Russia vs. socialism

This is a good moment to address the tension in this blog between Russia and socialism. The latter has been practiced everywhere from Phnom Penh to Oslo, and it's lived a robust life as an ideal whose partisans didn't always care much for the Soviets. So the nation of Russia, its culture and people, doesn't necessarily have an elective affinity with the political philosophy of socialism, and vice versa.

David Brooks said in the New Republic last fall that Barack Obama was the only Senator he'd met who knew more about political philosophy than he did. Looking back, I'm struck by how little interest I've had in political philosophers. Or at least the political philosophers Brooks refers to. In rough order of importance, judging by nothing more than his columns, I'm guessing they would be: Edmund Burke, Reinhold Niebuhr, F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, George Orwell, John Rawls, Michael Oakeshott. I know very little about these people, and it's not just because many of them are conservatives. Fur Coat used to wave around Reflections on the Revolution in France during grad school, but I could never get into it. I read a biography of Niebuhr once but was I supposed to take that Christian militarism seriously? Hayek's Road to Serfdom is a good book; Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution are great. I like John Stuart Mill in theory and wish I had more patience for him. Dewey is excruciating. George Orwell is fine but I'm not sure what makes him a philosopher. Never read a word by Oakeshott or Rawls.

By contrast the people who excited me back in those days were outside the liberal tradition. Marx, Gramsci, Hegel (maybe excited is the wrong word), the Frankfurt school, Croce. Some of these are good writers but I don't know how useful they are in 2010. At this point in life I sort of wish I'd invested a little time in Reflections on the Revolution in France.

The above list says something about the cloistered state of humanities graduate programs, as well as the fact that democracy to young people is boring. But the odd thing is that while the authors of socialist texts are alluring, their books are dense and drab. If Das Kapital is hard to slog through, what about Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital? Georg Lukacs is OK and Gramsci is good, but can you imagine reading Ernst Bloch for inspiration? Or Lenin? At least Lenin's books are short, but who in their right mind is going to tackle Althusser?

And yet all these names generate a frisson of delight that is absent from the democratic philosophers. John Dewey is just as impenetrable as Rosa Luxembourg but the idea of reading her, of being admitted to all that conspiratorial knowledge and grasping the secret of oppression and exploitation, is irresistible. Dewey is just a guy wondering how flawed humans can avoid killing each other. I enjoy having her books on my shelf, thumbing through them, imbibing the danger laced in her pages and admiring the perfect logical symmetry of her table of contents. Dewey just sits there ignored, and so would Burke, Niebuhr, Mill and Oakeshott.

The West's Love Affair with Stalin

It may seem odd that this blog is devoted to one year in the whole of human history. Why is one moment more or less important than any other moment? Walter Laqueuer observes that historians seem to agree that some moments are more important than others, and probably a plurality of historians would agree that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 is the single most important moment in modern world history, if not in the whole of human history.

This was of course the rhetoric of Revolution, but, strangely, historians have, by and large, endorsed this view. Even so, they don’t agree about anything beyond that. They condemn the purges, but disagree about almost every other detail of the revolutionary experience. One things historians still debate is why the West failed to come to terms with the nature of Soviet tyranny for so long. Laqueuer analyzes this dilemma in his essay, “Russia and the West” in The Fate of the Revolution, arguing that the reasons for Western naiveté are diverse and complicated.

Laqueuer begins the analysis by reminding readers that most contemporaries fundamentally misunderstood the French Revolution too. Even Burke and Paine—despite their genius for analyzing the philosophical significance of the Revolution—got it wrong in many fundamental aspects. Burke thought that revolutionary violence sprang from the actions of a small conspiracy of morally corrupt and evil men. He did not think the Revolution had sprung up as a reaction or byproduct of a host of societal structural flaws and social pressures. Paine, for his part, thought the Revolution was long overdue, but made no serious effort to explain how reform could coexist with revolutionary oppression and capricious murder.

The Russian Revolution naturally met with similar misunderstanding, made worse by the fact that the Russian people were cut off from contact with the West throughout the Revolution and afterward. In London and Paris, most people initially reacted to the Bolshevik takeover with abuse, although Western anger had as much to do with the fact that the West had lost an important ally in the war against Germany. As Laqueur reminds us, the British papers regularly ran articles that sensationalized Bolshevik actions, accusing them of making women the common property of men, nationalizing parenthood, outlawing God and religion, and murdering countless innocents. The attacks were intertwined with virulent anti-Semitism.

