The proletariat, herded into the towns as a result of
industrialisation, was explosive and revolutionary by its very nature.
Alongside it, part of the bourgeoisie had been the forcing-house of the new
ideologies; but now it had already fulfilled its revolutionary role. On
occasion, perhaps, the help of the democratic and liberal middle classes might
still be useful: but for a long time Marx and Engels were very hesitant to use
it. And after 1848, not without reason, they especially mistrusted the
reactionary potential of the French peasants, whom they saw as ‘false
proletarians’ deeply attached to their parcels of land.
Debates about what form revolutionary action should take continued
long after Marx’s death in 1883. Roxa Luxemburg (1870-1919), from Germany,
shared Marx’s views. For her, only the industrial proletariat was to be
trusted: it must be the sole driving force of revolution, since all the other
classes were its enemies. The ‘Party’, therefore, must belong to the
proletariat, which must watch it closely from within and control it. That, she
believed, was the only way to prevent its being bureaucratised.
Lenin took a different tack.
Like some reformists, he doubted whether the proletariat (‘under imperialism’)
was naturally and spontaneously revolutionary: and in any case spontaneity
horrified him. The time had come, he thought, to emphasise the Party and
possible alliances which might rally to the proletariat’s cause any other
oppressed social groups, whoever they might be. In 1902,
in What is to be Done?, he maintained that, without
the leadership of a centralised party of professional revolutionaries, the
proletariat would opt not for revolution, but for reformism and trade-unionism,
dreaming perhaps of a utopian working-class aristocracy. Was it not the case
that in Britain at that time, the up-and-coming Labour Party was having to
oppose the Trade Unions’ hesitant conservatism, as in France, where the unions
were more anti-Socialist than is often thought. Contradicting Rosa Luxemburg
and some others, Lenin added that the age of national wars was not yet over,
and that there had to be alliances with the liberal bourgeoisie. Furthermore,
and still in disagreement with Rosa Luxemburg and ‘Luxemburgism’, he called for
a programme of agrarian reform, and refused in any case to regard the peasants
as reactionary. On that crucial point, he was surely influenced by Russia’s
revolutionary Socialists. Like them, he saw the enslaved
peasantry as
the essential driving-force of revolution, and did not intend to ignore its
immense explosive power. In the event, it ensured success for the 1917
Revolution. As regards Russia, Lenin had been right.
This is not the place to examine
in detail the ideological discussion and declarations that marked and in some
cases influenced the development of the Soviet Union after 1917. Suffice it to
say that there was a cultural shift, from Marxism to Leninism. The latter was a
revised form of Marxism ‘reinterpreted’, as anthropologists might say, to adapt
it to the under-industrialised, still mainly agrarian Russia of the Tsars at
the beginning of the twentieth century – so near in time still, and yet so far.
‘The proletariat,’ declared Lucien Goldmann, ‘was too small in numbers, and
therefore too unimportant, economically, socially and politically, to spark off
by itself a revolution which would at once have ranged the rest of society
against it.’
The Russian Social-Democratic
Party, later the Communist Party, was founded in 1898 by the
second generation of Russian Marxists (Lenin, Julius Martov and Fyodor Ilich
Dan) with the agreement of the first generation (Georgy Plekhanov, Pavel
Axelrod, Vera Zassulich, Lev Deutsch), who while abroad had formed the Group
for the Liberation of Work (Grouppa Osvobojdeniya Trouda).
During the Social-Democratic
Party’s second congress, in 1903 in London, a deep split occurred. On one side
were the Bolsheviks (Russian for ‘the majority’, although in this case it was
by one vote); on the other were the Mensheviks (‘the minority’), including
Plekhanov himself. Why the dispute? Because of Article 1 in the Party’s
statutes, into which Lenin had introduced measures that went
by the name of ‘democratic centralism’. They provided for
a
preponderant role for ‘professional revolutionaries’, i.e. technicians;
strict,
indeed iron discipline by the Party;
wider
and dictatorial power for the Central Committee over the whole of the Party,
and especially its grass-roots organistions;
if need
be, a small Bureau to take over all the Party’s powers.
Was that clear enough? It made
the Party an autonomous war machine, which the Mensheviks accused of
dictatorship and disregard for democratic principles. (Trotsky predicted that
Lenin’s measures would end in the dictatorship of one man, the Chairman of the
Central Committee.)
All the same, there is plenty
of evidence that this tactical approach was made necessary by the state of
social and industrial development in Russia at the time. In 1905, Lenin
attacked the argument advanced by a small number of Socialists who believed, he
said, ‘that a Socialist (i.e. proletarian) revolution was possible, as if the
productive forces of the country were sufficiently developed for such a
revolution to take place’. More revealing still is the
last-minute argument between Lenin and Gregory Plekhanov, the founder of
Russian Marxism, on the eve of the seisure of power by the revolutionaries of
1917. Lenin denied planning to take power: if the he took it, he said, it would
simply in the hope of support from the Socialist revolution that was about to
break out in the advanced capitalist countries – a hope which the Russian
Revolution would soon have to abandon, condemned as it quickly was to stand
alone. Plekhanov, reverting to basic Marxist arguments – the weakness of the
industrial proletariat, the Backwardness of Russian capitalism, the huge
majority of the peasant population – warned Lenin that if he seised power he
would be forced, whether he liked it or not, to impose dictatorship and
terrorist methods of government. Lenin retorted
that to talk like that was to insult him. But he seised power, and he unleashed
the agrarian revolution, just like Mao Tse-tung thirty years later.
