In defence of Communism
The cold war is over, but anti-communism is
October, to study it and to draw lessons for the future. For October was too great an event to be trampled underfoot by this new breed of
Preface stronger than ever.
In 1995, François Furet submitted his proposal for an epitaph on the tombstone of communism, in the form of his thick book A past and an illusion:
an essay on the Communist idea in the 20th century.' In 1997, a team of historians coordinated by Stéphane Courtois authored an even more monumental work. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, terror, repression.2 This book takes 800 pages to list the crimes of communism throughout the world and to calculate the number of corpses littered throughout its history. The book's goal is to pull communism out of its grave in order to put it on trial. For fear, perhaps, that it still haunts the world...
A massive success in France, the Black Book has already been published in German, French and Italian. Swedish and English versions will go on sale in the next few weeks.
"Why the hesitation to set up a Nuremberg tribunal [to judge] communism?" asks Courtois. He declares himself judge and jury and proceeds to pronounce his verdict. Communism, he says, is indistinguishable from Stalinism, and was at least as criminal as Nazism.
The result is a terrible muddling of people's terms of reference, and a thoroughgoing disorientation of political, historical and ethical consciousness.
By the end of the book, the history of the 20th century looks like a warehouse of neatly stacked corpses, in which the October Revolution was nothing less than a horrible error and the communist ideal a murderous monstrosity.
This is a book about history. But its impact, and the massive media coverage it has received, reflect a very modern ideological struggle.
The following text by Daniel Bensaid was first published in pamphlet form by France's Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire. As the author explained in the preface to that edition, cannot allow the history of the Russian Revolution to be told as a tale of untrammelled repression. We cannot let reason give way to fury. We cannot let the victims in this history be painted with the same brush as their hangmen.
"For these reasons, we have to return to historian-cum-inquisitor." [JD] 20 International Viewpoint #307 January 1999
"we
Introduction
Writing about the French Revolution in 1798 - at the height of the Reaction -Emmanuel Kant said that such an event, whatever its failings and retreats, was not destined to be forgotten. This was so, he said, because such a major break in the course of events provided a glimpse, even if only briefly, of the promise of genuine human freedom.
Kant was right. Our task today is to see if the great promise associated with the October Revolution - that even shook the world, that ray of hope in midst of the darkness and carnag First World War - can itself a "recalled..by nations". These are stakes involved in the research into and struggle over this question of our collective historical memory.
The 80th anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917 almost went unnoticed. The release of the Black Book of Communism has at least had the merit of once again focussing attention on the "October affair" , one of those major squabbles that will never truly be settled.
The main person behind the collection of essays, Stéphane Courtois, spells it out very clearly when he says that the goal of his enterprise is to prove that Stalinism was fully in keeping with communism, that Stalin was the direct heir of Lenin, and that there was an airtight continuity between the initial revolutionary flame and the icy twilight of the Gulag. "A Stalinist and a communist are one and the same, " he writes in the November 9 edition of le Journal du Dimanche.
It is essential that we provide a straightforward answer to the question raised by the great Soviet historian Mikhail Guefter: "This is the problem that has to be unravelled: was the march of events indeed continuous, or rather are we dealing with two sequences of events that, although intimately linked, in the final analysis belonged to two distinct political and mora. universes?".(5)
A decisive question indeed, the answers to which determine the way me see the century that is winding down -and the commitments we make for the coming turbulent century. If Stalinism as some argue or are prepared to con cede, was no more than a simple "devia-
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by Daniel Bensaid
tion" or a "tragic extension" of the communist project, we would have to draw some very radical conclusions about communism as such. 1. A very fin-de-siècle trial
This is precisely what the backers of the Black Book want. In fact, it is quite easy to be taken aback by the Cold War tone adopted by Stéphane Courtois and some of the media coverage of the the cold-war tone is not anachronistic. Capitalism - shrewdly rebaptised as "market democracy" - has been triumphantly proclaiming the defeat of any kind of alternative after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It is meant to be the absolute hands-down winner at the end of the 20th century.
In truth, however, this unrelenting Cold War attitude betrays a terrible, repressed fear - the fear that the vices and festering sores of the system will be all the more damning now that capitalism can no longer use its now-defunct bureaucratic twin as an alibi.
What the system needs, therefore, is a preventative demonisation of anything that could hint at a different future for
Now that its Stalinist counterfeit has collapsed utterly, the spectre of communism can once again return to haunt the
How many formerly zealous Stalinists - due to their inability to distinguish between Stalinism and communism -stopped being communists when they stopped being Stalinists, all the better to embrace the cause of capitalism with the fervour of the newly converted?
Stalinism and communism are not only discrete, but also implacably antagonistic. Recalling this difference is one important way for us to pay tribute to the many communist victims of
Stalinism is not a variant of communism, but rather the tradename for the bureaucratic counter-revolution. To be sure, in the throes of the struggle against the Nazis and in the debates over the consequences of the world crisis between the two World Wars, honest party members did not immediately take stock of this fact and continued to devote themselves body and soul to the cause. But this changes nothing. To answer Mikhail Guefter's question, we are indeed dealing with "two political and moral worlds", distinct and
In other words, our conclusions re in stark contradiction to those drawn by Stéphane Courtois in the Black Book of Communism.
Courtois occasionally denies having called for a Nuremberg trial for communism. He is somewhat embarrassed about sharing such a demand with fart-
"This is the problem that has to be unravelled: was the march of events indeed continuous, or rather are we dealing with two sequences of timate belong to events that, although intimately linked, in the final analysis belong to two distinct political and moral universes?
If we do not manage to unravel this problem, even today we might through carelessness become dangerous.
When we do not pause to reflect upon the past, the worst prejudices can be revived and historical consciousness is barred from piercing its way into the realm of politics."
Mikhail Guefter "Stalin died yesterday" * right leaders like Jean-Marie Le Pen of France's Front National.
However, the approach taken by the Black Book tends not only to erase the differences between Nazism and communism but also to suggesting that a purely "objective" and arithmetic comparison of the two actually favours
Nazism, the book says, claimed only 25 million lives against communism's 100m; it was responsible for 20 years of terror, as opposed to communism's 60
The first jacket of the book loudly proclaimed that communism had taken 100 million lives. In the book itself, the authors arrive at a figure of 85 million. Apparently, Courtois or his publishers had rather cavalierly thrown in another 15 million for good measure.
There is something terribly cynical about this morbid, wholesale numbercrunching that throws together different countries, periods, causes and camps. It is also, of course, deeply disrespectful towards the victims themselves.
In the case of the Soviet Union, Courtois counts 20 million victims, although we are left in the dark as to what this figure covers exactly.
In his contribution to the Black Book, Nicolas Werth actually provides a figure that is lower than the usual approximations. He says that historians, basing themselves on detailed archives, now calculate the great purges of 1936-1938 claimed some 690,000 victims. This is already enormous, worse than a horrific tragedy.
