Historiography of the Russian Revolution
Introduction- When considering an in-depth analysis of any given historical period,
all good historians will make some reference to historiography: the different
views and debates that are held by a variety of historians; the history of
History. An acknowledgement of the work that has come before them, an
exploration of the issues that have given rise to dispute and a comparison of
different arguments, gives balance and perspective to the writing of good
History. Differing political backgrounds and bias, different emphasis of themes
and new approaches sources has given rise to different ‘schools of thought’
within historians’ work; a trend that is indeed evident in the historiography
of Russian Revolution. Labels of ‘Soviet’, ‘Marxist’, ‘liberal’, ‘libertarian’
and ‘revisionist’ have emerged that describe a number of mutual points of
dispute and agreement amongst historians of the Russian Revolution. However, it is
important to realise that it is not always possible to ‘pigeonhole’ every
historian into neatly labelled ‘boxes’ and amongst historians of similar
viewpoints, such as liberals; there are often considerable areas of
disagreement. Nevertheless, many writers do stand for clearly defined schools
of thought: Pipes is a definite liberal, Fitzpatrick a revisionist and the History
of the CPSU (Bolsheviks) short-course articulates the Soviet view
developed under Stalin. There are, though, innumerable grey areas. Many
historians (especially more recent writers) have aspects in their work that
overlap different traditional labels; e.g. Figes draws a lot of his arguments
from the revisionist point of view, but he is fairly conservative in his
political persuasion (in some respects not too far removed from Pipes) and he
re-emphasises the importance of key individuals, such as Lenin, seeking to
address the criticisms made of some early revisionist accounts by putting the
‘leaders back into history’.
The fall of
Communism in the former USSR in 1991 has also drastically changed the
historiographical landscape. The opening up of the Soviet archives has led to a
renaissance in the study of the political nature of the Bolshevik Party, with
sources now available to perhaps answer some key questions that have previously
been largely based on conjecture or limited evidence. This has not resulted, though,
in an easing of debate. The work of Robert Service has offered a revised
understanding of the totalitarian view, whilst Russian historian Dmitri
Volkogonov is scathing in his attacks upon Lenin and Stalin, a view that is
largely identical to the classic liberal accounts in its conclusions. Indeed,
the collapse of Communism and the supposed ‘triumph’ or ‘vindication’ of
capitalist democracy has largely resulted in a return to the more conservative,
liberal point of view in many popular accounts of the Revolution.
An equally
important factor in developing an understanding of Russian historiography is
the recognition of bias and the context in which different historians
approaches have emerged. The basis of the Soviet view was to justify the
Revolution and celebrate the triumphs of Communism; the Cold War influence over
the liberal approach underscores its dismissal of any notions of ‘mass
participation’ (a ‘Marxist’ ideal) and thus seeks to demonise the Bolsheviks;
revisionists, on the other hand, are critical of both polarised views, and seek
a deeper, more complex analysis. The debate amongst different historical
approaches indeed continues to be an on going, developing discourse. Whilst the
Stalinist Soviet view has been largely discredited, Marxist interpretations
continue to be applied by some historians; the liberal view is still championed
and eloquently espoused by a number of modern writers (most notably Richard
Pipes); and revisionist (and even ‘post-revisionist’) approaches are
continually throwing new understandings upon our understandings of the Russian
Revolution.
Despite the
increasingly complex nature of Russian historiography, a most worthwhile
exercise is to consider which school of thought various historians belong to
when you read their work. It is equally important to acknowledge areas of
historical debate within your own writing, drawing attention to the insights
different individual historians have made. It is perfectly acceptable for you
to take on and base your own understandings on the interpretation of a
historian whose analysis you feel is the most convincing, although you must
acknowledge that you have gained your insights from their work. Unlike in some
other subjects, students of History are not expected to ‘re-invent the wheel’.
But that should not discount you seeking a complex answer to your questions
that draws on the conclusion of different schools of thought. New work is being
produced all the time and our understandings of the Revolution continue to grow
as historians uncover new sources and approach the old in different ways.
Students new to the study of History sometimes despair at trying to find out
“what really happened” or what is “the right answer”. The fact
that historians fundamentally disagree in their arguments can indeed be
confusing. However, good students of History should see that maybe a “right”
answer is very hard to come by. History was never nice and neat (just like real
life), but the initial lack of a ‘clear cut’ answer should not lead to
confusion – the analysis that is often most convincing is that which is best
able to articulate and explain contrasting views and debates. Recognise bias –
our own, that of historians, and that of the sources we analyse. Consider the
notions that post-modernism sheds on History, and on the nature of memory and
experience: how one person perceived and experienced the Revolution can be
entirely different to the experiences of another. We must continue to ask
questions of our sources: Why do they think that? How were they affected? What
were they hoping to achieve? Did their expectations, experiences, values and
desires change over time?
The
popular perception of the Russian Revolution in the Western world (and
therefore most school textbooks) has typically followed the liberal
interpretation. We live in a free, democratic society (or we hope it is) and
generally experience little discomfort, brutality or desperate danger. Russia
at the turn of the century is in many ways a seemingly ‘alien’ world. It can be
hard to not ascribe our own values onto this society. We should thus be wary of
our own bias. The violence and callousness of much of the Revolution naturally
repulses us. Punishing a thief by ramming a stake up his rectum or nailing him
to a fence is horrible and inhuman in the least – but to the Russian villager,
whose existence was often brutal and a life-long struggle for survival, it
might have made sense. Even trying to understand the personality of Lenin is a
difficult task. Many accounts of the Revolution portray him as wholly consumed
by the task of the Revolution, a one-sided and dogmatic figure. Yet Lenin
somehow found time to have a romantic fling with Inessa Armand. In the same
way, Dzerzhinsky not only ran the Cheka, but also a large children’s charity.
These were complex and very real human beings.
It is
disappointing that the brilliant work of revisionist historians has been often
overlooked, or is too complex in its analysis for popular media to make use of.
It was interesting that for the anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1997
the New York Times Literally Supplement chose all liberal
historians to reflect on the importance and significance of the events. Richard
Pipes has dismissed the revisionist account as simply a re-hash of the Soviet
view; politics and the actions of leading protagonists continue to be the
driving factors in understanding the Revolution. Pipes makes fine use of a wide
variety of sources, but he ignores the important new evidence that revisionist
historians have brought to light and he cannot reconcile any notions of popular
support and mass agency with the Bolshevik Party. Orlando Figes, the author of
one of the most brilliantly acclaimed new accounts of the Revolution, argues
“we are all social historians now”; meaning that the broad notions raised by
revisionist historians are now impossible to ignore. Although taking the
liberal view can often be the easiest way of making a straightforward response
to an exam or essay question (and the liberal view still has some compelling arguments),
by taking on board some of the new insights revisionist work has given us, by
seeking a more complex answer that is not consciously driven by political bias,
the richness of one’s analyses can only be made greater.
Following my
broad summary of the different schools in the History of the Russian
Revolution, I have included a number of short quotes from leading historians. I
have tried to structure the quotes so that they read like a conversation or
debate – which I think is a good way of conceptualising historiography. Note
how there is a certain amount of agreement on different matters, but also some
subtle and some glaring differences. I
have categorised these historians merely for the purpose of drawing attention
to key, broad approaches in their views of the Revolution – not all uniformly
agree on all issues of debate surrounding the Russian Revolution, nor do all
necessarily ‘fit’ neatly into the categories given. The
historians’ work I have drawn these quotes from are simply those I have read –
it is not a definitive list. Nor should you avoid reading at least a few
extended works yourself, to take in the narrative in its entirety is an
important and valuable exercise in itself.
Different
Historians’ Views: A Summary
Soviet View-
- Soviet historians make up the school of historical thought established and fostered by the Communist Party of the USSR up until 1991. The role of Soviet historians was to eulogise the leadership of Lenin, celebrate the triumphs of the Revolution and legitimatise the rule of the Party.
- Soviet historians are Marxist in their analysis of the Revolution:
- the Bolshevik victory was inevitable and followed the general laws of history established by Marx.
- The Revolution was due to the leadership of Lenin and his evaluation of the Russian situation in Marxist terms: he was able to guide and lead Russia’s masses in a genuine popular uprising against a corrupt, bourgeois regime. Revolutionary ‘mass consciousness’ was raised by the Party and the ‘people’ were led to victory by the ‘vanguard’ of the Revolution. The success of the October Revolution was evidence of Lenin’s brilliance in leadership and his tight, disciplined organisation of the Party; and the radical mass support of the Russian workers, peasants and soldiers. The increasing authoritarian measures that had to be taken during the Civil War were necessary responses to crises and external military threat. The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (B.) short-course, written under Stalin, is the best example of this view, although it does give very biased accounts of the contributions of key figures, such as Trotsky and Kamenev, who had fallen under the wrath of Stalin’s purges. The re-evaluation of Stalinism that occurred under Khrushchev after Stalin’s death led to a widening in Soviet views; however, the overriding correctness and legitimacy of the Communist Party’s authority to rule and the contributions of Lenin remained unquestioned.
In
analysing the February Revolution, Soviet historians place less emphasis
on WWI, believing that there was an essential continuity between developments
before and after the outbreak of war. The Revolution was thus a conscious
assault upon tsarism from the workers who had preserved the traditions of 1905.
The Bolshevik Party played a central role in shaping the workers’ protests.
Soviet historians maintain that there was also continuity of mass radicalism
between the revolutions of 1905, February and October 1917. October was the
ultimate fulfilment of the revolutionary aspirations of the masses and the laws
of history.
- Prominent Soviet historians: P.A. Golub, G.D. Obichkin, History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks) short-course - various authors, Trotsky’s early writings, E.N. Burdzhalov.
There
also exists a considerable number of Western historians who have adopted a
Marxist or leftist, and largely positive, view of the Bolshevik Revolution and
the influence of Lenin.
- Western Marxist historians: C. Hill, J. Reed.
Liberal View- The liberal view has been, until recently,
the dominant one espoused by historians writing in the West and it continues to
be a prominent interpretation championed by a number of writers. However, it
must be noted that the liberal interpretation of the Revolution was shaped by
the prejudices of the Cold War and is therefore fundamentally hostile to the
notions of socialism, Marxist theory (considered a ‘false’ doctrine) and
Communist Party rule. In general, liberal historians have traditionally
interpreted history ‘from above’, focussing on the ‘actors’ in ‘high politics’.
The role of key individuals or ‘principal characters’ (Tsar Nicholas II,
Kerensky, Lenin, Trotsky) is central in explaining the outcomes and nature of
the Revolution. The masses on the other hand, were largely irrational, ignorant,
passive or simply anarchic in their demands and actions. The manipulation and
exploitation of this “chaos” and naivety were central in the Bolsheviks’
victory; whilst the failing and unpopular war effort, the rampages of the
peasants and the unrealistic demands of the workers created a situation in
which the democratic Provisional Government could not hold power. For liberal
historians, the October Revolution was “a classic coup d’etat” in which the
Bolsheviks disguised their real aim - to build “a one party dictatorship“
(Pipes). October was neither popular nor democratic. It was due to the
superior organisation and subterfuge of the masses by a professional, dedicated
elite who were intent on just one goal: the seizure and retainment of power.
Events following the revolution would like-wise prove the undemocratic,
authoritarian and intolerant nature of the October revolutionaries. It was in
the nature of the Bolshevik Revolution to develop totalitarian
tendencies from the out-set: the Bolsheviks aimed for a one-party, one-ideology
state that tolerated no opposition and sought to control and manipulate every
aspect of its citizen’s lives.
The
early exponents of the liberal interpretation based much of their work on the
writings of Russian émigrés, whose views of the October Revolution were
understandably negative. It
was these sources that led many liberal historians to take an ‘optimist’
view of the February Revolution: Imperial Russia was steadily
transforming into a modern, democratic, industrial society. However, WWI
politically, socially and economically weakened the tsarist state and thwarted
reformist tendencies. It was these enormous pressures that ultimately led to
the collapse of the Tsar’s government. The February Revolution, however, again
provided an opportunity for Russia to develop a western-style democracy and
civil liberties. On-going pressure of the War continued to cause problems, but
the situation was ultimately subverted by the Bolsheviks, who exploited the
fears and desires of the masses. Russia’s chance at democracy and a stable,
civil and capitalist future was stolen by the Bolshevik’s power-hungry grab for
rulership.
Some
liberal historians have seen the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as the
vindication of their views: In his 2001 Communism - A Brief History,
Pipes claimed that his work “is an introduction to Communism and, at the same
time, its obituary”. Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov, much like Pipes, is
brutal in his condemnation of the outcomes of the October Revolution.
Volkogonov, who has had extensive access to the Soviet archives, makes some
compelling arguments that draw strong links between the actions of Lenin and
the development of Stalin’s ‘totalitarian’ regime. However, it must be remembered
that Volkogonov is a product of his environment: the freedom and need to expose
the failings of the Communist Party and the sufferings it caused is a process
of catharsis for many contemporary Russian writers.
· Prominent
liberal historians: B. Pares, R. Pipes, J. H. Keep, L.
Shapiro, M. Lynch, D. Volkogonov, A. Ulam, R. Conquest.
Libertarian View- The growth of ‘New Left’ writers during the Vietnam War led to the development of a different view of the Revolution that rejected the arguments of both liberal and Soviet historians. These ‘libertarian’ historians see the role of the masses as the central element of causation: it was the ordinary workers and peasants, men and women, who made the Revolution. They were neither brainwashed nor led by the Bolsheviks. As summarised by Edward Acton, libertarian historians argue that the “goals for which they (the masses) strove were their own”. Although the February and October Revolutions were genuine movements of the masses, they were later betrayed by the Bolsheviks. The libertarian view is thus sometimes referred to as ‘the theory of unfinished revolution’ and was influenced by the writings of Russian anarchists and the later ideas of Trotsky, who wrote The Revolution Betrayed in response to the direction of the USSR under Stalin. Much of the work of libertarian scholars was based on circumstantial evidence and was therefore dismissed by liberal and Soviet historians alike. However, many of the assumptions of the libertarian view would be proven to be not entirely wrong by the work of later revisionist historians.
- Prominent Libertarian historians: A. Berkman, M. Brinton.
Revisionist View-
In the 1970s, a number of scholars began to again question the assumptions of
both the Soviet and liberal scholars, but unlike libertarians, revisionist
or social historians employed advanced historical scholarly research
alongside modes of analysis borrowed from the fields of sociology, economics
and politics. In some ways like the libertarian view, revisionist historians
are wary of a historical narrative that discounts or marginalizes the role
played by ordinary people, arguing that an understanding of the Revolution
based purely on its chief ‘actors’ is a limited one. Although revisionist work
encompasses a number of various views, an overall recognition of the importance
played by the ordinary people in creating the revolutionary nature of Russian
society in 1917 is emphasised. Revisionists seek to understand and read history
‘from below’. Alongside trying to integrate the agency of ordinary Russians
into their explanation of the Revolution, revisionist historians also seek to
outline the sheer complexity, changing nature and regional differences that
were active in the Revolution. As expressed by Acton, “Russia’s workers were
not one uniform, grey mass but flesh-and-blood individuals, highly
differentiated in terms of level of skill, cultural development, nationality
and outlook. Rather then responding en masse to events, their reactions
depended closely upon their own particular experience”; likewise Russia’s
peasants had their own legitimate, articulate and very real demands.
Contrary
to the liberal view, the work of revisionists has revealed that there was a
degree of genuine mass support for the Bolsheviks in October 1917. Lenin
was indeed a key figure in shaping the course of the Revolution and it was the
Bolshevik Party who were able to best articulate the revolutionary demands of
the masses. The Russian masses were becoming more radicalised; society was
becoming increasing polarised along notions of class; and Lenin’s slogan of
“All Power to the Soviets” was a truly popular one. Revisionist historians have
also stressed the complexity of the relationship between the masses, Lenin and
the Bolsheviks. The programme of the Bolsheviks was successful because it
reflected the independent radical demands of the masses; and in clearly
articulating such demands, the Bolshevik Party swelled in size by October 1917,
becoming a mass popular party identified with the ideals Soviet power and class
struggle.
Again,
contrary to both Soviet and liberal arguments, revisionist research has
revealed that the Bolsheviks in 1917 were far from the disciplined, centralised
and tightly organised Party that traditional accounts make them out to be.
Party members held a diverse range of views and democratic debate was common;
orders given by the Party leadership were often ignored or disobeyed by the
rank-and-file; administrative procedures were rudimentary; and problems with
communication often left decisions and actions in the hands of local cadres.
Some
revisionist historians have argued that there was a degree of discontinuity
between the popular nature of the October Revolution and the increasing
authoritarian measures taken up by the Party post-1917. These historians argue
that the Bolsheviks held a considerably utopian view of how the Revolution
would develop after their seizure of power. As expressed by Lenin in his State
and Revolution, the rest of the world was meant to follow Russia into
socialist revolution and the ‘state’, after the temporary imposition of the
‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, would simply fade away. However,
international revolution did not follow October and the Party had to jettison
much of its popular appeal and resort to centralised, authoritarian measures in
order to respond to the myriad of economic, political, military and social
crises that were faced during the Civil War period; problems that Lenin and the
Bolsheviks had barely considered before seizing power. The question of whether
the new regime could survive or not without terror is debatable; however, the
notion that the Bolsheviks had a ‘hidden agenda’ behind their October seizure
of power is questioned by these historians who see the Bolsheviks acting more
out of utopian idealism, than conspiratorial deceitfulness.
This
complexity of relationship between the masses and the Party, that of rulers and
ruled, continues to be a key area of investigation amongst revisionist
historians. The extent to which the Party was responding to popular pressure in
instigating class terror during the Civil War and the popularity of Stalin’s
policies of mass industrialisation and collectivisation amongst the Party’s rank-and-file
throw into question notions of the Party elite being the sole ‘directors’ of
the Revolution. Historians such as Sheila Fitzpatrick have explored the
phenomenon of ‘Cultural Revolution’, which had significant elements of utopian
idealism and popular agency that were, in some respects, independent of
Stalin’s control. Stalin certainly played a key role in instigating mass
terror, but popular participation drove the process on into wider Soviet
society. Furthermore, the recent work of Robert Service has thrown into
question both liberal and revisionist views of the ‘totalitarian’ nature
of the Soviet regime. Service argues that while the Soviet state was certainly
totalitarian in its aims, the results left much room for popular resistance and
opposition via falsification of information, slack work habits and the
continued strength of family and kinship ties. Some recent investigations, such
as those by Orlando Figes and Service, have re-orientated their approach
somewhat and have again analysed the central role of key leaders, such as
Lenin, in the Revolution. Nonetheless, the overriding concern to include
everyday people’s experiences within the historical narrative, and not cast
aside the masses as passive victims, continues throughout contemporary revisionist
(or even ‘post-revisionist’ in some ways) accounts of the Revolution. As Figes
so eloquently states, the Revolution was “a human event of complicated
individual tragedies’’.
In regards to the February Revolution, the
debate over the origins of the Revolution is wide amongst revisionist
historians, and the review of the factors leading the downfall of tsarism are given
differing emphasis by different historians. However, a number of revisionists
have taken a ‘pessimist view’ of the February Revolution: Russia was
suffering a long-term institutional crisis and revolution was an unavoidable
outcome; Imperial Russia was headed toward turmoil and the impact of WWI made
little difference in the long run.
A number of contemporary liberal historians, most
notably Richard Pipes, have been strident in their recent criticisms of the
conclusions reached by revisionist historians, claiming that the revisionist
analyses are simply re-worked interpretations of the Soviet view. However, such
criticisms don’t reflect the rich and complex tapestry of interpretation
offered by revisionist work and must simply be rejected on the grounds of
political bias. Acton is more correct in arguing that, “by reading history
backwards, by attributing to the Party of 1917 characteristics it acquired
during the Civil War, the Soviet, liberal and libertarian traditions have all
distorted the process whereby the Bolsheviks came to power. Each tradition
mythologized the revolution”. Whilst in light of the events of 1991 Pipes might
call his work the “obituary” of Communism, a celebration and vindication of the
traditional Western view, Service offers a more balanced insight: “Communism is
the young god that failed; capitalism, an older deity, has yet to succeed for
most of the world’s people most of the time”.
·
Prominent
Revisionist historians: A.
Rabinowitch, R. Service, M. Ferro, S. Smith, J. Arch-Getty, A. Wood, O. Figes,
T. Hasegawa, S. Fitzpatrick, B. Williams, R.G. Sunny, E. Acton, C. Read, V.
Cherniaev, M. Melancon, S. Wheatcroft, W.G. Rosenberg, B. Kolonitskii, J. P. Nettl.
GENERAL
ISSUES OF DEBATE OVER THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION:
Even
though the February Revolution of 1917 is, to a degree, less controversial in nature
than that of October, historians have nevertheless differed in their
explanation as to why tsarism collapsed. A number of explanations have been put
forward but the relative importance of different factors is an area of dispute
amongst historians of all schools of thought:
Ø The
inherent weaknesses in the institutions and ideologies that the Old Regime used
to maintain its authority were fundamentally to blame: tsarism was facing a
‘crisis of modernisation’. The tsars wanted all the success and power of a
modern economic society, but unlike the West, were unwilling to grant the
social freedoms that generally went along with such developments.
Ø Unmet
class expectations and perceived social inequality created the revolutionary
situation.
Ø The
government failed to adjust to changing circumstances, as exemplified by the
failure of liberal reform in Russia after the 1905 revolution.
Ø The
individual character of Nicholas II; he was simply ill-suited to being an
autocrat.
Ø The
economic, social, political and military impact of the First World War simply
created unbearable strains upon the Tsarist regime.
Discussing
Historiography in Essays: When reviewing historians’ opinions in
your essays, you should aim to make the reader aware that you have a good grasp
of the different, broad trends in historiographical debate. You should be able
to identify a few key elements of these different views and also be able to
point out the views of some prominent individual writers. Although it’s not formally
required that you quote verbatim in exams, it would set you in good stead to
have a few ‘one-liners’ memorised. However, the views of historians should not
take precedence over your own argument, nor the use of primary evidence. They
are to be discussed merely to highlight different views and interpretations.
Some examples
of how you might incorporate a review of historiography and referrals to
different individuals and schools of thought into your sentences:
·
Whilst Soviet historians view the 1917
October Revolution as a 'mass movement' led by Lenin; liberal historians, such
as Richard Pipes, argue that October was simply "a classic coup
d’etat": the seizure of power by a small, well organised minority, without
the support or consent of wider society.
·
For revisionist historians, the Russian
Revolution was an infinitely more complicated movement than what Soviet and
liberal historians make it out to be. There was, to a degree, popular support
for the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 (whilst this support was
conditional on the idea of 'Soviet power') and the use of violence and terror
may have had an element of responding to popular demands. This is in direct conflict
with the liberal ‘totalitarian’ view that sees Lenin and Stalin as the sole
‘directors’ of the terror and control inflicted upon Soviet society.
·
Lynch sees a clear link between the
repressive and autocratic nature of both the Old Regime and the New Society, as
“1917 did not mark a complete break with the past. Rather it was the
replacement of one form of state authoritarianism with another".
Russian Revolution: Historians’ Quotes
Service: “…the
Russian Empire was deeply fissured between the government and the tsar’s
subjects; between the capital and the provinces; between the educated and the
uneducated; between Western and Russian ideas; between rich and poor; between
privilege and oppression; between contemporary fashion and centuries-old
custom”.
Smith: “The
collapse of the autocracy was rooted in a crisis of modernisation. The
government hoped that it could carry out modernisation whilst maintaining tight
control over society. Yet the effect of industrialization, urbanization,
internal migration, and the emergence of new social classes was to set in train
forces that served to erode the foundations of the autocratic state”.