Even so, these problems
continued to worry him. When in 1921, with the [] (NEP), he for a short time
put the machine into reverse, his public statements characteristically echoed the
same line of thought that had run through earlier polemics. ‘We were mistaken’,
he declared. ‘We acted as if one could build Socialism in a country where
capitalism scarcely existed. Before we can achieve a Socialist society, we must
rebuild capitalism.’ In the event, the [NEP] barely survived Lenin’s death.
From 1928-9 onwards, Stalin espoused industrialisation, which was pursued with
whatever means lay to hand. Its difficulties and its achievements are a matter
of history.
But let us return to 1883, the
date of Marx’s death, to illustrate the debate more clearly. Georgy Plekhanov,
imagining a case in which the revolutionaries seised power ‘by accident’ or ‘by
conspiracy’, wrote that ‘in those circumstances all they would be able to build
would be a Socialism like the Empire of the Incas’, i.e. with an authoritarian
regime. In saying this, Plekhanov was echoing a remark of Marx’s own.
Discussing a similar eventuality, Marx had spoken of ‘convent Socialism’ or the
‘Socialism of the barracks’.
To recall these words and these
debates, as has often been done, is not to condemn the events of October 1917
and their consequences in the name of some ‘pure Marxism’ which history has
somehow swept aside or scorned. The point is that, by chance, the Socialist
revolution occurred in the least industrialised country in Europe at
the time. So it was impossible for it to take place in accordance with
the Marxist scenario of a seisure of power by the proletariat. Power was seised
by the Communist Party (as the Social-Democratic Party became) – i.e. by a tiny
minority of the vast Russian population, perhaps some 100,000 people all told.
This highly organised minority took advantage of the appalling stampede of 10
or 12 million peasants, escaping from the army and flooding back to their
villages. On the way, some of them fought and killed each other; when they
arrived home, they began to commandeer the estates of aristocrats, the rich
bourgeoisie, the Church, the convents, the Crown and the State.
Lenin is said to have asked:
‘If Tsarism could last for centuries thanks to 130,000 aristocratic feudal
landowners with police powers in their regions, why should I not be able to
hold out for a few decades with a party of 130,000 devoted militants?’ He is
also said to have remarked, in Napoleonic fashion: ‘We’ll attack, and then
we’ll see.’
‘To hold out for a few decades’
until Russia had reached a degree of development and industrialisation that
might have allowed a ‘reasonable’ revolution: that, for years, seemed to be the
crucial problem. It was also the motivation for an implacable dictatorship which
was never the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ but that of the communist
leaders – in the name of a proletariat that did not yet exist. ‘Under Stalin,
the dictatorship of the leaders even became that of one single man.’ The
historical example that those sombre and dramatic years in the life of Russia
cannot fail to evoke is that of the Committee of Public Safety in 1793-4: but
in this case dictatorship did not so quickly fail. The reason was undoubtedly
the iron discipline of a single Party which prevented any lasting rebellion:
quite the reverse of what happened in Paris in 1794.
Marxism and Soviet civilisation
For many years the USSR had lived under a political dictatorship,
without freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of association or freedom
to strike, with a single, disciplined, ‘monolithic’ Party in which underlying
conflicts only came to the surface now and then as dramatic personal
confrontations. After the death of Stalin in 1953 there was
a certain liberalisation – or rather, humanisation, since ‘liberalisation’ was
then for Communists a dirty word. It was a slow process, but apparently
irreversible. And was not the reason for this ‘de-Stalinisation’, as some
called it, the fact that the dramatic, emergency days of the Committee of
Public Safety were long past? The USSR had not emerged from all its internal
difficulties, by any means, but it had joined the ranks of the major
industrialised countries, the priviledged nations. It had won its place by the
sweat of its brow, but it was there. At the same time it had built, whether
knowingly or not, some of the structures necessary to a mass civilisation. For
the first time, perhaps, it had the chance to choose its own road, its own
revolution, internally at least – since its role in world politics as a leader
of the other Communist countries placed other constraints upon it, from the
outside.
Even by then, Marxism had
already changed. Fifty years of effort and conflict on all fronts had been a
long ordeal. No wonder that during that time Marxism-Leninism, as a State
doctrine, while maintaining its cherished themes and doctrines, evolved a great
deal. It would have been a wonder had it not.
Official speeches went on
repeating the sacrosanct clichés: the class struggle, praxis, slavery,
feudalism, capitalism, relative pauperisation, dialectical materialism, the
material base or the coming of a wonderfully happy classless society. But that
did not mean that the whole massive ideology of Marxism, like all ideologies
and religions, had not by virtue of its own position been obliged to come to
terms with real life. In any case, the revolutionaries, like the Russian
intelligentsia of the turn of the century before them, had always held that an
idea was valid only if it took shape in practical life, in praxis. As a system
of tightly knit ideas, Marxism could therefore be valid only if it were
embodied in the actual experience of millions of people. And if it ‘became
concrete’ in this way, bringing itself ‘up-to-date’, experience was bound to rub
off on it. Its disciples claimed that ‘Marxism was a conception of the world
that overtook itself’. Sympathetic observers made the same point.
‘Twentieth-century Communism’, they said, ‘underwent transformations comparable
to those of Christianity in the first to the fourth century.’