Werth also establishes that on average two million people were held in the Gulag every year, of which a greater proportion than previously believed were actually freed to be replaced by new arrivals.
To come up with the figure of 20 million deaths, it is therefore necessary to include — in addition to the purges and the Gulag - the two great famines (five million deaths in 1921-1922 and six million in 1932-1933) and the civil war.
It comes as no surprise, however, that the authors of the Black Book cannot demonstrate that the famines and the civil war were "crimes of communism", the result of exterminations coldly planned and executed.
With such an ideological approach, it wouldn't be very difficult to write a Red Book of the Crimes of Capital, adding together the victims of colonial pillage and genocide, world wars, of deaths at work, epidemics, endemic famines, not only of yesteryear but of the present day as well.
In the 20th century alone, it would be easy to count several hundred million victims. Hannah Arendt saw modern imperialism as the blueprint of totalitarianism and the colonial concentration camps of Africa as the prelude to many other camps.(6)
If we are no longer examining regimes, periods and specific conflicts, and rather seeking to incriminate an idea as such, how many deaths through the centuries could be blamed on Christianity and its various evangelical "missions" , to free-market capitalism and "laissez-faire"?
Even in Russia, and even if we accept Courtois cock-and-bull calculations, capitalism would still be responsible for many more than Stalinism's "20 million
. Remember the two world wars.
Stalinism's crimes are sufficiently hair-raising, horrific and massive for there to be any reason to throw further crimes into the balance. Unless of course the objective is deliberately to cloud historical analysis.
This was certainly what happened on the occasion of the bicentennial of the French Revolution. At the time, some historians showed great enthusiasm in blaming the Revolution not only for the Terror or the repression of the Vendée resistance, but also for the white terror, for deaths in the war against the intervention of the counter-revolutionary coalition, and even for the victims of the Napoleonic wars!
There is nothing new about legitimate and useful comparisons of Nazism and Stalinism. Trotsky, for one, spoke of Hitler and Stalin as "twin celestial bodies"
But the differences are just as important as the similarities. The Nazi regime applied its programme and kept its
International Viewpoint #307 January 1999 21
In defence of Communism sinister promises, whereas the Stalinist regime was built against the communist
The regime had to devour communism's activist base in order to consolidate itself. The great number of circles of dissidence and opposition between the two wars are proof of this tragic reversal. There were the suicides, among others, of Maïakovski, Joffe, Tucholsky and Benjamin.
Can the Nazis point to such examples of tormented conscience in the face of an ideal that has been betrayed and deformed? Unlike Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany didn't need to become "the country of the great lie". After all, the Nazis were proud of their accomplishments, Stalinist bureaucrats couldn't face themselves in the mirror of communist principles. In choosing a historical method that deliberately depoliticises and dilutes concrete history in time and space, the authors of the Black Book leave us with little more than a theatre of shadows.
Nicolas Werth, for example, openly embraces "the deprioritisation of political history", all the better to trace in a linear fashion the decontextualised history of repression. The goal is no longer that of putting a regime, an era, or identifiable hangmen on trial - but rather that of incriminating an idea, "the idea that kills".
To carry out a trial not of facts and specific crimes but of an idea, inevitably creates collective guilt and makes a crime of alleged intentions.
For Courtois, the court of history is not only retroactive. It becomes dangerously preventative, when he laments that "the idea of revolution has not been buried deeply enough" and notes with indignation that "openly revolutionary groups remain active and operate in complete legality"!
To be sure, repentance is very much the fashion these days. Former Stalinists have a bad conscience that weighs on them like a rock. Some like Courtois himself, may well have a lot of mourning to do. Their atonement may well be peppered with resentment. But that is their own business.
But what about those who have remained communists, without ever having worshipped Stalin or recited from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book? What on earth does Courtois expect these communists to atone for? They doubtless made errors here and there. But given the way the world is going, it is clear that they have chosen neither the wrong cause nor the wrong adversary.
To understand the tragedies of the 20th century, and to draw useful lessons 22 International Viewpoint #307 January 1999 for the future, we have to leave the ideological stage. We have to go beyond the conflicting shadows that are cast there, immerse ourselves in the stuff of history, and examine the logic of political conflicts in which concrete choices are made between many different possible 2. Revolution or coup d'état?
A critical review of the Russian Revolution on the occasion of its 80th anniversary raises a series of questions, both historical and programmatic in nature. The stakes are high, involving our very ability to envision a future open to revolutionary activity. After all, each version of the past points to a different future.
The mass of new documents made available by the opening of Soviet archives will undoubtedly shed new light on the events of those years and give rise to new controversies. But even before delving into the archives, we run up against the dominant ready-made ideological discourse.
In these times of counter-reform and reaction, it should come as no surprise that Lenin and Trotsky are vilified in the same way that the heros of the French revolution, Robespierre and Saint-Just, were vilified during the Restoration.
To orient oneself in the current controversy, a good starting point is a review of three ideas that are quite widespread today:
1. October was not really a revolution but rather a plot or a minority-inspired coup d'état. From the beginning, it imposed, from above, its authoritarian conception of social organisation, bene-
2. The evolution of the Russian Revolution and its totalitarian misadventures product of a kind of original sin in the revolutionary idea. The unfolding of real historical events can therefore be reduced to tracing the lineage and the fulfillment of this perverse idea -brazenly leaving aside major upheavals, colossal events, and the uncertain outcome of all struggles.
3. The Russian Revolution was damned from the start. Its birth was "premature" relative to the "historical process". It was the product of an attempt to force the course and pace of history. The "objective conditions" for overthrowing capitalism were not in place. Rather than having the wisdom to 'self-restrain" their project, Bolshevik leaders were in fact the active agents of this violation of the "laws of history" 3. A revolution "from below"
The Russian Revolution was not the result of some conspiracy, but rather the explosion - in the context of the war -of the contradictions accumulated under the autocratic conservatism of the Czarist regime.
By the beginning of the century, Russian society had come up against the brick wall of these contradictions. The country was an exemplary case of "combined and uneven development", at once a dominant and a dependent country. It combined the features of the feudal countryside, where serfdom had officially been abolished for less than half a century, and the features of the most concentrated form of industrial capitalism. Although a major power, it was dependent both technologically and financially.
The list of grievances drawn up by father Gapone during the 1905 revolution is a striking inventory of the misery prevailing in the land of the Czars. Attempts at reform were quickly blocked by the oligarchy's conservatism, the stubborness of the despot, and the weakness of a bourgeoisie confronted with a nascent workers movement.
The tasks of the democratic revolution therefore fell to a kind of third estate in which - unlike the French Revolution - the modern proletariat, although in a minority, had already become the most dynamic force.
It is for this reason that "Holy Russia" came to represent the "weak link" in the imperialist chain.
The experience of the First World War set the tinderbox alight.
The evolution of the revolutionary process between February and October 1917, demonstrates quite clearly that it was not a matter of a conspiracy of a handful of professional agitators.
