BOLSHEVISM AND JACOBINISM
Mathiez, Albert
Albert Mathiez, the great historian of the French Reuo- lution and intrepid defender OJ Jacobinism, followed the progress of the Russian Revolution with close interest. An historian steeped in...
...Conquer or die” was their slogan...
...The belongings of persons alien to the Revolution shall be sequestered for the profit of the Republic...
...For him, the defeat of the Revolution would mean dispossession and ruin...
...And again: “It is impossible to achieve victory and root out capitalism without merciless repression of the resistance of the exploiters, who will not be deprived suddenly of their fortune, organizational advantages and knowledge without attempting consequently and over a long period of time to rid themselves of the domination of the poor...
...Under the pretext of acting as revoIutionaries, they all secure independence and the most absolute power for themselves, as if revolutionary power lived only through them...
...They have to grapple with the same problems in a similar atmosphere...
...under the revolutionary rkgime, the public power is compelled to defend itself against all who Winter 1955 78 DISSENT attack it...
...Like Robespierre, Lenin claims to shun the two extremes which might engulf the revolution: moderation and exaggeration...
...We would do Robespierre a grave injustice if we attributed to him the mentality of our presentday imperialists...
...The Montagnards organized a system of ration cards, but never thought of using them as a political weapon...
...Both dictatorships emerged out of defeat and imposed their rule through uprisings...
...This again is foreshadowed in Jacobin times...
...The future of Bolshevism will be decided upon the battlefield, as was the fate of Jacobinism...
...This must be fought against,” he says, “by drawing all members of the Soviets into active participation in the administration...
...Every big technical industry demands the most severe and absolute unity of will directing the simultaneous work of hundreds, thousands and even tens of thousands of men...
...IV...
...Moreover, Lenin has not abolished property...
...The worker considers the factory his own...
...The Montagnards’ stronghold was in the sections of Paris inhabited by artisans...
...He works as little as possible, seeing in revolution the right to laziness...
...They have had to go to war again to save their compromised revolutionand their heads...
...The Montagnards tried at first to avoid such measures, believing them dangerous...
...More than anyone else, Robespierre professed distrust of militarism and supervised his generals with a most suspicious eye...
...and, in the final analysis, both propose a similar goal: the transformation of society-not merely the society of France or of Russia but of the whole world...
...They confiscated the property of the kmigrks, a rich booty which made up their war treasury...
...Winter 1955 82 DISSENT Nowadays, politicians who proclaim themselves the heirs of the Jacobins praise their patriotism as against the defeatism and internationalism of the Bolsheviks...
...He does not want the reign of the speechifier any more than he wants the reign of the bureaucratic chair-warmer...
...These persons shall be detained until the day of peace and then banished forever...
...Kings, aristocrats, tyrants of all kinds are slaves in rebellion against Mankind, sovereign of the earth, and against Nature, legislator of the universe...
...DO not tolerate,” said Saint-Just, “that there be a single achieved a revolution and a true Republic...
...they were in existence long before the latter seized power...
...But it is even more dangerous, It does not take into account moral and ethical factors?’ Winter 1955 ‘* DISSENT - * 83 I t is certainly true that the Bolsheviks considered the truce of BrestLitovsk only temporary...
...Where in any of this is legality...
...The Soviets were not invented by the Bolsheviks...
...They punished by death those who preached the “agrarian law,” i.e., communism...
...Saint-Just puts it more bluntly: “What constitutes a republic is the total destruction of everything opposing it.:’ Lenin echoes this: “It is the height of stupidity and absurdly utopian to suppose that the passage from capitalism to socialism is possible without compulsion and dictatorship...
...After victory the Jacobins were divided, and this division spelled their doom...
...The Committee of Public Safety ordered all merchants of Bordeaux to furnish 20 million francs in foreign drafts and to export merchandise worth this amount...
...The same is true of the committees elected by the factory workers...
...Chevalier de Saint-Just, of army officers...
...It is not up to us to pay for the revolution in England...
...Trotsky, whose view of the Russian Revolution was permeated with the imagery of the French Revolution, also thought in these terms...
...Any individual who breaks the discipline of work,” he declares, “in any enterprise, in any kind of business, will be haled into court and punished without mercy...
...Their proselytizing as well as their repudiation of the Tsarist government’s financial obligations explain the hostility their name invokes in countries with traditional governments...