One would have to be a casuist
to count all
the changes, infidelities and heresies of which Marxism accused itself and
Marxists accused each other. To catalogue them would not be without
interest, so long as no particular detail were allowed to take precedence,
however significant it might seem. A catalogue of that sort would make sense
only against the practical background that would explain it and be explained by
it. Nor is it the clearest or most important way of appraising the Soviet
experiment.
In fact, if the years since
1917 seem a long time to those who have lived through their vicissitudes, they
are still not long enough to reveal how deeply or otherwise that brutal break
with the past, and the ordeals and further revolutions that followed it, have
affected the nation’s underlying ideological, social and cultural evolution. We
should need to distinguish what in all that experience was an aberration
(especially but not exclusively in the early transitional years before 1930)
and what was not. Only then could we hope to determine what relationship there
has been between an ideology imposed by force and a society sucked into an
experiment which it had not chosen and which it neither fully accepted nor even
fully understood.
How far, for example, was the
re-establishment of widely differing wage-rates, already planned by Lenin, an
accident, a decision expressing Stalin’s all-powerful will, a social necessity
or an inevitable economic trend? The result, in any case, was a social
hierarchy, with obvious priviledges for those in its higher ranks. A
Soviet university teacher remarked with a laugh: ‘We are the Soviet
bourgeoisie.’ Of course, such a hierarchy can re-establish a class system only
if its priviledges, which go with office, can be passed on to the next
generation, so that the children gain advantages (education, money or jobs)
from their parents’ social position. This tendency is natural in every society
with a strong family life, and Communism in the Soviet Union has in no way
destroyed it. Stalin even strengthened it.
A further basic problem has
been agriculture. Soviet attempts to organise it on collective lines were
failures, and were resisted by the peasantry, with long memories of their
maltreatment by Stalin. But this peasant discontent, so often echoed in muffled
form by Russian novels, is surely also a normal and almost inevitable reaction
on the part of any traditional culture suddenly torn from its ancient habits by
rapid economic modernisation. The problem would seem to arise in all
countries seeking to modernise at speed, irrespective of the solutions adopted.
It is by no means clear,
meanwhile, that the last word has been spoken in the more or less tense
dialogue between Soviet ideology and the Orthodox Church – if, indeed, there is
such a thing as a last word. In the face of ‘religious alienation’, the regime
adopted militant materialism, aggressive rationalism – not denying God but
vehemently affirming human concerns. The Second World War helped to revive
orthodox belief, and led to a compromise between the Church and Stalin, who
re-established the Patriarchate of Moscow, abolished by Peter the Great. Stalin
even made reference, in a speech on 7 November 1951, to Alexander Nevsky,
prince and saint of the Orthodox Church. No doubt the majority of the
practising faithful are of the older generation. But what are the real
attitudes of most people when it comes to baptism, marriage and funerals? The
pomp and circumstance with which the State tried to surround civil weddings may
be a proof that it had a fight on its hands, or at least had to fill a vacuum.
Finally, with successive
generations, the dramas of the past have begun to recede in people’s memories.
Marxism-Leninism has now moved into the background, rather as Western Cartesian
thinking, though still pervasive, has become less conscious as a philosophy.
This need not imply that the ultimate ideals of Communism have been totally
abandoned: but they are no longer burning issues, to be discussed every moment
of the day. Even in the 1960s, out of 220 million Soviet citizens, only 9
million were members of the Party. Marxism-Leninism was their trademark, their
watchword, their everyday language. But what about everybody else?
The biggest challenge that
Communism brought to life in the USSR, however, was rapid industrialisation,
and the hope of successfully completing it by building on its successes,
overcoming its difficulties and repairing its failures.
In human terms, the change cost
Soviet citizens dear. The leaders of the Revolution in 1917 did not inherit an
industrial infrastructure ready-made, ‘supplied in advance by capitalism’. They
had to build it; and this in part explains the particular nature of Stalinist
dictatorship. It took on the basic task ‘that elsewhere was performed by
nineteenth-century capitalism’. [Mnemotechnique] The cruelties
of Stalin’s regime are not wholly to be explained either as the whims of a
power-mad dictator or as the stern necessities of Socialism or Communism. They were
also in part a response to underdevelopment, a ruthless State policy devised to
invest human labour in the race to industrialise a Backward and mainly agrarian
country.
How far the goal was attained
will be debated by specialists for a long time to come. Statistics are a
fertile ground for controversy. Their language is international, so peoples
compare themselves with each other like children comparing their height. It is
important of course, to use the same units of measurement. Official figures, for
example, show industrial production in France to have increased by 7.7 per cent
a year between 1953 and 1959 (1953 = 100, 1959 = 156), by 8.3 per cent in
Germany (1953 = 100, 1959 = 169), and by 11.3 per cent in the USSR (1953 = 100,
1959 = 190). But these official statistics are not directly comparable. The
West calculates its indices in net value, the Soviets in gross value. The
Soviet economist Strulinin showed that industrial production in 1956,
calculated in gross value, was 22.9 times that in 1928, but only 14.7 times
that if calculated net. With discrepancies on that scale, it was easy to
imagine how long the USSR’s critics and its apologists could be locked in
debate.
However, while the Soviet
Union’s economic goals remained beyond its grasp, in the 1960s they were not
entirely out of sight. Immense progress had been made, with quite extraordinary
achievements in a number of places, not excluding Siberia.