Rather, it was the accelerated assimilation of a political experience on a mass scale, of a wide-ranging metamor
phisis of consciousness, of a constant shifting of the relationship of forces.
In his masterful History of the Revolution, meticulously analyses this radicalisation - from one trade union election to the next, from one municipal election to the next - among workers, soldiers and
Although the Bolsheviks accounted for only 13 percent of delegates at the congress of soviets in June 1917, things quickly changed after the July Days and Kornilov's attempted coup. By the in October, Bolsheviks accounted for 45-60% of
The insurrection was not a deft military sleight of hand carried out by surprise. Rather, it was the outcome and temporary resolution of a test of strength that had been brewing throughout a year. Mass sentiment was consistently to the left of the organised parties and their leaderships - not only the Socialist Revolutionaries, but even a part of the Bolshevik leadership. Up to and including the vote on insurrection!
Historians generally concur that the October insurrection - no more violent than the taking of the Bastille - was the culminating moment (denouement) of a year-long decomposition of the old regime. This is why there was a very cost in human lives, compared to the kinds of violence we have experienced ever since.
The relative "ease" of the insurrectionary seizure of power by the Bolsheviks illustrates the impotence of the the Russian bourgeoisie between February and October. It had been unable to set up a state and to undertake the building of a modern nation upon the ruins of
As a consequence, it was not a matter of choosing between revolution on the one hand, and an unqualified democracy on the other. Rather, the country was faced with two authoritarian options -revolution, or a military dictatorship under Kornilov or someone like him.
If by revolution we understand a spirit and movement of transformation below", harnessing the deepest aspirations of the people - as opposed to the implementation of some wonderful plan by an enlightened elite - then the Russian Revolution was very much a revolution, in the full sense of the word, rooted in basic demands for peace and
To understand that a radical overhaul of property and power relations was genuinely afoot, one need only examine the legislation adopted by the new regime during the first months of the first year of the revolution. Under the pressure of circumstance, these changes sometimes occurred at a quicker pace than had been expected or even desired.
A number of books describe this parting in the ways of the world, notably John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World.(8). It had an immediate particularly on the labour and socialist movements in other countries.(9)
At the time, tew people shed tears for the Czarist regime and its last despotic ruler.(10) Marc Ferro emphasises that -as in all authentic revolutions - the world was being turned on its head, including in the details of daily life. In Odessa, he notes, university students imposed a new history curriculum on their professors; in Petrograd, workers obliged their bosses to learn "the new labour law"; in the army, soldiers invited the chaplain to their meetings "to give his life new meaning"; in some schools, younger boys demanded the right to receive boxing lessons in order to earn the respect of their seniors. (11) 4. The test of the civil war
In spite of the terrible conditions, this initial revolutionary dynamic was still at play during the civil war that began in the summer of 1918. In his contribution to the Black Book, Nicolas Werth provides a detailed list of all the forces that were lined up against the new
There were Kolchak and Denikin's White armies, and the French and British-led foreign intervention. There were also massive peasant upheavals against food requisitions and working class riots against rationing.
Reading Werth's contribution, it is difficult to imagine where the revolutionary government could have found the strength to defeat such powerful adversaries. Werth argues that it did so through minority terror and the recruitment of desperate lumpenproletarians into the secret police, the Cheka.
His explanation takes into account neither the establishment of the Red Army in just a few months time, nor its many victories.
According to the authors of the Black Book, the Bolsheviks wanted the civil war from the start. Courtois et al describe the terror unleashed from the summer of 1918 onwards as the starting point for all the crimes committed since then in the name of communism.
But real history - made up of conflicts, struggles, uncertainty, victories and defeats - cannot be reduced to this dark tale of the self-development of a concept, in which "the idea gives birth to the world".
It makes more sense to examine the full scope of the civil war and to recognise that it involved a merciless confrontation of antagonistic social forces.
While the Bolsheviks did not want the civil war, they did foresee it. There is a big difference.
From the French Revolution onwards, every revolution has demonstrated the unhappy truth that there will always be a conservative reaction to emancipation movements. Counter-revolution follows revolution like a shadow.
This was shown in 1792 when Brunswick's troops marched on Paris, in 1848 with the June massacres, and during the Bloody Week of 1871.
This rule hasn't been defied since, from Franco's pronunciamiento in 1936 to Suharto's 1965 coup d'état in Indonesia (which took at least 500,000 lives) to Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973.
Russian revolutionaries did not declare civil war any more than French revolutionaries had in 1792. They did not call on French and British troops to intervene and try to overthrow them!
Werth recalls that beginning in the summer of 1918 the White armies were solidly entrenched on three fronts and that the Bolsheviks "did not control much more than Moscow and the surrounding region." The mechanisms of the Terror were set in motion in AugustSeptember 1918, when the foreign aggression and civil war began.
Likewise, during the French Revolution, Danton proclaimed the Terror to channel the spontaneous terror carried out by the population (the September massacres) in response to the threat posed to Paris by the advances of Brunswick's coalition troops.
Werth recognises that the Revolution was not to blame for the outbreak of civil war. Although he catalogues the horrors committed by both "Whites"
, he sees the genesis of the crimes still to come in a "hidden war within the war" against the peasantry.
In order to include the victims of the 1921-1922 famine in his accounting of the crimes of communism, Werth tends to describe the famine as being the result of a deliberate decision to exterminate the peasantry.
There is indeed proof of the harsh repression meted out against villages.
International Viewpoint #307 January 1999 23
In defence of Communism But is it possible to separate the problem of the civil war and that of the agrarian question?
To confront aggression against the new government, the Red Army had to mobilise four million soldiers within the space of a few months. These soldiers had to be equipped and fed. Within two years, Petrograd and Moscow lost more than half their population. Industry was devastated and produced nothing. In such conditions, how else but by requisitioning were the cities and army
To be sure, we can imagine ways in which things could have been differently. With hindsight, we can see the dangers associated with the establishment of a political police force and with the bureaucratic arbitrariness of local petty tyrants. But this is a concrete discussion over a range of political options -possible alternatives in the face of real difficulties - and not a matter of abstract By the end of the civil war, the grassroots no longer drove the leaders of the Revolution forward. Instead, the leadership strove to pull the grassroots along.
This is the origin of the mechanism of substitutionism, whereby the party substitutes itself for the people, the bureaucracy substitutes itself for the party, and the providential leader substitutes himself for everything and everyone else.
During this process, a new bureaucracy emerged - the legacy of the former regime and the result of the accelerated social mobility of new leaders.
After massive recruitment into the party in 1924, the several thousand October-era members held little weight, compared to the hundreds of thousands of new Bolsheviks. In this new batch could be found many careerists who had rallied to the party after the civil war victory, alongside recycled elements from the Czarist administration. 5. The heritage of the civil war
The civil war was a disastrous way for the Revolution to start. It created a jaded acceptance of the most extreme and inhuman forms of violence, which had already reached new heights during the First World War.
