A people's tragedy

‘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.

To explain this failure of democracy one must go back into Russian history. Centuries of serfdom and autocratic rule had prevented the ordinary people from acquiring the consciousness of citizens. One can draw a direct line from this serf culture to the despotism of the Bolsheviks. The abstract concept of the ‘political nation’, of a constitutional structure of civic rights, which had underpinned the French Revolution, remained largely alien to the Russian peasantry, confined in their isolated village worlds. The popular notion of power in Russia continued to be articulated in terms of coercive domination and quasi-religious authority derived from the traditions of serfdom and autocracy rather than in terms of a modern law-based state distributing rights and duties between citizens. The everyday power that the peasant knew — the power of the gentry captain and the police — was arbitrary and violent. To defend himself from this despotism he relied not on appeals to legal rights — indeed he replicated this despotic violence in his brutal treatment of his wife and children — but on the evasion of officialdom. Power for the peasant meant autonomy — it meant freedom from the state — which in itself was almost bound to give rise to a new coercive state, not least because the effect of this anarchic striving was to make the village virtually ungovernable. Indeed there were times in 1917 when the peasants themselves called for a ‘master’s hand’, a ‘popular autocracy’ of the Soviets, to bring order to the revolutionary village.2 The anarchism of the peasant was often wrapped in a cocoon of authoritarianism. Russian culture was one in which power was conceived not in terms of law but in terms of coercion and hegemony. It was a question of masters and men, of which side would prevail and dominate the other. Lenin once described it as ‘who whom?’ In this sense the revolution was the ‘serfs’ revenge’, as Prince Lvov put it in the violent summer of 1917, and it led to the mass terror of the civil war.