IMPACT OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: IDEOLOGY MATTERS
I. BACKDROP: GERMAN IDEALISM AND RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARIES
German philosophers in the 19th century were often "Idealists," that is to say that they maintained that ideas have a force, power, and reality that is more "real" than that concrete, reality that so consume us in our daily lives.
German idealism dominated the 19th-century Russian revolutionary movement from the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 until long after Lenin's successful revolutionary coup that we call the October (or Bolshevik or Communist) Revolution of 1917.
While I never want to downplay the central role of raw hypocrisy in human affairs, much of what we in the United States have interpreted as hypocrisy in the Soviet Union—the dissonance between the profound humanism of Marx's ideas and the coarse violence of the Stalinist dictatorship—this hypocrisy can also be seen as the desperate attempt to coerce reality through the power of belief—through the power of the Idea.
And one way to interpret the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was that the Soviets had lost their ability to convince themselves that the Leninist/Stalinist Idea had the power to transform reality into a better future. With the collapse of this self-justifying, central Myth that legitimized the Soviet experience, the Soviet Union died not with a bang but rather whimpered into Lev Trotsky's "dust bin of history."
With this introduction, I would now like to offer three examples in the Russian Revolutionary experience where Ideas profoundly affected the future course of events. Only toward the end of the Twentieth Century have these effects begun to run out of steam.
II. THREE EXAMPLES
A. "MODERATE" SOCIALISM AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION OF 1917
The first example involves the reaction of moderate socialists to the February Revolution in Petrograd in 1917.
Moderate Socialists, including the Marxist Mensheviks in contrast to Lenin's Bolsheviks, had adopted a position that Russia was not yet ready for a Socialist Revolution; reading Marx's Stages of History quite literally, they understood that the Bourgeois Revolution had to come first and had to take place under the leadership of the bourgeoisie. The working class movement thus had to be satisfied with playing the role of a party of the extreme opposition—the bourgeois revolution must come first and be developed, and the responsibility of the proletariat was to encourage this historical necessity.
Real consequences flowed from this belief. When the women, workers, and soldiers of Petrograd spontaneously took to the streets in February 1917, it took only several days for them to overthrow the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty. They then handed power they had won in the streets to their moderate socialist leadership—none of whom were philosophically or psychologically ready to assume the mantle of power. Consistent with their beliefs, the socialists in turn handed power to the bourgeoisie who established the Provisional Government. Not having the complete courage of their convictions, however, the moderate socialists also established the Petrograd Soviet which basically held veto-power over the actions of the bourgeois Provisional Government.
This "compromise" established the period of "Dual Power" which was inherently unstable. In retrospect, it is amazing that the Provisional Government, amidst the catastrophe of World War I, managed to hold on to power until October of 1917 when Lenin’s and Trotsky's Bolsheviks managed a coup d'etat to take power.
Lenin, like his Menshevik cousins, was a Marxist, but his Marxism focused less on the determinist element of Marx's Stages of History than on the ability of the individual to assert his will on history. For him, there was no need to wait patiently for the bourgeoisie to fulfill their historical duty at their own leisure; Bolshevism could force the pace. Lenin's Will to Power and his belief in the power of the Idea to change reality made the difference between his success and the moderate socialists’ failure.
B. LENIN'S IMPERIALISM, THE HIGHEST STAGE OF CAPITALISM
The second example of the power of the Idea concerns Soviet influence on the developing world.
Lenin wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1917, during the trials of the First World War and before the Bolshevik Revolution, to explain two crucial contradictions facing Marxists of the day.
The first contradiction concerned the delayed outbreak of the promised world revolution. After all, it had already been sixty-nine years since Marx in the Communist Manifesto had proclaimed that "A Specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism." What had gone wrong?
The second failure of the Marxist promise involved the inability of the world's proletariat to prevent war and its rejection of internationalism for nationalism. It had been a common belief among those of all political stripes from the far right to the far left, that socialist influence on the proletariat had made a major European war impossible. One of the central socialist beliefs was that wars are fought for the benefit of capitalist profits. Now, with the spread of democracy and the entry of powerful socialist parties into Europe's parliaments, the capitalists could try to provoke war to their heart's delight but would find it impossible to vote war credits through parliament or to mobilize soldiers who, following their socialist leadership, would refuse to fight. These ideas evoke memories of the anti-Vietnam War poster: "What if they gave a war and nobody came?"