Great social changes followed
the 1917 Revolution. In all the Soviet Republics, industrialisation began to
change people’s lives; and this fact in its turn affected the life of the
Union. Everywhere, new structures began to emerge.
A first major change was the
influx of peasants into the towns. The USSR imposed the growth-rate of an
American boom on a people traditionally stolid and in 1917 still essentially
peasant. Everywhere, tension arose between pace and peace, between the
ubiquitous pressure for change and the stolidity which often became stubborn
resistance to it. In the Central Asian Republics, the coexistence of
Americanism and orientalism was more extraordinary still.
The figures show the scale of
the change. In 1917, 80 per cent of the Russian populations were peasants. By 1962,
the peasants were barely in the majority, with 52 per cent, while the
proportion of industrial workers and managers had risen to 35 per cent. Over
the same period, the number of bureaucrats had been multiplied by 10, and the
number of intellectuals by at least 100. Altogether, there had been a huge
drift from the land and into the cities.
The results could be seen
almost everywhere. With the exception of the former capital, Leningrad, which
retained the metropolitan air it had always had, cities old and new, including
Moscow (which had become a sort of gigantic Chicago), took on a peasant
appearance. Their life became curiously rural. Intellectuals and students were
no exception. ‘A new race was created in Russia’, invading every sphere of
life, from the humblest job to heights of scientific research – the summit of
the social scale. Stalin’s double programme of industrialisation in the cities
and collectivisation on the land created urban jobs and rural jobless, forcing
peasants to seek work in the towns whether they liked it or not – all this in
only a few years.
In 1947,
peasants were still recognisable in the towns they had invaded: they wore
rustic clothes; they moved slowly; they shouted as they scrambled on to buses
and trams. Already by 1956 a change was visible. The peasants had become more
urbanised, and with a higher standard of living they were better dressed. By 1958, one no longer saw women and children walking barefoot;
behaviour in theatres and cinemas was exemplary; peasant boorishness was on the
wane. And yet people’s rural origins, still so recent, showed in a myriad tiny
ways. That is perhaps why in Leningrad, by contrast, everything seemed more
urbane, the women more elegant, the language spoken more correct. Thanks also
its physical appearance, admirably restored after 1945, the place gives the
impression of an old European city, quick, attractive and cultivated, linked by
its busy port to the wider world. It has not been swamped by the countryside.
Yet perhaps, despite its industrial suburbs, it still remains a little cut off
from the extraordinary bustle of life – that very feature that makes Moscow so
clearly a capital.
The influx of labour from the
countryside quickly outnumbered the skilled workers of the past. Peasants
filled the factories, ignorant, ill-trained, clumsy and, like all peasants,
suspicious of machinery. Turned overnight into factory-hands, they at first
achieved only low productivity. So, to make up the lack of production, more of
them were drafted in.
There was a similar influx of
peasants, or at least of their children, into the schools and universities. In 1917, at least 75 per
cent of the population was illiterate. By the 1960s, it was claimed,
illiteracy had been totally eradicated. This would certainly explain the
growing numbers of libraries, reading-rooms and popular editions of Russian
classics (although not of Dostoevski or Sergey Yesenin until 1955). These, as
well as selected foreign translations, were often printed in enormous numbers –
on occasion, as many as 10 million. True, the price of books, on mediocre
paper, was derisory. Was this why the classics were so popular? Or was it
because contemporary authors seemed lame, and the press was dull and difficult?
At all events, radio, television and records were also extensively devoted to
further education.
What O. Rosenfeld has called ‘this
cultural revolution’ in itself encouraged a genuine social revolution – an
immense desire for emancipation, a hunger to learn and rise in the social
scale. ‘Crazy over-ambition’, a harsh observer might say.
Let us call it rather an eagerness for culture, the key to both money and
prestige. Whatever their motive, there were more and more students at
universities and technical schools, or taking correspondence courses and
evening classes. Often, the children of peasants had the best results. In this
way, the USSR was training the intellectual élite it needed – engineers,
research workers, officers, professors – out of its inexhaustible human
resources. What happened in France after Jules Ferr’s educational reforms, and
then with free education in secondary schools and universities, was organised
by Soviet authorities at vertiginous speed – and therefore not always without
mishaps. It still seems astonishing, for instance, that from 1947 to 1956,
secondary education in the Soviet Union was fee-paying, not free.
By the 1960s, however, the
level of education was generally said to have fallen.
Once made, that statement calls
for qualification. The Russian spoken today, it is true, is no longer the
refined language of the past. The education so widely offered is utilitarian,
mass-producing the specialists needed by modern society, from the schoolteacher
to the engineer or even the university professor. ‘Semi-intellectuals’, said
one observer, not normally so unkind.
Unkind or not, was the remark
fair? Was this mass semi-culture simply a normal feature in a new country, as
is often suggested, or more simply still characteristic of an emerging mass
civilisation? In all the highly industrialised countries in the world, in
Europe or America, universal education tends to produce more specialists, and a
lower level of general culture. Yet the number of people forming a true
intellectual élite has not diminished: at the very worst, it has remained the
same. Instead of the
very small intellectual élite and the very large mass of illiterates that
traditional civilisations maintained, modern
civilisations present a more complex picture: a small élite, a very small
number of illiterates and a mass of people for whom education
is mainly vocational, not a form of higher intellectual training.
