Trotsky, the Russian Miniseries

I am surprised and pleased with the Russian miniseries, Trotsky, currently available on Netflix.  The relatively high-budget, eight-part series does an exceptionally good job of depicting one of the most important men or women of the twentieth century.  The film takes a few artistic liberties, casting his murderer, Jacson, as a serious interlocutor, and inflating the importance of Frida Khalo, his Mexican lover, to his overall life trajectory.  However, these narrative devices work extremely well, and help keep this very comprehensive biographical film from getting dull.  The film does cover many or most of the important elements of Trotsky's eventful life.  We see Trotsky in prison, Siberian exile, French exile, and Mexican exile.  We see him participating in the 1905 Revolution, the July Days, the 1917 October Revolution, the Civil War, and many other episodes of a rich and varied life.  We get to know his wife and children, as well as his complicated relationship with Stalin.  While Stalin emerges as an overtly villainous character too early in the film, the series' premature attention on Stalin is useful in explaining the strengths and weaknesses of each man.  The best thing about the series, Trotsky, is that is allows us to see the best and worst aspects of this historical genius.  We see that he is deeply committed to a revolutionary struggle to overthrow a monstrous regime.  We see that he possesses great reserves of courage, eloquence, and intelligence.  However, we also understand that Trotsky can be narcissistic, callous, and overly ambitious.  He neglects two wives, four children, a lover, and many political allies. He is every moral compromise in the service of revolutionary ends, including massacres and the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the German Empire.

Quotations from Victor Serge's Midnight in the Century

Below are some favorite quotations from Victor Serge's Midnight in the Century

"I don't completely understand your distinction between good and bad Thermidoreans."

"He liked her.  He didn't know if he loved her, exactly.  We live that way, without knowing."

Two days later they arrested him.  Just like that, in the street, near the trolley stop.

Two Trostkyists, one genuine, the other doubtful, were quietly discussing Radek's objections to the theory of permanent revolution.

"I'm charged with espionage.  And I'm only a poor slob, citizens and comrades, I swear to you, only a poor slob!"

"It's over.  What a bitch of a life.  When will it end?"
The elder replied sententiously:
"The Permanent Session of Chaos No. 16. continues.  Next point on the agenda."

Men existed here in sharp relief, the accumulated hours crushed them, but time per se did not exist."

"We have nothing, nothing in common with Menshevism."

"You're not a bad guy, but you're a born rat.  I'm not worried about the solidity of your skull-bone:  you're destined to have an honorable career in the concentration camps."

"Anyone want to write to the Proletarian authorities?"

"If our houses of detention are overcrowded, it's not the fault of the proletarian dictatorship but that of the counter-revolution which assails us on every side."

It all began with a dull pain in the area of the heart.  But was it in the area of the heart?  We don't know precisely where the heart is nor what it is.

Control yourself--it's just a heart attack--and if it were something worse?

He lost his calendar, the addition of weeks and months, and decided to live outside time.

"Do you know the difference between a great misfortune and a national disaster, Zina Valentinova?  Imagine a very great leader falling to the sidewalk from the eighth floor balcony of the Central Committee.  That would be a great misfortune.  Now imagine him surviving.  That would be a national disaster."

The glaciers are starts smashed across the earth.

The revolution will be stranded on the beach for the next twenty years.

"We're between two counter-revolutions.  How clear can anything be!"

His brains were spread over the dandelions, but his pince-nez glasses, their frame mended with black thread, were still perched on the bridge of his nose.

"Comrade Ryzhik's report on the joys of boreal springtime is adopted without debate, unanimously with one abstention:  mine.  I have ideological reservations."

",,,I request a three-second recess for Karl's latest revelation (may his revolutionary's soul rest in peace:  His body is rotting slowly in the toilet of the General Secretary's office).

"Listen, brother, I'm uneasy.  There are five of us--and not one informer!  Do you think that's possible?"

"And what does homo sovieticus need beyond a thousand roubles a month?"

Pessimism, in our age of disciplined energy, is perhaps in involuntary form of sabotage.

"We're right, comrades.  Right, like stones are right to be hard, like the grass i right to grow, for the Revolution doesn't want to die out."

"And for the moment the dialectic of history has placed us under its wheel."

Miorzly, every limb alert in that embrace, watched that hand reaching for murder with prodigious shrewdness, seized it on the wing as it clenched its face.

You don't hit a man when he's down, but you can hit a man when he's falling, before he hits the ground.

