Eli Sagan's Citizens and Cannibals

Eli Sagan's book, Citizens and Cannibals, is a fascinating theoretical treatise on the meaning of the French Revolution.  Favoring analysis over narrative, Sagan argues that the French Revolution reveals the fault lines of modernity.  According to Sagan, the French Revolution is representative of the anxiety modern men and women feel when they give us Early Modern sources of corporate identity. Following the logic of Marshall Berman's book, All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Sagan maintains that French revolutionaries turned to terror to compensate for the loss of the king, the Catholic church, guilds, and other sources of social and cultural identity. Sagan writes that most people in France accepted the principles of the French Revolution even before it occurred.  Nobles, clergymen, and even the king, all more or less gave up medieval assumptions and joined the bourgeoisie in believing in the rights of individuals and the bourgeois concept of freedom.

According to Sagan, the French Revolution had little or nothing to do with capitalism, which had made few inroads in France by the end of the 18th century, and everything to do with middle class values. The French Revolution was not made by industrialists or great merchants but rather by lawyers. The Revolution was ultimately an expression of a new ethos.  By 1789 most educated people accepted many or perhaps most modern ideas about politics.  Robespierre, for instance, believed in many of the things we believe in.  He hated slavery, favored the separation of church and state, supported progressive taxation, and championed free and universal education.  He believed in civil rights, as they are commonly understood.   Sagan goes so far as to call Robespierre a "moral genius" for his early and eloquent advocacy of so many of the causes we still champion today.  On the other hand, Robespierre, like so many of his contemporaries, hated factionalism.  This hatred was born of a fear that is representative of the widespread fear that accompanied all passages to modernity.

Why was the French Revolution so bloody?  Sagan makes a compelling case that Frenchmen embraced most aspects of modernity but rejected the concept of a loyal ambition.  They believed in individual rights, and Rousseau's famous "general will" of the nation.  What they simply could not abide were factions.  Sagan points out that this suspicion of factions is common even to America's founding fathers.  He also reminds us that France never fully resolved its disgust with factions until DeGaulle renounced the idea of becoming a dictator well over a century later.  With this hatred of factionalism, French revolutionaries were left with no other choice but to annihilate one another.  The stakes were huge:  Girondists knew that they would either kill members of the Mountain, or be killed. Of course, Sagan doesn't let matters wrest there.  He knows that many national histories involved widespread bloodshed, and bloodshed out of all proportion to the struggle for political power.  In France, revolutionaries didn't just kill potential political opponents, but rather killed powerless nobles and other groups.

In the twentieth century, ideological terrorists repeatedly created large groups of people for no reason at all.  The holocaust, for example, cannot be explained by any ordinary logic. The murder of a group of people who offered no resistance to the regime was, strictly speaking, irrational.  How to explain such hysteria?  Sagan offers the plausible argument that Germans, like so many others who encountered modernity, were both exhilarated and terrified by their isolation and freedom. Cannibalism is in a sense the flip side of citizenship.

The logic of modern terror makes sense in a Russian context.  On a narrow level, we see that the Bolsheviks never learned how to deal with factionalism except through radical violence.  On some level, Stalin understood that he would either kill or be killed by political opponents.  Bolsheviks never admitted to themselves that other Bolsheviks had a right to disagree about tactics or ideology in fundamental ways.  The unit of the party and therefore the nation could not be threatened, even if the alternative to disunity was violence.  But more than an explanation for bloody dictatorship, Sagan offers us an understanding of why the Soviet Union embraced violence on such an enormous scale. Sagan offers us an explanation for why there were so many Stalinists in 1930s Russia.  The Russians were hysterical about something.  They required sacrifices to feel better about the earth-shattering, if also exciting, changes they were experiencing.  This is the paradox of the Russian Revolution, a paradox that existed however as early as the French Revolution:  Russians were forging a radical version of equality, but also giving up many of their most familiar sources of social cohesion, including the tsar, the Orthodox Church, the aristocracy, and the peasant commune. How to deal with this level of uncertainty?  Surely violence was chicken soup for the terrified soul.

Lenin Revisited

"Lenin" is not the nostalgic name for an old dogmatic certainty;  quite the contrary, the Lenin who is to be retrieved is the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which the old co-ordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to reinvent Marxism"  Slavoj Zizek

"...in revolutionary times the limits of what is possible expand a thousandfold." Lenin.

"Do the masses of the Russian workers possess sufficient class-consciousness, fortitude, and heroism to perform "miracles of proletarian organization" after they have performed miracles of daring, initiative, and self-sacrifice in the direct revolutionary struggle."  Lenin.