Hasegawa: “…the
tsarist regime was pregnant with irreconcilable internal contradictions that it
had no capacity to resolve”.
History of
the CPSU (b.) short-course: “In tsarist Russia the capitalist yoke
was aggravated by the yoke of tsardom. The workers not only suffered from
capitalist exploitation, from inhuman toil, but, in common with the whole
people, suffered from a lack of all rights. The politically advanced workers
therefore strove to lead the revolutionary movement of all the democratic
elements in town and country against tsardom. The peasants were in dire need
owing to lack of land and the numerous survivals of serfdom, and lived in a
state of bondage to the landlords and kulaks. The nations inhabiting tsarist
Russia groaned beneath a double yoke – that of their own landlords and
capitalists and that of the Russian landlords and capitalists. The economic
crisis of 1900-03 had aggravated the hardships of the toiling masses; the war
intensified them still further. The war defeats added fuel to the hatred of the
masses for tsardom. The patience of the people was coming to an end”.
Figes: “Time and
time again, the obstinate refusal of the tsarist regime to concede reforms
turned what should have been a political problem into a revolutionary crisis:
decent minded liberals like Prince Lvov were forced into the revolutionary camp
by the regime’s idiotic policy of blocking the initiatives of patriotic bodies
such as the zemstvos…The tsarist regime’s downfall was not inevitable; but its
own stupidity made it so”.
Pipes: “…the
collapse of tsarism, while not improbable, was certainly not inevitable”.
Figes: “It was
ironic but somehow fitting that the 1905 Revolution should have been started by
an organisation dreamed up by the tsarist regime itself. No-one believed more
than Father Gapon in the bond between Tsar and people”.
History of
the CPSU (b.) short-course: “The streets of St. Petersburg ran
with workers' blood. January 9 (22) came to be known as "Bloody
Sunday": On that day the workers received a bloody lesson. It was their
faith in the tsar that was riddled by bullets on that day. They came to realize
that they could win their rights only by struggle”.
Trotsky: “Although
with a few broken ribs, Tsarism came out of the experience of 1905 alive and
strong enough”.
Figes: “…although
the regime succeeded in restoring order, it could not hope to put the clock
back. 1905 had changed society for good. Many of the younger comrades of 1905
were the elders of 1917. They were inspired by its memory and instructed by its
lessons”.
Trotsky: “The events
of 1905 were a prologue to the two revolutions of 1917, that of February and
that of October”.
History of
the CPSU (b.) short-course: “The revolution disclosed that tsardom
was the sworn enemy of the people, that tsardom was like the proverbial
hunchback whom only the grave could cure”.
Pipes: “In the
end, Russia gained nothing more than a breathing spell”.
History of
the CPSU (b.) short-course: “The triumph of the Stolypin reaction
was short-lived. A government which would offer the people nothing but the
knout and the gallows could not endure. Repressive measures became so habitual
that they ceased to inspire fear in the people. The fatigue felt by the workers
in the years immediately following the defeat of the revolution began to wear
off. The workers resumed the struggle. The Bolsheviks' forecast that a new rise
in the tide of revolution was inevitable proved correct”.
Wood: “…the
scandal which had surrounded Rasputin’s name was merely a symptom, not a cause,
of the acute malaise which inflicted an incompetent and unpopular regime now
deep in the throes of a devastating war”.
Lynch: “The
Rasputin scandal had been a bizarre symptom of the disease affecting Russian
politics rather than a cause”.
Figes:
“Alexandra’s ‘sexual corruption’ became a kind of metaphor for the diseased
condition of the tsarist state”.
Pares: “In the
midst of a world wide struggle, in a time of the closest collaboration with the
best brains of Western statesmanship, the Russian ministers were selected by an
ignorant, blind and hysterical woman on the test of their subservience to an
ignorant, fanatical and debouched adventurer”.
Service: “There were
those at court who made criticisms, but they castigated the symptoms of
decadence, not the disease: they reviled Rasputin while refusing to recognize
more basic political problems”.
Figes: “Nicholas
was the source of all the problems. If there was a vacuum of power at the
centre of the ruling system, then he was the empty space. In a sense, Russia
gained in him the worst of both worlds: a Tsar determined to rule from the
throne yet quite incapable of exercising power”.
Service: “…although
Nicholas II may not have been an outstanding emperor, it was the general
situation and not his personality that enfeebled the regime’s reaction to the
assaults made upon it”.
Pipes: “…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 pressure generated by World War I”.
Figes: “…whereas
the other European powers managed to adapt and improvise, the tsarist system
proved much too rigid and unwieldy, too inflexible and set in its ways, too
authoritarian and inefficient, to adapt itself to the situation as it changed.
The First World War was a titanic test for the states of Europe – and one that
Tsarism failed in a singular and catastrophic way”.
Hill: “The
fundamental cause of the Russian Revolution, then, was the incompatibility of
the tsarist state with the demands of modern civilization. War accelerated the
development of revolutionary crises, but their deep-lying causes could not be
wished away in times of peace”.
Fitzpatrick: “The
pressures of the First World War – and, no doubt, the personalities of Nicholas
and his wife, and the tragedy of their young son’s haemophilia – threw the
anachronistic traits of the Russian autocracy into sharp relief, and made
Nicholas seem less like the upholder of the autocratic tradition than an
unwitting satirist of it”.
Wood: “The tsar
foolishly added to his own isolation by assuming personal command of the
Russian army in 1915. His unhelpful presence at military headquarters in
Mogilev left the conduct of affairs in the capital…in the hands of his neurotic
wife – contemptuously known by the public as nemka (‘the German Woman’)
– and the abominable Rasputin”.
Hill: “Not only
were the ministers shockingly incompetent, they were also changed with
bewildering rapidity as the situation went from bad to worse”.
Service: “Truly this
was already a creaky structure of power. Matters were not helped by the fact
that the Emperor was not respected. He was a monarch whose capacity for hard
work was not matched by outstanding intelligence. He had no clear vision for
Russia’s future and wore himself out with day-to-day political administration.
He found contentment only in the company of his family and was thought to be
hen-pecked by his spouse Alexandra. In fact he was more independent from her
than rumour suggested, but the rumours were believed. Furthermore he surrounded
himself with advisors who included a variety of mystics and quacks…Nicholas was
out of joint with his times”.
Figes: “…when
misfortune had put him (Nicholas II) on the throne he swore to uphold and pass
on to his son the autocratic powers which he had inherited from his beloved and
much-feared father. He adhered to this coronation oath with dogged
narrow-mindedness, as if he were terrified that God (or his wife) would punish
him if he failed to rule like Ivan the Terrible. As long as he remained Tsar
nothing could divert him from this path. For twenty-two years he had ignored the
lessons of history, as well as the pleadings of countless advisors, which all
pointed to the fact that the only way to save his throne was to grant a
government accountable to the people. His motive was always the same: his
‘conscience’ forbade him to do it…he probably found it easier to abdicate than
to turn himself into a constitutional king. That was Nicholas’s tragedy”.
Pipes: “Nicholas
II fell not because he was hated but because he was held in contempt”.
Figes: “Throughout
his reign Nicholas gave the impression of being unable to cope with the task of
ruling a vast Empire in the grips of a deepening revolutionary crisis. True,
only a genius could have coped with it. And Nicholas was certainly no genius”.
Smith: “When the
February Revolution came, it was not as the result of military defeat, or even
war weariness, but as the result of the collapse of public support in the
government”.
Pipes: “Whatever
grievances they may have harboured – real and fancified – 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 Marxist theory that political developments are always and
everywhere driven by class conflict”.
Wood. “Despite
the disaffection of the military, however, it was neither the high command nor
the Duma politicians, still less the revolutionary parties, which finally
brought about the downfall of ‘Bloody Nicholas’. It was caused by the
spontaneous upsurge of the politically radicalised masses”.
Pares: “…the cause
of ruin came not at all from below, but from above…The Tsar had many
opportunities of putting things right, and several times he was on the point of
taking them…far from a dictation of events from below, this passive people went
on enduring long after it ought to have ceased to do so; and when the crash
came, it had done so little to shape it in any way, that it was left to the
last minute of a single regiment to determine the issue”.
Pipes: “The record
leaves no doubt that the myth of the Tsar being forced from the throne by
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”.
History of
the CPSU (b.) short-course: “The revolution was victorious because
its vanguard was the working class which headed the movement of millions of
peasants clad in soldiers' uniform demanding "peace, bread and
liberty." It was the hegemony of the proletariat that determined the
success of the revolution…The First Revolution, that of 1905, had prepared the
way for the swift success of the Second Revolution, that of 1917…The Revolution
of 1905 had shown that the Soviets were organs of armed uprising and at the
same time the embryo of a new, revolutionary power. The idea of Soviets lived
in the minds of the working-class masses, and they put it into effect as soon
as tsardom was overthrown, with this difference, however, that in 1905 it was
Soviets only of Workers' Deputies that were formed, whereas in February
1917, on the initiative of the Bolsheviks, there arose Soviets of Workers'
and Soldiers' Deputies”.
J. P. Nettl: “…for the
first time a Tsar had simply become irrelevant…one factor emerged with chilling
certainty: the growing consensus among the Duma leaders, the society of the
capital, and a good many of the ministers that nothing could be done with the
obstinate and totally unperceptive autocrat”.
Trotsky: “There were
not to be found anywhere in the country any groups of the population, any
parties, institutions, or military units which were ready to put up a fight for
the old regime”.
Pipes: “The most
striking aspect of the February Revolution was the extraordinary rapidity with
which the Russian state fell apart. It was if the greatest empire in the world
had been an artificial construction, without organic unity. The instant the monarch
withdrew, the entire structure collapsed in a heap”.
Figes: “Collapse
is certainly the right word to use. For the Romanov regime fell under the
weight of its own internal contradictions. It was not overthrown”.
Crankshaw: “Imperial
Russia simply rotted away from the centre outward until its shell fell
in”.
Trotsky: “…the
country had so radically vomited up the monarchy that it could not ever crawl
down the people’s throat again”.
E. N.
Burdzhalov: “The second
revolutionary wave had not achieved its main goal. The bourgeoisie remained in
power, a provisional government had been formed, and the basic demands of the
minimum programs of the RSDRP did not recede without a trace. It overthrew the
tsarist monarchy and strengthened the organ of genuine popular authority – the
Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and this was of paramount importance
for the revolution’s further development”.
Fitzpatrick: “In
February 1917, the autocracy collapsed in the face of popular demonstrations
and the withdrawal of elite support for the regime. In the euphoria of
revolution, political solutions seemed easy. Russia’s future form of government
would, of course, be democratic…Yet within eight months the hopes and
expectations of February lay in ruins. ‘Dual power’ proved an illusion, masking
something like a power vacuum. The popular revolution became progressively more
radical, while the elite revolution moved towards an anxious conservative
stance in defence of property and law and order”.
Kolonitskii: “For the
liberals it (the Revolution) was excessively radical, cutting across
their ideals and developing in a direction which was ‘left of common sense’.
The socialists considered it to be a ‘bourgeois’ revolution and looked for a
way out of the crisis and its problems by deepening the revolution”.
Smith: “The
February Revolution gave rise to a short-lived mood of national unity and
optimism. Liberty and democracy were the order of the day. Overnight everyone
was transformed from a subject to a citizen…Yet from the first, the scope of
the revolution was in dispute. For the reluctant revolutionaries of the
Provisional Government the overthrow of the tsar was an act of national
self-preservation driven by the need to bring victory in war. For the lower
classes, liberty and democracy meant nothing short of a social revolution that
would bring about the complete destruction on the old structure of authority
and the construction of a new life in accordance with the ideas of justice and
freedom”.
A.J.P. Taylor: “Though
called democratic, this government had no popular mandate and little popular
support. It simply carried on the old system, just as a hen continues to run
around the yard when its head has been cut off. No one knew how to change
direction”.