...The relationship between the two kinds of threat is evident...
...As soon as they could, they again took up arms to free the proletariat of Finland, Esthonia, Lithuania and the Ukraine and lent support to the Spartacist uprising and the Hungarian revolution...
...The Montagnards of the Year I1 had to face the same situation...
...The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, while professin...
...Lenin is no more fond of disorder: “If we are not anarchists, we must accept the necessity of the State, that is to say, the necessity of constraint during the stage of transition from capitalism to socialism...
...The peasants, who in both the France of 1793 and present-day Russia comprise the mass, are won over respectively to the Montagnard and the Bolshevik cause by the promise of material advantages...
...The Montagnards took power in order to intensify the war and drive through to victory, while the Bolsheviks in the beginning could think only of peace-peace at any price...
...Suspects are entitled only to half- or quarter-rations, A highly efficient but indeed terrible way of winning followers...
...The failure of the offensive ordered by Kerensky in July 1917, followed hy the Kornilov adventure, set the stage for the victory of the Soviets in the Petrograd insurrection of October 25, 1917...
...Trotsky says the same on the eve of October: “We shall establish a power which shall have no other aim than to satisfy the needs of the soldiers, workers and peasants...
...After their victory over the Gironde, the Montagnards uprooted the last vestiges of feudalism by abolishing the still-existing seignorial fees based on ancient land titles...
...The betrayal of Dumouriez, the Belgian disasters, the retreat of the armies on all fronts enabled the Montagnards to crush the Girondists, called to account in the Paris days of May 31 and June 2, 1793...
...From top to bottom of the ladder, the Soviet Government has to cope with the ambitions of its administrators...
...it makes up for numbers, but numbers cannot make up for lack of discipline...
...Under an old law dealing with the administration of railroads, commissars control the entire railway system with powers as broad ;is those of the Convention’s proconsuls...
...The arrest of the 73 Girondists who protested the events of June 2 was sufficient to alter the majority...
...Madame Kollontai is the wife of an army colonel...
...The Bolsheviks replaced the Constituent Assembly with the Congress of Soviets...
...How can we insure the most severe unity of will...
...He understands very well that the problem of production and distribution cannot be solved merely by regulations, but is, up to a certain point, a question of morale...
...The Montagnards governed by means of a purged assembly...
...He balks at exchanging it for depreciated currency...
...With this article, DISSENT hopes to initiate a discussion on the subject of the Russian Revolution...
...The Bolsheviks preferred dispersal to this sort of crippling...
...Lenin himself is fond of drawing it in his speeches.* Like all Russian socialists, Lenin was nurtured on the history of our Great Revolutioh, is inspired by its precedents, and puts them into practice after adapting them to the special conditions of his country...
...it through military victory...
...In the 85 Winter 1955 DISSENT assemblies they dispose of jobs and votes...
...When the followers of Danton, eager to make peace, proposed abandoning the Belgians, Rhinelanders, Savoyards and all the other peoples whose hopes hung on French promises, Robespierre vehemently opposed them...
...I t would be a mistake to think that the Bolshevik committees which manage the factories and control farm production in Russia are sovereign...
...Lenin does not want the proletarian power to remain “in a gelatinous stage...
...A difference in time explains the difference in theories and specific solutions, but the basic attitude is similar...
...The “levy in mass” or first requisition, the entrusting of the revolutionary army with carrying out the Laws of Sustenance, and the turning upon Christianity, were all fruits of the initiative of the Club leaders and local administrations before they were accepted and legalized by the Convention...
...11...
...The Russian revolutionists copy their French prototypes voluntarily and knowingly...
...Antonelli, in his recent book, puts it very well: “The Bolsheviks do not concede the‘right of people outside the proletarian class to organize freely...
...Often the former owner reappears as agent-manager for the state...
...This is not the place to compare the analyses of Mathiez and Luxemburg, both of whom wrote as fricsnds of the Russian Revolution but, obviously, from different historical assumptions...
...Let this people free themselves, and we will render them all our friendship and esteem...
...The Revolution is leading us to acknowledge the fact that those who have proved to be enemies of their country cannot be property owners...
...The People’s Coinmissars, for the most part, are not the shabby adventurers depicted by the servile press...
...Most of the great revolutionary measures of the Year I1 were not initiated by members of the Committee of Public Safety nor by deputies of the Convention, but were forced upon them by pressure from the Clubs...