"Citizen Chief, I'm a Civil War Communist, wounded at the age of eighteen on the Orenburg front.  I hope that's enough for you."
"I very much regret that it isn't."

On the scale of history, of what importance are these little sufferings, this senseless resistance of micro-organisms in a drop of water?

She always had that absent air at work.  Is she married?  The Interim Director considers her for a short moment with the bizarre attention of a solitary man who suffers from liver-trouble, smokes too much, and whom a sad woman has walked out on...

"Subjectively, perhaps they are still revolutionaries.  Objectively, they are hardened counter-revolutionaries."

"How do you say son-of-a-bitch in Marxist terms?"

"Got shot, that brother, a little while back.  Was really too fat to hide himself nowadays now that everyone else got thin."

He demanded an extremely conspicuous zeal from his subordinates, in order that it should be noticed.  What, indeed, is the use of unnoticed zeal?

"Your establishment is hardly on par with socialism, citizen chief.  Beginning with the bedbugs."

Richard Wright

Taking a break from Soviet history, or so I thought, I recently completed Richard Wright's autobiography, Black Boy. The book, rich in dialogue and descriptive details and told from the unwavering perspective of a bewildered juvenile, begins with a brilliant and compelling examination of his early years in the Deep South. Growing up in and around Jackson, Mississippi, Wright suffered enormously from a culture of  economic inequality, systematic violence, and psychological terror.  Life in Jackson during the 1920s was extremely difficult.  African-Americans were denied access to almost every basic human right, including meaningful employment, reasonable levels of health care and education, and even the ability to consistently put food on the table.  The Southern culture of terror infected African-American family life, and helped to turn Wright's immediate family, and many of his friends, into co-conspirators.  Wright's sophisticated analysis of white racism is withering.  Under the constant threat of white intimidation or retaliation, Wright's family members lived incomplete lives, engaging in domestic violence, petty crime, and frenzied religious experience. Wright himself grew up hungry, physically abused, undereducated, and fearful of being hurt or killed by defenders of white privilege.

Incredibly, Richard Wright escaped the conditions to which he was born.  His courage, moral genius, work ethic, and budding literary talent helped him to move from the Deep South, first to Memphis, and ultimately to Chicago.  In Chicago, Wright's story perhaps inevitably merged with the subject of this blog, namely world communism.  The second half of Black Boy traces Wright's involvement with Chicago's communist movement.  In Chicago, Wright became heavily involved with Communist, or Communist-inspired cultural and political clubs.  Wright's fascination with Communism is instructive. Although Black Boy's literary talent is perhaps best illustrated by his depiction of his early life in Mississippi, the two halves of the book work together to explain something vital about American and indeed global history.  And that is that Wright found hope in Communism as a result of America's complete moral failure in the area of race relations.  Why did so many black Chicagoans worship the name of Lenin?  Clearly, their general religiosity didn't make this a natural alliance.  Still, America's Jim Crow laws made African-Americans look seriously at any leader who promised to break down barriers of racial as well as class exploitation.

Wright ultimately revolted against some of Communism's worst excesses.  He was appalled, for instance, by the Party's political witch hunts against alleged Trotskyites.  Yet Wright's ambivalence about the Communist Party's peculiar methodology should be set again the writer's interest in the Party's noble goal.  Abrham Terz (a.k.a., Andrei Sinyavsky), the author of a treatise on Socialist Realism, reminds us of just how appealing that goal could be.  For Tertz, Communism offered people the most glorious vision imaginable, better than anything Westerners had invented since the rise of Christianity.  Communism promised utopia, and claimed to make sense of everything, including America's history of racial oppression.

The link between African-American aspirations and Soviet promises is an interesting one, deserving of much fuller exploration.  Only recently, I noted that Koestler met up with one African-American intellectual in the heart of Soviet Asia during the 1930s.  Others have described Robeson's infatuation with the Soviet Union and its constitutional "guarantees" for racial equality.  But the links between African-American intellectual currents and Soviet ones are not simple.  Ironically, in Black Boy, Wright attributes Communist treachery in Chicago to the lessons that the world Communist Party had learned under the Russian tsars.  And of course his most famous novel, Native Son, seems to have been inspired by Dostoevsky's pre-revolutionary--even anti-revolutionary, novel, Crime and Punishment.

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.    