Lenin's ingenious answer to both questions came in his book, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In it he argued that the concentration of production had transformed the capitalism of free competition into monopoly capitalism. The concentration of production also had dramatically increased the socialization of production. Big banks had changed from pure credit institutions into business banks and as such they dominated whole sectors of industry. Together the banks and industry were tied in with government. This coalescence of bank capital with industrial capital with strong government ties had led to the formation of a financial oligarchy that controlled large sections of the national economy.
Share issues and state loans had increased the power and amount of surplus capital which flowed beyond political frontiers and extended the financial oligarchy's control to other countries. The capital exporting monopolies had divided the world among themselves; international cartels formed the basis for international relations, and the economic division of the world provided the ground for the struggle for colonies, spheres of influence, and world domination. But once the world was divided up, the struggle had become one for the repartitioning of the world. Because the economic development of individual countries is uneven and sporadic, some were left at a disadvantage in this repartitioning. Imperialism represented a special, highest, stage of capitalism.
The transition to a capitalism of this higher order was connected with an aggravation of contradictions, frictions, and conflicts. Monopolists assured profits by corrupting the upper stratum of the proletariat in the developed countries. The imperialist ideology permeated the working class. In other words, the burden of bourgeois oppression had been shifted from the shoulders of the domestic proletariat to those of the colonial peoples. In effect, the domestic proletariat had been bribed and they came to see that their material interests were tied up with colonial enterprise. Now, successful war to repartition the world in the favor of a particular nation made fighting war against fellow proletarians in other countries worthwhile.
With his theory, Lenin seemingly had explained those two problems with Marx. The revolution had not yet swept the world because the potential revolutionaries, the proletariat, had been bribed by the illusion of short-term, material gains to forget their true, long-term interests. They had rejected their class-based internationalism for nationalism because wars fought to expand colonial holdings appeared to be in their material self-interest. Hence they did not prevent the outbreak of the Great War.
This theory held long-term importance because Lenin, unlike Marx and Engels, did not see the revolutionary perspectives as centered uniquely upon advanced capitalist countries. After the Great War, in a period of "Capitalist Encirclement" the Soviets attacked "the weak link in the chain of imperialism," the colonies. Political influence went to where the oppression was—the colonies.
In the colonial and post-colonial world after World War II, given the absence of an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie with the will and capacity to transform existing conditions and to overcome the entrenched interests opposed to full-scale development, a gospel of competitive individualism seemed useless for modernization to those in the Third World. What appeared to be needed to get the underdeveloped country moving has been collective effort inspired by a national sense of political purpose. Only governments had sufficient capital, organizational skills, and commitment to make rapid development possible. Ideologically, therefore, the intelligentsia of such countries gravitated to one or another of the various socialist doctrines—something that in general might be described as state capitalism, that is, the state and not private individuals perform the entrepreneurial duties of gathering land, labor, and capital for productive enterprise. Socialist rhetoric disguised this crucial essence.
For most of the twentieth century, Soviet Russia provided the model for those in the Third World who wished to rapidly modernize their countries. And rapid modernization was necessary for the sake of national prestige and independence. Russia's success seemed obvious when we note that within forty short years Russia had risen from the ashes of World War I to defeat Hitler, to become one of the world's two superpowers, and to be the first in space. Just as important as was this practical example was the vocabulary provided by Lenin. That Marx himself had had little to say to the underdeveloped world mattered little. I would argue that many Third World leaders, for two contentious examples Ho Chi-Minh and Fidel Castro, who led revolutions to assert national pride, independence, and prosperity, turned to Communism because Lenin had provided a vocabulary with a coherent explanation for colonial degradation and a means for asserting national regeneration. Additionally, of the major powers, the Soviet regime alone more-or-less consistently supported the aspirations of those wishing to throw off the oppression of colonialism and capitalism. Of course, today, the Communist model no longer holds the same allure it once did.
C. TWO MARXIST HERESIES: LENINISM/STALINISM AND MUSSOLINI'S FASCISM
The final example of the power of ideas generated during World War I involves the intimate, kissing cousin-relationship between Stalinist Communism and Mussolini's Fascism.
Despite facile assumptions, Fascism and Communism were not antipodes. Although their exact relationship remains difficult to define, there exist commonalties, as one author has pointed out:
