Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

Reflections on the Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was not an event or even a process, but a sequence of disruptive and violent acts that occurred more or less concurrently but involved actors with differing and in some measure contradictory objectives. It began as a revolt of the most conservative elements in Russian society, disgusted by the Crown’s familiarity with Rasputin and the mismanagement of the war effort. From the conservatives the revolt spread to the liberals, who challenged the monarchy from fear that if it remained in office, revolution would become inevitable. Initially, the assault on the monarchy was undertaken not, as widely believed, from fatigue with the war but from a desire to pursue the war more effectively: not to make revolution but to avert one. In February 1917, when the Petrograd garrison refused to fire on civilian crowds, the generals, in agreement with parliamentary politicians, hoping to prevent the mutiny from spreading to the front, convinced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate. The abdication, made for the sake of military victory, brought down the whole edifice of Russian statehood.

Although initially neither social discontent nor the agitation of the radical intelligentsia played any significant role in these events, both moved to the forefront the instant imperial authority collapsed. In the spring and summer of 1917, peasants began to seize and distribute among themselves noncommunal properties. Next, the rebellion spread to frontline troops, who deserted in droves to share in the spoils; to workers, who took control of industrial enterprises; and to ethnic minorities, who wanted greater self-rule. Each group pursued its own objectives, but the cumulative effect of their assault on the country’s social and economic structure by the autumn of 1917 created in Russia a state of anarchy.

The events of 1917 demonstrated that for all its immense territory and claim to great power status, the Russian Empire was a fragile, artificial structure, held together not by organic bonds connecting rulers and ruled, but by mechanical links provided by the bureaucracy, police, and army. Its 150 million inhabitants were bound neither by strong economic interests nor by a sense of national identity. Centuries of autocratic rule in a country with a predominantly natural economy had prevented the formation of strong lateral ties: Imperial Russia was mostly warp with little woof. This fact was noted at the time by one of Russia’s leading historians and political figures, Paul Miliukov:

To make you understand [the] special character of the Russian Revolution, I must draw your attention to [the] peculiar features, made our own by the whole process of Russia’s history. To my mind, all these features converge into one. The fundamental difference which distinguishes Russia’s social structure from that of other civilized countries, can be characterized as a certain weakness or lack of a strong cohesion or cementation of elements which form a social compound. You can observe that lack of consolidation in the Russian social aggregate in every aspect of civilized life: political, social, mental and national.

From the political point of view, the Russian State institutions lacked cohesion and amalgamation with the popular masses over which they ruled.… As a consequence of their later appearance, the State institutions in Eastern Europe necessarily assumed certain forms which were different from those in the West. The State in the East had no time to originate from within, in a process of organic evolution. It was brought to the East from outside.¹

Once these factors are taken into consideration, it becomes apparent that the Marxist notion that revolution always results from social (“class”) discontent cannot be sustained. Although such discontent did exist in Imperial Russia, as it does everywhere, the decisive and immediate factors making for the regime’s fall and the resultant turmoil were overwhelmingly political.

Was the Revolution inevitable? It is natural to believe that whatever happens has to happen, and there are historians who rationalize this primitive faith with pseudoscientific arguments: they would be more convincing if they could predict the future as unerringly as they claim to predict the past. Paraphrasing a familiar legal maxim, one might say that psychologically speaking, occurrence provides nine-tenths of historical justification. Edmund Burke was in his day widely regarded as a madman for questioning the French Revolution: seventy years later, according to Matthew Arnold, his ideas were still considered “superannuated and conquered by events”—so ingrained is the belief in the rationality, and therefore the inevitability, of historical events. The grander they are and the more weighty their consequences the more they appear part of the natural order of things which it is quixotic to question.

The most that one can say is that a revolution in Russia was more likely than not, and this for several reasons. Of these, perhaps the most weighty was the steady decline of the prestige of tsardom in the eyes of a population accustomed to being ruled by an invincible authority—indeed, seeing in invincibility the criterion of legitimacy. After a century and a half of military victories and expansion, from the middle of the nineteenth century until 1917, Russia suffered one humiliation after another at the hands of foreigners: the defeat, on her own soil, in the Crimean War; the loss at the Congress of Berlin of the fruits of victory over the Turks; the debacle in the war with Japan; and the drubbing at the hands of the Germans in World War I.² Such a succession of reverses would have damaged the reputation of any government: in Russia it proved fatal. Tsarism’s disgrace was compounded by the concurrent rise of a revolutionary movement which it was unable to quell despite resort to harsh repression. The half-hearted concessions made in 1905 to share power with society neither made tsarism more popular with the opposition nor raised its prestige in the eyes of the people at large, who simply could not understand how a ruler would allow himself to be abused from the forum of a government institution. The Confucian principle of T’ien-ming, or Mandate of Heaven, which in its original meaning linked the ruler’s authority to righteous conduct, in Russia derived from forceful conduct: a weak ruler, a “loser,” forfeited it. Nothing could be more misleading than to judge a Russian head of state by the standard of either morality or popularity: what mattered was that he inspire fear in friend and foe—that, like Ivan IV, he deserve the sobriquet of “Awesome.” Nicholas II fell not because he was hated but because he was held in contempt.

Among the other factors making for revolution was the mentality of the Russian peasantry, a class never integrated into the political structure. Peasants made up 80 percent of Russia’s population; and although they took hardly any active part in the conduct of state affairs, in a passive capacity, as an obstacle to change and, at the same time, a permanent threat to the status quo, they were a very unsettling element. It is commonplace to hear that under the old regime the Russian peasant was “oppressed,” but it is far from clear just who was oppressing him. On the eve of the Revolution, he enjoyed full civil and legal rights; he also owned, either outright or communally, nine-tenths of the country’s agricultural land and the same proportion of livestock. Poor by Western European or American standards, he was better off than his father, and freer than his grandfather, who more likely than not had been a serf. Cultivating allotments assigned to him by fellow peasants, he certainly enjoyed greater security than tenant farmers of Ireland, Spain, or Italy.

The problem with Russian peasants was not oppression, but isolation. They were isolated from the country’s political, economic, and cultural life, and therefore unaffected by the changes that had occurred since the time that Peter the Great had set Russia on the course of Westernization. Many contemporaries observed that the peasantry remained steeped in Muscovite culture: culturally it had no more in common with the ruling elite or the intelligentsia than the native population of Britain’s African colonies had with Victorian England. The majority of Russia’s peasants descended from serfs, who were not even subjects, since the monarchy abandoned them to the whim of the landlord and bureaucrat. As a result, for Russia’s rural population the state remained even after emancipation an alien and malevolent force that took taxes and recruits but gave nothing in return. The peasant knew no loyalty outside his household and commune. He felt no patriotism and no attachment to the government save for a vague devotion to the distant tsar from whom he expected to receive the land he coveted. An instinctive anarchist, he was never integrated into national life and felt as much estranged from the conservative establishment as from the radical opposition. He looked down on the city and on men without beards: Marquis de Custine heard it said as early as 1839 that someday Russia would see a revolt of the bearded against the shaven.³ The existence of this mass of alienated and potentially explosive peasants immobilized the government, which believed that it was docile only from fear and would interpret any political concessions as weakness and rebel.