Politics of Leaving

My office is nearly empty now. I've put away books and dismantled all elements of bourgeois display. I've packed up all of the family photographs, files, and antiques that adorned this space over the past three years. I've put away a fencing trophy my maternal grandfather (the Left-Wing inspiration for this blog perhaps) won at Harvard in 1912. I've packed up a set of clay cats my paternal grandfather made in the impoverished, smoke-filled twilight of his life. I have cleaned up a war ration card my mother received at five years old. There's a stripped down table that sat in my paternal grandmother kept in her cluttered basement for many decades. Family photos, antique (but not valuable) clocks--everything must go.

There are only a few Russian books left here. I've uncovered a stash of excellent political works. There is William Taubman's biography, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, which demonstrated that this Cold War leader was as complex and contradictory as any modern leader. Khrushchev was all things, impossible to sum up. He was guilty of monstrous crimes as one of Stalin's henchmen, and yet helped to put the Soviet Union onto a much more humane path after Stalin's death. He was incredibly clever and funny, but somehow also capable of extremely foolish, impetuous, and boorish behavior. The ultimate sycophant under Stalin, Khrushchev somehow demonstrated real bravery, not only on his path to power, but also in his efforts to publish his memoirs while in the political wilderness.

On the Khrushchev theme, I've got Guiseppe Boffa's laudatory account of the Khrushchev era as a whole called, somewhat dramtically, Inside the Khrushchev Era. Boffa was an Italian journalist and fellow travellor who praised the Soviet Union for its technological and industrial achievements, and heralded Khrushchev as a practical and humaine leader--just right for the age of detente.

On Stalin himself, I see Simon Montefiore's two equally good books, Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar, and Young Stalin. Montefiore has quickly established himself as one of the deans of Russian history, and rightly so. These two works somehow reveal sides of Stalin that hadn't yet emerged, especially Young Stalin. Montefiore managed to uncover dozens if not hundreds of previously undiscovered sources about Stalin, some by former lovers and others with almost as much personal knowledge about the legendary autocrat. The whole course of history seems to have reversed itself with this book. One somehow comes to see a Stalin who wasn't destined to become the master of Russian's destiny but who, nevertheless, possessed a real and multi-faceted genius, for politics, but also for organization, criminal activity, revolutionary propaganda, and even, perhaps, poetry.

Next, I've got two of Isaac Deutcher's three books on Trotsky here, The Prophet Unarmed, Trotsky 1921- 1929, and the Prophet Outcast,Trotsky 1929- 1940. Although undoubtedly biased by sympathy for the man's political perspectives, these are tremendous books, thoroughly researched but vivid tales of political courage and indeed heroic opposition to Stalin's ascendancy. Of course, Deutcher doesn't criticize Trotsky's crimes nor even his personality flaws that ensured his defeat by opponents. Deutcher also wrote the unfinished Lenin's Childhood, a short potrait of Lenin, his father and mother, and, most importantly, his terrorist brother who was executed for his involvement in a plan to assassinate the tsar.

Other political books on hand are Milovan Djilas' Conversations with Stalin, which illuminates the ties that originally bound Eastern European strains of communism to Moscow, but also shows how Yugoslavian leaders became alienated by Stalin and Russian primacy in general. And, to follow up the story of dissillusionment with Djilas' ant-communist treatise, written from a Yugoslavian prison, there's The New Class. Somewhat more globally, I also have Walter Laqueur's book of political essays here, Out of the Ruins of Europe. One of these is even titled Russian Roulette. So glad I went with Soviet Roulette instead of Russian Roulette, the title which first came to me when I presented the idea for this blog to my wife and one of her best friends (who said, quite correctly, that I needed a hook for the blog a la Julia and Julia: ideas anyone?).

Down to my last few books, I see that the majority of these are in some fashion political works as well. As I've said before, I grew up believing that politics was everything. I don't practice that belief anymore, but my obsession with the Russian Revolution is a form of nostalgia for a time when everybody shared my early belief in the primacy of the political over the cultural. (A time when most people didn't think that Real Housewives of New York, Orange County, Atlanta, and New Jersey would trumps everything remotely political in terms of its watercooler or Facebook appeal). I've got the book, The Lost Politburo Transcripts, which shows Stalin's mastery of a unique form of political discourse, the politburo debate and group decision-making process. And another, The Death of Uncle Joe, which describes the progressive disillusionment of some (but definitely not all) of the British communist intellectuals, especially in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. It's a book that inspired me to think about why my Left-of-Center friends and family didn't come down harder on the Soviet Union for its massive human rights violations. On the same theme of disenchantment with communist ideals, I have Robert Conquest's book of short, anti-communist essays and editorials, Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques from the Struggle for Truth. It's filled with dozens of short Conquest essays on subects such as Koestler, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, Grossman, Sakharov, and Djilas.

