The Thinking Reed

Legal Marxism in the USSR has come to the same conclusion as the Western Marxism personified in Deutscher, which was banned in our country. History has become politics. Soviet historians are confronted with a serious problem to which they continually address themselves in one way or another. On the one hand, morality in historical science means objectivity, impartiality. On the other, the position of someone who is looking at history from the standpoint of the interests of the future, thinking about the emancipation of society, cannot but be moral. Does the adjective ‘impartial’ apply to him? His is a ‘passionate’ [strastnaya] position — even, if you like, a ‘partial’ [pristrastnaya] one. The matter is further complicated by the fact that man, by his very nature, cannot be absolutely objective: in so far as he is an individual, he is a subjective being.

However, reality, which has set us this problem, has also created the conditions for solving it. In combating the official ideology, left-wing historians see their task as restoring historical truth. In this their partiality finds expression, their engagement — their ‘partisanship’ [partiynost], if you care to put it that way.

The problems of methodological principle were presented in Ya.S. Drabkin’s lecture on ‘Unsolved Problems in the Study of Social Revolutions’.107 The title speaks for itself. In a comparatively brief talk, Drabkin tried to formulate — or at least to enumerate — the fundamental problems which twentieth-century experience has set before Marxists (and, indeed, before all serious thinkers on social matters). On the plane of general theory this means: the problem of the dialectics of reform and revolution, which later confronted the Western Left — no less than the Soviet socialists — in a very acute form: the problem of ‘peaceful evolution’ from one mode of production to another — examples might be the transition to capitalism in Sweden, or the problem of the ‘socialist’ Thermidor.

All these are very serious problems — that is, of course, if they are to be solved not ‘ideologically’, disposed of with general phrases, but scientifically. As for Thermidor, this problem now arose for the first time for legal Soviet historiography. Drabkin recalled that Lenin did not deny the possibility of a Soviet Thermidor,108 but naturally the lecturer left the question open. Of course, all these important problems could be examined in the lecture only in an extremely abstract way, on the plane of general methodology, deliberately ‘without coming to any conclusions’. Besides, Drabkin could not have given any answers, even if he had them. The censorship allows (though not always) questions to be put, but disallows answers. Consequently, Drabkin considered that his task was merely to ‘focus attention on the most acute unsolved problems of research’.109

Nevertheless, it cannot be said that these problems remained totally unsolved. Discussion of the lecture gave rise to fresh debates, in which the participants got to grips with the conclusions to be drawn in principle. G.G. Diligensky concentrated on the subject of ‘Thermidor’. He declared that

neither the leading role of the working class in the revolutionary movement nor even the adoption by that movement of the programmatic principles of scientific socialism can guarantee, by themselves, that the aims of the movement will not become distorted.110

The only guarantee lies in conscious participation by the masses. And for that, ‘incidentally’, it is necessary that the masses themselves be capable of such conscious participation — that the country be ripe for revolution not only economically and politically but also socially and culturally. This consciousness (and of course, Diligensky meant by ‘consciousness’ not readiness for unquestioning submission but, on the contrary, capacity for independent action and decision-making) signifies that the working classes are mature and is the guarantee against utopianism, against descent by the revolution to totalitarian decisions, against a bureaucratic Thermidor: