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Sociology Research

 

David Lane comments:

Stefan Zweig in his 1927 book, Decisive Moments in History, ranks Lenin’s return to Russia in October 1917 as one of the three most decisive ‘moments’ in recent world history. The others were the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815.  ‘Decisive moments’ are defined by what followed them. Soviet-type regimes which were constituted after 1917 are perceived from three different angles which give rise to opposing political policies and evaluations.  Some emphasise the economic, social and cultural advances, others the dictatorial and repressive rule and the third approach considers the influence of hostile foreign opposition. Recognition of, and emphasis on, one or another of these features defines the political positions which divide Western commentators.

The Rise of Anti-Communism

British reactions to the Revolution were tempered by the emergence of the United Kingdom from the First World War as a severely weakened world power. There was an initial hostility by the political classes to the Revolution. The policy of the Western powers decided at the Paris Peace Conference, which followed World War I, was to stabilise the pre-1914 political world order and for the Britain, the retention of its foreign empire. The foundations were laid for policies to suppress communism. The armed intervention by American, British Empire and Japanese troops on the side of the Whites in the Civil War was intended to quash the Bolshevik uprising. In Great Britain, Winston Churchill was one of October’s most virulent critics. He is reported in a British Foreign Office document as throwing ‘the whole of his dynamic energy and genius into organising an armed intervention against Russia’.  In April 1919, he articulated his political opposition which has provided a base for later criticism of USSR. ‘Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevist tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading. It is sheer humbug to pretend that it is not far worse than German militarism’. Churchill’s views are symbolic of the hostility against Soviet Russia which has existed since October 1917. Later the rise of explicitly anti-communist movements defined communist states as ‘totalitarian’ and unreformable. They required regime change - unlike autocratic states which could be reformed and therefore tolerated.  Such ideas were fuelled by the claims advanced by Soviet leaders that their policy would have to develop, support and awaken the revolution in other countries. V.I. Lenin, for example, in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, written in 1918, contended that the Bolshevik Revolution served as a model for other countries and would hasten the victory of the proletariat abroad.

Not only established right-wing elites opposed the seizure of power, the statisation of property and demolition of emerging parliamentary democracy. There was also the criticism from the Western social-democrats who took a lead from the Menshevik position by criticising the whole idea of starting a socialist revolution in one country such as Russia with its undeveloped forces of production. As the Soviet Union developed under Stalin, opposition from the left crystallised and new positions, such as the notion of state capitalism, began to take root in left wing circles.

The Ambiguities of the Left

The British academic community had divided opinions. The leading British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, had an ambiguous attitude to October. He approved of October’s ideals on the one hand but abhorred Soviet practice on the other. Writing after a visit to Russia in 1920 in an influential book entitled, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, he conceded that ‘By far the most important aspect of the Russian Revolution is an attempt to realise socialism. … I believe that the heroism of Russia has fired men’s hopes in a way which was essential to the realisation of Socialism in the future. Regarded as a splendid attempt, without which ultimate success would have been very improbable, Bolshevism deserves the gratitude and admiration of all the progressive part of mankind’.

It was the methods used by the Bolsheviks that Russell, like many Menshevik critics in Russia, condemned. He denied the possibility of building socialism on the swamp of backwardness and in the context of the ‘hostility of the world’ to the objectives of October. 

In Britain, many of those who reacted against the unjustified privileges and arrogance of the British ruling classes saw hope of a ‘new civilisation’ (to use the term of Sidney and Beatrice Webb) in Soviet Russia. In the 1920s and 1930s there was widespread concern about the moral and political ‘decline of the West’. The Russian Revolution was considered to be an antidote to it.  John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1925, following his visit as a representative of the University of Cambridge to the bicentenary celebrations of the Academy of Sciences, quoted Trotsky favourably and reported that the Revolution would have some positive results both socially and economically. In his book, A Short View of Russia, he contended that ‘… [U]nder Socialism solidarity will be the basis of society. Literature and art will be tuned to a different key’.  He acknowledged that ‘money-making and money-accumulating’ were already qualitatively different in Russia and he concluded that ‘even if partially true, [it] is a tremendous innovation’. 

But he also queried whether the Bolsheviks’ quest for a Utopia ‘was insincere or wicked’.  The Soviet system he concluded did have some real ideals to which people could relate.  At the same time, he postulated, somewhat incongruously, that if he was a Russian, he ‘could not subscribe to the new official faith any more that the old. I should detest the actions of the new tyrants not less than those of the old’.

 

 

The Social and Political Context

The two-sided nature of many commentaries in Western Europe was conditioned by a belief in the socialist goals of the Bolsheviks but their perversion by the uncompromising conditions of Tsarist Russia. As Bertrand Russell put it: ‘Out of [Bolshevik power] has grown a system painfully like the old government of the Tsar- a system which is Asiatic in its centralised bureaucracy, its secret service, its atmosphere of governmental mystery and submissive terror’.  Hence while the objectives of the October Revolution were endorsed, the conditions of Soviet Russia were considered to be inimical to the attainment of socialist goals. 

