The Icon and the Axe

The victorious revolution brought with it a new tissue of ironies. It is ironic that a revolution begun by pure spontaneity in March, 1917, and defended by a wide coalition of democratic forces should be canceled out by a coup engineered by the smallest and most totalitarian of the opposition forces, and one which played almost no role in bringing tsardom to an end. It is ironic that communism came to power in the peasant East rather than the industrial West-and, above all, in the Russia which Marx and Engels particularly disliked and distrusted; and that the ideology which spoke so emphatically of economic determinism should be so completely dependent on visionary appeals and on the individual leadership of Lenin. It is ironic that the revolution in power should devour its own creators; and that many of the very first elements to lend genuine grass roots support to the Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg (the proletarian leaders of the "Workers Opposition" and the sailors of Kronstadt) were among the first to be brutally repudiated by the new regime for urging in 1920-1 substantially the same reforms which the Bolsheviks had encouraged them to demand four years before.

It is ironic that one of the most complete repudiations of democracy occurred at the very time when Russia was formally adopting the seemingly exemplary democratic constitution of 1936; ironic that the Stalinist war on the creative arts should occur at precisely the time when Russia was at the forefront of creative modernism; ironic that those organs of oppression that the people were least capable of influencing should be given the label "people's."

It is ironic that the USSR should succeed where most thought it would fail: m defeating the Germans and conquering outer space. It is perhaps most ironic of all that the Soviet leaders should fail in the area where almost everyone thought they would automatically succeed: in the indoctrination of their own youth. It is high irony that the post-war generation of Russians -the most privileged and indoctrinated of all Soviet generations, which was not even given the passing exposure to the outside world of those who fought in the war-should prove the most alienated of all from the official ethos of Communist society. There is the further irony of the Communist leaders' referring to youthful ferment as a "survival of the past," and the more familiar irony of partial reforms leading not to grateful quiescence but to increased agitation.

This remarkable situation is not without ironic meaning for the Western observer. Despite his formal, rhetorical belief in man's inherent longing for truth and freedom, Western man has been strangely reluctant to predict (and slow to admit) that such ideals would have any compelling appeal in the USSR. The tendency during the late years of the Khrushchev era to assume that evolutionary modification of despotism would continue without basic change represented the projection into the future of the trends of the immediate past. There was often also an implicit belief that the USSR (and perhaps also the United States) was evolving naturally toward a position somewhere between Stalinist totalitarianism and Western democracy." Such a balanced conclusion may, of course, be vindicated; but it would take all the cunning away from reason and represent an astonishing victory for the Aristotelian golden mean in a society that has never assimilated classical ideas of moderation and rationality.