It created a legacy of bureaucratic brutality, which Lenin became aware of during the crisis with Georgian communists, and which Trotsky describes in his book Stalin.(12)
Lenin's "Last Testament" and the "Journal of Lenin's Secretaries" (see Moshe Lewin's Lenin's Last Struggle) (13) testify in the most pathetic of ways to Lenin's awareness of the problem. Whereas revolutions are the stuff of 24 International Viewpoint #307 January 1999 multitudes and entire peoples, the dying Lenin was reduced to weighing the strengths and weaknesses of a handful of leaders on whom everything thereafter appeared to depend.
Without a doubt, the civil war was a "great leap backwards", a retreat for the country in relation to the level of development attained before 1914. The country had been bled dry. Of the four million inhabitants that Petrograd and Moscow had at the beginning of the Revolution, only 1.7 million were left at the end of the civil war. Petrograd's industrial workforce of 460,000 had
The devastated cities became parasites on the agricultural sector, obliging officials to carry out authoritarian supply operations in rural areas. The Red Army had four million members.
"When the new regime was finally able to take the country towards its declared objective," Moshe Lewin
"the starting point was actually much further back than it had been in 1917, let alone in 1914."
During the civil war a backward and statist socialism was put in place, a new state was built on ruins. state was established on the basis of a regressive form of social development" (in Moshe Lewin' Russia, USSR, Russia ). (14)
This is the principal origin of the bureaucratisation. A number of Soviet leaders, including Lenin, were aware of the problem fairly early anguished over their inability to stem the tide. The unbearable weight of circumstances and the absence of a democratic culture played a key role. As such, there can be no doubt that confusion had set in - from the moment power was seized - over the relationship between the state, the party and the working class.
This confusion was rooted in the idea of the expected rapid withering away of the state and disappearance of conflicting trends within the population. It paved the way for the statification" of society, and not the socialisation of state
Democratisation is a long and arduous process. It does not proceed at the same pace as decrees on economic reform. Especially not in a country with hardly any traditions of parliamentarism and pluralism. It requires time, energy, and
The burst of activity in committees and soviets in 1917 was the first stage in this process. A kind of civil society was coming into being. In the difficult context of the civil war, the simplest solution was to subordinate the organs of popular power - councils and soviets — to an enlightened guide, the party. In practice, this meant replacing the principle of elected and accountable representatives with nominations by the party - as early as 1918 in some cases.
Ultimately this led to the elimination of the political pluralism and freedom of opinion required for democratic life. And the systematic subordination of the rule of law to the rule of "might means
Bureaucratisation did not stem solely in manipulation from above, but was also at times linked to demands from below. This made it much more difficult
The grassroots wanted order and peace, after having gone through so much in the World War and the civil war - so much deprivation, that quarrels over democracy, political agitation and calls for accountability were seen as a
Marc Ferro quite rightly draws the reader's attention to this implacable dialectic. He recalls that at the beginning of the revolution there were "two trends -democratic-authoritarian in the grassroots and centralist-authoritarian in the leadership." By 1939, he writes, "only one of the two remained."
But for Ferro, the question was settled for all intents and purposes within the space of a few months in 1918 and 1919, with the marginalisation or disappearance of the neighbourhood and factory committees. (15)
In a similar vein, the philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is even more explicit when he declares that Bolchevism was "counter-revolutionary from 1920-1921 onwards" (that is, even
This is a key component of the debate. The point is not to provide a Manichean view contrasting the "golden age" of "Leninism under Lenin" one hand, and the history of Leninism under Stalin, on the other.
It is not about setting the glorious 1920s against the gloomy 1930s, as if nothing had yet to go wrong in the land of the soviets.
Yes, bureaucratisation was there from the start. Yes, the activities of the Cheka had a life of their own. Yes, the penal colony on the Solovki Islands was opened at the end of the civil war, before Lenin's death. Yes, the multi-party system was eliminated and freedom of expression restricted. Democratic rights in the party itself were restricted beginning with the tenth congress in 1921.
But the process we call the bureaucratic counter-revolution was not a simple event, for which there exists a specific date, symmetrical with the date of the October insurrection. It did not take place in a single day, but rather flowed from a series of decisions, confrontations and events.
Even those involved never concluded their debate over the exact periodisation
allow for a confrontation between different programmes and different ways of responding to all the big questions a society faces. An exchange of the different points of view found in local government bodies is not enough.
Second, those elected should be directly responsible to their voters, who should have the right to recall their representatives. Representatives, however, should not be bound to a specific man-
S. BERNARD Abrogation des lois anti-immigrés - not due to some obsession with historical precision, but rather in an effort to determine the political tasks that the outcome of the debate would imply.
The multiple facets of the process -its emergence and progression - can be charted in part through the accounts of Rosmer, Eastman, Souvarine, Istrati, Benjamin, Zamiatine and Bulgakov (in their letter to Stalin), in Maïakovski's poetry, Mandelstam and Tsetaïeva's anguish and Babel's notebooks.
Take the example of Kronstadt. The disastrous repression there in the spring of 1921 had the effect of raising awareness within the leadership of the need for a reorientation of economic policy.
Consider the civil war. Although the regime had emerged victorious, it proceeded to further restrict democratic freedoms rather than to widen their scope. The tenth party congress banned
With the benefit of hindsight, we can and must return to these questions of representative democracy, political pluralism, censorship, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, to provide a theoretical framework for examining the problems the pioneers of socialism had to confront - and to reflect upon the lessons of their experience.
It is clear that the legacy of Czarism, the four years of World War One slaughter for which 15 million Russian soldiers were mobilised, and the violence and atrocities of the civil war, all held much greater weight in determining the future of the revolutionary government than the doctrinal errors of its leaders, however serious these may
In an article on "the Revolution and the law" published in the Ist December 1917 edition of Pravda, the future minister of education Anatole Lunacharski began with the observation that "a anti-immigr
Retri d Régularisation proje des sans papiers society is not a unified whole"
It took a great amount of time and tragedy for all the implications of this tiny phrase to be grasped. Since a society is not a unified whole, even after overthrowing the old order, you cannot expect to socialise the state by decree without running the risk of "statifying"
Since a society is not a unified whole, trade unions have to remain independent from the state and from political parties, and parties independent from the state. Conflicting interests within a society must find an outlet in a independent press and a plurality of forms of representation. This is also why the autonomy of legal forms and norms must seek to ensure that the rule of law is not replaced by the perpetually arbitrary rule of "might means right",
The defense of political pluralism is therefore not a question of circumstance, but rather an essential condition for socialist democracy. This is the conclusion Trotsky reaches in The Revolution Betrayed. "In reality classes are heterogeneous; they are torn by inner antagonisms, and arrive at the solution of common problems no otherwise than an inner struggle of tendencies, groups and parties."(17)
This means that the collective will can only be expressed through a free electoral process - no matter the institutional forms - that combines direct participatory democracy and representative
While there is no absolute guarantee against bureaucratisation and the profesSional dangers of power, experience suggests the need for a number of specific measures and an overall approach.