The traditions of serfdom and the social institutions of rural Russia—the joint family household and the almost universal system of communal landholding—prevented the peasantry from developing qualities required for modern citizenship. While serfdom was not slavery, the two institutions had this in common that like slaves, serfs had no legal rights and hence no sense of law. Michael Rostovtseff, Russia’s leading historian of classical antiquity and an eyewitness of 1917, concluded that serfdom may have been worse than slavery in that a serf had never known freedom, which prevented him from acquiring the qualities of a true citizen: in his opinion, it was a principal cause of Bolshevism.⁴ To serfs, authority was by its very nature arbitrary: and to defend themselves from it they relied not on appeals to legal or moral rights, but on cunning. They could not conceive of government based on principle: life to them was a Hobbesian war of all against all. This attitude fostered despotism: for the absence of inner discipline and respect for law required order to be imposed from the outside. When despotism ceased to be viable, anarchy ensued; and once anarchy had run its course, it inevitably gave rise to a new despotism.

The peasant was revolutionary in one respect only: he did not acknowledge private ownership of land. Although on the eve of the Revolution he owned nine-tenths of the country’s arable, he craved for the remaining 10 percent held by landlords, merchants, and noncommunal peasants. No economic or legal arguments could change his mind: he felt he had a God-given right to that land and that someday it would be his. And by his he meant the commune’s, which would allocate it justly to its members. The prevalence of communal landholding in European Russia was, along with the legacy of serfdom, a fundamental fact of Russian social history. It meant that along with a poorly developed sense for law, the peasant also had little respect for private property. Both tendencies were exploited and exacerbated by radical intellectuals for their own ends to incite the peasantry against the status quo.^*

Russia’s industrial workers were potentially destabilizing not because they assimilated revolutionary ideologies—very few of them did and even they were excluded from leadership positions in the revolutionary parties. Rather, since most of them were one or at most two generations removed from the village and only superficially urbanized, they carried with them to the factory rural attitudes only slightly adjusted to industrial conditions. They were not socialists but syndicalists, believing that as their village relatives were entitled to all the land, so they had a right to the factories. Politics interested them no more than it did the peasants: in this sense, too, they were under the influence of primitive, nonideological anarchism. Furthermore, industrial labor in Russia was numerically too insignificant to play a major role in revolution: with at most 3 million workers (a high proportion of them peasants seasonally employed), they represented a mere 2 percent of the population. Hordes of graduate students, steered by their professors, in the Soviet Union as well as the West, especially the United States, have assiduously combed historical sources in the hope of unearthing evidence of worker radicalism in prerevolutionary Russia. The results are weighty tomes, filled with mostly meaningless events and statistics, that prove only that while history is always interesting, history books can be both vacuous and dull.

A major and arguably decisive factor making for revolution was the intelligentsia, which in Russia attained greater influence than anywhere else. The peculiar “ranking” system of the tsarist civil service excluded outsiders from the administration, estranging the best-educated elements and making them susceptible to fantastic schemes of social reform, conceived but never tried in Western Europe. The absence until 1906 of representative institutions and a free press, combined with the spread of education, enabled the cultural elite to claim the right to speak on behalf of a mute people. There exists no evidence that the intelligentsia actually reflected the opinion of the “masses”: on the contrary, the evidence indicates that both before and after the Revolution peasants and workers deeply mistrusted intellectuals. This became apparent in 1917 and the years that followed. But since the true will of the people had no channels of expression, at any rate, until the shortlived constitutional order introduced in 1906, the intelligentsia was able with some success to pose as its spokesman.

As in other countries where it lacked legitimate political outlets, the intelligentsia in Russia constituted itself into a caste: and since ideas were what gave it identity and cohesion, it developed extreme intellectual intolerance. Adopting the Enlightenment view of man as nothing but material substance shaped by the environment, and its corollary, that changes in the environment inevitably change human nature, it saw “revolution” not as the replacement of one government by another, but as something incomparably more ambitious: a total transformation of the human environment for the purpose of creating a new breed of human beings—in Russia, of course, but also everywhere else. Its stress on the inequities of the status quo was merely a device for gaining popular support: no rectification of these inequities would have persuaded radical intellectuals to give up their revolutionary aspirations. Such beliefs linked members of various left-wing parties: anarchists, Socialists-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks. Although couched in scientific terms, their views were immune to contrary evidence, and hence more akin to religious faith.

The intelligentsia, which we have defined as intellectuals craving power, stood in total and uncompromising hostility to the existing order: nothing the tsarist regime could do short of committing suicide would have satisfied it. They were revolutionaries not for the sake of improving the condition of the people but for the sake of gaining domination over the people and remaking them in their own image. They confronted the Imperial regime with a challenge that it had no way of repulsing short of employing the kind of methods introduced later by Lenin. Reforms, whether those of the 1860s, or those of 1905–06, only whetted the appetite of the radicals and spurred them to still greater revolutionary excesses.

Buffeted by peasant demands and under direct assault from the radical intelligentsia, the monarchy had only one means of averting collapse, and that was to broaden the base of its authority by sharing power with conservative elements of society. Historic precedent indicates that successful democracies have initially limited power-sharing to the upper orders; these eventually came under pressure from the rest of the population, with the result that their privileges turned into common rights. Involving conservatives, who were far more numerous than the radicals, in both decisionmaking and administration would have forged something of an organic bond between the government and society, assuring the crown of support in the event of upheavals, and, at the same time, isolating the radicals. Such a course was urged on the monarchy by some far-sighted officials and private individuals. It should have been adopted in the 1860s, at the time of the Great Reforms, but it was not. When finally compelled in 1905 by a nationwide rebellion to concede a parliament, the monarchy no longer had this option available, for the combined liberal and radical opposition forced it to concede something close to a democratic franchise. This resulted in the conservatives in the Duma being submerged by militant intellectuals and anarchist peasants.

World War I subjected every belligerent country to immense strains, which could be overcome only by close collaboration between government and citizenry in the name of patriotism. In Russia such collaboration never materialized. As soon as military reverses dissipated the initial patriotic enthusiasm and the country had to brace for a war of attrition, the tsarist regime found itself unable to mobilize public support. Even its admirers agree that at the time of its collapse the monarchy was hanging in the air.