In fact, at this higher level,
Soviet or CIS intellectuals, scholars and teachers are in our view (and taking
account of ideological differences) comparable with those in Europe or the
United States. They are also the heirs of the same culture. For a Parisian
intellectual, for example, to go from French universities to the Moscow Academy
of Sciences is to feel at home, to enjoy immediate mutual comprehension in any
discussion or jest. The first impression is that the USSR’s total isolation
since the Revolution – the physical isolation that cut it off from
uninterrupted relations with Europe – had no effect at this academic level. At
first sight, this seems surprising. But on second thoughts, one recalls that at
the beginning of the twentieth century Europe and Russia were stepped in the
same civilisation. And in the life of a civilisation, the time since then is
relatively short. Despite all the fantastic upheavals that have shaken so many
social and political structures in the former Soviet Union, it still largely
belongs to the same civilisation as that of Russia in 1917, i.e. our own.
True, literature and the arts
seem to contradict this assertion.
Indeed, if we look in them, as
usual, for the best portrait of the society that supports them, in the case of
the Soviet Union that portrait looks decidedly pale. But were the pious
official works, so absurdly unrealistic, to be regarded as truly representative
of Soviet writers and artists, and even of Soviet society and daily life? They
were of course the fruit of exceptional circumstance.
Their unconvincing tone was
absent from the works of Marx, Engels and even Lenin. It emerged only at the
beginning of Stalin’s ascendancy, around 1930. Then, the
authorities attacked any intellectuals who questioned or rejected Stalin’s iron
discipline and the mobilisation of ‘the artistic and literary front’ in pursuit
of the five-year plan. The first victim was the Association of Proletarian
Writers, the RAPP: it was dissolved in 1932, together with similar
organisations for music and the fine arts. In their place a single body was
formed, under the direct control of the Communist Party.
At the same time, artists and
writers were ordered to become ‘engineers of human souls’. In 1934 Andrei Zhdanov,
the Party Secretary, defined their dogma, ‘the method of Socialist Realism’.
What artists and writers must do was to describe with ‘veracity’ the
‘historically concrete character’ of Socialist reality, and in particular the
conditions of production, thus contributing to ‘the ideological transformation
and the education of workers in the spirit of Socialism’. Their duty, as
Zhdanov himself put it, was to be ‘tendentious’, to produce ‘edifying’ works,
in which people were clearly divided into ‘positive heroes’, the true
Communists, and ‘negative characters’ – all the rest. The avant-garde
movements that had flourished in all the arts at the beginning of the
Revolution, and which in the Soviet Union continued to be called ‘left-wing
art’, were now condemned as ‘formalist’ and suppressed. A number of writers and
theatre directors were arrested, and mysteriously disappeared. Most writers took
refuge in silence or semi-silence. Mikhail Sholokhov, the author of Quiet Flows the Don, whose first three
volumes were published between 1925 and 1933, and the fourth in 1940, wrote
nothing more until the death of Stalin.
After the Second World War, to
counteract the influence of ‘the corrupt West’, the ‘Zhdanov line’ was even
more strongly enforced. Literature, theatre and the cinema were all kept under
close surveillance; the slightest deviation was denounced and punished. In
1948, the great composers Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram
Khachaturian were violently attacked for writing ‘hermetic’ music and misusing
dissonance.
In other words, throughout
Stalin’s dictatorship, artists were brought to heel like the rest of the Soviet
population. All
the products of that period were conformist and mediocre.
Did the death of Stalin change
everything? Yes and no. There was certainly an immense reaction, and a sudden
slackening of tension: but the liberal explosion was thought dangerous, and at
that time it was very soon damped down.
The end of 1953 and the
following year saw a profusion of plays satirising the faults of Soviet
society; and an article by a young critic on ‘sincerity in literature’,
published in the magazine Novy Mir,
ridiculed the official distinction between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’
characters. Although the authors of these squibs were punished for their
boldness, de-Stalinisation and the attack on the ‘cult of personality’
encouraged further outspokenness. Hundreds of thousands of deportees returned,
and assurance was given that severe sanctions would no longer be applied. This
sparked off intense intellectual excitement, and what might be called a
literary changing of the guard: those writers who had made their names under
Stalin now feel silent, and those of his former victims who were still alive
reappeared in print. So great was the effervescence that the authorities were
worried. In 1957, they were advised and warned to avoid ‘revisionism’ and
systematically blackening Soviet reality in the guise of a refusal to
‘embellish and varnish it’. This reaction was a clear expression of the policy
pursued by Nikita Khrushchev.
He certainly condemned Stalin’s
methods. Even defeated political opponents were no longer executed or subjected
to physical violence; and there was some liberalisation in cultural matters and
relations with other countries. But to open the floodgates to a violently
critical campaign, at the very moment when the revelation of Stalin’s crimes
had deeply shaken a generation of his young and faithful admirers, would have
looked like endangering the regime and the USSR’s position as leader of the
world’s Communist countries, as well as perhaps weakening its international
power. So the Government reacted – forcefully.
Was the public, then, concerned
by that struggle? Huge popular audiences enjoyed the classic plays of the
Russian or foreign repertoire; they liked folklore, ‘pure, stylised or
adapted’; they flocked to classical operas that were a revelation to people
until recently still peasants. Hence the success of Faust, La Traviata or Carmen, rivalling the Red Army dancers
or Tchaikovski’s ballet Swan Lake.
But it would still be a mistake to believe that in these matters there was a
sharp distinction between ‘lowbrows’ and ‘highbrows’, the general public and
the intellectual élite. The freedom of expression that Soviet writers and
artists were seeking was in fact a crucial problem, then and in the future.