The Dark Lord of Mordor

Andrew Meier's The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service reminds us that the Soviet Union's battle with its capitalist enemies had important clandestine dimensions. The story of Cy Oggins, an American spy entangled (along with his wife) in the clash of ideologies, illuminates a great deal about interwar espionage, radical politics in America, and the ties that bound American and Soviet strands of communism together.



Oggins' story begins right before the First World War. At that time, many American workers as well as Ivy League intellectuals, immigrants, and pacifists were irresistibly drawn to radical politics. Cy Oggins' journey to the extreme left of American life wasn't all that unusual. Soviet Russia filled many of his countrymen with rapture. Wasn't it extraordinary that a regime had chosen land and peace over war and colonialism, chosen a red flag, the symbol of the workers' struggle, or selected a revolutionary national anthem, the Internationale? As Maier points out, many Americans were so inspired that they actually supported a new form of Russian tourism for those who wished to see what the future looked like. Or, to put matters the way Meier does, this was an epoch in which the theories behind great 19th century economic treatises were "spilling out onto the streets."



Oggins had plenty of reasons to be inspired by Russia, and plenty of other reasons to be repulsed by Russia's capitalist opponents. In addition to the general complaints about bourgeois exploitation of American workers (and indeed Cuban and Philippine ones), the Left had reason to complain about the way America's ruling class abused its power in undemocratic, illegal actions against worker-supported parties and movements. This was the age of the Wobblies, Emma Goldman and anarchists, Maurice Hindus, war resisters, Beard and Dewey, etc. And overseas, this was also the age of the Comintern, when the Soviet Union was, at least theoretically, only the nexus of an international strategy to liberate working people everywhere. Indeed, Meier reminds us that even in Russia ordinary Communists waited from one day to the next for the German Revolution that Marx had promised.



And all this Left-wing excitement existed even before the Great Depression, when capitalism seemed be collapsing even from the perspective of its greatest proponents in Washington and on Wall Street.



The Lost Spy does a wonderful job of showing readers why communism was so exciting. It also explains how international spy networks functioned, and how valuable so-called "traitors" could be to Moscow, euphemistically called The Center by its various agents abroad. Oggins ended up tracking White Russians and Trotskyites in France, and Japanese militarism in Shanghai and the Far East puppet state of Manchukuo. The book also tracks the hazards of working for Stalin. Many of the Oggins' friends were executed in Stalin's Great Purges. Most others were at least forced to confront some bitter truths about the Great Leader, as Stalin was sometimes known, including the fact that he eventually chose to ally himself with Nazi Germany. Oggins himself ended up in Lubyanka, one of the most infamous prisons in Russia, before being sent to a concentration camp in the distant north, where he inevitably died.



Ultimately, The Lost Spy elucidates the strange interplay between the ordinary and extraordinary in the secret life of spies. One minute the book is about a traveling man's sad inability to spend time with his seven year son; the next minute the book is about how a single spy could be of value to the Generalissimo as he sought to come to grips with Trotsky's Fourth Internationale or indeed the Empire of Japan. But as interesting as Meier makes his spies seem, Stalin is even more interesting. In this book, Stalin is Souron from the Lord of the Rings, searching out resisters across the world with a roving eye, no matter how small or seemingly innocuous. In this world, Trotsky's apparently futile resistance, takes on new significance. Even as his son and closest supporters fall to the rising tide of evil, Trotsky's hobbit-like opposition continued to occupy the thoughts of the Dark Lord of Mordor right up until an ice pick put an end to him.

Postscript: Cy Oggins was survived by his wife by 50 years. Ms. Oggins died at the age of 97, a fervent believer in the Communist ideal until the end. Cy died at the hands of Russian Mengelee, a mad Soviet scientist who performed medical experiments on gulag prisoners for Beria and his henchmen. Cy was killed by means of an insidious poison which paralyzed him even as he remained conscious. In the end, the author concluded that Cy was imprisoned because his spymaster had attempted to flee from the Soviet underground. Whenever a spy attempted to defect, it was a routine matter to "roll up" anybody connected to him. In these circumstances, Cy couldn't be released. It wasn't that he would betray the secrets of the gulag. Many in the West already knew about then. It was that he had the ability to betray the entire Soviet system of espionage. Oggins' case came up again the Yeltsin era, with the historian Volkogonov wrongly insisting that Oggins was an innocent man, unconnected with any underground activity for either side, who had been killed in cold blood by the criminal Soviet regime.