...One must not forget that the Montagnard dictatorship established itself through the uprisings of June 2, 1793 which crippled the Convention by excluding all the Girondist leaders and shortly sending them to the guillotine...
...Will Bolshevism meet the same fate...
...Uritsky is an engineer and Rykov an official translator...
...Sometimes violence has to be used to break down the doors of his barn...
...If one employs the criteria of western revolutions, we are now approximately at the level attained in 1793 and 1870...
...The State shall be the instrument to liberate the masses from all forms of slavery...
...This dichotomy is entirely superficial and cannot withstand analysis...
...Robespierre subordinated property rights to social interests, defining this as “the portion of ownership guaranteed by law,” The Bolsheviks have taken over the factories and managed them through committees elected by the workers...
...The Jacobins were at one with the Bolsheviks in placing the rights of society above individual rights...
...What rights have those in the fatherland who do not work...
...Lenin is not far from proclaiming, with Robespierre, that the motive force of the new rCgime must be virtue-in other words, the sacrifice of private interests to the common good...
...Up till now they have not felt the need that their forebears did to replace the old cult with a new one more suited to their policy, but they are already on that road, too...
...The bureaucrats who take inventory, requisition and distribute goods, take advantage of their position...
...The Jacobins never went this far, but they packed the revolutionary committees with $om-culottes and instructed them to see to it that the “Law of the Maximum” was applied...
...Their defeatism has been a tactic-nothing more...
...These confiscated lands, administered by district committees, represent a vast reserve which assures the rtgime of the loyalty of the rural masses and also, to a certain degree, facilitates the flow of foodstuffs to its urban partisans...
...The revolutionary courts of Soviet Russia, like those of Montagnard France, class as counter-revolutionary crimes hoarding, sabotage, deceit, tax evasion and concealment of inventory...
...That is tomorrow’s secret...
...The Jacobins set them an Winter 1955 0 . DISSENT 9 79 eslrly example by commandeering many of the ironworks and workshops needed for war production and controlling them through a narrow state administration...
...The end in both cases is the welfare of the masses...
...Times differ...
...But the resemblances that our analysis has shown to exist between the two great crises of 1793 and 1917 are neither superficial nor casual...
...This class internationalism, which Lenin could surely endorse, was never forsaken by Robespierre...
...But in Mathiez’ toughly realistic study and Luxemburg’s sharp criticism one can see the two po!es of political analysis-the claims of historical necessity and the claims of value-judgment -in clear perspective...
...They demanded freedom of the press, yet they suppressed opposition newspapers...
...More ingenious, the Bolsheviks divided the population into four categories, each with different ration privileges...
...All the Bolsheviks have done is to perfect the Jacobin methods...
...The Jacobins aroused the same fear and fury in their time...
...only at this price will you have something, to take up a trade which serves liberty...
...They had to vote by voice...
...Therefore he has organized a great campaign to educate the people through the press and by conferences of the Socialist Academy...
...When the Bolsheviks seize all vacant domiciles and turn them over to the poor, and impress members of the bourgeoisie into forced labor battalions, they prove themselves more faithful to Jacobin teachings than you might think...
...An article called “Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin,” by Benno Sarel, will appear in a later issue...
...In his final paragraphs Mathiez raises the possibility of a collapse or destruction of the Russian Revolution along lines similar to that of the French Revolution--by counter-revolution from without, or by an armed coup, a restoration...
...History never repeats itself exactly...
...The Russian soldiers at the front did not wait for Brest-Litovsk to make peace with the Germans, any more than the muzhiks waited for the decree of October 25, 1917, before taking the land from the monks and gentry...
...Yet in- power they wielded the death penalty as an instrument of governing...
...Sometimes,” notes Antonelli, “their intervention was even a moderating one which aligned certain elements of the working class and peasants against them...
...Faced with Russia’s exhaustion and general warweariness, Lenin is convinced that peace is necessary as a respite for consolidating the results of his coup de force...
...the triumph of our armies was for him merely a prelude to the triumph of liberty all over the world...
...Jacobinism and Bolshevism are both dictatorships born of civil and foreign war...
...Hdrault de Skchelles, from the old nobility...
...But note carefully that for the Montagnards and the Bolsheviks, peace and war are only means of safeguarding the revolution...
...The Russians,” he declared, “are poor workers compared with the citizens of advanced countries...
...The Soviet Republic is as centralized and bureaucratic as was the French Republic of the Jacobins...
...There is something even more despicable than a tyrant,” he declared, “and that is a slave...
...Both the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks were caught in a current stronger than themselves...
...When he proclaimed his hatred for the English, it was because he despised in them what he saw as a slavish docility to the will of their masters...
...But the counter-revolution in Russia came not from without, either nationally or socially, but from within, from a new ruling group which arose inside the body of the revolution and in its name destroyed it...
...In slight1.y abridged form, it is translated here for the first time into English...
...Followinq his motion, the Convention voted this decree: “The properties of patriots are sacred and inviolable...
...But they also confiscated, expropriated and requisitioned...
...BUT THE GREATEST THREATS TO T m SOVIET GOVERNMENT are perhaps not internal...
...Those who fight the people of one country in order to block the progress of liberty and abolish human rights shall be prosecuted by all, not merely as common enemies but as rebellious foes and brigands...
...The factory workers had already organized production committees when Lenin undertook his coup de forcs...
...I t would be futile to look for a contrast between the individualism of the Jarobins and the communism of the Bolsheviks...
...Robespierre, on the other hand, sensing the patriotic mood of his country and knowing its resources, believed that preservation of the Revolution and immediate victory on the battlefield were inseparable...
...The peasant who acquired land from Noble or Church felt himself in solidarity with the Jacobin cause, being tied to it with the powerful bonds of personal interest...
...While Mathiez was comparing the Russian to the French Revolution in order to validate but not glorify the Bolshevik experience, Rosa Luxemburg was criticizing Lenin’s policy precisely because it followed the Jacobin pattern...
...The Jacobins claimed to defend the right of ownership...
...The measures he has adopted are as opportunistic as those decreed by the Montagnards...
...One reason why Trotsky never fully saw this was that he was so thoroughly captivated by the kind of historical analogy that Mathiez draws in the following article...
...For many of their partisans, the dictator84 * DISSENT . Winter 1955 ship is an end in itself...
...Its aim, on the contrary, is to repress it in order to insure and fortify the rule of law...
...But one should not exaggerate the difference between the two rkimes...
...Our aim,” added Saint-Just, “is to establish a sincere government so that the people may be happy...
...Similarly, Maximilien de Robespierre canie from a line of lawyers...
...Brought to power by the exhaustion and weariness of a people clamoring for peace, the Bolsheviks first had to yield to the current...
...And will a successful 18th Brumaire by a more adroit Kornilov put an end to the tragedy...
...Let no one protest that Robespierre respected individual property while Lenin denies it...
...and Carnot, Couthon, Le Bas, the two Prieurs and Robert Lindet were all of good bourgeois stock...
...Robespierre typified chauvinism in his relentless denunciations of foreign refugees in France whom he suspected, not without reason, of serving as spies for the enemy...
...The Convention was elected during the troubled time of the September massacres: Most of the electoral assemblies that nominated the deputies had to submit to the rule of the Clubs...
...BOTH THE FRENCH AND T H E RUSSIAN DICTATORSHIPS are Ultrarealistic...
...So in reality the class dictatorship is contorted into a vast pilfering operation by petty tyrants...
...They are animated by the same spirit...
...They emerged from...
...Thieves who were caught redhanded during the October Revolution were shot on the spot as an example...
...but they have not abolished individual property...
...All his words and deeds discredit such an opinion...
...There is an apparent difference here...
...Albert Mathiez, the great historian of the French Reuolution and intrepid defender OJ Jacobinism, followed the progress of the Russian Revolution with close interest...
...The Bolsheviks recruited their Red Guard from among the factory workers of Petrograd...
...Trotsky is the son of a Iandowner...
...Both dictatorships had their roots in and drew their strength from the populations of the big cities, particularly from those of the capitals...
...Other contributions are invited...
...The peasant -whether of present-day Russia or of France in the Year I1 of the Revolution-wants to keep his crop...
...I t would be a very amusing and instructive game to compile and compare the judgments, over the 125-year interval, of governments and journalists trying to check the spreading plague...
...belief in communism and the abolition of private property, nevertheless allow it to survive...
...This was precisely the tactic with which Robespierre endeavored to rally and reassure the small merchants and property-owners of France...
...The reality is quite otherwise...