Pipes: “Russia was
governed – or rather misgoverned – by a regime of dual power, under which the
soviets subverted the authority of the administration without assuming
responsibility for the consequences”.
Lynch: “The
Provisional Government was thus from the beginning in an impossible and
paradoxical situation: in order to survive it had to keep Russia in the war,
but in keeping Russia in the war, it destroyed its chances of survival”.
Wood: “In the
fields and factories and at the front, therefore, the population was mobilizing
itself for continued revolutionary action as the twin organs of dual power
hedged and havered on the two crucial issues of the day – peace and land”.
Lynch: “He defined
the events of February not as a genuine class revolution but as a palace coup
which had simply given authority to ex-tsarist aristocrats and the bourgeoisie”
(on Lenin’s ‘April Theses’).
History of
the CPSU (b.) short-course: “Lenin's April Theses laid down for
the Party a brilliant plan of struggle for the transition from the
bourgeois-democratic to the Socialist revolution, from the first stage of the
revolution to the second stage – the stage of the Socialist revolution. The
whole history of the Party had prepared it for this great task”.
Pipes: “Totally
out of touch with reality, if not positively mad” (on Lenin’s April Theses).
Lynch: “He never
allowed the opponents or doubters to sway him. It was this clarity of purpose
and determination that enabled Lenin to seize power in the vacuum which
developed as the Provincial Government lost control”.
Wood: “Lenin’s
programme manifestly reflected and articulated the increasingly radical temper
of the party rank-and-file and the militant workers and troops”.
History of
the CPSU (b.) short-course: “The Bolshevik Party was confronted
with the task of explaining to the masses of workers and soldiers, who had been
intoxicated by the first successes, that the complete victory of the revolution
was still a long way off, that as long as the power was in the hands of the
bourgeois Provisional Government, and as long as the Soviets were dominated by
the compromisers – the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries – the people
would secure neither peace, nor land, nor bread, and that in order to achieve
complete victory, one more step had to be taken and the power transferred to
the Soviets”.
Golub: “He (Lenin)
was able swiftly and precisely to evaluate the new situation, to give scientifically-based
prognosis of the further development of the class struggle…and to plan the most
appropriate methods and means of struggle against the counter-revolution. And
again, as at every sudden historical turning-point, the creative power of
Lenin’s genius was displayed”.
Figes: “The social
polarization of the summer gave the Bolsheviks their first real mass following
as a party which based its main appeal on the plebeian rejection of all
subordinate authority”.
Fitzpatrick: “The
Bolsheviks’ strength was that they were the only party uncompromised by
association with the bourgeoisie and the February regime, and the party most
firmly identified with the ideas of workers’ power and armed uprising”.
Wood: “The
‘collaboration’ of Menshevik and SR ministers with the bourgeois, pro-war
government meant that the Bolsheviks were now the only political faction which
pursued an unswervingly anti-war policy”.
J.P. Nettl: “All
through the hot summer Petrograd alternatively simmered and boiled.
Smith: “By summer (1917)
the discourse of democracy put into circulation by the February Revolution was
being overtaken by a discourse of class, a shift symbolized by the increasing
use of the word ‘comrade’ instead of ‘citizen’ as the favoured form of
address”.
Rosenberg: “Indeed, as
imperial Russia’s state-capitalist structure did begin to crumble, at once
cause and consequence of the deprivations of war and revolution, the analytic
logic of class difference and conflict became the insidious, ideologized
passions of class warfare”.
Berkman: “The
revolutionary masses by their own initiative began, long before the October
days, to put into practice their social ideals. They took possession of the
land, the factories, mines, mills and tools of production. They got rid of the
more hated and dangerous representatives of government and authority. In their
grand revolutionary outburst they destroyed every form of political and
economic oppression”.
J.P. Nettl: “While
revolution see-sawed in Petrograd, the country on a whole lapsed into anarchy.
Over the next few months effective and centrally controlled government of any
sort ceased to exist”.
Service: “…it was
also a crucial advantage for Lenin that the political and administrative system
was in an advanced condition of disintegration. Peasants in most villages
across the former Russian Empire governed themselves. The military conscripts
intimidated their officers. The workers, even if they were loath to take to the
streets, wished to impose their control over the factories and mines. Kerensky
had lost authority over all these great social groups. While central power was
breaking down in Petrograd, moreover, it had virtually collapsed in the rest of
Russia”.
Nove: “Both in
the towns and in the villages the situation was approaching chaos even without
the help of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Of course, they tried to make things
worse, since they were unconcerned with an orderly land settlement, industrial
production or the military situation. They sought to reap the whirlwind. They
contributed to the breakdown but did not cause it”.
John Reed: “Daily the
Government seemed to become more and more helpless. Even the Municipal
administration broke down. The columns of morning papers were filled with
accounts of the most audacious robberies and murders, the criminals went
unmolested”.
Lynch: “In October
1917 the Bolsheviks were pushing against an already open door”.
Service: “If Lenin
had never existed, a socialist government would probably have rule Russia by
the end of [1917].”
Wood: “The
Bolsheviks made no secret of their preparations for insurrection, but Kerensky
seemed impotent to stop it”.
Pipes: “The events
that led to the overthrow of the Provisional Government were not spontaneous
but carefully plotted and staged by a tightly organised conspiracy…October was
a classic coup d’etat, the capture of governmental authority by a small band,
carried out, in deference to the democratic professions of the age, with a show
of mass participation, but with hardly any mass involvement”.
Ulam: “The Bolsheviks did not
seize power, they picked it up”.
G.D.
Obichkin: “In his
guidance of the uprising, Lenin’s genius as a leader of the masses, a wise and fearless
strategist, who clearly saw what direction the revolution would take, was
strikingly revealed”.
Pipes: “It was a
surreptitious seizure of the nerve centres of the modern state, carried out
under false slogans in order to neutralize the population at large, the true
purpose of which was revealed only after the new claimants to power were firmly
in the saddle”.
Smith: “The
seizure of power is often presented as a conspiratorial coup against a
democratic government. It had all the elements of a coup – albeit one much
advertised in the press – except for the fact that a coup implies the seizure
of a functioning state machine. Arguably, Russia had not had this since
February”.
Service: “Popular
uprisings have never been organised by a people as a whole. Only a minority
directly participates. And, by mid-October, Lenin could also argue that soviets
in city after city throughout Russia were following the example of Petrograd
and Moscow in acquiring Bolshevik majorities”.
Wood: “It would,
however, be incorrect to consider that the Bolsheviks’ planning for revolution
was efficient, co-coordinated or thoroughly considered. It succeeded by default
rather than design…the events of 24-26 October were marked by confusion,
apprehension, uncertainty and opportunism…After hours of indecision and ignored
ultimatums punctuated by sporadic and innocuous shell-fire, the Palace was
infiltrated (not stormed)”.
History of
the CPSU (b.) short-course: “The Petrograd workers in those days
showed what a splendid schooling they had received under the guidance of the
Bolshevik Party. The revolutionary units of the army, prepared for the uprising
by the work of the Bolsheviks, carried out fighting orders with precision and
fought side by side with the Red Guard. The navy did not lag behind the army.
Kronstadt was a stronghold of the Bolshevik Party, and had long since refused
to recognize the authority of the Provisional Government. The cruiser Aurora
trained its guns on the Winter Palace, and on October 25 their thunder ushered
in a new era, the era of the Great Socialist Revolution”.
Shapiro: “In the
last resort, Bolshevism proved less a doctrine, than a technique of action for
the seizing and holding of power by the Bolshevik party”.
Hill: “That in
these years the Bolsheviks had evolved a political philosophy and analysis of
events more realistic than those of any of their rivals was shown by the ease
with which they swept aside all other parties in the revolutionary months of
1917…In Russia in 1917 it was the Bolshevik mastery of fact that was
decisive. The party knew exactly what it wanted, what concrete
concessions to make to different social groups at any given stage, how to
convince the masses of the population by actions, its own and their own.
The party’s organisation allowed great flexibility in manoeuvre, combined with
firmness and strength in pursuit of the clearly envisaged ultimate objectives.
It was this which won the confidence of a following sufficient to enable the
Bolsheviks to seize and retain power whilst the Mensheviks and Socialist
Revolutionaries discredited themselves by the helplessness of their most
eloquent phrases in the face of the rude and stubborn fact”.
Wood: “There was
clearly much more behind the Bolsheviks’ victory than ideological or
organizational superiority over other political forces. The Bolsheviks were
simply much more in tune with popular feeling than either the
constitutionally-minded liberal politicians or the moderate socialists”.
Acton: “…the October revolution
emerges as very much more than a conspiratorial coup d’etat. By then the
central political issue was that of soviet power. It was popular support for
this cause which doomed Kerensky and the Provisional Government and explains
the ease with which armed resistance to the new order was overcome, even where
(as in Moscow) it was more formidable than in the capital”.
Volkogonov: “What had
taken place had not been a classic conspiracy. The Bolsheviks were prepared to
seize power by any means – peaceful, conspiratorial, or by mass uprising.
Reading the situation correctly, they saw that a conspiracy was not
required…What had been a small clutch of illegals in February 1917 had swollen
to a mighty force by October”.
Figes: “The
October insurrection was a coup d’etat, actively supported by a small minority
of the population…but it took place amidst a social revolution, which was
centered on the popular realization of Soviet power”.
Rosenberg: “If ‘coup’
is used conceptually to emphasize the sudden, swift and forceful manner in
which Bolshevik leaders seized state institutions on 25 October, clearly
October was a coup d’etat whether or not it had popular support. But in
so far as ‘coup’ connotes the ‘usurpation’ of power by a narrow band of
dedicated revolutionaries socially rooted in the radical intelligentsia, who
artificially cloaked their own political ambitions with a self-styled defence
of popular interests, as the notion is now frequently deployed, the essential
linkages between Russia’s revolution and October are lost, along with its world
historical meaning…the notion of the party as a disciplined conspiratorial
block determined from the start to seize power is and has always been a
distorting caricature”.
Lynch: “His (Lenin’s)
objective had not been to win mass support but to create a party capable of
seizing power when the political circumstances permitted”.
Pipes: “Communism
thus did not come to Russia as a result of a popular uprising: it was imposed
on her from above by a small minority hiding behind democratic slogans”.
John Reed: “Instead of
being a destructive force, it seems to me that the Bolsheviki were the only
party in Russia with a constructive programme and the power to impose it on the
country. If they had not succeeded the Government when they did, there is
little doubt in my mind that the armies of imperial Germany would have been in
Petrograd and Moscow in December, and Russia would again be ridden by a Tsar”.
Suny: “The Bolsheviks
came to power, not because they were superior manipulators or cynical
opportunists, but because their policies, as formulated by Lenin in April and
shaped by the events of the following months, placed them at the head of a
genuinely popular movement”.
Ulam: “Except for
the workers at some factories there was no pro-Bolshevik enthusiasm in the
population, only apathy”.
Pipes: “ The
Russian Revolution was made neither by the forces of nature nor the anonymous
masses but by identifiable men pursuing their own advantages”.
Acton: “To stress
the Party’s responsiveness to pressures from below is not to deny the
significance of the lead given by Lenin. His prestige within the Party was
enormous; his pre-eminence among the leaders was manifest; his ability to
combine theory and practice, to bring a Marxist analysis of the class struggle
to bear upon choices confronting the Party, was unique. Clearly his personal
radicalism played an important part in ensuring that the Party he had done so
much to create responded so readily to mass radicalism…whereby in April
conditional support for the Provisional Government was withdrawn in favour of
outright opposition, reflected rank-and-file radicalism as much as Lenin’s
personal authority”.
Rosenberg: “Bolshevik
strength grew not only because of the party’s relative organizational strength,
but also because of the explanatory content of party views and programs…The
complementary tasks of proletarian social and Bolshevik political revolution
thus coalesced; so too did workers and party “professionals” in a period of
increasingly economic privation and social polarization, when the Bolsheviks
(and others) could provide most workers with seemingly clear ideas of an
alternative, socialist, mode of production”.