You Shook Me

More Americans have gotten their impressions of the Russian Revolution from Ten Days That Shook the World than from any other source. John Reed's short book is filled with the reporter's first-hand and generally enthusiastic impressions of the revolutionary events of October 1917. The prose is energetic; and one is tempted to think that Reid's omnipresence in the events he describes must have influenced countless American journalists and nonfiction writers, particularly Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson.

Reed's insights influenced countless liberal and leftist Americans to look sympathetically upon the world's first successful proletarian coup d'etat. His sympathies for Lenin, Trotsky, and Bolshevism in general are overt. Even so, Reed's book does not wholly elide or erase the moral complexity of Red October. Reed's book assumes two things: first, that tsarist Russia was thoroughly discredited in the eyes of most if not all right-thinking Russians; second, that by 1917, if not before, the Allied cause in the the First World War had no moral claims on the Russian people.

Beyond this, Reed clearly endorses the Bolshevik position of providing Russia with clear and moral leadership, but gives readers a very clear idea of why many socialists and radicals clung to the Provisional Government rather than jump on to the Bolshevik bandwagon. The Bolsheviks gained support among key constituencies--namely the army, the navy, the proletariat, and the peasantry--by calling for an immediate end to the war, ending capital punishment in the armed forced, putting industry into the hands of workers, granting land without compensation to peasant Land Committees, and making a series of promises to the ethnic minorities.

Even so, Reed shows that most Menshiviks and Social Revolutionaries thought that the Bolshevik coup would ultimately undermine the socialist cause. Their critique, which Reed does nothing to obscure, was predicated in the idea that the Bolshevik party had too little support in the country at large to be successful. While Reid clearly admires Bolshevik audacity, he understands that the Bolsheviks represented a minority opinion even within those Leftist communities which clearly opposed not only the tsar but the bourgeois parties such as the Cadets.

As a small minority, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries could object to Bolshevik authority by relying on Marx's theory of a bourgeois interlude between feudal and socialist politics. But socialist critics of Lenin and Trotsky also made practical arguments to support the Provisional Government. They said that the proletarian insurrection would rally the forces of counter-revolution and lead to a reactionary restoration of some sort. Bourgeois liberals would united with Cossacks, royalists, tsarist officers, anti-semitic Black Hundred supporters, and many others to overthrow all previous socialist gains.

Menshevik and Social Revolutionary criticisms were varied, and included principled Marxist critique as well as seemingly partisan resentment at being ignored despite strong democratic support. The non-Bolshevik Marxist parties (and some key trade unions) also doubted that the Bolsheviks even had enough leadership talent to run a government, and many in all parties predicted that the Bolshevik experiment would collapse of its own accord in a matter of days. The popularity of Ten Days That Shook The World is justified. It's a clear and persuasive explication of Lenin's claim to be the most effective exponent of the socialist traditions of peace, land reform, and worker empowerment. And it's a brilliant work of reportage that provides a rare window onto the written and oral discourse that overtook Russia in these days of historical possibility.



But most importantly, the book is a lasting testament to the moral complexity of the revolutionary moment, when everyone (general, officer, politician, peasant, trainman) is a potential hero and a potential villain. In Reed's book, even old-guard liberal politicians demonstrate personal valor and high-mindedness. They just happen to be on the wrong side of history.

The World According to Garp(achev)

How did Mikhail Gorbachev see the world in 1987, four short years before the union he led fell to pieces? It’s impossible to know Gorbachev’s inner thoughts, but his speech to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in that same year seems surprisingly straightforward. While the General Secretary flatters his audience, he also challenges it. Was Communism really doomed? Very likely, but Gorbachev didn’t think so. The history of Bolshevism was replete with heroic progress; the future could resemble this glorious past. Notwithstanding its challenges, the Soviet Union had done more for human kind in seventy years than any other people had done for it in a comparable period.



Possibly a rhetorical flourish, Gorbachev reminded the Party of the significance of October, 1917. This was “humanity’s finest hour,” the “dawn of the real history of mankind,” and a time that “changed man’s inner world beyond recognition.” It was also a summation of everything good and progressive in Russia’s long history. October was peasant rebellion, Decembrist action, worker strike, and cultural protest all rolled into one. Lenin and the Revolution liberated the people, and brought them education, social welfare, equality, freedom, and the first experiment in real democracy in an age of bourgeois imperialism.



