The Thinking Reed

A complex combination of factors: scientific and technological progress, new social experience by the masses, their increased education and culture, the decrease in the former social and cultural isolation of the working classes — all this has reduced the susceptibility of the ordinary person to a number of social illusions. The masses are no longer satisfied with mere promises, with more or less vague depictions of a happy life in the future. They more and more insistently demand rational, logical, convincing means of solving concrete problems. And the masses will march behind those persons and parties who offer them such means.111

At a certain stage the growth of consciousness leads not directly to revolutionization but to rejection of politics, to scepticism and indifference, as we have seen in the case of Soviet society. But this is a crisis of growth, which is followed by a fresh revolutionary upsurge.

K.L. Maydannik, representing the ‘extreme left’ wing of the Soviet legal Marxists, expressed himself still more definitely. The guarantee against Thermidorian dictatorship in post-revolutionary society lies in democratic forms of government: ‘The revolutionary struggle for democracy is a constituent part of the struggle for socialism, not a stage precedent thereto.

…’112

Drabkin, Diligensky and Maydannik all used examples taken from the history of the West and of the ‘Third World’. But although considerations of censorship dictated avoidance of any direct reference to the connection between the problems under discussion and our own society, in Gefter’s lecture the discussion of Thermidor and revolution returned to primary sources and inquiry into concrete Russian material on social history. The lectures complemented each other, the conclusions to be drawn remaining somewhere in the spiritual space between them.

4 The Soviet State and the Asiatic Mode of Production

There was nothing surprising in the fact that questions raised by Russian history should eventually have brought the historians back to Russian material. What was important was something else — that material concerning other societies should provide so much for reflection about our own history. Gefter wrote later that ‘Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century was “a model of the world”.’113 In our country the tragic contradictions of the world as a whole reached their culmination. This was why, for example, discussion of the ‘Third World’ and ‘the Asiatic mode of production’; had and has such importance for the understanding of historical processes in Russia.

As a matter of fact, the problems of the ‘Third World’ are constantly raised not only by specialists in that field such as Maydannik, Mirsky and others, but also by theoreticians working in related fields — Vodolazov, Lukin, Burlatsky. Above all, the history of the ‘Third World’ countries makes it easy to find material for criticizing the vulgar schemas of official teaching. In this way the attempt to divide the whole history of the world into five phases — primitive society, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism — collapses like a house of cards. ‘It is hardly necessary to speak of setting up such constructions on ground so shaky,’ wrote the Sinologist L.S. Vasil'ev.