The motivation of the tsarist regime in refusing to share political power with its supporters, and when finally forced to do so, sharing it grudgingly and deceitfully, was complex. Deep in their hearts, the Court, the bureaucracy, and the professional officer corps were permeated with a patrimonial spirit that viewed Russia as the tsar’s private domain. Although in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Muscovite patrimonial institutions were gradually dismantled, the mentality survived. And not only in official circles: the peasantry, too, thought in patrimonial terms, believing in strong, undivided authority and regarding the land as tsarist property. Nicholas II took it for granted that he had to keep autocracy in trust for his heir: unlimited authority was to him the equivalent of a property title, which, in his capacity of trustee, he had no right to dilute. He never rid himself of the feeling of guilt that to save the throne in 1905 he had agreed to divide ownership with the nation’s elected representatives.

The tsar and his advisers also feared that sharing authority with even a small part of society would disorganize the bureaucratic mechanism and open the door to still greater demands for popular participation. In the latter event, the main beneficiary would be the intelligentsia, which he and his advisers considered utterly incompetent. There was the additional concern that the peasants would misinterpret such concessions and go on a rampage. And finally, there was the opposition to reforms of the bureaucracy, which, accountable only to the tsar, administered the country at its discretion, deriving from this fact numerous benefits.

Such factors explain but do not justify the monarchy’s refusal to give conservatives a voice in the government, the more so that the variety and complexity of issues facing it deprived the bureaucracy of much effective authority in any event. The emergence in the second half of the nineteenth century of capitalist institutions shifted much of the control over the country’s resources into private hands, undermining what was left of patrimonialism.

In sum, while the collapse of tsarism was not inevitable, it was made likely by deep-seated cultural and political flaws that prevented the tsarist regime from adjusting to the economic and cultural growth of the country, flaws that proved fatal under the pressures generated by World War I. If the possibility of such adjustment existed, it was aborted by the activities of a belligerent intelligentsia bent on toppling the government and using Russia as a springboard for world revolution. It was cultural and political shortcomings of this nature that brought about the collapse of tsarism, not “oppression” or “misery.” We are dealing here with a national tragedy whose causes recede deep into the country’s past. Economic and social difficulties did not contribute significantly to the revolutionary threat that hung over Russia before 1917. Whatever grievances they may have harbored—real and fancied—the “masses” neither needed nor desired a revolution: the only group interested in it was the intelligentsia. Stress on alleged popular discontent and class conflict derives more from ideological preconceptions than from the facts at hand, namely from the discredited idea that political developments are always and everywhere driven by socioeconomic conflicts, that they are mere “foam” on the surface of currents that really guide human destiny.

The relatively minor role played by social and economic factors in the Russian Revolution becomes apparent when one scrutinizes the events of February 1917. February was not a “workers’ revolution”: industrial labor played in it the role of a chorus that reacted to and amplified the actions of the true protagonist, the army. The mutiny of the Petrograd garrison stimulated disorders among the civilian population unhappy over inflation and shortages. The mutiny could have been contained had Nicholas chosen to quell it with the same brutality Lenin and Trotsky employed four years later when faced with the Kronshtadt rising and nationwide peasant rebellions. But Lenin’s and Trotsky’s sole concern was holding on to power, whereas Nicholas cared for Russia. When the generals and Duma politicians persuaded him that he had to go to save the army and avert a humiliating capitulation, he acquiesced. Had staying in power been his supreme objective, he could easily have concluded peace with Germany and turned the army loose against the mutineers. The record leaves no doubt that the myth of the tsar being forced from the throne by the rebellious workers and peasants is just that. The tsar yielded not to a rebellious populace but to generals and politicians, and he did so from a sense of patriotic duty.

The social revolution followed rather than preceded the act of abdication. The garrison soldiers, peasants, workers, and ethnic minorities, each group pursuing its own aims, made the country ungovernable: what chance there was of restoring order was frustrated by the insistence of the intelligentsia running the soviets that they and not the Provisional Government were the true source of legitimate authority. Kerensky’s inept intrigues, coupled with his insistence that democracy had no enemies on the left, accelerated the Government’s downfall. The country at large—its political entities as well as its resources—became the subject of duvan, the division of loot, which no one was strong enough to stop until it had run its course.

Lenin rode to power on that anarchy, which he did much to promote. He promised every discontented group what it wanted. He took over the Socialist-Revolutionary program of “land socialization” to win over the peasants. Among the workers, he encouraged syndicalist trends of “worker control” of factories. To the men in uniform, he held out the prospect of peace. The ethnic minorities he offered national self-determination. In fact, all these pledges ran contrary to his program and all were violated soon after they had served their purpose, which was to undermine the Provisional Government’s efforts to stabilize the country.

Similar deception was applied to divest the Provisional Government of authority. Lenin and Trotsky concealed their bid for one-party dictatorship with slogans calling for the transfer of power to the soviets and the Constituent Assembly, and they formalized it by a fraudulently convened Congress of Soviets. No one but a handful of the leading figures in the Bolshevik party knew the truth behind these promises and slogans: few, therefore, realized what had happened in Petrograd on the night of October 25, 1917. The so-called “October Revolution” was a classic coup d’état. The preparations for it were so clandestine that when Kamenev disclosed in a newspaper interview a week before the event was to take place, that the party intended to seize power, Lenin declared him a traitor and demanded his expulsion.⁵ Genuine revolutions, of course, are not scheduled and cannot be betrayed.

The ease with which the Bolsheviks toppled the Provisional Government—in Lenin’s words, it was like “lifting a feather”—has persuaded many historians that the October coup was “inevitable.” But it can appear as such only in retrospect. Lenin himself thought it an extremely chancy undertaking. In urgent letters to the Central Committee in September and October 1917 from his hideaway, he insisted that success depended entirely on the speed and resoluteness with which the armed insurrection was carried out: “To delay the uprising is death,” he wrote on October 24, “everything hangs on a hair.”⁶ These were not the sentiments of a person prepared to trust the forces of history. Trotsky later asserted—and who was in a better position to know?—that if “neither Lenin nor [he himself] had been in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution.”⁷ Can one conceive of an “inevitable” historical event dependent on two individuals?

And if this evidence still fails to convince, one only has to look closely at the events of October 1917 in Petrograd to find the “masses” acting as spectators, ignoring Bolshevik appeals to storm the Winter Palace, where sat elderly ministers of the Provisional Government clad in overcoats, defended by youthful cadets, a battalion of women, and a platoon of invalids. We have it on the authority of Trotsky himself that the October “revolution” in Petrograd was accomplished by “at most” 25,000–30,000 persons⁸—this in a country of 150 million and a city with 400,000 workers and a garrison of over 200,000 soldiers.