The problems that beset art and
literature hardly affected mathematics and the natural sciences. These, for the
most part, were in a flourishing state. There were many reasons for this. The
sciences, as an intellectual discipline, have usually been subject to little
detailed control. Very often, they have no relevance to political or
ideological debates, and can avoid them. At the same time, the Russians have
always been exceptional mathematicians. Furthermore, the Government has not
been sparring with either cash or encouragement; and there is something
inspiring about building a new world or imagining others as yet undreamed of.
Finally, it has to be admitted that in the field of research there is something
to be said for authoritarianism. In the capitalist countries, research tends to
be dispersed among the different branches of industry, and is partly determined
by industry’s needs. In the USSR, it has been concentrated on Government
priorities. Industry has lost out; so, still more, have consumer comforts, for
so long disdained. But research has benefited, as has the organisation of
scientific teams. And today, success in research depends more on teams than on
brilliant individuals. So there may be homage due to the Academy of Sciences of
the USSR.
What conclusion can we draw?
That in the years after the Second World War, the Soviet Union was still
emerging from immense difficulties; and that it had the potential for great
material success. Some things it had already achieved. But the establishment of
a new structure was far from completed. It was haunted by tragic memories, as
well as, paradoxically, by its own world reputation. At a time when it could
almost be free to choose its own future, it had to take account of what
international repercussions its choice might have.
This somewhat limited its
freedom – a limitation that continued long after de-Stalinisation. It also
limited its own ‘superstructures’ of art and literature, those means of
‘escape’ without which no civilisation can fully explore itself or express
itself. Let us hope that before long the arts will spring into sudden life,
like the apple trees in Bolshoi Square in Moscow in the first warm sunshine in
May.
The Congress of October 1961
The dramatic 22nd Congress of the Communist Party,
in October 1961, threw a fantastic light on the then situation of the USSR.
There is no point now, of course, in recalling the dramatic clash of personalities,
the lists of condemnations, of excommunications, of the ‘living dead’ or the
‘walking corpses’. Nor is there any need to analyse in detail a turmoil that so
much recalls a Dostoievski novel – perhaps the tormented and tormenting
characters of The Brothers Karamazov.
What mattered, and what was
first clearly shown at that time, was Soviet civilisation itself, confronted
with its difficult tasks and choices, in both domestic and foreign affairs. The
future depends on how they are tackled. There are three major problems. The
first concerns the non-Russian nationalities, the people of other races and
civilisations within the union of federated Republics. The second is the
economic and material situation (but is it only material?) of ex-Soviet
civilisation as a whole. The third is the fate of international Communism, which already in 1961 was ceasing to
be monolithic and becoming ‘polycentric’, a kind of ‘Communism of the States’.
As
regards the first problem, what is at stake is the Union itself. The USSR, as
its name implied, regarded itself as a federation of Republic, or States that
were in principle independent, but bound together. In the CIS, can their mutual
relations be improved in such a way as to produce a powerful and unified
civilisation?
The Union was first formed by
the Empire of the Tsars; and even before 1917 it had already suffered many
misadventures. Divided, resorted, consolidated, then called in question again,
it continued to pose a difficult problem with no perfect solution. While
clearly autonomous, none of the Republics was truly independent, since its
defence, its policing and its communications were under control by the central
authorities, represented by delegates on the Central Committee of each
Republic. There was local nationalism – ‘chauvinism’ – and it was condemned.
Clashes occurred. Georgia had to be brought back in the Union in 1921; forty
years later, de-Stalinisation offended its fidelity to its most famous son. The
Baltic States, freed in 1918, annexed in 1940 and reoccupied in 1945, had had
priviledged status under the Tsars: but the Soviet Union long refused to renew
it. There was a crisis in Kirgizia in 1949-51, when the Soviet authorities
banned the national epic poem, Ma as.
And in 1958 the
Supreme Soviet announced its intention to recognise Azei as the only language
of Azerbaijan.
Local interests and cultures,
traditional languages and historical memories, fidelity or otherwise to
Communism, and the immigration or intrusion of Russians or Ukrainians into
other Republics: all these gave rise to problems, and sometimes to tensions, of
a colonial type. To take one example, after the reclamation of virgin land in
Kazakhstan, there were more Russians there than Kazakhs.
The only policy of which the
USSR was capable came as no surprise: it sought to maintain and safeguard the
life and ‘harmony’ of the Union. This it did by making reasonable and even very
generous concessions to the non-Russian Republics – especially since they
represented, all told, only a very small part of the USSR’s strength. This was
the policy that emerged at the 20th Congress of the Party in 1956. The result was a series of measures to give them greater
autonomy – an avowed return to Lenin’s nationality policy. To a Westerner, all
this was reminiscent of the traditional problems of colonisation and
decolonisation – but with one important difference. In the case of the USSR,
the ‘colonies’ and the ‘mother country’ were geographically and physically in
direct contact. On the agenda of the 21st Congress of the Communist Party there
was explicit mention of the word ‘assimilation’ – a highly charged and
evocative term. Was it possible? And would the USSR be able to achieve it, when
the West had so often failed?