The Communist Party achieved the first successful revolution in the modern, imperialist era. It also modernized Russia and brought it victory in World War II. In Gorbachev’s view, the Party’s successes were predicated on something other than unfettered discipline. For Lenin had taught his disciples the virtues of “revolutionary dialectics,” which is to say he had taught them to use Marxist principles to solve political problems in bold but open-ended, creative ways.

The Bolsheviks had, after all, made a long series of strategic reversals. First, they abandoned their slogan, “all power to the soviets,” when their opponents, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, controlled those quasi-governmental political organs. Second, they turned against the traditional Leftist prejudice against seizing power in a socially backward country such as Russia. Third, they performed a volte-face and withdrew from the First World War in order to salvage the Revolution. Fourth, the Bolsheviks overturned their erstwhile theory of a volunteer militia and created a professional Red Army capable of winning a fierce civil war. Fifth, and most importantly, Lenin ended War Communism and allowed capitalism to coexist with socialism during the period of the New Economic Policy.

Gorbachev thought that the Party was the backbone of progress in Soviet Russia. It was the vanguard of revolutionary change. Therefore, the General Secretary felt justified in asking Party members to help him to correct serious problems in the socialist economy. While admiring the spirit of self-sacrifice that had quite literally “electrified” the Soviet landscape, he thought that Stalinist command economics were not appropriate for an advanced economy. A modern USSR could no longer rely on “enthusiasm alone” to effect change. While previous generations had achieved miracles in terms of hauling the country into the twentieth century, the present generation confronted challenges that required innovation, honesty, humanistic values, self-criticism, and flexibility.

Centralized planning had served Russia well during the Interwar period. Notwithstanding his mistakes, Stalin had led the Party toward essentially sound goals. Stalin’s Party had gotten it right. His Party had ignored Trotsky’s blandishments and built the world’s first socialist state. Stalin’s Party had liberated labor and built dozens if not hundreds of major industrial projects. Following the Great Patriotic War, the Communists overcame the devastation, raised Soviet prestige in the international community, and raised its citizens’ standard of living.

On the other hand, the Soviet Union’s achievements had entailed a dark flip side. The country’s economy became too rigid, too centralized, and too bureaucratic. Stalin’s legacy ran counter to the Leninist path of respecting peasants (Gorbachev saw no irony in this phrase). And it was basically undemocratic. The cult of personality disenfranchised Russians. The centralized economy forestalled initiative. To take the country forward, Russia needed reform and openness. More than that, the Soviet Union needed to “update methods,” create “contemporary forms,” and embrace science, technology, and progress. It needed to encourage independence, initiative, and responsibility among the people. If this prescription seems vague, it was.



What did Gorbachev mean when he talked about improving quality or accelerating social progress? What specific proposals would bring these things about? Was Gorbachev’s unity among Party members compatible with his call for independent modes of thinking? Was his demand that workers take more responsibility over their lives consistent with his desire to keep the Party apparatus together?



Whether his speech reflected personal opinion or political reality, Gorbachev presented his Party with a realistic middle path between jettisoning its historical legacy and submitting to apathy and stagnation. Gorbachev’s understanding of history was profoundly flawed. As late as 1987, he was espousing a Stalinist line about both Trotsky and Bukharin, still insisting that the Party had essentially “been right” in its activities. But who –besides Yeltsin--could have done more than that? Clearly, Gorbachev’s intellect and energy and relative honest was not enough to salvage the Bolshevik project. The country was in very bad shape. Its economy was in shambles, but perhaps more importantly, the Russian people had begun to blame the Party for its troubles.

Red Army

As late as 1988, the Soviet Union was churning out anti-imperialist propaganda, including deputy chief of the Political Directorate of the Soviet Army and Navy, Alexei Sorokin’s, short tract on the virtues of the Red Army entitled “The Soviet Army—The Army of the People.” Sorokin’s pamphlet gives readers a concise history of the accomplishments of the USSR’s armed forces, but the pamphlet’s cover photo of a Russian soldier being given flowers by a peasant woman a kiss by a little peasant girl.



At bottom, the author contends that the Red Army was better than its Western counterparts in that it was an instrument of popular sovereignty and revolutionary morality rather than one of imperialism and capitalist aggression. While ignoring Trotsky’s colossal contributions to its formation, the author notes that Lenin called upon the people to defend the Revolution against German militarists, foreign interventionists, and counter-revolutionaries. (Marx and Engels had already given theoretical justification to Lenin’s resolve to suppress inevitable counter-attacks of the landlord class and its international allies).