From the instant he seized dictatorial power Lenin proceeded to uproot all existing institutions so as to clear the ground for a regime subsequently labeled “totalitarian.” This term has fallen out of favor with Western sociologists and political scientists determined to avoid what they consider the language of the Cold War. It deserves note, however, how quickly it found favor in the Soviet Union the instant the censor’s prohibitions against its use had been lifted. This kind of regime, unknown to previous history, imposed the authority of a private but omnipotent “party” on the state, claiming the right to subject to itself all organized life without exception, and enforcing its will by means of unbounded terror.

Seen in perspective, Lenin owes his historical prominence not to his statesmanship, which was of a very inferior order, but to his generalship. He was one of history’s great conquerors: a distinction not vitiated by the fact that the country he conquered was his own.^* His innovation, the reason for his success, was militarizing politics. He was the first head of state to treat politics, domestic as well as foreign, as warfare in the literal sense of the word, the objective of which was not to compel the enemy to submit but to annihilate him. This innovation gave Lenin significant advantages over his opponents, for whom warfare was either the antithesis of politics or else politics pursued by other means. Militarizing politics and, as a corollary, politicizing warfare enabled him first to seize power and then to hold on to it. It did not help him build a viable social and political order. He grew so accustomed to storming on all “fronts” that even after asserting undisputed authority over Soviet Russia and her dependencies, he had to invent ever new enemies to fight and destroy: now the church, now the Socialists-Revolutionaries, now the intelligentsia. This belligerence became a fixed feature of the Communist regime, culminating in Stalin’s notorious “theory” that the closer Communism approached final victory the more intense grew social conflicts—a notion that justified a bloodbath of unprecedented ferocity. It caused the Soviet Union in the sixty years that followed Lenin’s death to exhaust itself in entirely unnecessary domestic and foreign conflicts that eviscerated her both physically and spiritually.

The failure of Communism, which since 1991 is no longer in dispute, having been conceded even by the leaders of the former Soviet Union, is often blamed on human beings’ falling short of its allegedly lofty ideals. Even if the endeavor failed, apologists say, its aspirations were noble and the attempt worthwhile: in support of which claim they could cite the Roman poet Propertius, “In magnis et voluisse sat est”—“In great endeavors, even to want is enough.” But how great was an endeavor so at odds with ordinary human desires that to pursue it, recourse had to be had to the most inhuman methods?

The Communist experiment is often labeled “utopian.” Thus a recent history of the Soviet Union, far from sympathetic, bears the title Utopia in Power. The term, however, is applicable only in that limited sense in which Engels used it to criticize socialists who did not accept his and Marx’s “scientific” doctrines, by making in their visions no allowance for historic and social realities. Lenin himself was forced to admit toward the end of his life that the Bolsheviks, too, were guilty of ignoring the cultural realities of Russia and its unpreparedness for the economic and social order that they tried to impose on it. The Bolsheviks ceased to be Utopians when, once it had become obvious the ideal was unattainable, they persisted in the attempt with resort to unrestrained violence. Utopian communities always postulated the concurrence of their members in the task of creating a “cooperative commonwealth.” The Bolsheviks, by contrast, not only did not care to obtain such concurrence, but dismissed as “counterrevolutionary” every manifestation of individual or group initiative. They also displayed a constitutional inability to deal with opinions different from their own except by abuse and repression. For these reasons they should be regarded not as Utopians but as fanatics: since they refused to admit defeat even after it stared them in the face, they satisfied Santayana’s definition of fanaticism as redoubling one’s efforts after forgetting one’s aim.

Marxism and Bolshevism, its offspring, were products of an era in European intellectual life that was obsessed with violence. The Darwinian theory of natural selection was promptly translated into a social philosophy in which uncompromising conflict occupied a central place. “No one who has not waded through some sizeable part of the literature of the period 1870–1914 writes Jacques Barzun, “has any conception of the extent to which it is one long call for blood, nor of the variety of parties, classes, nations, and races whose blood was separately and contradictorily clamored for by the enlightened citizens of the ancient civilization of Europe.”⁹ No one embraced this philosophy more enthusiastically than the Bolsheviks: “merciless” violence, violence that strove for the destruction of every actual and potential opponent, was for Lenin not only the most effective, but the only way of dealing with problems. And even if some of his associates shrank from such inhumanity, they could not escape the corrupting influence of their leader.

Russian nationalists depict Communism as alien to Russian culture and tradition, as a kind of plague imported from the West. The notion of Communism as a virus cannot withstand the slightest examination since, although an intellectual movement international in scope, it first took hold in Russia and among Russians: the Bolshevik party both before and after the Revolution was overwhelmingly Russian in composition, acquiring its earliest base in European Russia and among Russian migrants in the borderlands. Undeniably, the theories underpinning Bolshevism, notably those of Karl Marx, were of Western origin. But it is equally undeniable that Bolshevik practices were indigenous, for nowhere in the West has Marxism led to the totalitarian excesses of Leninism-Stalinism. In Russia, and subsequently in Third World countries with similar traditions, Marxism fell on a soil devoid of traditions of self-rule, observance of law, and respect for private property. A cause that yields different results in different circumstances can hardly serve as a sufficient explanation.

Marxism had libertarian as well as authoritarian strains, and which of the two prevailed depended on a country’s political culture. In Russia, those elements in the Marxist doctrine gained ascendancy that fitted her patrimonial heritage. The Russian political tradition since the Middle Ages was for the government—or, more precisely, the ruler—to be the subject and “the land” the object. This tradition fused readily with the Marxist concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” under which the ruling party claimed undivided control over the country’s inhabitants and resources. Marx’s notion of such a “dictatorship” was sufficiently vague for it to be filled with the content nearest at hand, which in Russia was the historic legacy of patrimonialism. It was the grafting of Marxist ideology onto the sturdy stem of Russia’s patrimonial heritage that produced totalitarianism. Totalitarianism cannot be explained solely with reference either to Marxist doctrine or to Russian history: it was the fruit of their union.