Later, the rhetoric was toned down, but sophisticated intellectuals such as the Webbs came to admire Stalin. It’s ironic that the West actually disliked Lenin more than they disliked Stalin. (Note: The Americans were less outraged by the defection of Russia in World War I, and assumed, wrongly, that the Bolsheviks would become more moderate over time. After all, they confidently reminded themselves that Communism removed the incentive of pay differentials and was therefore doomed to failure if left unreformed).

On paper, Lagueur tells us that Stalin’s Constitution was one of the best the world had ever produced, and in person Stalin could be as affable and modest and charming as anyone. Many visitors wrongly assured their constituencies at home that Russia was no less democratic than their homelands. Even Russian justice was lauded. And, if Stalin wasn’t always charming, he was at least powerful: and power, as we all know, is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Stalin had something else going for him: he wasn’t Hitler. This fact must have helped many people to overcome their scruples about the severity of his rule. If he was eliminating opponents, he was at least preparing Russia to meet the crisis Germany was bound to provoke. One is tempted to go further than Laqueur and say that frenzied Nazi propaganda attacks against the Soviet Union must have made it tempting to assume that Stalin’s Russia had something to recommend it. If Hitler hated Russia, maybe the Bolsheviks couldn’t be all bad. Needless to say, the triumph of the Soviet Union in World War II made it that much harder to believe the worst about Bolshevism. And soon after that, Russian industrial growth became the envy of the world.

Conservative Critique of Revolution

The Russian Revolution of 1917 wouldn’t have made sense without the French Revolution of 1789. The French Revolution defined radical struggle as well as its inevitable byproduct: self-conscious conservatism. The terms, Left and Right, emerged as a result of the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly. So Ivan Bunin’s critique of Red Russia was not a recent invention. Edmund Burke has said it all before in Reflections on the Revolution in France more than hundred years previously.

Burke’s critique of the French Revolution was predicated on a wider critique of the Enlightenment. Although he was a reformer, Burke stood firmly against the notion that society could or should be improved by rationality alone. Burke’s argument is complex, perhaps even a touch defensive, because the case for Revolution was strong. People knew the Ancien Regime was corrupt, abusive, arbitrary, and illogical.

On the face of it, thinking people could no longer accept the principle of autocracy, which allowed the king to rule by divine right with little regard for the welfare of his subjects, the rule of law, or the dictates of reason. The king’s arbitrary power was only the most obviously irrational aspect of pre-revolutionary France. The church ruled vast swathes of land and enjoyed immense privilege, including an exemption from taxation. The aristocracy enjoyed similar rights, which ranged from the right to carry weapons and the right to be executed by a dignified beheading as opposed to a more plebeian hanging.

The French system was rooted in feudalism, which was rooted in local privileges for local aristocrats who exercised enormous influence over the lives of serfs and peasants. The bourgeoisie, while gaining in influence from one decade to the next, were lumped together as a group with everyone in France who had no claim to aristocratic or clerical privilege. In these circumstances, the Revolution had a lot going for it. The new order it promised seemed fairer, smarter, and more efficient, that what it proposed to displace.

Burke rejected the logic of revolution, but respected that logic and made his case without relying on purely religious sentiment. Instead, he maintained that society was a slowly evolving organism that embodied the mystical but important lessons of history. If England’s system of government appeared irrational—with kings, lords, and an uneven electoral franchise—the system had evolved over many generations, contained myriad checks and balances, and worked well enough to preserve the people’s liberty. The conservative approach to politics was applied to Russia. While it might appear that the revolutionaries were overthrowing a destructive autocracy and an exploitative economy, Russian traditions had evolved over time for good reason.

Bunin, for instance, believed that—for all Russia’s flaws--the wisdom of the ages was contained in the Russian Orthodox Church, the Aristocracy, and other traditional institutions. If Old Russia represented a host of injustices, anti-Semitism included, Bunin thought that quick solutions would make things worse—much worse. Quick solutions, based on short-sighted claims to utilitarianism, reason, and universal truth, would result in violence and the triumph of an impoverished conception of humankind. We know now that Bunin turned out to be right: revolutionary Russia did make things worse.

The hubris of revolutionaries helped them to do away with the Tsar, but also with all other institutions that might have put a break on the government’s power, including the Church, the peasant commune, the Duma, independent judiciaries, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, the Jewish Bund, the intelligentsia, the arts, the military, and subject nationalities. Eventually, Stalin even moved against the family as an institution, and private life in general.