Attitudes to October after the First World War were also conditioned by the erosion of parliamentary democracy in European states and the oppressive conditions in Britain’s colonial dependencies. Russell, for example, compared Russia under the Bolsheviks to colonial India under the British.  Europe was governed by states which had set up dictatorial regimes of one type or another. A consequence of the Russian revolution was a rise of social tension in Western Europe and the growth of right wing anti-socialist parties. Civil wars spread to Europe.  Hitler, as early as 1923, when in prison, considered the Russian Bolsheviks to be ‘blood-stained criminals’ and, as he put it in Mein Kampf,  Germany was ‘the next battlefield for Russian Bolshevism’. Here he brings out the international significance of the October Revolution and its potential to threaten the West. Other right-wing opponents, often citing the assassination of the Tsar and oppression of the peasants, emphasised the repressive elements of Soviet power.  Oppression became an important component in Western conceptions of Soviet power.

The ‘Soviet Experiment’

The left, however, also subscribed to what became known in Great Britain as the ‘Soviet experiment’ in terms of the social and political advances achieved. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, leading British Fabian social-democrats and founders of the London School of Economics, in their influential book on Soviet Communism (first published in 1935) considered Soviet Russian to be a ‘new civilisation’. For them, its major characteristics were the abolition of profit-making, the planned production for community consumption, social equality and universal work, universal participation in social affairs, the ‘vocation of leadership’ formed by the Communist Party, the ‘cult of science’ and the repudiation of religion. Whatever its faults, Soviet communism had much to commend it.

An added significance of the Webbs is that they were from the more reformist Fabian wing of British social-democracy – a major intellectual component of the British Labour Party. Their positive views of the Soviet Union’s type of state ordered socialism had a significant effect on the evolution of British left-wing and liberal politics and the emergence after World War II of the British welfare state.

The positive evaluation of Soviet communism in Britain has to be considered against the social and political protest fuelled in Britain by structural and prolonged unemployment in the 1930s. John Maynard Keynes, a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge and a government economic adviser, had considerable influence. He was critical of capitalism. His major concern like that of many others in the 1930s was how to eliminate unemployment. He did not believe that the market mechanism could end it. He saw the attainment of full employment through planning as a major advance of the Soviet Union. Similar views were advanced by leading liberal sociologists such as Joseph A. Schumpeter who concluded that socialist planning eliminated waste and the need for taxation.  In his book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, he even had a chapter on The Case for the Superiority of the Socialist Blueprint (see chapter XVII).  Such views, informed by Soviet experience, had important effects in legitimating state coordination in place of market competition.

It is under these circumstances – economic failure and political decay in the West – that the repressive aspects of the Soviet experiment were condemned but were counterbalanced by the positive economic and social advances.

The Impact of the Second World War

By the end of the Second World War, the achievements of the planned economy overwhelmed the criticisms of repression and even Winston Churchill held Stalin in high (though critical) esteem. The victory of the USSR over Nazi Germany had a tremendous effect on public opinion and led to a period in which the Soviet form of socialism had a positive image.  The dominant ideology is always conditioned by the forces determining foreign affairs. Communism became an acceptable ideology (though one not to be followed by democrats) and Communist parties made significant gains in some parts of Western Europe – though only small advances in Britain.

It will no doubt come as a surprise to most people in 2017, that the Soviet conception of socialist democracy had prominent advocates in the West. E.H. Carr (then one of Britain’s foremost specialists in international affairs) writing in his influential book, The Soviet Impact on the Western World, published just after the Second World War in 1945, considered that ‘The missionary role which had been filled in the First World War by American democracy ….had passed in the Second World War to Soviet democracy and Marshal Stalin’. 

The Rise of Anti-Communism

These sentiments were, however, criticised by the growing anti-communist movement, and the more oppressive dimensions of Soviet power were utilised to justify the ideological condemnation of Soviet practices and to provide a legitimation for the Cold War.  The idea of totalitarianism resting on interpretations such as Robert Conquest’s, The Great Terror (1968), became a prominent ideological foundation for anti-communism. 

Western social democratic parties moved further away from statist policies of systemic change. In the UK, while Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, after the Second World War, favoured cooperation with the USSR, Ernest Bevin concurrently was staunchly anti-communist. In international affairs, the Labour Party supported NATO, accepted the terms of the Marshall Plan and joined an American alliance.  It defined itself as non-communist (even anti-communist) and accepted the hegemony of the USA.  The emphasis in its outlook changed from recognition of social and economic achievements of the USSR to the condemnation of the negative repressive effects of Stalin’s rule and its totalitarian character. The third dimension I noted above, the supposed threat of October leading to the awakening of revolution in other countries became a major element in Western perceptions of the USSR. 

This component in the perception of Soviet power was only ended with the ascent of Gorbachev to political power and the ensuing policies of President Eltsin. Not only did Gorbachev repudiate the claim that the USSR had any political pretentions of extending its power but he also led the movement to join the world market system on terms laid down by the West. What consequently was lost in the breakup of the USSR were the social and economic objectives promised by October. And perhaps the Soviet Union can claim a fourth ‘decisive moment’ to be added to update Stefan Zweig’s list: the deletion of the ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from the Constitution of the USSR in March 1990.

David Lane is Emeritus Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge University and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is author of The Capitalist Transformation of State Socialism

[Image Copyright: Sputnik]

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