Important as ideology was, however, its role in the shaping of Communist Russia must not be exaggerated. If an individual or a group profess certain beliefs and refer to them to guide their conduct, they may be said to act under the influence of ideas. When, however, ideas are used not so much to direct one’s personal conduct as to justify one’s domination over others, whether by persuasion or force, the issue becomes confused, because it is not possible to determine whether such persuasion or force serves ideas or, on the contrary, ideas serve to secure or legitimize such domination. In the case of the Bolsheviks, there are strong grounds for maintaining the latter to be the case, because they distorted Marxism in every conceivable way, first to gain political power and then to hold on to it. If Marxism means anything it means two propositions: that as capitalist society matures it is doomed to collapse from inner contradictions, and that this collapse (“revolution”) is effected by industrial labor (“the proletariat”). A regime motivated by Marxist theory would at a minimum adhere to these two principles. What do we see in Soviet Russia? A “socialist revolution” carried out in an economically underdeveloped country in which capitalism was still in its infancy, and power taken by a party committed to the view that the working class left to its own devices is unrevolutionary. Subsequently, at every stage of its history, the Communist regime in Russia did whatever it had to do to beat off challengers, without regard to Marxist doctrine, even as it cloaked its actions with Marxist slogans. Lenin succeeded precisely because he was free of the Marxist scruples that inhibited the Mensheviks. In view of these facts, ideology has to be treated as a subsidiary factor: an inspiration and a mode of thinking of the new ruling class, perhaps, but not a set of principles that either determined its actions or explains them to posterity. As a rule, the less one knows about the actual course of the Russian Revolution the more inclined one is to attribute a dominant influence to Marxist ideas.^*

For all their disagreements, contemporary Russian nationalists and many liberals are at one in denying links between tsarist and Communist Russia. The former refuse to acknowledge the connection because it would make Russia responsible for her own misfortunes, which they prefer to blame on foreigners, especially Jews. In this they resemble German conservatives who depict Nazism as a general European phenomenon in order to deny that it had any antecedents in Germany’s past, or that Germany bears any particular blame for it. Such an approach finds a ready audience among the peoples affected, since it shifts the responsibility for whatever went wrong onto others.

Liberal and radical intellectuals—not so much in Russia as abroad—similarly deny affinities between Communism and tsarism because that would make the whole Revolution a costly and meaningless blunder. They prefer to focus on the declared objectives of the Communists and compare them with the realities of tsarism. This procedure does produce a glaring contrast. The picture, of course, changes substantially as soon as one compares Communist and tsarist realities.

The affinities between the regime of Lenin and traditional Russia were noticed by more than one contemporary, among them the historian Paul Miliukov, the philosopher Nicholas Berdiaev, the veteran socialist Paul Akselrod,¹⁰ and the novelist Boris Pilniak. According to Miliukov, Bolshevism had two aspects:

One is international; the other is genuinely Russian. The international aspect of Bolshevism is due to its origin in a very advanced European theory. Its purely Russian aspect is chiefly concerned with its practice, which is deeply rooted in Russian reality and, far from breaking with the “ancien regime,” reasserts Russia’s past in the present. As geological upheavals bring the lower strata of the earth to the surface as evidence of the early ages of our planet, so Russian Bolshevism, by discarding the thin upper social layer, has laid bare the uncultured and unorganized substratum of Russian historical life.¹¹

Berdiaev, who viewed the Revolution primarily in spiritual terms, denied that Russia even had a Revolution: “All of the past is repeating itself and acts only behind new masks.”¹²

Even someone entirely ignorant of Russia should find it inconceivable that on a single day, October 25, 1917, in consequence of an armed putsch, the course of a thousand-year-old history of a vast and populous country could undergo complete transformation. The same people, inhabiting the same territory, speaking the same language, heirs to a common past, could hardly have been fashioned into different creatures by a sudden change of government. It takes great faith in the power of decrees, even decrees backed by physical force, to believe in the possibility of such drastic mutation, unknown to nature. Only by viewing human beings as inert matter entirely molded by the environment could such an absurdity even be entertained.

To analyze the continuities between the two systems we shall have reference to the concept of patrimonialism, which underpinned the Muscovite government and in many ways survived in the institutions and political culture of Russia to the end of the old regime.¹³ Tsarist patrimonialism rested on four pillars: one, autocracy, that is, personal rule unconstrained by either constitution or representative bodies; two, the autocrat’s ownership of the country’s resources, which is to say, the virtual absence of private property; three, the autocrat’s right to demand unlimited services from his subjects, resulting in the lack of either collective or individual rights; and four, state control of information. A comparison of tsarist rule at its zenith with the Communist regime as it looked by the time of Lenin’s death reveals unmistakable affinities.

To begin with, the autocracy. Traditionally, the Russian monarch concentrated in his hands full legislative and executive powers, and exercised them without interference from external bodies. He administered with the help of a service nobility and a bureaucracy that owed allegiance to his person rather than to the nation or the state. Lenin from the first day in office instinctively followed this model. Although as a concession to the ideal of democracy he gave the country a constitution and representative bodies, they performed purely ceremonial functions, since the constitution was not binding on the Communist Party, the country’s true ruler, and the parliament was not elected but handpicked by the same party. In the performance of his duties, Lenin resembled the most autocratic of the tsars, Peter I and Nicholas I, in that he insisted on personally attending to the most trifling details of state affairs, as if the country were his private domain.

As had been the case with his Muscovite forerunners, the Soviet ruler claimed title to the country’s productive and income-producing wealth. Beginning with decrees nationalizing land and industries, the government took over all assets except for articles of purely personal use; and since the government was in the hands of one party, and that party, in turn, obeyed the will of its leader, Lenin was de facto owner of the country’s material resources. (De jure ownership lay with the “people,” defined as synonymous with the Communist Party.) Industries were run for the state by state-appointed managers. Their output, and, until March 1921, the production of the land, were disposed of as the Kremlin saw fit. Urban real estate was nationalized. With private commerce outlawed (until 1921 and again after 1928), the Soviet regime controlled all legitimate wholesale and retail trade. These measures went beyond the practices of Muscovy, but they perpetuated its principle that Russia’s sovereign not only ruled the country but owned it.

He also owned its people. The Bolsheviks reinstituted obligatory state service, one of the distinguishing features of Muscovite absolutism. In Muscovy, the subjects of the tsar, with minor exceptions, had to work for him either directly, in the armed forces or the bureaucracy, or indirectly, by cultivating his land or that conditionally leased to his servitors. As a result, the entire population was bonded to the Crown. Its manumission began in 1762, when the gentry were given the right to retire into private life, and concluded ninety-nine years later with the liberation of the serfs. The Bolsheviks promptly revived the Muscovite practice, unknown in any other country, of requiring every citizen to work for the state: the so-called “universal labor obligation” introduced in January 1918 and enforced, according to Lenin’s instructions, by the threat of execution, would have been perfectly understandable to a seventeenth-century Russian. In regard to peasants, the Bolsheviks revived also the practice of tiaglo, or forced labor, such as lumbering and carting, for which they received no compensation. As in seventeenth-century Russia, no inhabitant was allowed to leave the country without permission.

