Robespierre

In a recent post, I mentioned above six or seven books that delve into the nature of terror and its relationship to revolution.  I maintained that terror and revolution couldn't be separated, and indeed that terror and modern Russian history couldn't be disentangled.  I would be remiss if I didn't say something about Maximilien Robespierre in this context.  Robespierre, of course, was the both the chief architect and loudest champion of revolutionary violence.  His influence on generations of revolutionaries and would-be revolutionaries is impossible to overestimate.  You can hear shades of Robespierre in Marx, but more especially in Lenin and Trotsky and Mao.  Slavoj Zizek's book on the subject, a collection of Robespierre's most representative speeches, is an excellent introduction to Robespierre.  Virtue and Terror gives Robespierre a chance to speak for himself, without the rancor and condemnation modern historians so often attach to his name.  The unmediated Robespierre is shockingly prescient about the nature of power.  Like Machiavelli, Robespierre seems to have an excellent grasp on politics:  he knows how and why the Committee of Public Safety's Reign of Terror is functioning, and he seems to know also how vulnerable that power is to both internal and external enemies.  One appreciates Robespierre's articulateness.  In the midst of chaos, Robespierre the Incorruptible is able to translate Enlightenment philosophy into a clear governmental program.  One also appreciates Robespierre's boldness:  here is a man who seems to have honestly assessed the costs of revolution.  If one wants to overthrow centuries of despotism, one should be prepared to overthrow God, king, aristocracy, and even peace.  Trotsky, in his 1920 defense of revolutionary violence, Terrorism and Communism, echoes Robespierre's brave logic.  Revolutionary terror is, ironically, the shortest way to peace.  Irresolution in the midst of civil war means a longer civil war, not a shorter one.  Of course, the consequences of Robespierre's ethics have been influential, and their impact on subsequent revolutionary movements far-reaching.

Below are are a few quotations drawn from Robespierre, as presented by Slavoj Zizek.  In a subsequent post, Soviet Roulette will look at Leon Trotsky's Terrorism and Communism.  The similarities between Robespiere and Trotsky demonstrate a clear line of thinking between the two great revolutionaries.


"The theory of revolutionary government is as new as the revolution which brought it into being.  It should not be sought in the books of the political writers, who did not foresee that revolution, nor in the laws of tyrants who, satisfied with abusing their power, are not much concerned with its legitimacy.."

"The function of government is to direct the moral and physical forces of the nation towards the goal of its appointing."

"The goal of constitutional government is to preserve the Republic; that of revolutionary government is to found it."

"Revolution is the war of liberty against its enemies:  the constitution is the system of liberty victorious and at peace."

"Revolutionary government needs extraordinary activity, precisely because it is at war.  It is subject to less uniform and less rigorous rules, because the circumstances in which it exists are stormy and shifting, and above all because it is continual forced to deploy new resources rapidly, to confront new and pressing dangers."

"Revolutionary government owes good citizens full national protection; to enemies of the people it owes nothing but death."

"Temples to the gods are not meant to provide sanctuary for the sacrilegious who come to profane them;  not is the constitution supposed to protect the plots of tyrants who seek to destroy it."

"Above all we must be careful not to kill patriotism by trying to cure it.  Patriotism is ardent by its nature.  Who can love the homeland coldly?"

"The foundation of the French Republic is not a game for children."

"All the vices are fighting for them:  the Republic only has virtues on its side."

"And with what rapidity the seeds of division they throw among us could develop, if we do not hasten to stifle them!"

"And for some time, the foreign courts have been vomiting over France all the cunning scoundrels they have in their pay."

"Yesterday they were murdering the defenders of liberty;  today they are attending their funerals, and demanding divine honours for them..."

"So that France, once illustrious among enslaved countries, eclipsing the glory of all the free peoples that have existed, may become the model for all nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the universe;  and that in sealing our work with our blood, we may at least glimpse the shining dawn of universal felicity."

"In the French Revolution's system, that which is immoral is impolitic, that which is corrupting is counter-revolutionary."

"Perhaps the most dangerous reef we have to avoid is not the fervour of excessive zeal, but rather the lassitude of well-being".

Three Things to Know About Revolutions

Below are three things experience has taught us about revolution.

First, revolutions are violent affairs.  To paraphrase something somebody in the Godfather once said, after the rhetoric of evolutionary reform breaks down, “things get rough.” A revolution is an explosive situation in which men and women decide that violence is a legitimate method of solving a set of political problems.  Strike that:  a revolution is an explosive situation in which men and women decide that violence is the only appropriate method of addressing a set of political problems.  As Chairman Mao said, "Revolution is no dinner party."  People die in revolutions, and after revolutions, more people die.  

Second, revolutions are exciting. Revolutions are extraordinarily creative affairs in which broad swaths of the population feel empowered to participate in civic and cultural life in new and creative ways.  In fact, segments of the populations experience liberation in surprisingly diverse ways.  If the political regime required radical reformation, why not do the same in art, architecture, prose, poetry, international relations, economics, family relationships, and gender relations? 

Third, revolutions are predictably unpredictable.  When a revolution breaks out, people often falsely believe they know what will happen to the revolution over time.  That is to say, they believe that there is an ahistorical sequence to revolutionary events or a natural mechanism of revolt, something akin to the stages of grief.  We get angry, we blame others, we feel guilty, we accept; or, in the case of revolutions, we suffer, we lose control, we dream and hope of a better future, we collapse into stale routine. There’s a paradox here.  On the one hand, many analysts--Marx and Lenin included--believe that revolutions are the most predictable of all human events.  That is to say, revolutionaries study previous revolutions in detail precisely because they believe on some level in an unalterable historical pattern.  A revolution in ancient Rome looks like a revolution in modern Germany, or a revolution in Mongolia.  A revolution is a revolution is a revolution.  

If you read the Russian revolutionaries, to say nothing of Hegel or Marx who help to invent the trope of revolutionary historiography, you can’t help but be struck by their arrogance.  They know what happened in France so they can predict what will happen in Russia.  There will certainly be a Thermidor, and if there isn’t one, it’s only because the revolutionaries will change natural flow of history by enacting ingenious new dams or levies, usually in the form of draconian systems of surveillance and terror.  But of course the revolutionaries weren’t simple people.  They thought about revolution a lot, and lived closer to them than we do today.  Lenin didn’t predict either of the revolutions of 1917.  Instead, he and the other Russian radicals were like modern storm-chasers, driving toward political maelstroms even though they didn’t quite get to any of them in time to bear witness to their awesome power.  But Lenin, and Trotsky more than Lenin, did see enough of the immediate aftermath of revolution to understand their chaotic, elemental power.  Notwithstanding all of their stubborn attempts to diagnose something ahistorical about revolutions, Russian revolutionaries understood that revolutions were truly terrifying, unwieldy, and unpredictable.  Their knowledge of this dark side of revolution was surely what made them so willing to turn to terror in attempt to try to prevent their recurrence once they were installed in power.  

The Bolsheviks said they were suppressing opposition at Krondstadt out of a fear of counter-revolution and reaction, but one has to suspect that their brutal strategies of containment were born of their own involvement in history’s only real contact with almost primordial chaos.  Viewed in this light, one almost comes to terms with the paradox of Bolshevik interest in making a science of revolution.  After all, it’s only a scientist who hopes that we can conduct the same experiment with revolution over and over again but gain the same result. 

Revolutions aren’t purely local affairs.  Reading Antoinette Burton’s book, A Primer for Teaching World History, I am reminded that revolutions shouldn’t ever be seen as occurring in a purely national context. The Russian revolutionaries accepted Marx’s early take on this international thesis:  revolutions were the product of modernity, global economic processes, and transnational class struggle.  Lenin added something important to this line of argument by exploring the relationship between colonialism and international militarism.  But even modern scholars understand that we can’t truly comprehend the nature of any revolution without exploring how the event, or series of events, is connected to global processes.  These processes can be direct, and uncomplicated.  For instance, the Russian Revolution was the outgrowth of processes and movements that affected men and women in almost every corner of the globe, including urbanization, industrialization, colonization, and world war.  But they can also be more intricate.  The Russian Revolution had analogies both inside Europe and outside Europe.  Turks, Egyptians, Hungarians, Germans, and Chinese—to say nothing of Georgians and Uzbeks—all strove to initiate political and economic reform, to overhaul gender relationships, and recast their relationship with the global economic order.  Moreover, if we don’t accept the fact that each revolution only exists in relationship to other revolutions—whether those revolutions are historically distant, such as 1789, 1848, or 1870, or nearly coterminous, such as that of Germany, Turkey, Hungary, Spain, Cuba, or China—we miss one of their most characteristic and important markers, i.e., their truly world-historical character.    

Chinese Communism

If Soviet Roulette had any readers, I imagine they'd be asking why we don't place the Russian revolutionary experience within the context of global history more frequently. Why, for instance, don't we talk more about 1789 or 1848? Why don't we talk about the impact of 1917 on the developing world? While the Bolsheviks may not have ignited successful revolutions in Western Europe, they did inspire successful imitators in China, Vietnam, Cuba, and countless other newly independent nations. But of course China remains the most significant communist victory. Its size, strength, and longevity make China worthy of comment.

So too does the fact that the Bolsheviks were involved in China's internal struggles before and after China's communist party defeated its Old Regime, Japanese, and nationalist rivals. But how does a non-expert approach the history of China in the twentieth century? I began with UCLA Professor Richard Baum's Great Courses lecture series, The Fall and Rise of China. In these lectures Baum notes Mao's political intelligence, charisma, and military prowess, but Baum emphasizes that Mao led his party into a long series of economic and political disasters. Under Maoism, the Chinese people suffered mightily, although they almost always attributed their suffering to internal or external enemies. While Mao successfully confronted American military might during the Korean War, and eventually established political and economic autonomy from the Soviet Union, his large-scale cooperatives and frenetic efforts to industrialize the country, led to massive starvation in the countryside and many, many engineering and economic disasters.

The Cultural Revolution, when launched, destroyed any semblance of political or economic order in the country, and only Deng's masterful political comeback and his slow reputation of Maoist economic principles (if not Mao himself) eventually set China on the path to relative stability and economic progress that we see today. When viewed in the light of the Soviet Union's experience, one can't help but think that Lenin and Stalin's worst crime was to inspire the Chinese Communist Party. For the Chinese Communists, for all their military courage and prewar respect for the peasantry, killed many millions as they did away with any semblance of democracy, political dissent, or economic decentralization.

Communism on Trial

One of the hallmarks of communist regimes, and the Soviet Union in particular, is its egregious disregard for justice, especially with respect to political opponents, schismatics, and dissidents. With this in mind, it's not surprising that so many legal tragedies are featured in the book Great World Trials: The 100 Most Significant Courtroom Battles of All Time, edited by Edward W. Kappman.

Which Russian communist or other communist trials made the list? It should be no surprise that the Moscow purge trials of 1936 to 1938 made the grade. Here, famously, Stalin explained the logic of the Great Terror to the world, inviting about 30 foreign guests and journalists to witness communist justice first-hand. In the first trial, which set the tone for the other two, a number of Old Bolsheviks with impeccable revolutionary credentials waived their "right" to defense attorneys and publicly confessed to coordinating (or in one case merely passively encouraging) a massive conspiracy to assassinate Kirov and Stalin, and overthrow the Soviet state. The other two trials saw the fruits of continued terror, intimidation, torture, and ideological persuasion, and other Soviet leaders publicly confessed that they bore direct responsibility for economic failures, Trotskyite plots, and foreign intrigue. Almost all of the accused were shot almost immediately following the trials, although a few perished in the gulag, as millions of less famous victims of Soviet justice did throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and, to a lesser extent, thereafter.

Other, less famous, trials were equally politicized and unrelated to credible evidence. In Hungary, the editor thought that Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty's trial deserves to be remembered, since this Catholic anti-communist was arrested in 1948, tortured, forced to publicly confess to plotting to overthrow the government, and sentenced to a life in labor, although he was freed during the Hungarian revolt against communism in 1956 and remained at the U.S. legation for fifteen years before agreeing to move to Rome in 1971, where he died fourteen years later.

In Yugoslavia, Milovan Djilas' trial is of course noteworthy. Djilas, the former Yugoslavian Politburo member and one of Tito's closest collaborators World War II, had become increasingly vocal in his opposition to Soviet-style political rule, and was eventually and repeatedly tried and jailed for allegedly slandering his country in the foreign press.