"..you performed miracles of proletarian heroism yesterday in overthrowing the tsarist monarchy."  Lenin.

"I would call this raving had not decades of political struggle taught me to regard honesty in opponents as a rare exception." Lenin

"Let us not forget that the issue of power is the fundamental issue at stake in every revolution."  Lenin

Dostoevsky once wrote in his Diary of a Writer:  "Try to pose for yourself this task:  not to think of a polar bear--and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute."   I think the opposite is also true:  try to think of the Revolution and everything but the Revolution will come to mind.  This is my excuse for straying so frequently, and so far, from the ostensible subject of this blog.  But today let me reflect on the fountainhead of the Russian revolutionary project, V.I. Lenin.  What kind of man was Lenin?  Like most great men and women of the past, one could spend a lifetime reading his biographies and never get a fixed image of the man.  Was he good or evil?  Was he exceptionally gifted or a product of his times?   Did he predict events better than other people?  Was he capable of shaping events or merely react to them?  Was he better or worse than his Bolshevik peers?  How responsible was he for Stalinism?

Fortunately, Lenin has left us a treasure trove of writing so we can at least return to primary sources to get a sense of how he thought about revolution before it had become monumentalized, or at least a sense of what he wanted other people to think he thought about it.  In fact, Lenin left us so much writing that it's hard to know where to begin.  But why not begin, as Slavoj Zizek begins in Revolution at the Gates:  Selected Writings from 1917, on the very eve of the first revolution of 1917, the February Revolution?  What was Lenin saying then, before he had become the chief spokesperson of a new government, and a political institution?  What did he say before he had any clue what would ultimately become of Russian socialism?

When one reads Zizek's selection of writings one is struck by the moral dichotomy of Lenin.  For clearly the framework of Marxism had allowed him to understand Russia's participation in the First World War with some degree of historical detachment.  Lenin's belief that the global conflagration was the inevitable consequence of bourgeois imperialism may not have been, strictly speaking, correct.  However, Lenin's Marxist perspective did allow him to see that the great conflict wasn't helping ordinary Russians, and not even Russian control of the Black Sea Straits--one secret goal of the war--would change that simple fact.  Lenin's refusal to choose sides in the First World War speaks to the central paradox of his approach to morality.  Lenin got the First World War right because he believed that moral decisions could only be decided with reference to long historical processes, especially as these related to the rise of the proletarian class.  This big perspective had its advantages.  One sees quite clearly that Lenin's support for peace and radical land reform were, historically speaking, correct.  On the other hand, we know that Lenin's detachment from ordinary politics led to authoritarian policies and devastatingly cruel decisions.

Lenin's writings also reveal his remarkable ability to demonstrate certainty about the future in the midst of political chaos.   Revolutionary Russia was a chaotic place, but Lenin's uncertainty only applied to tactics, which he was willing to change as circumstances changed.  On the big questions, Lenin didn't waver.  He knew Tsarism was bankrupt, that the Provisional Government was scarcely any better, and that even fellow socialists were unable to grasp the real historical logic of Marxism.   Lenin's writings are highly polemical.  In each letter or broadside the Bolshevik leader mocks his opponents unceasingly.  Lenin's opinion of anything that smacks of bourgeois influence is brutal.

It's interesting to compare Lenin's antipathy for bourgeois with the antipathy French revolutionaries expressed toward their political and even perceived social opponents. In the Price of Liberty, historian Donald Sutherland spends a great deal of time discussing conspiracy theories among French revolutionaries.  In that great upheaval, revolutionaries turned to violence at multiple stages in order to solve political problems.  They did so for several reasons apparently.  First, revolutionaries believed that the ancien regime, and specifically the king, had always used arbitrary power to solve problems.  If the king had been able to use violence to solve problems, why shouldn't the sovereign people do the same? After all, the people had a hundred times more political legitimacy than a king.  Second, revolutionaries, believing that their political settlement was invisible insofar as it had been established by the whole nation, could only conceive of defeat as a consequence of perfidy from within.  With this mindset, the French radicals attacked their enemies viciously, even condoning mob violence.  If perceived enemies perished without a trial, so be it.  The forms of justice were less important than the results.

