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.

Foucault and Soviet Studies

What can Michele Foucault do for students of Soviet history? I’d say that you’d begin with an analysis of the links between Enlightenment thinking and Soviet ideology. The Enlightenment is clearly responsible for Marx’s optimism about human nature. Man is a blank slate, formed almost entirely by the social forces that surround him. (See the earlier post on Soviet conceptions of time to see how the Enlightenment got coupled with Soviet experimentalism to create the conditions in which human catastrophe were much more likely).

It’s only Soviet arrogance that took the Enlightenment assumption to ridiculous and destructive new extremes, assuming that political pressures could and should supersede all other potential social influences. Foucault’s central concept of the panopticon—invented by Jeremy Bentham as a method of policing prisoners by an intrusive, but labor-saving system of surveillance—is the best metaphor of the underside of Enlightenment thinking.

As Europe became more rational and scientific, it also became correspondingly more intrusive and regulatory. This was true of all European states throughout the 19th century, but Soviet Russia took the principle of the panopticon to unprecedented levels. Under Lenin and especially Stalin, private life became suspect, a threat to the primacy of the state and party. Anything that threatened to intrude in, or compete for, the hearts and minds of ordinary Soviet citizens was immoral.

The other obvious offering that Foucault to Soviet Studies is the way in which the Communist Superpower became the Western world’s alter ego, or, to use Foucault’s terminology, the Western world’s Other. It seems as if the human mind is constructed in such a way that it cannot embrace dichotomy. We define sanity by contrasting it with a definition of madness, we define freedom by contrasting with a definition of slavery, and we defined freedom by contrasting it with slavery. In this way, Western liberal democracies with capitalist economies created a sense of self by opposing their own identity with that of the Eastern neighbor.

In truth, the Soviet power was objectively antithetical to that which the West espoused. However, where this wasn’t the case, where the Soviet Union represented something more subtle than an alien enemy, the Soviet Union was demonized and characterized as the opposite of everything Western citizens valued. What damage this way of thinking did to democratic socialism in the West is difficult to say. But clearly, Right Wing politicians have used the Soviet bugbear to justify military budgets, foreign wars, and a variety of domestic policies that might otherwise have appeared to be too capitalistic to the Europeans and Americans.

Marie Antoinette and 1917

What is a revolution? The term gets overused today. We use it to describe any change. There are revolutions in fashion, diplomacy, technology, teaching techniques, music, and culture. Even in the restricted arena of politics, the term revolution is somewhat overused. If nations count their moment of independence from colonial powers as revolutions, we’ve seen dozens or even hundreds of revolutions in the past four or five decades alone. And of course revolutionary movements, many unsuccessful, are going on all the time, even today.

Columbia has a movement; Afghanistan has one; etc. But not all revolutions are alike: there are revolutions and then there are revolutions. The American Revolution in this sense barely qualifies. We broke away from a colonial power but retained English law, English political institutions, English juridical traditions, English language and culture, and English trade. George Washington was a wealthy and influential man both before and after the Revolution. The Russian Revolution was different. It changed a great deal including the political system, the legal framework, the economic structure, the culture, the calendar, the diplomatic orientation of Russia, the level of permissible violence, and so much more.

It’s interesting to see what Russian revolutionaries thought about previous revolutions, especially in the first months or even years of their success. There were quite a lot of revolts in history, but it seems that only the French Revolution gave them usable models to follow, with perhaps only the Revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 offering competitors of any sort.

The French example was influential in Russia for a number of reasons. For one thing, the French revolution had actually made its way to Moscow in 1812 and indeed inspired the Octoberists in the 1820s. For another, the French model had been, in its time, equally shocking to its contemporaries and equally as evangelical.

The violence level in the French Revolution was obviously much lower than that of the Soviet version, and yet cutting off a king’s head, murdering aristocrats in their cells, persecuting priests, and falsely accusing the queen of incest while parading her friends’ severed heads in front of her prison windows, was probably as shocking in its time as was the Soviet experiment. And in the end, the French Revolution was also about class and about creating a brand new, almost deliberately futuristic or Utopian society that was predicated on Enlightenment ideals.