Service: “…the
revolutionary transformation was not monopolized by the political elites but
also involved the masses acting in their own interests and through their own
organisations…The masses had not taken leave of their senses. War, economic
dislocation and administrative breakdown meant that their everyday needs were
not being met. The sole alternative was for the people to preside over their
own affairs; and as the situation worsened, so the workers, soldiers, and
peasants took to direct political action. The Bolshevik party had the slogans
that most nearly corresponded to their wishes. And so the Leninist seizure of
power was an easy task: the masses had already completed most of the job for
the Bolsheviks”.
Rabinowitch: “One can
certainly understand why the Mensheviks and SRs reacted the way they did. At
the same time, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that by totally
repudiating the actions of the Bolsheviks and of the workers and soldiers who
willingly followed them, and, even more, by pulling out of the congress, the
moderate socialists undercut efforts at compromise by the
Menshevik-Internationalists, the Left SRs, and the Bolshevik moderates”.
J.P. Nettl: “A similar
coup d’etat could have been undertaken by the other revolutionary parties,
particularly the Socialist Revolutionaries – if their leadership had been more
determined…the determination of Lenin and Trotsky was something of an
historical accident. The Bolshevik survival has deeper social significance”.
Smith: “The
October seizure of power generated an exhilarating sense that a new world was
in the offing where justice and equality would triumph over arbitrariness and
exploitation, where the power of nature would be harnessed to ensure plenty for
all”.
Service: “Yet what
also needs to be understood is that the congruence between Bolshevik policies
and mass aspirations was never tight and always doomed”.
A.J.P. Taylor: “The
Bolshevik revolution was not a fully orchestrated piece with the music already
composed. It was compounded, like most other events, of confusions and
misunderstandings, of human endeavours and human failures, where the outcome
surprised the victors as much as it stunned the defeated”.
Pipes: “As late as
January 1917, when he was in exile in Switzerland, Lenin predicted that he and
his generation would not live to see a revolution in Russia. This he said seven
weeks before tsarism collapsed. If there was anyone in Europe who understood
the weaknesses of tsarist Russia it was Lenin, and yet even he did not foresee
its imminent demise” Three Whys of the Russian Revolution
Pipes: “Some
historians who argue the inevitability of the collapse of tsarism point for
proof to the extraordinary number of industrial strikes that occurred in Russia
on the eve of the First World War. This argument, however, cannot withstand
scrutiny. While, indeed, there was an unprecedented number of strikes in Russia
at that time, exactly the same phenomenon occurred in England and the United
States. Both of these countries experienced a surge of industrial stoppages on
the eve of August 1914, and yet neither had a revolution. Industrial action is
rarely political in motivation and, therefore, hardly reliable system of a
regime’s imminent collapse” Three Whys of the Russian Revolution
Pipes: “all power
was concentrated in the Crown. The lines of authority ran from the top down;
there were hardly any lateral lines. The fact that the wires were concentrated
in the hands of the Crown and its staff meant that in q time of crisis the
state would instantly disintegrate; for once the monarchy went, these wires
snapped and there was nothing left to hold the country together” Three Whys
of the Russian Revolution
Pipes: “while, in
Germany society, the force ‘below’ stepped in to fill the temporary vacuum; in
Russia, when there was nothing at the top, there was nothing below either. Only
another authoritarian regime, imposed from above, could restore a semblance of
order” Three Whys of the Russian Revolution
Pipes: “People who
come into power with plans of grand reforms as a rule quickly realise, if able
to test those plan, that ingrained habits and vested interests set limits to
what they can accomplish...ideas which looked good on paper can be next to
impossible to implement, no matter how noble the intention. But if ambitious
would-be reformers lack the opportunity to learn from experience, they not only
adhere to their utopian ideals but become ever more fanatically committed to
them, certain that, with sufficient determination and force, they should be
able to make them work” Three Whys of the Russian Revolution
Pipes: “unrelenting
hostility between the government and the political opposition was the prime
immediate cause of the regime’s collapse. The government, driven against the
wall, made concession after concession, and yet nothing was enough because the
liberals and radicals were sharpening weapons for the coup de grace” Three
Whys of the Russian Revolution
Pipes: “Russians
found it difficult to accept that they had been bested in a fair fight by a
superior force; the loss had to be due to a treason. And, as misfortune would
want it, the wife of the tsar was a German- a very patriotic lady, devoted to
Russia, but nevertheless widely believed to be a spy who betrayed…[these] were
a tissue of lies concocted by politicians willing to use any tool to embarrass
the government. The animosity towards the Crown brought into being an
unprecedented alliance of radicals and liberals, who hated it on principle,
with conservative nationalises, who acted out of dismay over the alleged
betrayal of Russia to the Germany enemy. This coalition left the government
friendless and defenceless. ” Three Whys of the Russian Revolution
Pipes: “It is a
mistake to attribute the February Revolution to fatigue with the war. The
contrary is true. Russians wanted to pursue the war more effectively, and they
felt that the existing government was not capable of doing it, that existing
political structures were in need of a major overhaul...Fatigue with the war
set in only after the unsuccessful June 1917 offensive launched by the
Provisional Government to bolster its prestige and lift national morale. Until
then, even Bolsheviks did not dare to openly call for peace because it was a
highly unpopular slogan” Three Whys of the Russian Revolution
Pipes: “being a
devoted Russian patriot and loyal ally...he abdicated...put of pure
patriotism...[there is] not a slightest doubt that he faced no popular
pressures to abdicate; the pressure stemmed exclusively from the ranks of
politicians and generals who thought the Crown’s removal essential to victory.
The fact that the tsar’s abdication had opposite effect of that intended tells
nothing of his motives in so doing” Three Whys of the Russian Revolution
Pipes: “For
humankind at large Lenin had nothing but scorn” The Unknown Lenin
Pipes: “There was
nothing preordained about either the fall of tsarism or the Bolshevik power
seizure. In fact…the latter was something of a fluke, but that, once it
occurred and the totalitarian machine was in place, then the rise of Stalin
became virtually a foregone conclusion.” Three Whys of the Russian
Revolution
Pipes: “a classic
coup d’etat, rather than a popular revolution, and the Bolshevik’s victory was
attributed not to their popular support but to their superior organisation and
greater ruthlessness.” Three Whys of the Russian Revolution
Pipes: “he did not
care about Russia. He cared about Germany and England in the sense that, for
him, as a revolutionary, they were the key countries. Russia he viewed as
nothing more than a stepping-stone to global upheaval; a backward country,
populated mainly by an uncouth rural ‘petty bourgeoisie’ in the shape of self sufficient
‘middle’ peasants and ‘kulaks’. Such a country could not make a world
revolution: at best, it could serve as a spark that would set off the power-keg
abroad. In his view, Russia was the weak link in the chain of world
imperialism, the snapping of which would unleash upheavals in the heart of
Europe.” Three Whys of the Russian Revolution
Pipes: “a
classical modern coup d’etat accomplished without mass support. It was a
surreptitious seizure of the nerve centres of the modern state, carried out under
false slogans in order to neutralize the population at large, the true purpose
of which was revealed only after the new claimants to power were firmly in
saddle.” Three Whys of the Russian Revolution
Reed:
“Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob, loved and revered as perhaps few
leaders in history have been. A strange popular leader- a leader purely by
virtue of intellect; colourless, humourless, uncompromising and detached,
without picturesque idiosyncrasies- but with the power of explaining profound
ideas in simple terms, of analysing a concrete situation. And combined with
shrewdness, the greatest intellectual audacity.” Ten Days That Shook the
World
Reed: “Bolsheviki
ahead, irresistible, overriding hesitation and opposition- the only people in
Russia who had a definite programme of action while the others talked for eight
long months” Ten Days That Shook the World
Reed: “If the
masses all over Russia had not been ready for insurrection it must have failed.
The only reason for Bolshevik success lay in their accomplishing the cast and
simple desires of the most profound strata of the people, calling them to the
work of tearing down and destroying the old, and afterwards, in the smoke of
falling ruins, cooperating with them to erect the framework of the new…” Ten
Days That Shook the World
Service: “The
[November] Revolution has often and widely been held to have been mainly
Lenin’s revolution. But was it? Certainly Lenin had a heavier impact on the
course than anyone else. The point is, however, that great historical changed
are brought about not only by individuals. There were other mighty factors at
work as well in Russian in 1917…Lenin could not have done of even co-ordinated
everything”
Figes: “There was
no ‘private Lenin’ behind the public mask. He gave all of himself to politics.
He rarely showed emotion, he had few intimates, and everything he ever said or
wrote was intended only for the revolutionary cause. This was not a man but a
political machine. Lenin’s personal life was extraordinarily dull…He did not
smoke, he did not really drink, and apart from his affair with the beautiful
Inessa Armand, he was not even interested in women. Krupskaya called him
‘Ilich’, his nickname in the party, and he called her ‘comrade’. She was more
like his secretary than his wife…Lenin lived for the revolution.” The Sunday
Times, March 2000
Harrison
Salisbury: Legend has
invested the events of October with heroic stature. They are presented as an
epic tapestry across which move figures possessing dimensions greater than
life. Above them towers the commanding presence of Lenin, the leader, the
master strategist, all wise, armed with the guiding truth of Marx, organising
and directing the strategy and tactics of the supreme revolution. Lenin
triumphs against the colossal strength of Russia's capitalist-feudal society,
he thwarts false prophets, he confounds enemies within the ranks of his own
party and emerges as the tribune of his people, the saviour of humanity.
The picture has been painted many times, and not only by the eulogists of the Lenin cult. The Bolshevik Revolution, as many insist on calling it, proved to be a watershed in contemporary history... It is natural to expect so germinal an event to be presented on an Olympian stage. Natural - but in the case of Russia's October, totally mistaken. [They were] encumbered by trivia, petty rivalry, miscalculation, hesitation, ineptitude, posturing and mistakes. Almost nothing was planned and what did happen was often accidental. The Bolsheviks did not seize power in one bold clandestine move. They blundered into power, divided, fighting against each other, and until the final moments Lenin had only an occasional role in what happened. Kerensky and his government were not crushed by the steel power of valiant revolutionaries. He and his supporters skedaddled off the political stage.
The picture has been painted many times, and not only by the eulogists of the Lenin cult. The Bolshevik Revolution, as many insist on calling it, proved to be a watershed in contemporary history... It is natural to expect so germinal an event to be presented on an Olympian stage. Natural - but in the case of Russia's October, totally mistaken. [They were] encumbered by trivia, petty rivalry, miscalculation, hesitation, ineptitude, posturing and mistakes. Almost nothing was planned and what did happen was often accidental. The Bolsheviks did not seize power in one bold clandestine move. They blundered into power, divided, fighting against each other, and until the final moments Lenin had only an occasional role in what happened. Kerensky and his government were not crushed by the steel power of valiant revolutionaries. He and his supporters skedaddled off the political stage.
Russian Revolution: Historians’ Quotes about Lenin's Consolidation of Power
John Reed: “So plunged
the Bolsheviki ahead, irresistible, overriding hesitation and opposition – the
only people in Russia who had a definite programme of action while the others
talked for eight long months”.
Pipes: “The system
of legislation the Bolsheviks set in place within two weeks of the October
coup, for all its revolutionary rhetoric, marked a reversion to the autocratic
practices of tsarist Russia before the October Manifesto of October 17, 1905.
They simply wiped out the eleven intervening years of constitutionalism”.
John Reed: “Not by
compromise with the propertied classes, or with other political leaders; not by
conciliating the old Government mechanism, did the Bolsheviki conquer the
power. Nor by the organized violence of a small clique. If the masses all over
Russia had not been ready for insurrection it must have failed. The only reason
for the Bolshevik success lay in their accomplishing the vast and simple
desires of the most profound strata of the people, calling them to the work of
tearing down and destroying the old, and afterwards, in the smoke of falling
ruins, cooperating with them to erect the framework of the new”.