The Communist bureaucracy, both that employed by the party and that by the state, quite naturally slipped into the ways of its tsarist predecessor. A service class with duties and privileges but no inherent rights, it constituted a closed and minutely graded caste accountable exclusively to its superiors. Like the tsarist bureaucracy, it stood above the law. It also operated without glasnost’, that is, outside public scrutiny, administering much of the time by means of secret circulars. Under tsarism, advancement to the topmost ranks of the bureaucratic hierarchy bestowed hereditary nobility. For Communist officials, advancement to the highest ranks was rewarded with inclusion in the rolls of the nomenklatura, which carried entitlements beyond the reach of ordinary servitors, not to speak of the common people—the Communist equivalent of a service nobility. The Soviet bureaucracy, like the tsarist, did not tolerate administrative bodies outside its control, and made certain they were promptly “statified,” that is, integrated into its chain of command. This it did to the soviets, the new regime’s putative legislative organs, and to the trade unions, agencies of its equally putative “ruling class.”

That the Communist bureaucracy should so quickly adapt old ways is not surprising, given that the new regime in so many respects continued old habits. Continuity was facilitated by the fact that a high percentage of Soviet administrative posts was staffed by ex-tsarist functionaries, who brought with them and communicated to Communist newcomers habits acquired in the tsarist service.

The security police was another important organization that the Bolsheviks adopted from tsarism, since they had no other prototype for what became a central institution of totalitarianism. Tsarist Russia was unique in that she alone had two police formations, one to defend the state from its citizens, the other to protect citizens from each other.^* State crimes were very loosely defined, little distinction being drawn between intention and deed.¹⁴ The tsarist state police developed sophisticated methods of surveillance, infiltrating society through a network of paid informers and opposition parties with the help of professional agents. The tsarist Department of Police had the unique authority to impose administrative exile for crimes that were not crimes in any other European country, such as expressing a desire for change in the political system. Through a variety of prerogatives granted it in the aftermath of the assassination of Alexander II, the tsarist police between 1881 and 1905 virtually ruled Russia.¹⁵ Its methods were all too familiar to Russian revolutionaries who, on coming to power, adopted them and turned them against their enemies. The Cheka and its successors assimilated the practices of the tsarist state police to such an extent that as late as the 1980s, the KGB distributed to its staff manuals prepared by the Okhrana nearly a century earlier.¹⁶

Finally, as concerns censorship. In the first half of the nineteenth century Russia was the only European country to enforce preventive censorship. In the 1860s censorship was eased and in 1906 it was abolished. The Bolsheviks reinstituted the most oppressive tsarist practices, shutting down every publication that did not support their regime, and subjecting all forms of intellectual and artistic expression to preventive censorship. They also nationalized all publishing enterprises. These procedures went back to the practices of Muscovy: they had no European equivalent.^*

In all these instances the Bolsheviks found models not in the writings of Marx, Engels, or other Western socialists, but in their own history: not so much the history described in books but that which they had experienced in their own persons fighting tsarism under the regime of Reinforced and Extraordinary Safeguard instituted in the 1880s to deter the revolutionary intelligentsia.¹⁷ These practices they justified with arguments borrowed from socialist literature that gave them a mandate to behave with a brutality and ruthlessness that far exceeded anything known under tsarism, for tsarism was inhibited by the desire to be viewed favorably by Europe, whereas the Bolsheviks treated Europe as an enemy.

It is not that the Bolsheviks wanted to copy tsarist practices: on the contrary, they wanted to have nothing in common with them, to do the very opposite. They emulated them by force of circumstance. Once they rejected democracy—and this they did conclusively in January 1918 by dispersing the Constituent Assembly—they had no choice but to govern autocratically. And to rule autocratically meant ruling the people in a manner to which they had been accustomed. The regime introduced by Lenin on coming to power had its immediate antecedents in the most reactionary reign of Imperial Russia, that of Alexander III, under which Lenin had grown up. It is uncanny how many of his measures replicated the “counter-reforms” of the 1880s and 1890s, even if under different labels.

Nor is it surprising that the Russian Revolution should have ended up where it did. Revolutionaries may have the most radical ideas of remaking man and society, but they must build the new order with human material molded by the past. For that reason, sooner or later, they succumb to the past themselves. “Revolution” derives from the Latin revolvere, “to revolve,” a concept originally applied to the motions of the planets, and used by medieval astrologers to explain sudden and unexpected turns in human events. And objects that revolve do return to their starting point.

One of the most controversial issues arising from the Russian Revolution is the relationship of Leninism to Stalinism—in other words, Lenin’s responsibility for Stalin. Western Communists, fellow-travelers, and sympathizers deny any link between the two Communist leaders, insisting that Stalin not only did not continue Lenin’s work but subverted it. This view became mandatory in Soviet historiography after 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev delivered his secret address to the Twentieth Party Congress: it has served the purpose of disassociating the post-Stalinist regime from its despised predecessor. Curiously, the same people who depict Lenin’s rise to power as inevitable abandon their philosophy of history when they came to Stalin, whom they represent as a historic aberration. They have been unable to explain how and why history should have taken a thirty-year detour from its allegedly predetermined course.

An examination of Stalin’s career reveals that he did not seize power after Lenin’s death but ascended to it, step by step, initially under Lenin’s sponsorship. Lenin came to rely on Stalin in managing the party apparatus, especially after 1920, when the party was torn by democratic heresies. The sources indicate that contrary to Trotsky’s retrospective claims, Lenin depended not on him but on his rival to carry on much of the day-to-day business of government and to advise him on a great variety of issues of domestic and foreign policy. Thanks to this patronage, by 1922, when illness forced Lenin increasingly to withdraw from affairs of state, Stalin was the only person to belong to all three of the ruling organs of the Central Committee: the Politburo, Orgburo, and Secretariat. In these capacities, he supervised the appointment of executive personnel to virtually all branches of the party and state administration. Owing to the rules established by Lenin to forestall the rise of an organized opposition (“factionalism”), Stalin could repress criticism of his stewardship on the grounds that it was directed not at him but at the party and therefore, by definition, served the cause of the counterrevolution. The fact that in the last months of his active life Lenin developed doubts about Stalin and came close to breaking off personal relations with him, should not obscure the fact that until that moment he had done everything in his power to promote Stalin’s ascendancy. And even when Lenin became disappointed with his protégé, the shortcomings he attributed to him were not very serious—mainly rudeness and impatience—and related more to his managerial qualifications than his personality. There is no indication that he ever saw Stalin as a traitor to his brand of Communism.