Political enlightenment lay at the heart of Red Army successes: Communist Party members stiffened the resolve of ordinary soldiers and ensured the loyalty of former tsarist officers whose expertise, the author admits, proved invaluable to the inexperienced Red Army officer class. At first, the author claims that the military strategy was decided by Lenin and a small group of senior Party officials, although this gave way to a unified command system in the middle of the 1920s. As literacy expanded dramatically as a result of communist educational ideals, the Soviet Army became increasingly efficient. The 1920s also saw the Army implementing a system of formal bigotry against anyone who was not fortunate enough to hail from the working classes (although this principle of exclusion was later revoked when class differences had been “ended”).



The growing power of the Soviet army eventually led to the country’s greatest triumph, the defeat of the mighty NAZI war machine. Interestingly, Sorokin notes that the Germany armed forces had grown strong as a result of the investment by America and its allies in the German economy during the interwar years, but skips over Stalin’s nonaggression pact with Germany, as well as the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or indeed the Russian invasion of Poland and other Eastern European states before operation Barbarossa. However, the author’s adjective for the premeditated attack by German is “perfidious,” a term that at least hints at the embarrassing fact that Communist Russia had some reason to expect cooperation from Hitler.

At any rate, Sorokin rightly attests to the heroism of the Soviet Army, and the brutality of the invading forces that can be linked to the deaths of 20 million Soviet citizens. Clearly, the Revolution—indeed all revolutions—need defending. Witness the unfortunate demise of the interwar experiments with communism such as that of Hungary and Bavaria.

Sorokin is rightly proud of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War and battles such as Moscow, Stalingrad and Leningrad, and the role the Red Army played in the liberation of 13 different European and Asian nations. One of his ongoing themes is that Communist Party members were particularly heroic in such battles and suffered disproportionate losses relative to ordinary Russian citizens, a theme that must have been appealing to old line Bolsheviks in the age of glasnost and perestroika.

Soviet successes were also predicated on the superiority of Communist principles. Collectivized farms even produced more food for the army than would have otherwise been the case. The author acknowledges allied assistance but notes that Russia was responsible for the great bulk of German losses. Of course, Sorokin says very little about American leadership in the Pacific War, and says nothing about the Lend-Lease program. In fact, Sorokin insists that the Soviets played a large role in the Japanese capitulation owing to the Soviet route of its one million man Kwangtung army. Moreover, he says that the American decision to drop the bomb was meant to intimidate Russian and the world rather than to win the war against Japan. Needless to say, Sorokin says nothing at all is said about Stalin’s disastrous military decisions in the opening phases of the war.



Coming to the present, the author underscores that the Soviet armed forces are distinct from those of the West. They are peaceful, popular with ordinary people, scientifically managed, inseparably linked to the Communist Party, and supportive of revolutionary aspirations in the developing world. Under Gorbachev, the armed forces were withdrawing from Afghanistan (which he asserts, with some defensiveness, they were right to aid), making significant efforts to abolish nuclear weapons, and maintaining the “shield of socialism,” i.e., the Warsaw Pact.

Rand and Nietzsche For Kids

My five year old son has been asking me how it is that I have chosen to write a blog about socialism without commenting on the philosophical legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Rightly or wrong, the fascist critique of the Revolution was intertwined with an admiration of Nietzsche’s famous aphorisms. What is the relationship between the Superman and socialism? How about the will to power? The tyranny of the weak over the strong? What did the slogan—God is Dead—mean to the socialist project? WWNS, What Would Nietzsche Say about the October Revolution and its aftermath?



Even Francis Peabody, the Christian social theorist referred to in a recent post, felt it necessary to address Nietzsche’s legacy in the context of a full analysis of what he called the Social Question. I tell my son that I’m no philosopher. I’m not equipped to deal with the subject. He replies (our debate is getting old—it often interrupts our attempts to play Good Transformers versus Bad Elmo and his stuffed animal goons) that it’s simply impossible to neglect the twentieth century’s most important philosopher. I don’t get Nietzsche so I don’t really have an opinion. He doesn’t understand that at all.



I recall a moment in my long and sorry graduate school career when I approached a cultural studies professor and asked him whether I might not audit his class. I was a history graduate student but somewhat fraudulently claimed cultural studies as a minor field. The professor (who hailed from the Caribbean and had a deep, Jazz radio sort of voice) invited me to his class, and also to a more mysterious “Foucault Reading Group.” It felt like I was falling through a series of trap doors. I hadn’t been trained for cultural studies, still less for philosophy.

The conversation among the professor and his graduate students seemed brilliant to me, or perhaps I was merely stupid, or bored silly by years of old fashioned political and social history. A remember one woman with fashionable glasses (and who what other graduate student in Urbana had fashionable glasses?) who dominated the conversation.