Lenin's unflinching attacks against not only bourgeois politicians, but against those socialist politicians who could be seen as collaborating with the bourgeois ones, is redolent of the spirit of 1789, or at least 1792.   This shouldn't surprise us.  We know that Lenin, like Marx and all students of revolution, studied the French Revolution.  And if one studies the French Revolution, and accepts it as something that did more good for humanity than harm, it's hard to totally disavow violence.  The French Revolution had various phases, but violence underpinned most of these phases.  The king was killed, the queen was killed, aristocrats were murdered, peasant counterrevolution was suppressed, armies were defeated, and suspected agents of counterrevolution were guillotined.  Lenin, like most revolutionary thinkers, must have thought long and hard about the violence inherent in revolution well before 1917.  In fact, both the Provisional Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution were surprisingly bloodless.  With relatively few causalities, Lenin in power might well have wondered if he gotten revolution right.  A true revolution needs enemies it would seem.

At any rate, Lenin's writings reveal a man who believes that revolution is a social phenomenon which is inherently just, and which, paradoxically, remains both open-ended and predictable.  True revolutionaries know that revolution follows certain historical patterns first outlined by Karl Marx.  True revolutionaries side without reservation on the side of revolution, and true revolution is always radical, violent, and anti- accommodationist.

E.H. Carr

Is a blogger who deals with the Russian Revolution obligated to read E.H. Carr’s massive treatment of the 1920s? As Carr doesn’t actually cover the Revolution or the Civil War, I have a plausible if not persuasive case for amnesty. However, Carr has dealt with this period of the consolidation of revolutionary energies in more detail than any other author, and by a wide margin. Carr has in fact written over 4000 pages on the subject, and this count doesn’t include any of his other smaller studies of men like Bakunin or Herzen. He’s covered NEP, Socialism in One Country, and many other key Russian events with patience and diligence. (For Carr, Stalin’s approach to the challenge of Trotsky and others was extremely practical: could Communists be expected to wait for the global revolution rather than advance Russia’s national interests in the meantime?)

I’m not about to take on this monumental task of reading a large portion of Carr anytime soon, so I’m thankful for Laqueur’s short overview of the work, written over two decades ago. Back then, the jury was still out on E.H. Carr. Carr has a lot to recommend him. He had a rich diplomatic past and excellent command of the primary sources available in the West. He is also relatively objective, if such a thing is possible, and knows how to write, as evidenced by his wonderfully comic treatment of Bakunin’s strange career for instance. He also appreciated the gravity of what was happened in the Soviet Union. This really was an experiment without parallel in modern history. However, E.H. Carr’s heroic attempt to turn his long series of books the post-revolutionary era doesn’t quite measure up to Macaulay’s treatment of Rome, which remains as a profound work of literature even if its historical explanation are often out of favor with professional historians.

If Laqueur was critical of Carr he was not yet prepared to past judgment on Carr’s project. It was, he thought, too early for that. By now, Carr’s mistakes loom larger and his enormous oeuvre is only sometimes seen as useful let alone authoritative by the present giants of Russian history. Laqueur naturally found fault in Carr’s decision to omit the Revolution and Civil War, since the policies and structures of the 1920s only make sense if one understands how and why they were first created. Laqueur also finds fault in Carr’s claim to impartiality, which admittedly waxes and wanes which each book, according to the shifts in modern European experience. For Laqueur, objectivity can be a mask for insensitivity to human suffering, or a mask for one’s hidden but also present viewpoint and prejudice.

The fascinating thing about Carr is that he wrote a history that left out most personalities and focused instead on legal, political, and economic structures. This approach helps Carr to overlook dramatic stories that didn’t really make a difference in the bigger life of the Soviet state. However, Laqueur says Carr often overlooks the reality behind formal structures. The Soviet Constitution, for instance, is really not very important. It reads surprisingly well, but since it was never implemented, the real story of Soviet jurisprudence is that it never evolved to protect the most fundamental rights of Soviet citizens.

Carr’s major response to his critics was that he was attempting to do a kind of history that made few moral judgments. As he said on some occasions, it would be inappropriate for historians to judge the morality of players in the English or French Revolutions, so why do so now with the Soviet one? Moreover, what’s true of France and England may not be true of the Soviet Union. If the Soviet government would look brutal if it appeared in the West, it’s not quite so unusual in terms of Russian experience. As the facts are now known, this seems to be a woefully insensitive to the millions of Russians whose lives were ruined or ended by Stalin’s police state.

Rule Number One: "Take Power When It's Given to You"

Walter Laqueur’s 1917 is a wonderful overview of both the year 1917 and the historiography surrounding it. Let me just hit on a few of his more interesting points about the year and its place in history.