...The Chinovniks of Lenin are no better than those of Nikolai 11...
...Robespierre and Lenin alike justify the use of terror as necessitated by the exigencies of the internal and external struggle...
...To learn how to work-that is the problem Soviet Power must put in all its grandeur before the people...
...Furthermore, the Jacobins and their partisans were almost the only participants in these elections...
...As soon as the Constituent Assembly met, Robespierre proposed that the royal army be disbanded and replaced by a new, republican army, thus seeking to purge the members of the old nobility from the officer corps...
...Force everyone to do unhappy or poor man left in the state...
...In brief, the end justifies the means and surmounts all contradictions...
...Here again the Bolsheviks imitate the Jacobins...
...Whoever oppresses one nation is the enemy of all...
...In similar fashion the Bolsheviks enthroned themselves in October by turning over the lands of the monasteries and the large estates to the muzhiks...
...civilization has marched on for a century and a quarter...
...But he made no distinction between the interests of France and the cause of the Revolution...
...The People’s Commissars have done the same...
...In the name of the public welfare they do not hesitate to violate openly the very principles they advocate...
...Already Lenin is worried about the gradual intrusion of parliamentarism into the Soviets...
...Before them the Jacobins of the revolutionary committees had established lists of suspects, and even earlier the Constitutional Monarchy of 1791 had deprived of their political rights all who refused to take the civil oath...
...I have read somewhere that Lenin was inspired by the methods of the Hibertists...
...May 28, 1918...
...In order to overcome the resistance of rich peasants who were reluctant to comply with requisitioning, the Bolsheviks set up committees of poor peasants, which carried out all rationing measures...
...Will a Russian 9th Thermidor follow the days between May 31 and October 25...
...From the tribune of the Jacobins, he even pronounced his famous curse upon the English people...
...The Bolsheviks have nationalized the banks, taken inventory of private holdings and transferred them to the State Bank, setting limits on the amount of cash withdrawals...
...as of April 23, 1918, the election of officers in the Red Army has been abolished...
...Lenin stresses the great need for increasing production through intensified, disciplined labor...
...Mathiez‘ article first appeared in Scientia, an international review, in 1920...
...LET us NOT DECEIVE OURSELVES or try to fool others by depicting the Bolshevik government (with the Jacobin example before it) as an artificial creation hammered out of decrees conceived in the brains of a few visionaries and men of ambition...
...By such a compromise with the bourgeois cooperatives . . . i.e., is a compromise worked out between the bourgeois and the workers’ coop by directing the bourgeois elements, by utilizing them, by granting them certain partial concessions, we have created the necessary conditions for a 80 Winter 1956 DISSENT forward movement, the latter being slower than we anticipated originally, but at the same time stronger, with a firm guarantee for the base and line of communication, with better fortification of the positioh attained...
...77 Winter 1955 DISSENT Both dictatorships are based on the lower classes but led by deserters from the former ruling class...
...H. 76 DISSENT Winter 1955 Albert Msthiez Between Jacobinism (by which I mean the government of the Mountain, from June 1793 to July 1794) and Bolshevism, there is a significant parallel...
...He declares in a speech (previously cited) that compromises are necessary before attaining the communist order...
...Bolshevik interventionism is similar to the Republican interventionism of the French Revolution...
...Except, it might be remarked, in one respect...
...While granting volunteers the right to elect their leaders through an ingenious graduated system, the Committee of Public Safety gradually managed, in point of fact, to establish very strict obedience to its will...
...Sabotage, assassinations,, jacqueries, revolts are less to be feared than blockades and foreign wars...
...The “Maximum” (taxation of all necessities) was urgently demanded by sectional groups lmg before this principle was made law...
...They stabilized an earlier state of affairs by creating a legal framework for it...
...The Soviets disfranchised a Winter 1955 91 DISSENT great number of citizens, including monks, employers and the idle...
...Both promise to end it when victory is won...
...111...
...WHEN, AFTER BREST-LITOVSK, LENIN AND TROTSKY created a new army from which they excluded politically doubtful elements, they again followed Jacobin teachings...
...We shall soon find out if its armies are capable of surmounting the external danger and suppressing the last revolts...
...It is true that the agrarian committees which control the confiscated big estates are elected, but at their elbow stands the central power in the person of armed commissars with full authority to insure subordination to the state...