Rosenberg: “One of the
most salient features of revolutionary Russia in the eight months or so after
October 1917 is that nothing seemed to have changed for the better. This
realization, and the even more precarious, uncertain conditions that soon
emerged, disturbed and angered broad groups of workers”.
Volkogonov: “Of course
a regime subjected at its inception to the pressures of a civil war such as
that faced by the Bolsheviks will seek and find rationalisations for its harsh
policies. The question is, how clearly did Lenin and his followers distinguish,
in their own minds, between the force and coercion required to combat their
armed enemies, and that which they used against their purely political foes,
real and potential? The promise to create a new society without oppression,
police rule and terror…was swallowed up by the imperatives of Bolshevik
survival and never retrieved”.
Pipes: “The
machine gun became for them the principle instrument of political
persuasion…and they could use it with impunity” (on the closing of the
Constituent Assembly).
Rosenberg: “At the
risk of emphasizing the obvious, let me stress, first the importance of
remembering that whereas the Bolsheviks came to power reflecting politically
the perceived interests and will of a great number of Russia’s fifteen to
eighteen million workers, they did so only as part of a vast social upheaval
over which they had, in fact, very little control…the overthrow of the old
order involved, simultaneously, a massive, and ultimately for the Bolsheviks,
problematic assault on a wide array of social relationships and values that
reflected Russia’s social institutions”.
Volkogonov: “…Lenin
wanted earthly happiness for the people, at least those he called ‘the
proletariat’. But he regarded it as normal to build this ‘happiness’ on blood,
coercion and the denial of freedom”.
Lynch: “It is doubtful whether,
even without that threat (to the
Bolsheviks survival) Bolshevism
could have developed other than as an oppressive system. Its dogmatic Marxist
creed made it as intolerant of other political creeds as tsardom had been”.
Hill: “The
attempt to overthrow the Bolsheviks after the revolution produced cruelties
indeed; but the revolutionary process abolished a regime of despair and created
a new world of hope”.
Trotsky: “The
execution of the Tsar and his family was needed not only to frighten, horrify
and instil a sense of hopelessness in the enemy, but also to shake up our own
ranks, to show that there was no retreating, that ahead lay total victory or
total doom”.
Figes: “It (the
murder of the Romanov family) was a declaration of the Terror. It was a
statement that from now on individuals would count for nothing in the civil
war”.
Pipes: “…the ‘Red
Terror’ was not a reluctant response the actions of others but a prophylactic
measure designed to nip in the bud any thoughts of resistance to the
dictatorship”.
Volkogonov: “Threatened
by danger, the Bolsheviks resorted to the most repugnant means of saving their
state, mass terror against their own people. They kept Lenin’s promise to turn
the imperialist war into a civil war”.
Smith: “The belief
that the end justified the means served them well, blinding them to the way in
which means corrupt ends”.
Figes:
- “The Bolshevik Terror came up from the depths. It started as a social revolution, a means for the lower classes to exact their own bloody revenge on their former masters and class enemies”.
- “The Red Terror did not come out of the blue. It was implicit in the regime from the start…The Bolsheviks were forced to turn increasingly to terror to silence their political critics and subjugate a society they could not control by other means”.
- “Under Lenin’s regime – not Stalin’s – the Cheka was to become a vast police state. It had its own leviathan infrastructure, from house committees to the concentration camps, employing more than a quarter of a million people”.
J.P. Nettl: “The
machinery of counter-terror and repression grew piecemeal but rapidly from each
challenge to Bolshevik authority”.
Service: “Lenin,
Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky believed that over-killing was better than running the
risk of being overthrown”.
Volkogonov:
- “The leaders of the revolution had become priests of terror”.
- “Lenin himself was the patron saint of the Cheka”.
- “As during the French Revolution the knife of the guillotine ceaselessly reaped its doleful harvest, so now the Cheka gunned its way through the population.”
- “Like the sound of a bolt being shot, the two syllables, Che-ka, would stop any conversation”.
- “The guillotine of the Russian Revolution was the gun”.
Smith: “…it is the
Bolsheviks’ incapacity to realise their ends, their blindness rather than their
vision, that is striking. After they came to power, they faced a huge range of
problems for which Marxism-Leninism left them ill-equipped…Policy, therefore,
was frequently the outcome of improvisation and pragmatism as much as of the
hallowed tenets of ideology. In other words, the relationship between belief
and action was complex, influenced by a far larger range of factors”.
Volkogonov: “Having
seized power, he (Lenin) shrugged off the cape of Social Democrat and
donned the cloak of the Jacobin. All his attitudes were now conditioned by one
consideration: to cling to power at any cost”.
Pipes: “Their
irresponsibility was nowhere more evident than in their obstinate attempts to
introduce a money-less economy” (on induced hyper-inflation during War
Communism).
Figes: “…War
Communism was not just a response to the civil war; it was also a means
of making civil war…the policies of War Communism were seen by the
Bolsheviks as an instrument of struggle against their social or ‘internal’
enemies”.
Volkogonov: “Lenin
apparently never asked himself why, before 1921, the Bolsheviks were incapable
of giving the people anything but chaos, civil war, hunger and terror. The fact
is, the Bolsheviks had achieved their goal: the Party had power”.
Nove: “In
interpreting the events of 1917-21, it is important to bear in mind the
following. Firstly, there was a good deal of anarchy, of sheer elemental chaos,
in the situation of Russia in those years. Orders by the centre might be
obeyed, but quite probably the local authorities, even if communist-controlled,
pleased themselves. Orders were in any case all too often confused and
contradictory, though sheer inexperience or because the civil service machine
was all too effectively smashed…Therefore much that happened was not due to
central orders at all, and many of these orders were due to desperate efforts
to cope with confusion and anarchy”.
History of
the CPSU (b.) short-course: “War Communism had been an attempt to
take the fortress of the capitalist elements in town and countryside by
assault, by a frontal attack. In this offensive the Party had gone too far
ahead, and ran the risk of being cut off from its base. Now Lenin proposed to
retire a little, to retreat for a while nearer to the base, to change from an
assault of the fortress to the slower method of siege, so as to gather strength
and resume the offensive”.
Volkogonov: “It seem
unlikely that the Bolsheviks gave any thought to the fact that giving promise
while in opposition is a different thing from fulfilling it in government. On
every point - peace, land, liberty, Constituent Assembly, freedom of the press
and all the rest – their promises rapidly changed into coercion, limitation,
alteration, a different ‘reading’ or an outright denial. Even the land, which
they did give, they made undesirable by confiscating everything it produced”.
Figes: “Half a
million Red Army soldiers joined the Bolshevik Party during the civil war.
These were the missionaries of the revolution. They carried Bolshevism, its
ideas and its methods, back to their own towns and villages, where they flooded
into the Soviet institutions during the early 1920s. The whole Soviet apparatus
was thus militarized…The success of the Red Army increasingly led to the
application of military methods throughout the Soviet system. Nothing did more
to shape the ruling attitudes of the Bolsheviks than the experience of the
civil war…The Bolshevism that emerged from the civil war viewed itself as a
crusading brotherhood of comrades in arms, conquering Russia and the world with
a red pencil in one hand and a gun in the other”.
Service: “In
particular, he [Lenin] had little foresight about what he was doing when he set
up the centralised one-party state. One of the great malignancies of the 20th
century was created more by off-the –cuff measures than by grandiose planning.”
Service: “…how new
was the world being built by Lenin and Sovnarkom? The RSFSR had facets
reminiscent of the tsarist order at its worst. Central power was being asserted
in an authoritarian fashion. Ideological intolerance was being asserted and
organised dissent repressed. Elective principles were being trampled under
foot”.
Lynch: “1917 did
not mark a complete break with the past. Rather it was the replacement of
one form of state-authoritarianism with another”.
Figes: “There was
no master plan. When the Bolsheviks came to power they had no set idea – other
than the general urge to control and centralize – of how to structure the
institutional relationships between the party and the Soviets…Only during the
civil war, when they stressed the need for strict centralized control to
mobilize the resources of the country, did the Bolsheviks plan the general
structure of the party-state”.
Pipes: “So
unnatural were the new conditions, they so outraged common sense and decency,
that the vast majority of the population viewed the regime responsible for them
as a terrible and inexplicable cataclysm which could not be resisted but had to
be endured until it would vanish as suddenly and as inextricably as it had
come”.
Smith: “The
Bolshevik revolution wrought calamity on a scale commensurate with the
transformation in the human condition it sought to achieve. Measured by the
benchmarks of contemporary politics, Bolshevik ambition leaves us reeling. But
it is easier for us today to appreciate the illusions under which they laboured
than the ideals they sought to achieve. Yet we shall never understand the
Russian Revolution unless we appreciate that the Bolsheviks were fundamentally
driven by outrage against the exploitation at the heart of capitalism and the
aggressive nationalism that had led Europe into the carnage of the First World
War. The hideous inhumanities that resulted from the revolution, culminating in
Stalinism, should not obscure that fact that millions welcomed the revolution
as the harbinger of social justice and freedom”.
Service: “The soviet
order was extremely disorderly for a great deal of the time. Yet the movement
towards a centralised, ideocratic dictatorship of a single party had been
started. Neither Lenin nor his leading comrades had expressly intended this;
they had few clearly elaborated policies and were forever fumbling and
improvising. Constantly they found international, political, economic, social
and cultural difficulties less tractable than they assumed. And constantly they
dipped into their rag-bag of authoritarian concepts to help them survive in
power…and they felt that the ruthless measures were being applied in the
service of a supreme good”.
Volkogonov: “The
Russian revolutionaries, including Lenin, rightly exposed the age-old evils of
human existence, the exploitation, inequality, lack of freedom. But having
acquired the opportunity to abolish these evils, the Leninists established a new,
barley disguised form of exploitation to be carried out by the state…In the
last analysis, the Leninist promise of great progress turned into great
backwardness”.
Service: “The basic
compound of the Soviet order had been invented by Lenin and his fellow
communist leaders within a couple of years of the October Revolution. There had
been created a centralized, one-ideology dictatorship of a single party which
permitted no challenge to its monopoly of power…Civil war had added to the
pressures which had resulted in the creation of the compound. On taking power
in 1917, the communist leaders had not possessed a preparatory blueprint.
Nevertheless they had come with assumptions and inclinations which had
predisposed them towards a high degree of state economic dominance,
administrative arbitrariness, ideological intolerance and political violence”.
Volkogonov: “Dogma
deprived the Bolsheviks of common sense”.
Pipes: “The
Bolsheviks ceased to be utopians when, once and for all it had become obvious
the ideal was unattainable, they persisted in the attempt by resorting to
unrestrained violence”.
Service: “Despite
all the problems, the Soviet regime retained a vision of political, economic
and cultural betterment. Many former army conscripts and would-be university
students responded enthusiastically. Many parents, too, could remember the
social oppressiveness of the pre-revolutionary tsarist regime and gave a
welcome to the Bolshevik party’s projects for literacy, numeracy, cultural
awareness and administrative facility”.
Figes: “The
Russian Revolution launched a vast experiment in social engineering – perhaps
the grandest in the history of mankind…The experiment went horribly wrong, not
so much because of the malice of its leaders, most of whom had started out with
the highest of ideals, but because their ideals were themselves impossible”.
Volkogonov: “…despite
the fact that millions of honest people, led by the ‘vanguard of the
revolution’, laboured for it, the utopia remained a fairy-tale”.
Fitzpatrick: “Communists
of the 1920s were afraid of class enemies, intolerant of cultural pluralism and
uneasy about the lack of unity in the party leadership and the loss of a sense
of direction and purpose. They wanted their revolution to transform the world,
but it was very clear during the NEP how much of the old world had
survived…Many rank-and-file Communists and sympathizers, especially among the
young, were becoming disillusioned, inclined to believe that the revolution had
reached an impasse…It was a mood of restlessness, dissatisfaction, and barely
subdued belligerence and, especially among the party youth, nostalgia for the
old heroic days of the Civil War”.
