The Role of Terror in Russian History

Recently I've delved into a variety of different books dealing with the subject of terror.  I've looked at Terry Eagelton's Holy Terror, which traces Europe's fascination with violence back to its Greek origins (See my posts on the book);  Hannah Arendt's short study of the subject, On Violence, which opens, appropriately enough, with reference to Lenin's statement that the twentieth century would be a century of wars and revolution;  and Slavoj Zizek's short treatise on the subject, Violence. Obviously, the question of terror is central to the history of twentieth century Europe and, more particularly, Russia.  Stalinism is of course terror personified.  We need only read Robert Conquest's masterwork, The Great Terror:  A Reassessment, to gain a true picture of the extent to which the trajectory of a people can revolve around criminality and violence.

Yet Stalin didn't invent revolutionary violence. Lenin and all other Old Bolsheviks accepted, or rather embraced, the idea of terror as well.  So too did rival socialist and anarchist parties.  The Bolsheviks saw terror as a legitimate vehicle for establishing and maintaining revolutionary gains against all comers.  Although the idea of terror seems to be discredited in modern political discourse, most revolutionary theorists and thinkers believed that real social change required a large measure of violence.  In fact, almost everybody who opposed the status quo, who opposed the worst excesses of either medieval or modern (ie, capitalist) life, believed that violence in defense of liberty was, to paraphrase Barry Goldwater, no vice.  People looked back in particular to the model of French Revolution's Reign of Terror.  Who could gainsay the fact that violence had secured the country against its enemies, both internal and external?

Sophie Wahnich's book, In Defence of Terror:  Liberty or Death in the French Revolution, reminds us of the fact that nineteenth century radicals had few qualms about celebrating the Reign of Terror as perhaps the only weapon which could sustain revolution and keep kings and aristocrats at bay.  Of course, knowing that politics was a sterile arena, late nineteenth century Russians radicals openly embraced terror as an engine of change.  By the onset of World War I, certainly men like Lenin were unlikely to regret the use of violence to effect social change.  Could things get any worse than they were in the Great War?  Perhaps Lenin can be forgiven for thinking that they couldn't.  Zizek's contemporary analysis of global inequality illustrates this line of thinking.  Zizek believes in two kinds of violence, subjective and objective violence.  Subjective violence is revolutionary violence, or any form of popular insurrection.  The other kind of violence is objective violence.  Zizek argues that objective violence is the invisible, structural violence of capitalism and neo-colonialism.  While we tend to focus on seemingly random outbreaks of subjective violence, we seldom see the objective conditions which make these outbreaks inevitable. 

One interesting way of looking at revolutionary violence is found in Antoine de Baecque's book, Glory and Terror:  Seven Deaths Under the French Revolution.  De Baecque's original contribution to the study of violence is to show how violence tells an important story in any revolution, or perhaps competing stories.  For De Baecque, dead bodies are scripts which narrate a revolutionary story of justice.  De Baecque does a close reading of seven different macabre stories from the French Revolution.  The interesting thing about these famous deaths is that in each case the revolutionaries move very far away from the known historical "facts."  That is to say, revolutionaries invented very elaborate and richly told tales of horror that surpassed the events as they occurred.  These collective fantasies (and its interesting to see that counter-revolutionaries also engaged in collective fantasies about dead bodies) tell us a great deal about the importance of violence to the mental act of rebellion. 

Thinking of the literature on revolutionary violence, I'm reminded of a presentation I recently attended on the subject of the academic peculiarities of veterans.  The presenter, an expert on advocating for the veteran population, spoke of their defining traits, almost all of them positive.  Veterans were hard-working, respectful, service-oriented, etc.  They also demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for aggression.  The thought disturbed me.  How could this group of heroes, the embodiment of everything good in our country, also be a group of killers?  On some level, I knew that veterans are, almost by definition, killers.  They are, at least, all potential killers.  If this is so, why did the term veteran sound so innocuous, so friendly, so positive?