First, the distinction between classes, parties and the state must be reflected in the recognition of political and trade-union pluralism. This is the only way to date since this would prevent elected assemblies from engaging in genuine exchange and deliberation.
Third, strict limits should be placed on a person's right to hold several elected offices at once, and on their right to renew their mandates. Their salary should be no higher than that of a skilled worker or public sector emp loyee, in order to prevent government from becoming the personal and professional preserve of a specific layer of individuals.
Fourth, government should be decentralised with responsibilities going to that level of local, regional or national administration closest to the citizenry -with the right of veto for lower levels of government in matters that affect them directly. Provision should also be made for the right to call referenda on popular initiative.
A democracy of the freely associated producers is perfectly compatible with a system of universal suffrage. Grassroots local councils and territorial assemblies made up of workplace and neighbourhood representatives could be established, and could organise voting on major questions affecting the populations in question.
Recent experiences (Poland in 19801981 and Nicaragua in 1984) have pointed the way to a system based on two chambers - one elected directly through universal suffrage, the other directly representing workers, peasants, and more broadly, all the different forms (associations, committees) of people's power.
This approach (which in multinational states could include a chamber repre-
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RETRAIT PRI Abrogation deslois
In defence of Communism senting the different nationalities) provides a theoretical framework for fulfilling the need for general elections, on the one hand, and the most direct form of popular democracy, on the other. It acts as a check on decrees that confuse the reality of society as a whole with the realm of the state - with the goal being the withering away of the state in tandem with the blossoming, spread and generalisation of self-management.
This overall approach is a summary of the lessons drawn from a painful history. It is not foolproof protection from the professional dangers of power, nor is it a recipe that can be followed in every concrete situation.
With hindsight, we can discuss the consequences of the Bolshevik Constituent Assembly. We representativity assembly and that of the Congress of Soviets at the end of 1917. Would it have been preferable to maintain a dual form of representation (a kind of prolonged dual power)? Should free elections have been organised at the end of the civil war, in spite of the risk that the militarily defeated Whites would get the upper hand in a context of destruction and foreign pressure?
Each situation has to be examined in the specific context of the national and international relationship of forces at the time. That being said, every historical experience thus far has confirmed the warning issued by Rosa Luxemburg
"Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element." (18)
The need for the most deeply rooted form of democracy is at once a question of freedom and a condition for economic efficiency. It is the only way to ensure the superiority of a planned, self-managed economy over the all-encompassing automatism of the market. 6. Lust for power?
Taken together, the outcome of the first socialist revolution, the triumph of Stalinism, and the crimes of the totalitarian bureaucracy, constitute one of the major events of the century.
For some people, human nature itself contains the seeds of evil. Human nature is said to contain an irrepressible desire for power that shows up in various guises - including that of seeking to make people happy by imposing pre-conceived utopian schemes on them.
The polemical objective of the Black 26 International Viewpoint #307 January 1999
Book is to prove that Stalin followed directly in Lenin's footsteps. To do this, it is necessary to destroy "the old legend that Stalin betrayed the October Revolution". Jacques Amalric says that "the horrors of Stalinism are consubstantial to Leninism"; while Eric Conan says that "the initial criminal impulse came from Lenin" (L'Express, 6 November
This argument has found a certain response even on the left. The leadership of the French Communist Party (PCF) has failed to extend the critique of their own past to include a detailed examination of the PF's traditional periodisation of the Russian Revolution and of the different orientations that clashed throughout the 1920s and
Instead they have made a vague self-criticism and referred to Stalinist crimes as a "tragic extension" of the revolutionary moment (Claude Cabanes, L'Humanité, 7 November 1997).
If such an inevitable fate, pregnant with such disaster, was unfolding from day one, what possible sense is there in calling oneself a communist today? 7. The 1920s: parting of ways
The initial dynamism of the revolution made itself felt throughout the 1920s — in spite of the bureaucratic reaction, which very early on began to "freeze the revolution"; in spite of shortages and cultural backwardness.
This dynamism could be seen in the many pioneering initiatives made in the field of daily life: educational and pedagogical reforms, family law, urban utopias, graphic and cinematographic innovation. It is this same dynamism that explains the contradictions and ambiguities of the "great transformapainfully undertaken in the interwar period. One finds a mixture of bureaucratic terror, on the one hand, and the energy of revolutionary hope, on the other. Such contradictory circumstances made it difficult to grasp fully their meaning and historical implications.
It is essential, therefore, to examine the roots and key manifestations of what
"Stalinist pheno- by looking at the society was organised at the time, at the different forces in place and in conflict
In its own concrete historical circumstances, Stalinism was part of a more general tendency towards bureaucratisation that can be found in all modern societies. This tendency is ted primarily by the emergence of the social division of labour (especially between manual and intellectual work) and by the consequent "professional dangers of power".
In the Soviet Union, this tendency was intensified and accelerated -bureaucratisation took place in a context of destruction, shortages, cultural obsolescence and the absence of democratic
From the start, the social base of the revolution was at once broad narrow. Broad in so far as it was based on the alliance between workers and the peasantry, which accounted for a huge majority of the overall population. But the minority working-class component was soon wiped out by war damage and losses sustained during the civil war. Bureaucratic brutality is always proportional to the fragility of the bureaucracy's social base and a gauge of the bureaucracy's parasitic nature.
But there was a clear break in both domestic and foreign policy between the beginning of the 1920s and the
To be sure, authoritarian tendencies had already begun to get the upper hand before the 1930s. Obsessed by the (very real) "primary enemy"- imperialist aggression and capitalist restoration — Bolshevik leaders began to ignore or underestimate the "secondary enemy", the bureaucracy that undermined them from within and ultimately devoured
Such an unprecedented state of affairs was difficult to imagine; it took time to understand it, interpret it and act on all the resulting conclusions. While Lenin understood the alarm sounded by the Kronstadt crisis — leading him to call for a major reorientation of the eco-
- it was only later in Trotsky's work The Revolution Betrayed that political pluralism was laid down as a principle rooted in the heterogeneity of the proletariat itself, applicable even
after the seizure of power.
Most documents and personal accounts on the Soviet Union and on the Bolshevik Party itself make it clear that there was indeed a major shift of direction in the 1930s. The best proof of this are the millions upon million who died from hunger, were deported, or were victims of trials and purges.
The bureaucracy had to unleash this hurricane of violence in order consolidate its own power and reach its 1934 "victory congress" intact. 8. The key turning point
Nicolas Werth primarily sees continuity between the terror of the civil war and the mass terror of the 1930s. In the process, he relativises the meaning of the 1920s and the clashes over orientation within the party. For him, the 1920s were merely an "intermission" and a "ceasefire" between two rounds of state
Yet he himself provides proof of a quantitative change in the scale of repression; and of a qualitative change in the content of this repression.