...Lenin, like Lunacharsky, is the son of a former acting State Counsellor...
...1918...
...An historian steeped in the events of 1793 would naturally be inclined to see their reenactment in the events of 1917, but the patterns of similarity he found were deep and genuine...
...Will Trotsky and Lenin remain united...
...He predicted that the war would lead to a dictatorship of the sword...
...The Montagnards, to be sure, devoted themselves with sublime ardor to national defense...
...He never repudiated the doctrine of the brotherhood of man...
...Nor was this exceptional...
...He sought to include in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1793 the following articles : I. Men of all countries are brothers, and people of different countries must help each other according to their means, as if they were citizens of the same State...
...Revolutionary government,” said Robespierre, “has nothing in common with anarchy...
...But because of its backwardness, Russia resembles illiterate, agricultural 18-century France more than is generally believed...
...In a brief analysis, I shall try to show that between the methods of the Bolsheviks and those of the Montagnards the analogies are not only obvious, but are joined by a close and logical kinship...
...The latter made morale the order of the day and sought to educate the masses and curb selfishness by setting up a grandiose interlocking system of civil holidays and social institutions, for which the ad hoc periodical, Selection of Heroic and Civic Deeds, served as the organ, Like the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks broke with the Church and divorced it from the State...
...One may have to believe in the principle of ownership in order thus to violate it, but here it becomes merely a privilege of citizenship...
...Nevertheless, this same Robespierre supplied the following definition of military discipline : “Discipline is the soul of the army...
...We seek,” said Robespierre, “a state of affairs in which all low and cruel passions are chained, all charitable and generous passions encouraged by law . . . in which the fatherland assures the welfare of each individual . . . in which commerce becomes the source of public wealth and not merely the monstrous opulence of a few firms...
...The army became the arbiter of their quarrels, and the Republic was finally confiscated by a victorious general...
...Nor does he hesitate to defend piecework and even the Taylor system, which Western tradeunionists consider serfdom...
...Did not Saint-Just propose confisrating the property of all opponents of the regime...
...Chicherin, Minister of Foreign Affairs, is also of noble birth...
...Zinoviev and Kamenev are from the bourgeoisie and are university graduates...
...The People’s Commissars had to create order out of chaos...
...The logic of their doctrine of proletarian interventionism forces them to intervene whenever the cause of the proletariat seems endangered...
...They correspond in kind to the same necessities and are no different in nature...
...Joffe and Sokolnikov each possessed considerable fortunes...
...the popular societies they decide opinions...
...they do not have control of the factories...
...Thus the decree on cooperatives, published in the spring of 1918, eratives...
...It will be interesting to observe, and rich material for reflection, if the rhythm of the two revolutions follows the same beat until the end, Translated by TRAVERS CLEMENT Winter 1955 86 DISSENT...
...His proposal was rejected, but the noblemen-officers chose to emigrate, so the same result was achieved...
...Lenin’s speech of May 28...
...By these means he hopes to raise the culture level of the masses and inaugurate a revolution of the spirit...
...By submitting the will of those thousands to the will of one...
...It could be pointed out that the dictatorship of the Montagnards was a legal one, the instrument of the National Convention which expressed the will of the nation, while the Bolshevik dictatorship, since it dispersed the Constituent Assembly and now maintains itself by force, is altogether illegal...
...Lenin realizes this and tries to meet it forcefully...
...Under the constitutional rkgime,” declares Robespierre, “it is sufficient to protecr the individual from the abuses of public power...
...Both Robespierre and Lenin demanded the abolition of capital punishment...
...Why be surprised then if they meet with the same obstacles and face the same dangers...
...He endeavors to put an end to disorganization, and pursues an iron-handed policy...
...both are class dictatorships utilizing the same methods: terror, requisitioning and taxation...
...These dictatorships submitted to their troops in order to command them...
...It is as if the Committee of Public Safety had replaced the Convention with the Society of Jacobins...
...The Jacobins did not hesitate to take over the banks either, nor to freeze their assets and place them under strict regulations...
...Appearances notwithstanding, there is no important difference between Jacobin and Bolshevik conceptions of international relations...
...Before him, Saint- Just had warned of the same perils: “The city is almost taken over by functionaries...
...For the Bolsheviks the dictatorship of the proletariat is only a means to an end, which is communism...
Vol. 2 • January 1955 • No. 1