I think the term revolutionary must be seen in the same light.  A revolutionary is, almost by definition, a killer.   Inspiring fear in others is part of the job.  In some eras, people have celebrated the positive aspects of the revolutionary, purposefully overlooking the murderous ones, or seeing murder as an aspect of social change.  To some extent, this explains the Great Terror.  We can't understand this tragic phenomenon if we don't see how and why so many former revolutionaries accepted the idea of violence as something positive. 

Eagleton Reflects on Terrorism

As a recent post suggests, I'm enthralled with Terry Eagleton's take on the origins and meaning of terrorism.  In some ways, Eagleton helps us to understand something extremely important about Soviet history.  Sometimes, when you read Soviet history, you're rendered almost mute by the repetitive nature of the Soviet tragedy. But what sense can you make of that tragedy?  Why did it occur?  What does it mean?  Is it a peculiarity of Russian history?  I think sometimes it's important to look at the problem in multiple ways to get some perspective on it.  Terrorism can't be explained by political history alone.  In fact, terrorism is a philosophical question, and a literary one, and a psychoanalytic one.  I remember reading a bit of Foucault's The Order of Things, which taught me nothing so much as that different phases of history don't necessarily evolve or dissolve into one another.  Rather, whole epistemes emerge in which humankind's imaginative settings get fundamentally realigned.  This is surely the case with terrorism.  In the age of the Russian Revolution, something almost without precedent happened.  While the French Revolution isn't irrelevant to the Bolshevik experiment with power, the scale of French political murders doesn't look anything like the scale of the Russian catastrophe.  In the end, the Russian experiment was the fulfillment of the modern approach, or at least one particularly modern approach, to liberty.  Lenin and the Bolsheviks were philosophically committed to total liberty, freedom on a scale never hitherto taken seriously. In every age governments have been brutal and oppressive.  Even today, Russia callously passes laws to persecute sexual minorities and restricts basic civil rights and freedoms.  But in the Soviet age, the ruling party embraced a totalizing creed of absolute freedom which would transcend the rights of individuals, groups, classes, and religious identities.  In the name of a transcendent, universal goal, every form of violence was permitted. The fact that the Soviet state was one of the most articulate exponents of the twentieth century's most cherished beliefs, that nothing whatsoever should stand in the way of emancipating humankind, makes Soviet history so compelling. Of course, the death of the Soviet Empire doesn't signify the death of the mentalite that made it possible.  People today still regularly embrace terror--and Eagleton acknowledges that terror has some legitimate if restricted used--whether on behalf of the state or on behalf of stateless people or, most frequently, on behalf of religion.  It's an irony of the present that God is at forefront of both sides of the modern debate on terrorism.  On the one hand, belief in God sometimes acts as a break on the state's right to use violence to solve political problems. On the other hand, the boundlessness of God's claims on his followers is terrorism's chief inspiration today.

Some of Eagleton's quotes from Holy Terror:

"To be called a terrorist, then, is to be accused of being cleaned out of ideas, conjuring a grandiloquent doctrine instead of the simple act of butchery."

"History for Hegel is forged by a succession of mighty legislators who are forced to transgress the moral frontiers of their time simply because they are in the van of progress."

"Almost nothing in Freud's writing--certainly not the idea of infantile sexuality--is as offensive to common sense, as likely to leave the mind as outraged and incredulous, as the scandalous proposal that men and women unconsciously desire their own demise."

"Reason, faced with the libidinal riot, goes berserk, as one kind of excess (anarchy) provokes another (autocracy) into being. Pentheus, one might venture, reacts to the cult of Dionysus rather as the FBI reacted to the cultists at Waco."

"If you greet the violence of others simply with red-necked repression, you are likely to have your buildings blown to pieces, as Pentheus's palace is shattered by Dionysus, while crazed religious zealots (the Bacchic women) tear you to pieces and dabble elbow-deep in your blood in a grisly parody of the eucharist."

"I am sane and you are mad,' Dionysus coolly informs the incredulous king.  It is sane to acknowledge madness, and lunatic to imagine that such madness could ever simply be bulled into reason."

"Without resistance, power ceases to be present to itself and suffers an inward collapse;  with resistance, it can no longer dream of its own perfection."

"We are dealing here with a desire which provokes the very turbulence it seeks to quell."

