A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

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. Trotsky and Bukharin argued passionately with each other about the strategy of the NEP — the former favoured squeezing the foodstuffs from the peasantry whenever the breakdown of the market system threatened to slow down industrialization, whereas Bukharin was prepared to allow a slower pace of industrialization so as to maintain a market-based relationship with the peasantry — but these were still intellectual debates, both men were supporters of the NEP, and, despite their differences, neither would have dreamt of using these debates as a pretext to murder one another or to send their opponents to Siberia. Only Stalin was capable of this. He alone saw that Trotsky and Bukharin had become so blinded by their own political debates and rivalry that he could use the one to destroy the other.

In this sense Stalin's personal role was itself the crucial factor — as was, by his absence, Lenin's role as well. If Lenin's final stroke had not prevented him from speaking at the Congress in 1923, Stalin's name today would occupy a place only in the footnotes of Russian history books. But that 'if was, if you will, in the hands of providence, and this is history not theology.

Conclusion

'I do not believe that in the twentieth century there is such a thing as a "betrayed people",' Gorky wrote to Romain Rolland in 1922. 'The idea of a "betrayed people" is nothing but a legend. Even in Africa there are only peoples not yet organized and therefore powerless politically.'¹ Gorky's view of the Russian Revolution denied that the people had been betrayed by it. Their revolutionary tragedy lay in the legacies of their own cultural backwardness rather than the evil of some 'alien' Bolsheviks. They were not the victims of the revolution but protagonists in its tragedy. This may be a painful lesson for the Russian people to learn at the end of the twentieth century. Seventy years of Communist oppression might well be thought to have earned them the right to see themselves as victims. But Russia's prospects as a democratic nation depend to a large extent on how far the Russians are able to confront their own recent history; and this must entail the recognition that, however much the people were oppressed by it, the Soviet system grew up in Russian soil. 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. 'And the people remained silent' was a Russian proverb — and it describes much of Russian history. To be sure, this was a people's tragedy but it was a tragedy which they helped to make. The Russian people were trapped by the tyranny of their own history.

'We are slaves because we are unable to free ourselves,' Herzen once wrote. If there was one lesson to be drawn from the Russian Revolution it was that the people had failed to emancipate themselves. They had failed to become their own political masters, to free themselves from emperors and become citizens. Kerensky's speech of 1917, in which he claimed that the Russian people were perhaps no more than 'rebellious slaves', was to haunt the revolution in succeeding years. For while the people could destroy the old system, they could not rebuild a new one of their own. None of the democratic organizations established before October 1917 survived more than a few years of Bolshevik rule, at least not in their democratic form. 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 one.