In 1929, the "mass collectivisation" plan set itself the goal of collectivising 13 million farms by force. The execution of this plan provoked a cycle of large-scale famine and the mass deportations of 1932-1933. "The spring of 1933 was clearly the culmination of the first major cycle of terror that had begun in late 1929 with the launch of the dekulakisation."
In 1934, after the assassination of Petrograd party leader Kirov, the second major cycle began. This cycle included the huge political trials and, especially,
"great purge" of 1936-1938, which is said to have claimed some 690,000 victims. Forced collectivisation and stepped-up industrialisation led to the of entire sections of the population, a "ruralisation" of the cities and a massive jump in the number of people in the Gulag.
There was an increase in the number and severity of repressive laws. In June 1929, during mass collectivisation, a key reform was made to the prison system: detainees given prison terms of more than three years were thereafter transferred to labour camps.
With the uncontrollable surge in internal migration, internal passports were introduced in December 1932. A few hours after the Kirov assassination, Stalin himself drew up the decree known as the "Law of 1" December 1934" , legalising summary justice, thereby creating the mechanism of choice for the great terror.
Beyond destroying grassroots movements in the towns and countryside, this bureaucratic terror also liquidated what remained of the legacy of October. We know that the trials and purges elimina-
"For such a phenomenon in human history will not be forgotten, because it has revealed a tendency and faculty in human nature for improvement such that no politician, attecting wisdom, might nave conjured out of the course of things hitherto existing, and one which nature and freedom alone, united in the human race in conformity with inner principles of right, could have promised. But so far as time is concerned, it can promise this only indefinitely and as a contingent occurrence. "But even if the end viewed in connection with this occurrence should not now be attained, even if the revolution or reform of a national constitution should finally miscarry, or, after some time had elapsed, everything should relapse into its former rut (as politicians now predict), that philosophical prophecy still would lose nothing of its force. - For that occurrence is too important, too much interwoven with the interest of humanity, and its influence too widely propagated in all areas of the world to not be recalled on any favorable occasion by the nations which would then be roused to a repetition of new efforts of this kind."
Emmanuel Kant
The Conflict of the Faculties?
ted whole sections of the party and army. Most cadres and leaders from the revolutionary period were either deported or executed. Of 200 central committee members of the Ukrainian Communist Party, only three survived. In the army, 17% of the 178,000 cadres were arrested
At the same time, there was a huge growth in the size of the administrative apparatus — to carry out this vast repressive undertaking but also to run an economy fully in state hands.
According to Moshe Lewin, while in 1928 the state employed 1.45 million administrative personnel, by 1939 there were 7.5m. During the same period, the total number of white-collar workers rose from 3.9m to 13.8m.
As can be seen, "bureaucracy" is not some vague term. It is a social force.
The bureaucratic apparatus of the state swallowed up whatever genuine party activists remained
This counter-revolution was felt in all fields, whether in economic policy (forced collectivisation and large-scale growth of the Gulag); in foreign policy (in China, Germany and Spain); in cultural policy (19); in daily life itself, with what Trotsky called "domestic Thermidor"; in ideology (with the crystallisation of state orthodoxy, the codification of "diamat" - dialectical materialism — and the publication of an official history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
This can only be called a counterrevolution. Qualitatively broader, qualitatively more tangible and qualitatively more destructive than the authoritarian measures - however worrying they were - taken during the heat of the
Nicolas Werth is torn between recog nising that the 1930s represented something radically new, and insisting that there was direct continuity between the revolutionary promise of October and the triumph of Stalinist reaction. He refers to the Stalinist triumph, on the one hand, as a "decisive episode" in the establishment of the system of repres sion; and, on the other, as the "final episode of the confrontation begun in 1918-1922". A decisive about-face or a mere final chapter? You can't have it
Focussing on the idea of continuity necessarily involves skipping over the controversies of the 1920s and the stakes involved in these controversies, as if the whole decade were an insignificant sideshow. This deprives of all context any linear telling of the tale of repression. It pushes into an ill-defined background all the conflicts that existed around key decisions - whether in the field of international policy (orientation in the Chinese revolution, attitude towards the rise of the Nazis and the
International Viewpoint #307 January 1999 27
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In defence of Communism war in Spain); or with respect to domestic affairs (Trotskyist and Bukharinist opposition to forced collectivisation, economic and social alternatives inspired by a different approach to communism). 9. Counter-revolution and restoration
To describe what happened as counter-revolution is disturbing to some, since the pre-revolutionary order was not restored. Yet history cannot be run in reverse like a film.
After Thermidor, the conservative ideologue and all-round expert in the field of reaction, Joseph de Maistre, made the sublime observation that a counter-revolution is not a revolution put into reverse but rather the reverse of a revolution. The two are not symmetrical. A revolution can therefore give birth to something new and unprecedented. This is what happened in Germany under Bismarck following the failure of the 1848 revolutions. Similarly, Thermidor did not go so far as to restore the French monarchy. The post-Thermidor period of the French Empire is an extended grey zone in which one finds a constant interplay between revolutionary aspirations and the consolidation of a new order.
Many communist activists lost their bearings in just such a grey zone. These activists were impressed by the achievements of the "socialist fatherland" while either unaware of or unable to grasp the
Those that wanted to know could get a fairly clear, if not complete, idea of what was happening in the 1930s-era USSR of the Stalinist terror. There were the accounts of Victor Serge and Ante Ciliga, the counter-trial organised by John Dewey, accounts of opposition to the repression of anarchists and the POUM in Spain.
But in those days of anti-fascist struggle and "bureaucratised heroism" (to borrow a phrase from Isaac Deutscher), it was often difficult to fight at one and the same time both the main enemy and the not-so-secondary enemy that sparked defeat from within.
The USSR under Stalin was not like the USSR of stagnation under Brezhnev. It was being transformed from head to toe, under the whip of an enterprising bureaucracy. The secret of this energy was not unlike that of the Napoleonic energy that fascinated Chateaubriand. "If Bonaparte's communiqués, speeches and proclamations stand out for their energy, this energy in no way belonged to him alone. Rather, it belonged to its time, it stemmed from the revolutionary inspiration that weakened in Bonaparte's bosom, for his line of march went against it."
This is not the only striking analogy between the two figures: "The Revolution that gave Napoleon life very soon appeared to him to be an enemy, which he fought on every possible occa-
No other country had ever experienced as brutal a metamorphisis as that of the USSR in the 1930s under the weight of a Pharaonic bureaucracy. Between 1926 and 1939, the city population rose by 30 million; urban wellers jumped from 18 to 33 percent of the total population. During the first Five-Year Plan alone, cities grew by 44%, almost as much as between 1897 and 1926. The waged labour force more than doubled in size, from 10 to 22 million.