"It is not in fact true that the dead cause no trouble:  the dead cause us an infinite amount of trouble."

"It is in our nature to be in excess of our natures.  There is a surplus to our biological needs and drives which we call culture, and it is this superfluity which makes us the peculiar animals that we are."

"Mercy in its superfluity must not look too uncomfortably like vengeance."

"Justice, then, can be quite as lunatic as revenge."

"...in the case of Judaeo-Christianity at least, Yahweh is boundless in his love and mercy, and all boundlessness is potentially a form of terror."

"Human bodies are comically interchangeable in an orgy, but tragically so in a terrorist bombing or concentration camp.  As far as both the predatory and the promiscuous go, any old body will do...In massacres as in mass orgies, everyone is just a stand-in for everyone else. Both kinds of event exemplify the abstract logic of modernity."

"The Bacchic revelers are positive slaves to emancipation, as driven in their pleasures as any compulsive or neurotic."

"The fundamentalist, whether Texan or Taliban, is the flip-side of the nihilist:  unless it is founded on cast-iron first principles.  It is just that the fundamentalist believes in such principles, whereas the nihilist does not."

"Anarchy and absolutism are the recto and verso of each other.  Both suspect that chaos is our natural condition."

"The command to live is a traumatic one because it is a universal imperative, and thus is bound to be implacably indifferent to the individual...We are commanded to love indiscriminately, which is why the paradigmatic case of such conduct is the love of strangers.  Anybody can love a friend."

"The New Testament is notably hostile to family values."

"As one who consorts amicably with whores, Jesus has strikingly little to say about sex..."

"The cosmos could quite easily never have happened.  Instead, God could have devoted his considerable talents to, say, figuring out how to create square circles."

"For St. Augustine, the fact that human beings are 'created' means that their being is shot through with non-being...Since this is a potentially debilitating condition, ideology exists among other things to convince us that we are needed."

"For this rather warped theology, God is a terrorist who demands the blood of his own son as the price for having been immortally offended.  Even two-legged terrorists can be less insanely excessive than that."

"For Thomas Aquinas, God is a kind of nothingness about whom nothing really intelligible can be said, even if Aquinas himself managed to say it at extraordinary length.  There is a sense in which he would have endorsed Lenin's scathing comment that theology is 'a subject without an object.'"

"The sublime is a glimpse of infinity which dissolves our identity and shakes us to our roots, but in an agreeable kind of way."

"...Nietzsche, as usual, presses the matter a stage further:  to see others suffer, he gleefully suggests in the Genealogy of Morals, is a joy inferior only to making them suffer."

"For Kant, sublime eruptions like the French Revolution could be admired as long as they were aetheticized, contemplated from a secure distance."

"The truly terrible sublime, however, is the lawless revolt which established the political order in the first place..."

"...insanity can be a surfeit of reason, not such a shortage of it."

"Terrorism is among other things a reaction to a politics which has grown vacuously managerial."

"The defusing of politics is countered by the denial of it, as too little passion yields ground to a monstrous excess of it."

"As Bertolt Brecht once inquired:  what's robbing a bank compared to founding one?"

"Bourgeois morality spells the death of the imagination."

Terror in Jim Pinnel's Saturn's Daughters

"For her, revolution was a patchwork of half-understood ideas, seductive in its promise of unqualified freedom, unlimited horizons, and an escape from her dreary home."

"She's eighteen. A rebel by the sound of her.  But rebellion isn't revolution--she'll learn that one way or the other."
"What's the difference?"
"Discipline, Coalminer.  Discipline is the difference."

"Freedom was doubtless a principle of revolution, but in practice there was something unrevolutionary about the unrestricted exercise of personal liberty."

"Who's going to pay our wages when they are dead?  Don't think about that, do they?"
"I asked him that, and he says, come the revolution, they'll take women in the army."

"Strange, that new girl," Olga remarked, grateful for the help.  "Going off like that with the Hangman.  He gives me the creeps."
"Not so strange really," Anna replied.  "She's a normal, healthy young women--she likes violent men.  Killers, I should think, she finds irresistible."
"What's normal and healthy about that?"
"Well, of course, Popov isn't in uniform like most of our killers."