When I objected that something she had said wasn’t historically accurate, she coldly and decisively dismissed my comment with something like this: What I’ve said may not be historically true, but if I am speaking of an archeology of knowledge, then wouldn’t it make all the sense in the world? The large circle of her supporters nodded in agreement and I was ashamed.

Inevitably, the Foucault Reading Group turned its attention to one of Foucault’s inspirations, namely Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo. I couldn’t keep up with my peers, but I do remember one relevant discussion of Nietzsche’s concept of "resentiment." I recall from this distant time, the term refers to the way weak people will sometimes resent stronger people. It’s a form of bitterness born out of jealousy and a desire to bring people down to their lowest common denominator. It’s related to Nietzsche's critique of Christianity as an ideological justification for ensuring that the meek really could inherit the earth, or at least quash anyone who really was worthy of such an honor.

Socialism in this context resembles Ellsworth Toohey (Thank you, Wikipedia) in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. He’s a brilliant but sinister apostle of everything second-rate, incompetent, and ordinary. He resists Howard Roark, the Nietzsche-inspired superman and architect. He knows Roark’s projects are superb, and for precisely this reason he objects to them. As editor, Toohey uses democracy itself (in the form of his readership, who are easily manipulated) to thwart humankind’s natural aristocracy. One can easily imagine that Ayn Rand had Lenin or Trostsky in mind when she created Toohey. The original communist leaders were also brilliant, almost themselves natural aristocrats, who used their genius to implement a system that ruthlessly ensured the triumph of mediocrity.

The socialist project failed, but it made some significant attempts to implement social equality, at least on a theoretical level. In a way that would have horrified Nietzsche, the Communist Party in Russia, as well as China, celebrated the little guy, and move brutally against anyone who had any association with elitism, including priests, aristocrats, kulaks, intellectuals, NEP-men, and former officers, and indeed their families. The system of Soviet mass education and public education were also geared toward leveling out disparities. This was the ultimate expression of currents of modernity that—I would imagine—horrified Nietzsche. Socialism did away with Christianity, but seemed to embody the essence of Christian principles anyway by celebrating the weak at the expense of the strong.

Tragedy and Farce in 1852

An analysis of the Revolution of 1917 necessarily involves retrospective treatment of other European revolutions. 1789 is the obvious point of departure, but 1848 shouldn’t be neglected since this revolutionary conflagration touched almost every corner of Europe and was therefore more universal than either 1789 or 1917, despite the glaring irony of its failure to gain even a foothold in autocratic Russia.



1848 was also an event that Karl Marx came to know first-hand and his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte deals brilliantly with its closing chapter, the triumph of the popular dictator and nephew to the original Bonaparte. Marx’s short treatise on contemporary France succeeds as political commentary as well as historical analysis. Its witty and sardonic treatment of Louis Bonaparte would make John Stewart and the Daily Show proud if it were written today. But the work has something important to say about the nature of revolution in the modern world, even apart from its careful depiction of class struggle, economic transformation, and the process of ideological mystification.



According to Marx, revolutions were becoming increasingly serious in the 19th century. “Early revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to drug themselves concerning their own content…. There the phrase went beyond the content. Here the content goes beyond the phrase.” For Marx, bourgeois revolutions were shallow, effervescent, ecstatic, but short-lived, while proletarian revolutions “criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts,” and so on, until society has been so utterly transformed by the experience that there is, quite simply, no turning back.

The deep nature of modern or proletarian revolution is contrasted with the superficial nature of bourgeois revolution. For instance, the bourgeois republic, even when it is ostensibly bound to a written constitution, recognizes only citizen rights and privileges that are effectively undermined and checked by the rights of the body politic.

The proletarian revolution, Marx rightly predicts, will recognize no checks on its own authority or prerogatives. It will, moreover, be decisive, passionate, and heroic. Most importantly, the modern revolution will not be cowardly. It will face down its critics and disregard “pretentiously paraded exertions and philistine terror” that the change it brings will represent the “end of the world.”

One can almost hear a communion between Marx and Lenin in lines like these. Wasn’t Marx telling his followers to embrace the future, at whatever the costs? What of the opponents of the modern revolution? In Marx’s disturbingly comic description, these were nothing more than “vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, procurers, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term La Boheme…”

Clearly, in a modern revolution, opponents could, in the words of Leon Trotsky half a century later, be safely “swept into the trash bin of history.”