This led to a mass "ruralisation" of the cities, huge undertakings in literacy and education, and a breakneck implementation of labour discipline.
This great transformation went handin-hand with a nationalist renaissance, an upward spiral of careerism and the appearance of a new brand of bureau-
Moshe Lewin spoke with irony about this gargantuan Soviet "quicksand
. It was "classless" - in a manner of speaking. "For a while, before the dust settled, the whole nation became declassed (déclassé): som downwards, some upwards."(21)
Mikhail Guefter raises the essentia question of whether there was a "conti nuous march" between October and the Gulag, or rather "two distinct moral political worlds"
An analysis of the Stalinist counter-
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revolution provides a clear answer. The periodisation of the Russian revolution and counter-revolution is not a mere periodisation flow a series of political positions, orientations and tasks.
Before the counter-revolution, one can speak of errors to be rectified, of alternative orientations within a common project. Afterwards, however, forces and projects stand in stark opposition; it was time for decisive organisational breaks.
Lest there be some misunderstanding, this is not a family squabble aimed at pointing to yesteryear's victims, after the fact, in order to prove the existence of a kind of "communist pluralism" that supposedly unites both victims and their executioners. Rather, a strict periodisation means we can, in Guefter's words, let "historical consciousness pierce its way into the realm of politics" 10. A "premature" revolution?
Since the collapse of the USSR, one line of argument has made a big comeback. The revolution, it is argued, was premature and therefore a doomed adventure from the very beginning.
French Socialist Party leader Henri Weber defends this approach in an oped piece in the 14 November 1997 edition of Le Monde. The argument, of course, is hardly new; its origins lie early on in the speeches of the Russian Mensheviks and, from 1921 onwards, in Kautsky's analyses. Much blood, tears and destruction would have been spared, Kautsky writes, "if the Bolsheviks had mastered the Menshevik feel for self-limitation to what is attainable. This is the stuff of true leaders" (22)
A revealing formula indeed. Kautsky inveighs against the idea of a vanguard party, but doesn't shy away from imagining an omniscient party that is both pedagog and master, that is able to finetune the course and pace of History as it pleases. As if struggles and revolutions did not have their own logic!
Support for the established order is usually the result of any quest for "selfrestraint" when the opportunity for struggle or revolution presents itself. For very soon it is no longer a matter of "self-restraining" the objectives of the party, but of restraining mass aspirations plain and simple. In this sense, social democrats like Ebert and Noske proved themselves to be gifted practitioners of "self-restraint" when they assassinated Rosa Luxemburg and crushed the Bavarian soviets.
The seizure of power in October 1917 resulted from the inability of bourgeois liberals and reformists to provide solutions to the crisis of society and the
Mikhail Guefter's answer to the question "Was there any choice in 1917?" is a thousand times more convincing and fertile than the thesis of "prematurity" "This is a decisive question. I have given considerable thought to this problem and my answer is categorical. There was no choice. What was done at the time was the only solution standing in the way of an overhaul of society and senseless debâcle that would have been infinitely more bloody.
"Choices came afterwards, concerning the type of social system and the historical path to follow - all, however, within the framework [created by October 1917]. Not simple variations on a theme (the problem was broader), nor mere steps to climb en route to a chosen summit, but rather a tributary, many possible tributaries." (23)
These tributaries, these forks in the road, were very numerous indeed, and always the object of differing and contrasting views - whether in 1923 on the occasion of the German October, or on the question of the NEP and economic policy, on forced collectivisation, on democracy in the party and in the country, on the rise of fascism, on the war in Spain, and on the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
Through each of these tests, different proposals, programmes and orientations locked horns - proof that other paths existed, that events could have unfolded in many possible ways.
In point of fact, the "prematurity" thesis inevitably feeds the idea that history is well-ordered and tuned like clockwork, with everything occurring at its appointed hour, just in time. This approach revives the platitudes of the unflinching historical determinism for which Marxists are so often criticised.
The base, goes the tired old refrain, narrowly pre-determines what happens in the corresponding superstructure. Such an approach overlooks the fact that history is not a steamroller bearing some pre-ordained fate. Rather, history is torn through with events that open out onto a whole spectrum of possibilities
- not everything is possible, of course but a set horizon of various new and possible outcomes is indeed created at
Some 80 years later, the authors of the Black Book give the impression that the Bolsheviks, in the wake of their successful October sleight of hand, stopped at nothing to cling onto power for power's
But such a reading of events neglects the fact that the Bolsheviks never imagined the Russian Revolution to be a solitary adventure, but rather as the first stage of a European and world Revo-
They say Lenin danced in the snow on the 73rd day following the seizure of power. He had not initially expected that the Revolution would be able to hold on for as long as the Paris Commune. In his eyes, the very future of the revolution depended on its ex -ten -sion to a European level, to Germany in
The events that rocked Germany. Italy, Austria and Hungary between 1918 and 1923 highlight the truly Euro-
There was nothing pre-ordained about the failures of the German Revolution and the Spanish civil war, the turn of events in China, or the victory of fascism in Italy and Germany. Surely, Russian revolutionaries cannot be blamed for the irresponsibility and cowardice of French and German social democrats.
From 1923 onwards, it became clear that the Bolsheviks could no longer count on a short-term extension of the revolution into Europe. The time had
International Viewpoint #307 January 1999 29
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In defence of Communism come for a radical reorientation. This was the backdrop of the high-stakes confrontation between partisans of "socialism in one country" and those of "permanent revolution" — a confrontation that tore the party apart in the mid1920s.
While not contesting the initial legitimacy of the Russian Revolution, there are those who draw the conclusion that it was based on a wrong forecast and impossible gamble. But there was no question of a "forecast"; rather, the Revolution was part of an orientation aimed at eliminating the causes of the First World War by overthrowing the system that lay at its root.
There was indeed a shockwave in the wake of the war, between 1918 and 1923. After the failure of the German October, however, the situation was definitively stabilised. What options existed thereafter? Was it right to sue for time without illusions of being able to "build socialism in one country" country which, moreover, was in a state
This was the nub of the debates and struggles of the 1920s.
On the economic and social level, the NEP provided a part of the solution. For it to be implemented properly, however, the country needed officials with a much higher degree of training and culture than what had been imparted by the arbitrary methods of war communism.
Politically, what was needed was a democratic orientation that sought majority legitimacy through elections held in the framework of soviet pluralism. Internationally, the need of the hour was an internationalist policy that did not use the Comintern to subordinate the various Communist Parties and their policies to the interests of the Soviet state. Such options were indeed raised, even if only partially. Unfortunately, there was never a serene debate over which path should be followed; rather, the necessary exchange was replaced by merciless confrontation.
Those defeated in the process of these struggles were not wrong. While it is common currency to draw macabre balance sheets of revolutions, it is much more difficult to determine the terrible consequences that ensue when a revolution is aborted or crushed. Who can deny that there is a close link between, on the one hand, the German non-revolution of 1918-1923 and the 1937 defeat of the Spanish Revolution and, on the other, the victory of Nazism and the catastrophes of the Second World War?