Figes: “…the fact
remained that within the village the Bolsheviks were without real authority.
This was the root failure of the NEP. Unable to govern the countryside by
peaceable means, the Bolsheviks resorted to terrorizing it, ending up in
collectivization. The events of 1918-21 had left a deep scar on peasant-state
relations. Although the civil war between them had come to an end, the two
sides faced each other with deep suspicion and mistrust during the uneasy truce
of the 1920s…Militant Bolsheviks were increasingly afraid that the revolution
would degenerate, that it would sink in the ‘kulak’ mud, unless a new civil war
was launched to subjugate the village to the town. Here were the roots of
Stalin’s civil war against the village, the civil war of collectivization.
Without the means to govern the village, let alone transform it on socialist lines,
the Bolsheviks sought to abolish it instead”.
Service: “Most
Bolshevik leaders had never liked the NEP, regarding it as an excrescent boil
on the body politic and at worst a malignant cancer”.
Figes: “Having
defeated the Whites, who were backed up by no fewer than eight western powers,
the Bolsheviks surrendered to the peasantry” (on the NEP).
Fitzpatrick: “…the Right
was promising much less in the way of achievement than Stalin; and the party in
the late 1920s was hungry for achievement, and it did not have our
retrospective knowledge of what it was going to cost. The Right, after all, was
promising a moderate, small-gains, low conflict programme to a party that was
belligerently revolutionary, felt itself threatened by an array of foreign and
domestic enemies, and continued to believe that society could and should be
transformed”.
Service: “Bolshevik
leaders, unlike tsars, strove to identify themselves with ordinary
people…central party leaders tried to present themselves as ordinary blokes
with un-flamboyant tastes…interest in fine clothes, furniture or interior décor
was treated as downright reactionary. A roughness of comportment, speech and
dress was fostered”.
Lynch: “Trotsky
never had control of the political system as it operated in Soviet Russia.
Politics is the art of the possible. After 1924 all the possibilities belonged
to Stalin.”
John Reed: “He’s not
an intellectual like the other people you will meet…but he know what he wants.
He’s got willpower, and he’s going to be top of the pile some day” (on
Stalin, 1919).
Lynch: “The grey
blur was about to become the Red tsar” (on Stalin’s defeat of the Left and
then the Right during the 1920s).
Ward: “Trotsky
and Bukharin might win the argument, but Stalin invariably won the vote”.
E.H. Carr: “A triumph
not of reason, but of organisation” (on Stalin’s rise to power).
Deutscher: “It seemed
to Trotsky almost a bad joke that Stalin, the wilful and sly but shabby and
inarticulate man in the background should be his rival”.
Figes: “On the one
hand it seems clear that the basic elements of the Stalinist regime – the
one-party state, the system of terror and the cult of personality – were all in
place by 1924. The party apparatus was, for the most part, an obedient tool in
Stalin’s hands. The majority of its provincial bosses had been appointed by
Stalin himself, as the head of the Orgburo, in the civil war. They shared his plebeian hatred for the specialist and the intelligentsia, were moved by his
rhetoric of proletarian solidarity and Russian nationalism, and on most
questions of ideology were willing to defer to their Great Leader. After all,
they were the former subjects of the tsars…On the other hand, there were
fundamental differences between Lenin’s regime and that of Stalin. Fewer people
were murdered for a start. And, despite the ban on factions, the party still
made room for comradely debate”.
Pipes: “once...the
totalitarian machine was in place, then the rise of Stalin became virtually a
foregone conclusion” Three Whys of the Revolution
Pipes: “uni-linear
explanation of historical phenomena like the Marxist one s bound to be false,
and can be sustained only by ignoring events that do not fit the class interpretation”
Three Whys of the Revolution
Pipes: “Continuity
was facilitated by the fact that a high percentage of Soviet administrative
posts were staged by ex-tsarist functionaries, who brought with them and
communicated to Communist newcomers habits acquired in the tsarist services”
Three Whys of the Revolution
Fitzpatrick: “forthright
about their own use of terror...and they took pride in being tough-minded about
violence” The Russian Revolution
Fitzpatrick: “did not see
any parallel to the Tsarist secret police, though Western historians have often
drawn one. The Cheka, in fact, operated much more openly and violently than the
old police” The Russian Revolution
The USSR under Stalin: 1928-32
Lynch:
“Essentially the Plan was a huge propaganda project which aimed at convincing
the Soviet people that they were engaged in vast industrial enterprise of their
own making” (on the First Five-Year Plan).
Fitzpatrick: “…Moscow’s
central politicians and planners were clearly in the grip of ‘gigantomania’,
the obsession with hugeness. The Soviet Union must build more and produce more
than any other country. Its plants must not only catch up with the West in
economic development, but surpass it”.
J.P. Nettl: “The real
significance of the second revolution of 1928-30 was not so much in what it
achieved, as in the radical change in the manner of achieving it”.
Fitzpatrick: “The winter
of 1929-30 was a time of frenzy, when the party’s apocalyptic mood and wildly
revolutionary rhetoric did indeed recall that of an earlier ‘heroic period’ –
the desperate climax of the Civil War and War Communism in 1920”
History of
the CPSU (b.) short-course: “History had never known industrial
construction on such a gigantic scale, such enthusiasm for new development,
such labour heroism on the part of the working-class millions…It was a
veritable upsurge of labour enthusiasm, produced and stimulated by Socialist
emulation”.
Fitzpatrick: “Less like
an obedient functionary than a wheeling dealing entrepreneur, ready to cut
corners and seize an opportunity to out do his competitors” (on factory
managers during the 5 Year Plans).
Lynch: “He (Stalin)
stood Marxist theory in its head. Instead of the economy determining the
character of the political system, the political system would determine the
character of the economy”.
Fitzpatrick: “…Cultural
Revolution was an iconoclastic and belligerent youth movement, whose activists,
like the Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, were by no
means a docile tool of the party leadership…many of the initiatives taken in
the name of Cultural Revolution were spontaneous, they produced some unexpected
results”.
Service: “Many of
Stalin’s inclinations were shared by many Bolsheviks”.
Fitzpatrick: “The policy
of ‘promoting’ workers into administrative jobs and sending workers to higher
education was not new, but it had never been implemented with such urgency or
on such a massive scale as during the Cultural Revolution…For members of this
favoured group – ‘sons of the working class’, as they liked to call themselves
in later years – the Revolution had indeed fulfilled its promises to give power
to the proletariat and turn workers into masters of the state”.
Volkogonov:
- “Lenin had created a system which could only tolerate one leader at its summit”.
- “Leninist was eating Leninist, the system was remorselessly consuming its creators”
- “Lenin had transformed the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dictatorship of the Party, and Stalin went further by making the dictatorship of the Party into that of one man”.
- “Stalin finished building Lenin’s totalitarian pyramid”.
- “Stalin was indeed, as the slogan had it, ‘the Lenin of today’.”
- “None of us – the present author included – could begin to imagine that the father of domestic Russian terrorism, merciless and totalitarian, was Lenin”.
Service: “Lenin’s
ideas on violence, dictatorship, terror, centralism, hierarchy and leadership
were integral to Stalin’s thinking…It is hard to imagine Lenin, however,
carrying out a terror upon his own party”.
Shapiro: “The
purpose of the new cult was clear to all: if Lenin was Allah, then Stalin was
his prophet”.
Service: “…if Lenin
had not given him the map, Stalin would have never had the chance to select the
destination”.
Volkogonov: “The system
created by Lenin would have found its Stalin in any event. The country might
have been spared the monstrous experiments of Stalinism, but the one-party
‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would inevitably have led to an authoritarian
regime”.
Service: “The First
Five-Year Plan had intensified state authority beyond precedent. The Politburo
under Stalin decided every great aspect of policy in foreign affairs, security,
politics, administration, economy, science and the arts…yet somehow the peoples
of the USSR had resisted being pummeled into the shape prescribed by the
Kremlin”.
History of
the CPSU (b.) short-course: “The sum and substance of the
achievements of the First Five-Year Plan was that they had completely
emancipated the workers and peasants from exploitation and had opened the way
to a prosperous and cultured life for ALL working people in the
U.S.S.R”.
Volkogonov: “Collectivisation
is essentially a form of serfdom in the 20th century”.
Shapiro: “It (the
famine) was a salutary lesson to the peasants that resistance did not pay”.
Deutscher: “The first
purely man-made famine in history” (on the impact of collectivization).
History of
the CPSU (b.) short-course: “The Bolshevik Party had helped
millions of poor peasants to join the collective farms and to escape from
servitude to the kulaks. By joining the collective farms, and having the best
lands and the finest instruments of production at their disposal, millions of
poor peasants who had formerly lived in penury had now as collective farmers
risen to the level of middle peasants, and had attained material security”.
Ward: “What
happened between November 1929 and December 1931 cannot be grasped by merely
reciting statistics…a socio-economic system in existence for five hundred years
vanished forever”.
History of
the CPSU (b.) short-course: “Purging and consolidating its ranks,
destroying the enemies of the Party and relentlessly combating distortions of
the Party line, the Bolshevik Party rallied closer than ever around its Central
Committee under whose leadership the Party and the Soviet land now passed to a
new stage – the completion of the construction of a classless, Socialist
society”.
Service: “The
thought, practices and institutions of the Civil War had set precedents for the
horrors of the late 1930’s…Nonetheless the Great Terror would not have taken
place but for Stalin’s personality and ideas”.
Fitzpatrick: “The Great
Purges could not have snowballed as they did without popular participation.
Self-interested denunciations played a part, as did complaints against bosses
that were based on real grievances”.
Service: “The Jews
and Gypsies exterminated by Hitler knew that they were dying because they were
Jews and Gypsies. Stalin’s terror was more chaotic and confusing: thousands
went to their deaths shouting out their fervent loyalty to Stalin”.
Volkogonov: “To Stalin
the aim was supreme; the people meant nothing”.
Conquest: “He (Stalin)
carried out a revolution which completely transformed the Party and the whole
of society. Far more than the Bolshevik Revolution itself, this period marks
the major gulf between modern Russia and the past”.
History of
the CPSU (b.) short-course: “The rise in the standard of welfare
and culture of the masses was a reflection of the strength, might and
invincibility of our Soviet revolution. Revolutions in the past perished
because, while giving the people freedom, they were unable to bring about any
serious improvement in their material and cultural conditions. Therein lay
their chief weakness. Our revolution differs from all other revolutions in that
it not only freed the people from tsardom and capitalism, but also brought
about a radical improvement in the welfare and cultural condition of the
people. Therein lies its strength and invincibility”.
Service: “The
central authorities aimed at the total penetration of society…however, the
Soviet state found it difficult to achieve its goals…groups based on family,
wider kinship, friendship, leisure and a common culture were molecules
resistant to disintegration into separate atoms…control over people came
nearest to perfection in relation to two groups: those at the very bottom and
those at the very top. Camp inmates had no rights: their daily routine ensured
compliance with the instruction of their guards on pain of death. Politburo
members, too, lacked rights, and their physical proximity to Stalin necessitated
an unswerving obedience to the whim of the Leader…But in between there were
gradations of non-compliance which were possible and common…the entire
structure of public information, surveillance and enforcement was patchy. Such
a state and society were clearly not totalitarian if the epithet involves
totality in practice as well as intent…Totalitarianism as a term fails to
encapsulate the contradictions with this extremely nasty and orderly but also
extremely chaotic reality…But the goal was so ambitious that even its
half-completion was a dreadful achievement”.
Figes: “They were
not the victims of the revolution but protagonists in its tragedy…It was the
weakness of Russia’s democratic culture which enabled Bolshevism to take root.
This was the legacy of Russian history, of centuries of serfdom and autocratic
rule, that had kept the common people powerless and passive…To be sure, this
was a people’s tragedy but it was a tragedy they helped to make. The Russian
people were trapped by the tyranny of their own history…For while the people
could destroy the old system, they could not build a new one of their own…By
1921, if not earlier, the revolution had come full circle, and a new autocracy
had been imposed on Russia which in many ways resembled the old”.