But even the one difference separating the two men—that Lenin did not kill fellow-Communists and Stalin did so on a massive scale—is not as significant as may appear at first sight. Toward outsiders, people not belonging to his order of the elect—and that included 99.7 percent of his compatriots—Lenin showed no human feelings whatever, sending them to their death by the tens of thousands, often to serve as an example to others. A high Cheka official, I. S. Unshlikht, in his tender recollections of Lenin written in 1934, stressed with unconcealed pride how Lenin “mercilessly made short shrift of philistine party members who complained of the mercilessness of the Cheka, how he laughed at and mocked the ‘humanness’ of the capitalist world.”¹⁸ The difference between the two men lay in the conception of the “outsider.” Lenin’s insiders were to Stalin outsiders, people who owed loyalty not to him but to the Party’s founder and who competed with him for power; and toward them, he showed the same inhuman cruelty that Lenin had employed against his enemies.^*

Beyond the strong personal links binding the two men, Stalin was a true Leninist in that he faithfully followed his patron’s political philosophy and practices. Every ingredient of what has come to be known as Stalinism save one—murdering fellow Communists—he had learned from Lenin, and that includes the two actions for which he is most severely condemned: collectivization and mass terror. Stalin’s megalomania, his vindictiveness, his morbid paranoia, and other odious personal qualities should not obscure the fact that his ideology and modus operandi were Lenin’s. A man of meager education, he had no other source of ideas.

In theory, one can conceive a Trotsky, Bukharin, or Zinoviev grasping the torch from the dying Lenin and leading the Soviet Union in a different direction than Stalin. What one cannot conceive is how they could have been in a position to do so, given the realities of the power structure at the time of Lenin’s illness. By throttling democratic impulses in the Party in order to protect his dictatorship, and by imposing on the Party a top-heavy command structure, Lenin ensured that the man who controlled the central party apparatus controlled the Party and through it, the state. And that man was Stalin.

The revolution inflicted on Russia staggering human losses. The statistics are so shocking that they inevitably give rise to doubts. But unless someone can come up with alternate numbers, the historian is compelled to accept them, the more so that they are shared alike by Communist and non-Communist demographers.

The following table indicates the population of the Soviet Union within the borders of 1926 (in millions):

Fall 1917: 147.6

Early 1920: 140.6

Early 1921: 136.8

Early 1922: 134.9¹⁹

The decrease—12.7 million—was due to deaths from combat and epidemics (approximately 2 million each); emigration (about 2 million); and famine (over 5 million).

But these figures tell only half the story, since obviously, under normal conditions, the population would not have remained stationary but grown. Projections by Russian statisticians indicate that in 1922 the population should have numbered more than 160 million rather than 135 million. If this figure is taken into account, and the number of émigrés is deducted, the human casualties of the Revolution in Russia—actual and due to the deficit in births—rise to over 23 million^*—two and a half times the fatalities suffered by all the belligerent countries in World War I combined, and a loss nearly equal to the combined populations at the time of the four Scandinavian countries plus Belgium and the Netherlands. The actual losses were heaviest in the age group 16–49, particularly in its male contingent, of which it had eradicated by August 1920—that is, before the famine had done its work—29 percent.²⁰

Can one—should one—view such an unprecedented calamity with dispassion? So great is the prestige of science in our time that not a few contemporary scholars have adopted, along with scientific methods of investigation, the scientists’ habit of moral and emotional detachment, the habit of treating all phenomena as “natural” and therefore ethically neutral. They are loath to allow for human volition in historical events because free will, being unpredictable, eludes scientific analysis. Historical “inevitability” is for them what the laws of nature are to the scientist. But it has long been known that the objects of science and the object of history are vastly different. We properly expect physicians to diagnose diseases and suggest remedies in a cool and dispassionate manner. An accountant analyzing the finances of a company, an engineer investigating the safety of equipment, an intelligence officer estimating enemy capabilities obviously must remain emotionally uninvolved. This is so because their investigations have as their objective making it possible to arrive at sound decisions. But for the historian the decisions have already been made by others, and detachment adds nothing to understanding. Indeed, it detracts from it: for how can one comprehend dispassionately events that have been produced in the heat of passion? “Historiam puto scribendam esse et cum ira et cum studio”—“I maintain that history should be written with anger and enthusiasm,” wrote a nineteenth-century German historian. Aristotle, who in all matters preached moderation, said that there were situations in which “inirascibility” was unacceptable: “For those who are not angry at things they should be angry at are deemed fools.”²¹ The assembling of the relevant facts must certainly be carried out dispassionately, without either anger or enthusiasm: this aspect of the historian’s craft is no different from the scientist’s. But this is only the beginning of the historian’s task, because the sorting of these facts—the decision as to which are “relevant”—requires judgment, and judgment rests on values. Facts as such are meaningless, since they furnish no guide to their selection, ordering, and emphasis: to “make sense” of the past, the historian must follow some principle. He usually does have it: even the most “scientific” historians, consciously or not, operate from preconceptions. As a rule, these are rooted in economic determinism because economic and social data lend themselves to statistical demonstration, which creates the illusion of impartiality. The refusal to pass judgment on historical events rests on moral values, too, namely the silent premise that whatever occurs is natural and therefore right: it amounts to an apology of those who happen to win out.

Judged in terms of its own aspirations, the Communist regime was a monumental failure: it succeeded in one thing only—staying in power. But since for Bolsheviks power was not an end in itself but means to an end, its mere retention does not qualify the experiment as a success. The Bolsheviks made no secret of their aims: toppling everywhere regimes based on private property and replacing them with a worldwide union of socialist societies. They succeeded nowhere outside the boundaries of what had been the Russian Empire in spreading their regime until the end of World War II, when the Red Army stepped into the vacuum created in Eastern Europe by the surrender of Germany, the Chinese Communists seized control of their country from the Japanese, and Communist dictatorships, aided by Moscow, established themselves in a number of recently emancipated colonial areas.