In 1959,
the Secretary of the Kazakhstan Communist Party declared: ‘Lenin’s thesis that
nations can merge by growing economically and doing more and more together has
been confirmed by experience.’ This is perfectly possible. There have been
examples of successful assimilation in the past. A common policy, mutual
concessions and the need to live together can be powerful influences; so can
the building of new structures, political, economic and social, which both
sides share as a result of so many years’ experience of Communism.
Nevertheless, civilisation are tenacious. This can be seen in the matter of
language alone: the Republics of the USSR defended theirs with stubborn
success. They were not prepared to renounce their local civilisations. At the
time of writing, the debate was still going on – as it is today. It may well
have been that the fight again illiteracy, and the spread of education,
actually helped to intensify national awareness among the peoples of Central
Asia.
Prosperity or ‘bourgeois’
civilisation: the announcement of a twenty-year plan to lead the USSR to the
delights of Communist society did not seem a vain project in 1962.
So long as such and such a
condition was met, said the experts, the USSR should be able to make its ‘Great
Leap Forward’ into prosperity. They never agreed on what the conditions were.
But the Soviet public passionately wanted peace and longed for material
progress, which it believed was possible. That is why in the 1960s so many
younger people eagerly took part in the active running of the country. An
immense change seemed to be imminent, whatever form it might take and whatever
label it might later receive.
In 1962,
Soviet life was dominated by the hope of rapidly advancing towards the final
stages of the Industrial Revolution. The Khrushchev revolution seemed to open the
way to such progress, since the seven-year plan of 1958 had stressed the new
industries by a ‘sophisticated’ consumer society – electronics,
electro-mechanics, nuclear energy, plastics, chemicals. All of these were
industries which, even before they called forth a new generation of consumers,
required and would have to train ‘a new type of working class’ – white-coated
technicians, technologists, scientific and industrial research workers, and so
on. The pressure of these new social forces would sooner or later make the
democratisation of the USSR inevitable and irreversible, concluded the
sociologists from whom we gleaned these details.
But that pressure, of course, had
to make its way through both the live and the inert counter-pressures of
Communist society and the Party itself. It was logical, moreover, for the Party
to try to control and apportion any new prosperity and comfort, so as to make
the success its own.
That might have been possible,
but only if the USSR could have proved that its years of Communism had radically
changed it: that, if the Russia of 1917 was still part of Western civilisation,
the Soviet Union could achieve prosperity along lines different from the
‘bourgeois’ West, where it had been the best way of staving off revolution.
On this point, at the time of
writing, it was impossible to make predictions. The future remained entirely
open. It did, however, still seem possible that the former USSR might invent
its own solution, copying neither the American nor the European model.
International Communism? There
too, the future remained open, with few hints of what was to come. Western
commentators on the October 1961 Congress tended to see it as marking the end
of the monolithic International Communist Party. It seemed to them that the
USSR was consciously abandoning its leadership and the sacrifices that implied,
in order to concentrate on its own ‘Great Leap Forward’ and become the only
Communist country to achieve Communist perfection, thanks to material
prosperity. It seemed, in a word, as if the USSR was accepting ‘bicentrism’ for
itself and China, or even polycentrism – ‘Communism of the States’, leaving
everyone to their own problems and their own fate.
It seemed rash to be so
categorical. Even in the great Communist family, politics follows its ordinary
rules. Anger, quarrels, even threats, are often followed by reconciliation and
compromise (which is not only an Anglo-American ideal). Soviet mistrust of China is
nothing new: it has roots in centuries of history, and also in the
nineteenth-century conflicts in which Russia was one of the great powers that
shared the spoils of China’s wealth. But Soviet mistrust of
the United States was no less deep-rooted at the time of the Cold War.
The same reasons that obliged the United States to emerge from isolationism
make it impossible for the USSR, like it or not, to concern itself only with
its own economic problems. It has to see its internal policy in the context of
international reality.
Nevertheless, in the 1960s,
there seemed to be signs of differentiation among the various Communist parties
in the world, gravitating round the USSR like planets around a sun, and many of
them quite unlike each other.
In outer orbit were the
national Communist parties. Some were in the hostile environment of prosperous
Western countries like France or Italy, or even virtually non-existent, as in
the Anglo-Saxon countries or West Germany. Others, at that time, were living
underground lives in Western countries politically hostile to them but
economically weak: this was the case in Spain, Portugal and Latin America.
Others again were fighting their political battles in the open, in less
developed countries still fascinated by the Soviet and Chinese experiments, and
still living on hope.
Closer, but none the less
distant, were the satellite Communist countries. Those of the ‘glacis’ facing
the West had protected Soviet territory, like buffer states, since the Second
World War: Eastern Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and
Bulgaria. In all of them, great economic and social changes were under way. All
except Bulgaria, perhaps, were rapidly industrialising; both Eastern Germany
and Czechoslovakia, moreover, had inherited viable industrial economies from
pre-Communist days. Outside the ‘glacis’, finally, were Albania’s eccentric
Communist system and the equally individual Yugoslavia.
The position of these countries
at that time was complex. On the one hand, they could not stray far from the
Soviet Union; on the other, some of the structural reforms on which they staked
their future (agrarian reform, the break-up of huge estates in Poland and
Hungary, and industrialisation) would not have been possible, or would
certainly have been much harder, without the brutal intrusion of Communism. In
fact, their relations with the USSR and with Communism itself differed from
country to country, more or less confident, free and fruitful according to
their various economies and the different civilisations from which they sprang.
Finally, in the far distance,
weighed down by its difficulties but upheld by its pride, there was Communist
China, the
largest less-developed country in the world. It was certainly the least docile
and the most dangerous of the USSR’s partners.