In Cuba, Castro's 1959 revolutionary tribunals followed a similarly disturbing pattern, with Batista's officers receiving little if any legal due process. Indeed, after three officers were convicted and killed in a show trial atmosphere, a court acquitted 44 airmen for alleged "genocide", but Castro personally overturned the verdict and re-tried the men, despite a lack of evidence against them. Soon, Castro had eliminated any pretense to an independent judiciary. However, it should be noted that Batista's 1953 trial of Castro and his fellow rebels, was no model of legal normalcy either, insofar as many of Castro's fellow conspirators had been tortured after they had been captured by the military.

Communist legal philosophy, which privileged political or moral considerations and devalued putatively bourgeois notions of fairness and due process, was put into practice with disastrous results throughout large portions of the world. In Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel was repeatedly tried and punished between 1977 and 1989 for allegedly undermining state interests through his advocacy of civil rights and freedom. And of course China's legal system was, and remains, deeply flawed, although Great World Trials only mentions the Gang of Four Trial, which thrust four notorious Chinese communist leaders into their own show trial in 1980. The verdict, which did not benefit from a legitimate legal process, nevertheless helped China to put an end to the worst aspects of Mao's disastrous political legacy, much as Robespierre's down's fall during the French Revolution, or Beria's arrest and summary execution following the death of Stalin, led to positive political changes notwithstanding the hypocrisy of the judgments. Not that the farcical Tianamen Square trial doesn't also garner a mention in Great World Trials.

In addition to the above-mentioned examples of a profoundly flawed approach to justice, communism has frequently been on trial, directly or indirectly, in many of the West's most famous trials of the twentieth century. Think of the trial of Rosa Luxenburg's murderers in Germany following World War I, the Nazi case against those accused of setting fire to the Reichstag, the Rosenberg trial in the United States, or Victor Kravchenko's case. Kravchenko, the author of a vehemently anti-Stalinist memoir, decided to defend the legitimacy of his opposition to Stalinism by suing a Paris journal, Les Lettres Francais, for defaming him. He won the suit but his libelers, freedom fighters during the era of Nazi occupation of France, emerged unscathed.

What Would Trotsky Do?

There's a quaint little Canadian movie--and what Canadian movie, with its reverential references to Alice Munro or the Cowboy Junkies--isn't quaint--entitled, The Trotsky. It's a film that makes a playful attempt to reconcile the communist revolutionary tradition and contemporary, bourgeois Canadian society. The film is about a young man, 17 or 18, who believes himself to be the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky. What would a real revolutionary do when confronted with contemporary social conditions? Would comfortable, wealthy, quasi-socialist Canada warrant revolutionary activity? Leon Trotsky's young avatar never doubts his calling. Notwithstanding a comfortable upbringing, he sets out to organize the workers at his father's business and then eventually attempts to organize the students at his school. His indefatigble efforts to oppose authority in the service of justice bare fruit, reminding viewers that courage, conviction, and the ability to see injustice (whether it's there or not) can have profound effects, even today.

The film has a brilliant leading man, but doesn't quite work. Is the problem that communism isn't very funny? This explanation seems implausible, as a subsequent post on communist humor and the book, Hammer and Tickle, will make clear. But certainly it's difficult to calibrate mirth with a real social message, as this film tries, heroically sometimes, to do. On the one hand, the film's protagonist is a wonderful pastiche of the historical actor, whose encounters with ordinary Canadian high school students and authority figures are often awkward, unexpected, and exceedingly funny. On the other hand, the film is ultimately about how young people can or should organize for social justice in a world of post-modern malaise. (By the way, I didn't invent that term; rather, I was accused of "post-modern malaise" by a job interviewer who thought I was being to flippant about the rhetoric of education and empowerment.)

Using the Bolshevik example in this context can seem perverted against the historical background of communist brutality and democide. The incongruity is more or less disturbing at various points in the film. Take, for example, the scene in which Trotsky's father finally acknowledges his love for his wayward son by giving him a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. It's signed, "From your favorite fascist," or words to that effect. One wants to laugh, but Mao (to say nothing of Hitler) was responsible for so much twentieth century tragedy, one doesn't.

In fact, this film makes one doubt whether the radical revolutionary tradition has anything at all to recommend it. Certainly the Trotsky's successful kidnapping of the school principal doesn't dispel any doubts one might have about this style of school reform. Even so, the film deserves some credit for sketching out a portrait of a modern radical, as opposed to the modern reformer we all know so well. It's still useful to ask questions about the role of radical opposition even after such opposition has become so endangered by parliamentarianism, financial stability, and (Canadian) socialized medicine.