Once it had proven impossible to export Communism, the Bolsheviks in the 1920s dedicated themselves to constructing a socialist society at home. This endeavor failed as well. Lenin had expected through a combination of expropriations and terror to transform his country in a matter of months into the world’s leading economic power: instead, he ruined the economy he had inherited. He had expected the Communist Party to provide disciplined leadership to the nation: instead, he saw political dissent, which he had muzzled in the country at large, resurface within his own party. As the workers turned their backs on the Communists and the peasants rebelled, staying in power required unremitting resort to police measures. The regime’s freedom of action was increasingly impeded by a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy. The voluntary union of nations turned into an oppressive empire. Lenin’s speeches and writings of the last two years reveal, besides a striking paucity of constructive ideas, barely controlled rage at his political and economic impotence: even terror proved useless in overcoming the ingrained habits of an ancient nation. Mussolini, whose early political career closely resembled Lenin’s and who even as Fascist dictator observed the Communist regime with sympathy, concluded already in July 1920 that Bolshevism, a “vast, terrible experiment,” had miscarried:

Lenin is an artist who worked on humans as other artists work on marble or metal. But human beings are harder than granite and less malleable than iron. No masterwork has emerged. The artist has failed. The task has proven beyond his powers.²²

Seventy years and tens of millions of victims later, Lenin’s and Stalin’s successor as head of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, conceded as much in an address to the American Congress:

The world can sigh in relief. The idol of Communism which spread everywhere social strife, animosity, and unparalleled brutality, which instilled fear in humanity, has collapsed. It has collapsed, never to rise again.²³

Failure was inevitable and imbedded in the very premises of the Communist regime. Bolshevism was the most audacious attempt in history to subject the entire life of a country to a master plan, to rationalize everybody and everything. It sought to sweep aside as useless rubbish the wisdom that mankind had accumulated over millennia. In that sense, it was a unique effort to apply science to human affairs: and it was pursued with the zeal characteristic of that breed of intellectuals who regard resistance to their ideas as proof that they are sound. Communism failed because it proceeded from the erroneous doctrine of the Enlightenment, perhaps the most pernicious idea in the history of thought, that man is merely a material compound, devoid of either soul or innate ideas, and as such a passive product of an infinitely malleable social environment. This doctrine made it possible for people with personal frustrations to project them onto society and attempt to resolve them there rather than in themselves. As experience has confirmed time and again, man is not an inanimate object but a creature with his own aspirations and will—not a mechanical but a biological entity. Even if subjected to the fiercest dressage, he cannot pass on the lessons he has been forced to learn to his children, who come into this world ever fresh, asking questions that are supposed to have been settled once and for all. To demonstrate this commonsensical truth required tens of millions of dead, incalculable suffering for the survivors, and the ruin of a great nation.

The question of how such a flawed regime succeeded in maintaining itself in power for so long certainly cannot be met with the answer that, whatever we may think of it, it had the support of its own people. Anyone who explains the durability of a government not based on an explicit mandate of its citizens by its alleged popularity must apply the same rationale to every other enduring authoritarian regime, including tsarism—which survived not seven decades but seven centuries—and then still face the unenviable task of having to explain how tsarism, presumably so popular, collapsed in a matter of days.

In addition to demonstrating the inapplicability of scientific methods to the conduct of human affairs, the Russian Revolution has raised the profoundest moral questions about the nature of politics, namely the right of governments to try to remake human beings and refashion society without their mandate and even against their will: the legitimacy of the early Communist slogan, “We will drive mankind to happiness by force!” Gorky, who knew Lenin intimately, agreed with Mussolini that he regarded human beings as a metalworker regards ore.²⁴ His was but an extreme expression of an attitude common to radical intellectuals everywhere. It runs contrary to the morally superior as well as more realistic principle of Kant’s that man must never be used as merely means for the ends of others, but must always be regarded also as an end in himself. Seen from this vantage point, the excesses of the Bolsheviks, their readiness to sacrifice countless lives for their own purposes, were a monstrous violation of both ethics and common sense. They ignored that the means—the well-being and even the lives of people—are very real, whereas the ends are always nebulous and often unattainable. The moral principle that applies in this case has been formulated by Karl Popper: “Everyone has the right to sacrifice himself for a cause he deems deserving. No one has the right to sacrifice others or to incite others to sacrifice themselves for an ideal.”²⁵

Hippolyte Taine drew from his monumental study of the French Revolution a lesson that he himself described as “puerile,” namely that “human society, especially a modern society, is a vast and complicated thing.”²⁶ One is tempted to supplement this observation with a corollary, that precisely because modern society is so “vast and complicated” and therefore so difficult to grasp, it is neither proper nor feasible to impose on it patterns of conduct, let alone try to remake it. What cannot be comprehended cannot be controlled. The tragic and sordid history of the Russian Revolution—such as it really was, not as it appears to the imagination of those foreign intellectuals for whom it was a noble attempt to elevate mankind—teaches that political authority must never be employed for ideological ends. It is best to let people be. In the words attributed by Oscar Wilde to a Chinese sage: There is such a thing as leaving mankind alone—but there never was such a thing as governing mankind.

^*Vera Zasulich, who had begun her revolutionary career in the 1870s and lived to witness Lenin’s dictatorship, acknowledged in 1918 the responsibility of socialists for Bolshevism in that they had goaded workers—and, one could add, peasants—to seize property, but taught them nothing of citizens’ obligations: NV, No. 74/98 (April 16, 1918), 3.

^*Clausewitz had noted already in the early 1800s that it had become “impossible to obtain possession of a great country with a European civilization otherwise than by internal division”: Carl von Clausewitz, The Campaign of 1812 in Russia (London, 1843), 184.

^*The debate over the role of ideas in history is not confined to Russian historiography. In both Great Britain and the United States, sharp battles have been fought over this issue. The proponents of the ideological school suffered notable defeats, especially at the hands of Louis Namier, who demonstrated that in eighteenth-century England ideas, as a rule, served to rationalize actions inspired by personal and group interests.

^*Many European countries had political police departments, but their functions were to investigate and turn suspects over to the judiciary. Only in tsarist Russia did the political police have judiciary authority, which allowed it to arrest and exile suspects without recourse to courts.

^*“In contrast to Western countries where, from the moment of the emergence of book-printing, typographies were in private hands and the publication of books was a matter of private initiative, in Russia the printing of books was from the beginning a monopoly of the state, which determined the direction of publishing activity …” C. P. Luppov, Kniga v Rossii v XVII veke (Leningrad, 1970), 28.

^*Indeed, Viacheslav Molotov who had worked with the two men longer and closer than anyone else stated without hesitation that Lenin was “harsher” (bolee surovyi) than Stalin. F. Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym, (Moscow, 1991), 184.

^*S. G. Strumilin (Problemy ekonomiki truda, Moscow, 1957,39) estimates the losses until late 1920—i.e., before the 1921 famine—at 21 million. With the famine victims added, the figure would rise to 26 million. Iu. A. Poliakov (Sovetskaia strana posle okonchaniia grazhdanskoi voiny, Moscow, 1986, 128) speaks of over 25 million. The American demographer Frank Lorimer sets the number of deaths between 1914 and 1926 at 26 million (exclusive of emigration). Lorimer, however, overstates the number of Russian fatalities in World War I (2 million instead of 1.1 million): Frank Lorimer, The Population of the Soviet Union (Geneva, 1946), 41.