To determine where responsibilities really lie and provide a periodisation of history based on the broad political alternatives that existed at any given time, it is questions of this sort that must be raised and examined once
To speak of "premature revolution" means taking the opposite tack; it means pronouncing a verdict in the court of history instead of delving into the internal logic of the conflict and the policies that clashed therein.
Analysis with Attitude
Defeats, after all, are no greater prool of error than victories are proof of truth
"If success meant innocence; if even posterity were to be burdened by the
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There is no final judgement in history. That being the case, it is essential that we be able to sketch out an alternative path that history could have taken - by tracing this path step-by-step through all the occasions when major choices had to be made, and when the situation threw up a fork in the road. It is such an approach that makes history intelligible and enables us to draw lessons for the tomorrow. Direct from the front line in the fight against neo-liberalism.
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VIEWPOINT
Considérations sur la France down in the face of popu-
(1796) and Du Pape (1819). lar protest and severe ecospace of ten days, shook the world. The promise of humanity, universality and emancipation that arose in the evanescent heat of that event is far too "interwoven with the interest of humanity" to be so readily forgotten. We have been entrusted with a legacy, which we also represent from day to day. This legacy is threatened by the suffocating conformism of the day. Our task, therefore, is to bring about those "favorable occasions" on which this legacy can be "recalled... by the nations which would then be roused to a repetition of new efforts of this kind." (25) * • The International Viewpoint website has a range of articles on the Russian revolution, and the new materials being Biographical Notes released from the Soviet archives.
www.internationalen.se/sp/rr.htm This article is translated from the French by Raghu Krishnan. It was published by the LCR as a pamphlet, following the French edition of the Black Book: Livre noir du communisme. Crimes, terreur, répression, Stéphane Courtois et al, Paris: Callmann-Lévy, 1997. Notes 1. François Furet, Le Passé d'une illusion, essai sur l'idée communiste au XXème siècle (Paris: Callmann-Lévy, 1995). 2. Ed. Stéphane Courtois, Le Livre noir du communisme. Crimes, terreur, répression (Paris: Callmann-Lévy, 1997). 3. Emmanuel Kant, "The Conflict of the Faculties" (1798). 4. Mikhail Guefter, "Stalin est mort hier", L'Homme et la société (1987). 5. ibid 6. Hannah Arendt, Les origines du totalitarisme, volume 2, L'impérialisme (Paris: Seuil, 1984). 7. Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 1977). 8. John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970). 9. Collective work, La Révolution d'Octobre et le mouvement ouvrier européen (Paris: EDI, 1967). 10. Marc Ferro, La Révolution de 1917 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997). 11. Mare Ferro, Naissance et effondrement du régime communiste en Russie (Paris: Le Livre de poche, 1997). 12. Leon Trotsky, Stalin (New York: Harper & Brothers
Publishers, 1941).
13. Moshe Lewin, Lenin's Last Struggle (London: Pluto
Press, 1975).
14. Moshe Lewin, Russia, USSR, Russia (London: 1995).
15. Marc Ferro,
Des
Soviets au communisme bureaucratique (Paris: Gallimard, 1980).
16. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Lignes (review) no. 31,
May 1997.
17. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1972).
18. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and
Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1961).
19. Variam Chalamov, Les Années vingt (Paris: Verdier,
1997).
20. François René vicomte de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, reprinted).
21. Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1985).
Karl Kautsky,
"Von der Demokratie zur
22.
Staatsktaverei" (1921).
23. Mikhail Guefter, op. cit.
24. ibid
25. Emmanuel Kant, "The Conflict of the Faculties"
(1798).
26. Panait Istrati, Vers l'autre flamme, après seize mois dans l'URSS, confessions pour vaincus (Paris: Gallimard,
1987).
27. Isaac Babel, La cavalerie rouge (Paris: Babel, 1997).
28. Ante Ciliga, The Russian Enigma (London: Ink
Links, 1979).
Isaac Babel Max Eastman Ossip Mandelstam
Novelist, author of La Eminent American intel- Russian poet. He was Cavalerie rouge.(27) He was lectual. In 1922, he estab- arrested in 1933, deported, executed in 1941 and lished ties with Trotsky exiled and then deported rehabilitated in 1954. while in Moscow. once again. He died in 1937 Walter Benjamin Panait Istrati
Leading writer and Romanian writer. After a philosopher. In flight from trip to the USSR, he wrote Journalist with La Vie ouvNazi terror, while attemp- a vigorous critique of the rière and leader of French ting to leave France for the regime.(26) Communist Party (PCF). USA, he was stopped at the Linked to Trotsky from Spanish border, where he Adolf Abramovitch 1915 onwards, he was exccommitted suicide on 26 Joffe luded from the PCF in 1924 September 1940. Played a central in the Worked for Révolution prolé-
Revolution alongside Lenin. tarienne and then La Vérité, Mikhail Bulgakov He represented the Bolshe- weekly publication of the
Russian writer. Most of vik government in Berlin Trotskyist Left Opposition his work was not published and Tokyo. A friend of in France founded in 1929. until after Stalin's death. Trotsky, he was arrested and deported. He commitAnte Ciliga ted suicide in 1927, leaving First president of post-
Central committee mem- a farewell letter to Trotsky. independence Indonesia ber of Yugoslav CP and (1945-1967). In 1967, he Comintern. He travelled to Vladimir Maïakovski was removed from power the USSR in 1928 and Poet and fervent defen- by his minister of War, joined the Left Opposition. der of the Revolution. DeArrested, deported to nounced bureaucratisation. Siberia and finally expelled Committed suicide in 1930. from the country in 1936. Sukarno's minister of Author of The Russian Joseph de Maistre War, in 1965 he oversaw Enigma. (28) Politician and writer. He the massacre of more than emigrated from France in 500,000 communists. In John Dewey 1793. Monarchist author of May 1998, he stepped
American educator and philosopher. In 1936, he joined the US Trotsky Defense Committee.
in a transit camp.
Alfred Rosmer
Sukarno
General Suharto.
Suharto nomic crisis.
Kurt Tucholsky
Stridently anti-nationalist and anti-militarist German writer. The Nazis burned his books and deprive him of his nationality.Sought refuge in Sweden. Committed suicide in 1935. Victor Serge
Revolutionary, member of the Left Opposition. He wrote many novels and chronicles. Boris Souvarine
One of the leaders of the Comité de la Troisième Internationale and a PCF delegate to the Communist International. He backed Trotsky in 1924 and was excluded from the PCF. Author of a major critical work on Stalin. Anna Tsetaieva
Writer and poet. Committed suicide upon returing to the USSR in 1941. Boris Zamiatin
Russian novelist. He left the country in 1931 with Stalin's authorisation. International Viewpoint #307 January 1999 31
booknotes