The Thinking Reed

The Vekhi writers were wrong, but the optimism of the Left was also premature. After 1905 they hoped that one more shove would suffice to bring down the old regime, and nobody doubted that what would follow then would be the triumph of freedom. Besides, could it have been known beforehand that ‘near the end of the play’ the Tsar’s government would get involved in a world war and bring Russia to such a monstrous catastrophe that what would be at stake would be not a transition to democracy but the salvation of the people and the state, the mere survival of society?… In 1910 nobody suspected that, not the Vekhi writers not the Liberals nor the Socialists.

The Vekhi writers suffered not only political defeat (in the sense that the intelligentsia did not follow their lead) but also philosophical defeat. In the last analysis Merezhkovsky was quite right, in his polemic against Vekhi, when he said that the spiritual revolution cannot be separated from the social revolution. In a country where there is no political liberty, spiritual rebirth can come only through a struggle for democracy. And that, in turn, implies that social consciousness must be renewed in forms quite different from those proposed by the ‘God-seekers’ — including Merezhkovsky himself. However, history was to outwit not only the Vekhi writers, the ‘God-seekers’ and the ‘God-builders’, but, as we shall see later, the Bolsheviks as well…

Notes

2 Revolution and Bureaucracy

The Party of Revolution and Order

The events of 1917 in which the old Russia perished proved to be a turning point in the history of the intelligentsia, of culture, of the freedom movement and of the state system. In circumstances of general breakdown and collapse, when the country was threatened with complete disintegration and reversion to barbarism, the Bolshevik Party and the organized working class were together the only force capable of establishing some sort of order in Russia and saving it as a civilized state.

The Bolsheviks were at one and the same time ‘the party of revolution’ and ‘the party of order’. Because they constituted the sole militarily disciplined and centralized organization amid the general ruin and chaos, when even the army was without the slightest discipline, it was inevitable that they should come to power. On the day of the October Revolution the independent Social-Democratic newspaper Novaya Zhizn' acknowledged that the Bolsheviks were probably the only force that could bring back order in Russia. Unlike the ‘good wishes’ of the intelligentsia, the decisions of the Bolshevik workers’ organizations ‘do not remain on paper’. The paper wrote that ‘the Bolshevik working-class intelligentsia, who played the leading role in the trade unions, the factory and works committees and the other practical organizations of the proletariat, have carried out an immense amount of cultural work during recent months.’1 The Bolsheviks alone managed to maintain labour discipline in the factories.

The actual seizure of power on 7 November was received fairly calmly by the intelligentsia. The Provisional Government which the Bolsheviks drove out had been elected by no one and possessed no authority. ‘The Provisional Government’, observed Novaya Zhizn', ‘did not perish, did not fall in battle, it dissolved.’2 A shock for the intelligentsia, however, was the series of measures taken by the new rulers which restricted democracy, such as the suppression of a number of right-wing newspapers, which Novaya Zhizn' called an ‘anti-socialist and stupid measure’.3

The cause of the October 1917 revolution is not to be sought in the ‘evil will’ of the Bolsheviks but in the objective situation, which left no room for any other solution. The Russian bourgeoisie, weak and involved with the old regime, had from the very beginning of the revolution, in February 1917, taken up extremely reactionary positions. Even if the proletariat which carried out the revolution had not put forward socialist slogans, large-scale industry would have had to be nationalized, for purely political reasons, as a measure of struggle against bourgeois reaction. In this case socialist ideology provided justification for what was a matter of political necessity. Despite the view generally accepted later, the Bolsheviks were not free ‘creators’ of history but rather the slaves of objective necessity which, as a rule, left them no choice. They could have repeated the words of Saint-Just: ‘La force des choses nous conduit peut-être à des résultats auxquels nous n’avons point pensé.’4