Unlike the French Revolution, historians were largely unable to analyze new primary sources related to the Russian Revolution as a result of the closed society that guarded these documents. So the debate over the Russian Revolution was largely been confined to the meaning of events right up until 1991, as opposed to debating what actually happened. One crucial question about meaning is whether to accept the Marxist contention that 1917 was a deep, structural transformation of society rather than an accident or conspiracy.

The counter-revolution saw things differently: the Bolsheviks defeated their enemies because they exploited a series of bizarre and tragic circumstances that led to an unprecedented power vacuum. There was nothing inevitable about the triumph of the Bolsheviks—once a tiny minority even within the greater socialist movement--in Russia. In light of subsequent events in Russia, which really did transform society in fundamental ways, this argument is unconvincing. But Laqueur also points out one weakness in the Marxist argument that the year 1917 was really the inevitable result of historical processes and irresistible social pressures. If the first revolution of 1917, the one that resulted in the Provincial Government, represented the victory of the bourgeoisie, is it possible that real socialists actually replaced the bourgeoisie less than one year later, in the October Revolution of 1917?

Laqueur also looks at the victory of the Bolsheviks over their socialist rivals. It’s one thing to look at why the Tsar lost credibility and the Kadet party failed to make a commitment to the kind of radical reform the country needed. It’s even possible to understand that Kerensky’s Provincial Government was too attached to the war effort to survive failed military offensives against the Germans. But why did the Bolsheviks prevail against the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who were each much larger socialist parties? Laqueur thinks that most historians have accepted the premise that the Mensheviks weren’t equipped to compete with the Bolsheviks. Although they were much larger, they accepted the traditional Marxist theory that socialist revolution was not appropriate in backward Russia, which lagged far behind the West in terms of economic development as well as political maturity. The Mensheviks were, at first, more numerous than the Bolsheviks, but they had no will to power, and were even committed to a measure of democracy.

The Social Revolutionaries were more complicated. Were they or were they not capable of competing for power with the Bolsheviks? The Social Revolutionaries were by far the largest socialist party in Russia. But they were seriously divided into left-wing and right-wing faction—to say nothing of the Chernov center--and the left-wing faction was closer to the Bolsheviks than they were to their own center. They were rooted in the countryside, and almost by definition bereft of strong communication networks and mobilization strategies.

It’s true that the Bolsheviks had some significant advantages over their rivals. The Bolsheviks were well-organized, fervent, and willing to take power. They had no scruples about democracy. Moreover, the Bolsheviks were ideologically versatile. Lenin had scrapped large portions of Marxist theory by moving to seize power in Russia, but he had also thrown over Marxist theory by conveniently adopting the peasant-friendly land confiscation platform of his Social Revolutionary rivals. Indeed, Lenin at first also favored the liberation of the subject nationalities, which clearly conflicted to any notion of the solidarity of the working classes across national loyalties.

For Laqueur, one of the strange ironies of 1917 is that the Bolsheviks defeated their rivals and won Russia precisely because they had such a poor political position. That is to say, the Bolsheviks won because nobody else took them seriously and, more importantly, nobody else was willing to make a serious play for power at a time when power seemed to be so elusive and ephemeral. Laqueur sites that famous worker exclamation to the Social Revolutionary leader, Chernov: “Take power, you son of a bitch, when it’s given to you.”

Since Chernov had just witnessed the execution of the tsar followed by the gradual dissolution of the authority of the Provincial Government (which shared power with the Soviets even at the height of its authority), it’s no wonder that he wasn’t eager to “take power.” But once the Bolsheviks did take power, they became instantly locked in Civil War with reactionary opponents. And this being so, large portions of the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary Party were obviously unlikely to support the White Guards against any form of socialism.

Laqueur’s concluding remarks on the year 1917 and its place in history are notable, notwithstanding the fact that they undermine the premise of this blog. Laqueur says that 1917 was at first seen to be one of the central turning points in modern history. However, in retrospect, he feels that historians will see 1917 as only an early sign that the focus of world history was moving eastward toward China, India, and other countries. In hindsight, he thinks decolonization will loom much larger than anything that happened in Russia.

Aesthetics of Tragedy

Another argument of Fitzpatrick deserves comment. Fitzpatrick’s opinion is that there is an aesthetic dimension to the long Russian revolution. To take the argument one step further, the fact that Stalin killed the original revolutionaries who believed in a socialist utopia is the most aesthetically interesting aspect of the revolutionary experience. It’s one thing for the protagonists to defeat their enemies; it’s another for the protagonists to self-destruct. In the French Revolution, the trials of Danton and Robespierre are the most sacred moments of the entire historical drama. How odd to face the guillotine killed poetically by the very process he had helped to create.

Yet Robespierre’s death—see that beautiful movie, Danton—might be seen as tragic too, since Robespierre was the essence of Revolution, an incorruptible force who may have become intolerable to men who didn’t possess the stomach to remain loyal to the original principles of the Revolution—equality, fraternity, and liberty. Certainly Robespierre’s death—and the death of the cause of the Sans-Coulette—he represented, were seen as the heart of the tragedy of the French Revolution by the Russian revolutionaries.

Although the Communists killed many innocent Russians, the ones who garnered the most international sympathy were the Old Bolsheviks or true believers in the very force that destroyed them. Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union was sad enough: Once Lenin’s most capable lieutenant, he was first dragged from his apartment and exiled to the distant In the Purge Show Trials, then expelled from the Soviet Union altogether. (Later, we famously met his end by way of an assassin’s ice pick).

Still worse, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and even Bukharin, all implicated themselves; testifying to their own despicable—but false—betrayal of the Communist cause. This kind of self-immolation was harnessed by Western writers such as Koestler, who wrote a horrific tale of a brave true believer who struggles to find a reason to believe that his own admission of guilt and consequent death is historically necessary. Orwell wrote about a similar theme in Animal Farm. The Revolution succeeds but the revolutionaries quickly separate into a new oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.

Soltzheniztyn, despite his own familiarity with non-Bolshevik victims, was also impressed with the tragic dimensions of the Old Bolsheviks, who, even in the gulag, argued relentlessly that their party had made a simple mistake by accusing them but remained a force for good in the country at large. If Stalin could only be told about their unhappy fate in the gulag, he would set things right.

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.

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.

Why Now?

I don’t know why I first became obsessed with Russia. I really have no connection to the country. I’ve never visited for example; don’t have ancestors from the area, etc. I took an undergraduate class, so I think my current obsession might be a form of nostalgia. And of course there are a few things about Russia that are almost intrinsically interesting.

It’s massive, for instance, and stretches many time zones, possessing untold natural riches, and a huge citizenry. The fact that it straddles both East and West is interesting too, as is its brutal past, historic ties to Mongol invasions, and relatively unique religion, being neither Protestant nor Catholic. What is more, Russian history is the history of so many other things, since Russian history is inter-tangled with the history of Eastern European states, Baltic states, Transcaucasia, Turkish states, and China, Japan, and the general European balance of power. The supremely good literature would make it worthy of an obsession as well.

However, it’s probably communism that makes for the obsession. Real revolutions are rare. The French Revolution of 1789 would have been a good subject for a blog. And when one happens it’s worthy of prolonged study. 1917 was a fascinating year. When rich people are exiled, killed, humiliated, forced to do manual labor, forced to share homes with their servants, or excluded from political power—something unusual has happened.

There is probably a lot of unrecognized continuity between pre-and-post Revolutionary Russia. However, the economic, political, cultural, artistic differences were profound. So it’s interesting to see what happens next, especially since Russia experienced no Thermidorean reaction, and never saw the overthrow of the Revolutionary tradition until the better part of a century had passed.

Even the French had nothing similar happen: first Napoleon, then the Bourbons again—and certainly no sans-coulette government. As a true crime aficionado, I’d say that modern Russian history is without parallel too. If you study British history, you must look for grave crimes abroad for the most part, in Ireland, or in more distant colonial parts. With Russia, you’ve got czarist crimes and pogroms, 19th century terrorism, then you’ve got revolutionary violence, and Stalinist purges, the Gulag, and the world wars, which were obviously ten times more bloody than anything experienced by Britain. And obviously, Russia too had all of the violence of colonialism, even without the overseas empire.

The other factor in Russia that makes Russian history interesting is its history of serfdom, which can in some respects be compared to American slavery, both ended in the same decade. Maybe the bourgeoisie is equally interesting, but it seems more familiar and therefore less interesting than Russian aristocracy and Russian serfdom.

There was a time when I was bored by the Cold War, bored by the decaying bureaucratic structures of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, for example. I’ve moved away from this because I’m now interested in the question of how something as evil and dysfunctional as the Soviet regime could transform itself into something so banal (if still evil). But I understand people who are bored of the Cold War. I myself sometimes think of Cold War history as something akin to 1970s music or episodes of some no-longer-relevant sitcom like Welcome Back Kotter. Still, this is a good time to study the Soviet Union. With capitalism experiencing another wave of severe setbacks, it’s important to look back at the only other distinct option that modernity apparently produced.