This rapid sketch-map reflects
not only political position as they then were, but also economic situations
which change less rapidly. These do not determine the future, but they
influence it in advance. The former USSR, whose decades of effort put it in
some ways in the lead, may well have to suffer the solitude its efforts have
earned.
I. A
History of Civilisations
II.
Civilisations outside Europe
Part I. Islam and the Muslim World
Part II. Africa
Part III. The Far East
III.
European Civilisations
Part I. Europe
Part II. America
Part III. The Other Europe: Muscovy, Russia, the USSR and the CIS
I. A
History of Civilisations
1. Changing Vocabulary
2. The Study of Civilisation Involves All the Social Sciences
3. The Continuity of Civilisations
I. 2.
The Study of Civilisation Involves All the Social Sciences
Civilisations as geographical areas.
Civilisations as societies.
Civilisations as economies.
Civilisations as ways of thought.
I. 3.
The Continuity of Civilisations
Periods within civilisations.
Underlying structures.
History and civilisation.
II. Part
I. Islam and the Muslim World
4. History
5. Geography
6. The Greatness and Decline of Islam
7. The Revival of Islam Today
II. Part
II. Africa
8. The Past
9. Black Africa: Today and Tomorrow
II. Part
III. The Far East
10. An Introduction to the Far East
11. The China of the Past
12. China Yesterday and Today
13. India Yesterday and Today
14. The Maritime Far East
15. Japan
II. Part
I. 4. History
Islam as a successor civilisation: the Near East in new form.
The history of the Near East.
Muhammad, the Koran and Islam.
Arabia: the problem of a barely urbanised culture.
II. Part
I. 5. Geography
Islam’s lands and seas.
A continent as intermediary: trade-routes and towns.
II. Part
I. 6. The Greatness and Decline of Islam
No Muslim civilisation before the eighth or ninth century.
The golden age of Islam: eighth to twelfth centuries.
Science and philosophy.
Stagnation or decadence: twelfth to eighteenth centuries.
II. Part
I. 7. The Revival of Islam Today
The end of colonialism and the birth of new nationalist movements.
Muslim States in the modern world.
Muslim civilisation in the twentieth century.
II. Part
II. 8. The Past
Geography.
The dark past.
II. Part
II. 9. Black Africa: Today and Tomorrow
The awakening of Africa.
Economic and social issues at stake.
Art and literature.
II. Part
III. 10. An Introduction to the Far East
What geography shows.
Barbarism against civilisation: the evidence of history.
Distant origins: the reasons for cultural immobility.
II. Part
III. 11. The China of the Past
Religion.
Politics.
Social and economic affairs.
II. Part
III. 12. China Yesterday and Today
The time of imposed treaties: China as humiliated victim (1839-1949).
China renewed.
Chinese civilisation in the modern world.
II. Part
III. 13. India Yesterday and Today
Ancient India (before the British Raj).
British India (1757-1947): an ancient economy at grips with the modern
West.
Will India be spared a Chinese-style revolution?
II. Part
III. 14. The Maritime Far East
Indo-China.
Indonesia.
The Philippines.
Korea.
II. Part
III. 15. Japan
Japan before Chinese influence.
Japan learns from Chinese civilisation.
Modern Japan.
III. Part
I. Europe
16. Geography and Freedom
17. Christianity, Humanism and Scientific Thought
18. The Industrialisation of Europe
19. Unity in Europe
III. Part
II. America
20. Latin America, the Other New World
21. America par excellence: the United States
22. Failures and Difficulties: From Yesterday to the Present
23. An English-speaking Universe
III. Part
III. The Other Europe: Muscovy, Russia, the USSR and the CIS
24. From the Beginning to the October Revolution of 1917
25. The USSR after 1917
III. Part
I. 16. Geography and Freedom
Europe takes shape: fifth to thirteenth centuries.
Liberty and rights: eleventh to eighteenth centuries.
III. Part
I. 17. Christianity, Humanism and Scientific Thought
Christianity.
Humanism and humanists.
Scientific thought before the nineteenth century.
III. Part
I. 18. The Industrialisation of Europe
The origins of the first Industrial Revolution.
The spread of industralism in Europe (and beyond).
Socialism and industrialism.
III. Part
I. 19. Unity in Europe
Outstanding art and culture.
Economic interdependence.
Political delay.
III. Part
II. 20. Latin America, the Other New World
Geography, Nature and society: literature bears witness.
Racial problems: quasi-fraternity.
The economy: civilisations on trial.
III. Part
II. 21. America par excellence: the United States
A reassuring past: opportunities and setbacks.
Colonisation and independence.
Conquering the West.
Industrialisation and the growth of towns.
III. Part
II. 22. Failures and Difficulties: From Yesterday to the Present
An old nightmare: Black America, an ineradicable colony.
Capitalism: from the trusts to State intervention and oligopoly.
The United States in the world.
III. Part
II. 23. An English-speaking Universe
In Canada: France and Britain.
Southern Africa: Dutch, British and Blacks.
Australia and New Zealand, or Britain at last unchallenged.
III. Part
III. 24. From the Beginning to the October Revolution of 1917
Kiev.
The Russian Orthodox Church.
Greater Russia.
III. Part
III. 25. The USSR after 1917
From Marx to Lenin.
Marxism and Soviet civilisation.
The Congress of October 1961.