Thanks to Midas Public Relations for sending me a copy of Jim Pinnell's Saturn's Daughters, a work of historical fiction that examines the origins of modern Russian terrorism.  Pinnell's well-researched novel reminds us that Soviet totalitarianism had its roots in the dialectic of terrorism and tsarist authoritarianism.  Pinnell's account of three women who take up arms against a brutal regime is rich in detail.  Reading Pinnell helps one to understand the philosophical assumptions of the radical intelligentsia in the second half of the nineteenth century.  We get a glimpse of the radicals' reading list, which of course included Hegel, Bakunin, and Chernychevsky.  We also get a glimpse of the way in which an undemocratic government spawned a kind of mirror image of itself in an undemocratic underground opposition.  At first, both parties were, relatively speaking, amateur brutes.  The government was indifferent to the needs of its citizens, especially its workers and peasants, and the intelligentsia, in turn, felt little or no need to sympathize with the sovereign and his aristocratic and clerical supporters.  Over time, the game became much more dangerous, with each side adopting ever more sophisticated modes of surveillance and brutality.

Terry Eagleton examines the broader philosophical underpinnings of this double helix of violence in his treatise on the West's fascination with violence, entitled Holy Terror.  Eagleton offers a somewhat deeper explanation of Soviet totalitarianism than we offer encounter.  Sometimes historians seem to argue that Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin and other Soviet leaders developed dangerous habits as a result of their years of conspiracy, and these habits eventually became addictions when when the erstwhile criminals entered into government.  This may be partially true.  Certainly the Old Bolsheviks were hard men with little sympathy for liberalism or what they regarded as the fig leaves of parliamentary democracy and bourgeois civil rights.  Yet that explanation doesn't go far enough.   Eagleton helps us to understand that modern thinkers are attracted to the very essence of terror, an essence they come to crave.  If we acknowledge the unspeakable cruelty and terrifying dimensions of early Soviet brutality, we must also acknowledge that Stalinism was no accident.  Stalin was rather the right man for one of modernity's most important projects:  namely, terror.

Returning to Pinnell, we see three ladies who are enthralled with the whole notion of terror.  One of the three women is new to political violence, and so her awakening is properly compared to a sexual awakening.  In truth, terror isn't ever very far removed from sensuality and sexuality.  If one watches television at all, one understands that almost all modern tele-dramas depend on the intrinsic links between these two cosmic forces.  Pinnell's special contribution to our understanding of the modern cult of violence is to demonstrate that women are often just as attracted to terror as men are.  Pinnell's characters are victims of gender ideology in late nineteenth century Russia, but this doesn't make them immune from the attractions of violence.  One kicks a condemned man in the face, another learns the art of boxing, a third moves to exert power over her disciples.

Terry Eagelton's analysis of terror is far reaching.  He argues that the modern era's interest in terror is linked to its fascination with liberty.  Pairing liberty with terror is even now an uncomfortable proposition.  Why this pairing still seems unnatural is hard to say.  We know that the French Revolution articulated a rationale for unlimited freedom as well as a justification for unlimited violence.

After 1789, Western men and women never gave up on either liberty or terror.  The problem, Eagleton asserts, is that modern notions of liberty are grounded in nothing other than, well, liberty.  In the absence of God, secular philosophy grounds liberty in a philosophical void. Thus liberty is an unruly, immodest, and indeed dangerous proposition.  Indeed, liberty knows no limits.  The paradox of all paradoxes is, of course, that if you look hard enough you realize that a paradox isn't as ironic as it originally appears.  This is the case with liberty and terror.  One may wonder why the Soviet Union, that country which professed to be the freest country the world had ever known, attacked so many of its citizens, depriving them of almost every figment of freedom as we commonly understand the term.  But look again.  If we accept the idea that the Soviet Union was resistant to any constraints on the practice of liberty, we intuitively understand why it simultaneously adopted the practice of terror.  If terror could enforce liberty, who could gainsay it?  The two things weren't so different anyhow.  They were both pure expressions of will, which needed to be unfettered almost by definition.