Trotsky: “Nero too,
was a product of his epoch, yet after he perished his statues were smashed and
his name was scraped off everything. The vengeance of history is more terrible
than the most powerful General Secretary. I venture to think that this is consoling”
(on Stalin, 1947).
Stalin quotes
-We
think that a powerful and vigorous movement is impossible without
differences — "true conformity" is possible only in the cemetery.
LENIN Quotes
-A lie told often enough becomes the truth.
-A
revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation;
furthermore, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution.
-Any cook should be able to run the country.
-Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.
-Capitalists are no more capable of self-sacrifice than a man is capable of lifting himself up by his own bootstraps.
-Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.
-Crime is a product of social excess.
-Democracy is indispensable to socialism.
-Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.
-Fascism is capitalism in decay.
-Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.
-Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
-Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.
-If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.
-If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years.
-It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws.
-It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.
-No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.
-One man with a gun can control 100 without one.
-Destroy the family, you destroy the country.
-The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into medium states and all-national isolation, not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them.
-Only an armed people can be the real bulwark of popular liberty.
-A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie.
-The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.
-The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
-...the concentration of capital and the growth of their turnover is radically challenging the significance of the banks. Scattered capitalists are transformed into a single collective capitalist. When carrying the current accounts of a few capitalists, the banks, as it were, transact a purely technical and exclusively auxiliary operation. When, however, these operations grow to enormous dimensions we find that a handful of monopolists control all the operations, both commercial and industrial, of capitalist society. They can, by means of their banking connections.
-It would be the greatest mistake, certainly, to think that concessions mean peace. Nothing of the kind. Concessions are nothing but a new form of war.
-All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all.
-While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.
-One of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers (Communist) and the disarming of the bourgeoisie (the middle class).
-...first ascertain exactly the position of the various capitalists, then control them, influence them by restricting or enlarging, facilitating or hindering their credits, and finally they can entirely determine their fate.
-Ideological talk and phrase mongering about political liberties should be disposed with; all that is just mere chatter and phrase mongering. We should get away from those phrases.
-We do not have time to play at “oppositions” at “conferences.” We will keep our political opponents... whether open or disguised as “nonparty,” in prison.
-The bourgeoisie is many times stronger than we. To give it the weapon of freedom of the press is to ease the enemy’s cause, to help the class enemy. We do not desire to end in suicide, so we will not do this.
-I don’t care what becomes of Russia. To hell with it. All this is only the road to a World Revolution.
-The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its currency.
-On Wilson's 14 Points: “landmark of enlightenment in international relations”
-Any cook should be able to run the country.
-Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.
-Capitalists are no more capable of self-sacrifice than a man is capable of lifting himself up by his own bootstraps.
-Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.
-Crime is a product of social excess.
-Democracy is indispensable to socialism.
-Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.
-Fascism is capitalism in decay.
-Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.
-Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
-Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.
-If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.
-If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years.
-It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws.
-It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.
-No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.
-One man with a gun can control 100 without one.
-Destroy the family, you destroy the country.
-The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into medium states and all-national isolation, not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them.
-Only an armed people can be the real bulwark of popular liberty.
-A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie.
-The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.
-The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
-...the concentration of capital and the growth of their turnover is radically challenging the significance of the banks. Scattered capitalists are transformed into a single collective capitalist. When carrying the current accounts of a few capitalists, the banks, as it were, transact a purely technical and exclusively auxiliary operation. When, however, these operations grow to enormous dimensions we find that a handful of monopolists control all the operations, both commercial and industrial, of capitalist society. They can, by means of their banking connections.
-It would be the greatest mistake, certainly, to think that concessions mean peace. Nothing of the kind. Concessions are nothing but a new form of war.
-All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all.
-While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.
-One of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers (Communist) and the disarming of the bourgeoisie (the middle class).
-...first ascertain exactly the position of the various capitalists, then control them, influence them by restricting or enlarging, facilitating or hindering their credits, and finally they can entirely determine their fate.
-Ideological talk and phrase mongering about political liberties should be disposed with; all that is just mere chatter and phrase mongering. We should get away from those phrases.
-We do not have time to play at “oppositions” at “conferences.” We will keep our political opponents... whether open or disguised as “nonparty,” in prison.
-The bourgeoisie is many times stronger than we. To give it the weapon of freedom of the press is to ease the enemy’s cause, to help the class enemy. We do not desire to end in suicide, so we will not do this.
-I don’t care what becomes of Russia. To hell with it. All this is only the road to a World Revolution.
-The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its currency.
-On Wilson's 14 Points: “landmark of enlightenment in international relations”
Stalin quotes
-Stalin after Nazi-Soviet pact: “We got peace for our country for 18 months, which let us make military preparations.”
-"Great Britain provided time; the United States provided money and Soviet Russia provided blood."
-Stalin after 1936 constitution: “Never
before - no, really never - has the world ever seen elections so
completely free, and so truly democratic! History has recorded no
other example of the kind."
-“Do you want our Socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose it is independence? We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.”
-“Do you want our Socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose it is independence? We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.”
-“USSR should overtake and outstrip the capitalist countries.”
-“Socialism in one country”
-“I believe in one thing only, the power of the human will”
-“Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem.”
-After Fulton Speech Stalin in Pravda 13 March 1946: “Mr. Churchill has called for a war on the USSR.”
-After Fulton Speech Stalin in Pravda 13 March 1946: “Mr. Churchill has called for a war on the USSR.”
-Stalin before his death: “the imperialistic powers will wring your necks like chickens.”
-If
any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a "peace
conference," you can be sure his government has already placed its
orders for new battleships and aeroplanes.
-A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.
-The press must grow day in and day out — it is our Party's sharpest and most powerful weapon.
-We
disagreed with Zinoviev and Kamenev because we knew that the
policy of amputation was fraught with great dangers for the Party,
that the method of amputation, the method of blood-letting — and
they demanded blood — was dangerous, infectious: today you amputate
one limb, tomorrow another, the day after tomorrow a third — what
will we have left in the Party?
-What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.
-If the opposition disarms, all is well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves.
-What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.
-If the opposition disarms, all is well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves.
-We do not want a single foot of foreign territory; but of our territory we shall not surrender a single inch to anyone.
-Anti-Semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism. Anti-Semitism is dangerous for the toilers, for it is a false track which diverts them from the proper road and leads them into the jungle. Hence, Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable and bitter enemies of anti-Semitism. In the U.S.S.R., anti-Semitism is strictly prosecuted as a phenomenon hostile to the Soviet system. According to the laws of the U.S.S.R. active anti-Semites are punished with death.
-Anti-Semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism. Anti-Semitism is dangerous for the toilers, for it is a false track which diverts them from the proper road and leads them into the jungle. Hence, Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable and bitter enemies of anti-Semitism. In the U.S.S.R., anti-Semitism is strictly prosecuted as a phenomenon hostile to the Soviet system. According to the laws of the U.S.S.R. active anti-Semites are punished with death.
-We
are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We
must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they
will crush us. (Speech "The Tasks of Economic Executives" (4
February 1931) at the beginning of the rapid industrialisation
campaign. Ten years later, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.)
-I
want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and
indifferent about the quality of food they eat. (Stalin describing his
aim to create
-Life has improved, comrades. Life has become more joyous.
-Mankind
is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited;
and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division, and from
the antagonism between poor and rich, means abstracting oneself
from fundamental facts.
-Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
-History shows that there are no invincible armies and that there never have been.
-Ours is a just cause; victory will be ours!
-Ours is a just cause; victory will be ours!
-Hitlers
come and go, but Germany and the German people remain. ("The Order #55
of the National Commissar for the Defence" (23 February 1942) when
the enemy had reached the gate of Moscow during World War II. He
called on the people not to identify all Germans with the Nazis.)
-This
leads to the conclusion, it is time to finish retreating. Not one
step back! Such should now be our main slogan. ... Henceforth the
solid law of discipline for each commander, Red Army soldier, and
commissar should be the requirement — not a single step back without
order from higher command. ("The Order of the National Commissar
for the Defence of the Soviet Union" (28 July 1942) Moscow)
-The writer is the engineer of the human soul.
-Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.
-Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.
-The writer is the engineer of the human soul.
-Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.
-Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.
-God's
not unjust, he doesn't actually exist. We've been deceived. If God
existed, he'd have made the world more just... I'll lend you a book
and you'll see.
-Before
your eyes rises the hero of Gogol's story who, in a fit of
aberration, imagined that he was the King of Spain. Such is the fate
of all megalomaniacs.
-This
creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last
warm feelings for humanity. (At the funeral of his first wife, Kato
Svanidze, on 25 November 1907)
-One
of Ivan the Terrible's mistakes was to overlook the five great
feudal families. If he had annihilated those five families, there
would definitely have been no Time of Troubles. But Ivan the Terrible
would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and
praying. God got in his way in this matter. He ought to have been
still more decisive!
-If,
against all expectation, Germany finds itself in a difficult
situation then she can be sure that the Soviet people will come to
Germany's aid and will not allow Germany to be strangled. The Soviet
Union wants to see a strong Germany and we will not allow Germany to
be thrown to the ground.
-This
war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also
imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system
as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise. If now there
is not a communist government in Paris, this is only because
Russia has no an army which can reach Paris in 1945.
-I
consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or
how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count
the votes, and how. [Variant (loose) translation: The people who
cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes
decide everything.]
-The
Pope! How many divisions has he got? [Said sarcastically to Pierre
Laval in 1935, in response to being asked whether he could do
anything with Russian Catholics to help Laval win favour with the
Pope, to counter the increasing threat of Nazism; as quoted in The
Second World War (1948) by Winston Churchill]
-So
the bastard's dead? Too bad we didn't capture him alive! [Said in April
1945 — On hearing of Hitler's suicide, as quoted in The Memoirs of
Georgy Zhukov]
-Does
Djilas, who is himself a writer, not know what human suffering and
the human heart are? Can't he understand it if a soldier who has
crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has
fun with a woman or takes some trifle? [In response to complaints
about the rapes and looting committed by the Red Army during the Second
World War
In the Soviet Army, it takes more courage to retreat than advance.]
-Tsar
Alexander reached Paris. [Said to an American diplomat who remarked how
grateful it must be to see Russian troops in Berlin.]
-I
know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my
grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away
without mercy. [Said to Molotov in 1943]
-God
is on your side? Is He a Conservative? The Devil's on my side, he's a
good Communist. [Said to Winston Churchill in Tehran, November 1943, as
quoted in Fallen Eagle: The Last Days of the Third Reich (1995) by
Robin Cross, p. 21]
-Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?
-There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot storm.
-Quantity has a quality all of its own.
-I'm finished. I trust no one, not even myself.
Stalin Historiography
The Liberal thinks that persons play a major part in history. Stalin as a person is interesting in
understanding the events, he took advantage of other persons weaknesses etc to build his personal
power.
The Structuralist believes that it is structures in society that will determine the actions of history. The
French revolution is caused by society, not by persons storming the Bastille.
The Determinist believes that there are actual “laws” determining the historical way that events will
take. If there are a number of factors present, then these factors will lead to that certain event. Their
approach is similar to a natural scientist’s, if you heat water it will boil, if you have population starving
in the cities you will have a revolution etc.
The Intentionalists examines the willing and desires of different persons or factors in society had.
Did Stalin intend for the Purges to take place or not? Are there any evidences for this. If one is an
intentionalist you are most likely to have an liberal perspective too.
The Revisionist is an historian who has revised the history out of any reason, it doesn’t necessarily
mean that they belong to a whole new school, it only means that they have a different opinion than
most other active historians coming from having revised the facts.
The Normative approach, means that we should use history as a warning example, there are dos
and dont's in history.
Check out Old IB History Exam Test Questions
