From Hegel to Khrushchev
TUCKER, ROBERT C.
From Hegel to Khrushchev The Theory and Practice of Communism. By R. N. Carew Hunt. Macmillan (5th revised edition). 286 pp. Reviewed by Robert C. Tucker Consultant, RAND Corporation; attache,...
...It would be a big help if this fact were squarely faced...
...The oppositional attitude has now found expression, inter alia, in a Russian novel called Not By Bread Alone...
...It raises only one important question of political analysis: Was there any real difference of political line as between Malenkov and Khrushchev...
...Because of surviving unclarity on the difference that Stalin alive made...
...For the author evidently remains unconvinced that the post-Stalin period in Russia is, in any truly significant way, post-Stalinisi...
...It is a period, incidentally, of the emergence of a socialist opposition from below to the system of Sovietism as it has developed in past decades—a fact which is embarrassing not alone to official Russia but also to certain Western conceptions of official Russia, i.e., those which are prepared to equate Sovietism with socialism...
...In short, the real mystery lies not in what is happening now but in what was happening—and not happening —then...
...Hunt explains this reception by the need of "the Russians" for the "confidence and discipline" with which Marxism imbued them...
...Marx was a revolutionary, not, as Hunt suggests, because he could see no other way out of the contemporary worker's predicament, but because he experienced "existing reality" as intolerable...
...Contrary to a common conception, Marx's path went not from philosophy to science, but from philosophy to mythology...
...We should not "Bolshevize," even by implication, the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia...
...Why he did this is one of the many questions of Russian life in the late Stalin period that no amount of study of Marxism or the theoretical principles of Communism can help us to solve...
...Stalin's death opened the sluicegates of history in Russia and its empire, inaugurating a period of change and turmoil which shows no sign of ending soon...
...They do not fully understand the difference that Stalin's death made...
...He apparently finds it extremely hard even to imagine a real political conflict behind the shift of public political line which occurred when Malenkov resigned as Premier in February, 1955...
...If so, they will be disappointed...
...The besetting defect of our efforts to come to grips with this phenomenon, illustrated in the present volume, is that we try to understand it in terms of what it said about itself...
...This, in my view, is indicative of his mental distance from the post-Stalin scene...
...It is hardly more than a dry chronicle of main political events...
...Marxism was in fact an offspring of post-Kantian German philosophy, specifically of Hegelianism...
...At times one is almost tempted to suggest that Russia passed, on Stalin's death, from 1984 to roughly 1884...
...These are questions to which existing interpretations of the nature of the Soviet Union provide, on the whole, few illuminating answers...
...an analyst of socio-economic relations who made "incursions into prophecy which have furnished Communism with its mystique...
...For example, if his death opened the sluice-gates of Russian history, this is because, while alive, he managed to keep them shut or nearly so...
...Antony's College, Oxford but is currently on academic sojourn in this country, is an extremely erudite scholar with a matter-of-fact outlook and an admirable facility for succinct and pungent writing...
...Having originated in Europe, Marxism encountered a surprisingly favorable reception in semi-European Russia, somewhat to the chagrin of its Russophobic founder...
...Hegel was no representative of 19th-century Liberalism...
...Now it could be said in a way to span the whole Marx-to-Stalin story, from the prologue in Hegel's dialectic to the epilogue in Khrushchev's philippic...
...He adds that they embraced it with "uncompromising dogmatism" and later converted it into an "ossified and inflexible code" because "Unfortunately, they have always been lacking in a sense of the relative...
...Marxism is grounded in a value judgment reading: There ought to be a revolution...
...Although he leaves the question open, Hunt expresses considerable doubt that there was...
...The phenomenon of Stalinism is the specter that still stalks Soviet studies in the West...
...The latest edition brings the account up to date through the post-Stalin developments culminating in the 20th Soviet Party Congress of February, 1956...
...As in the 19th century, a fundamentally conservative Russian regime finds its greatest internal political worry in a radical literary intelligentsia...
...Further research will be needed to resolve such issues...
...The enigma of Stalin still casts its shadow forward onto the essentially unenigmatic present in Russia...
...It shows little feel for the issues of post-Stalin Soviet politics or for the deep drama of the period...
...Inevitably, some of the positions taken will seem disputable to the special student of Marxist thought...
...And this mental block, as suggested earlier, has to do with the failure to comprehend the post-Stalin period as, for all the persistence of bad elements of the past, post-Stalintsf...
...The meaning of Marx is still in some ways a mystery...
...One question which many readers may put to Hunt's book in its new edition concerns the meaning of the Russian events of today...
...His is really a story without an epilogue...
...These propositions define the book's basic approach...
...Hunt is inclined to view Marx as a scientist of society with an unfortunate penchant for apocalyptic predictions...
...These rather facile generalizations about Russian national psychology seem out of place in such a serious scholarly work...
...The evidence for the view that there was a real conflict may not be altogether conclusive (though to me, for one, it is quite convincing), but it should not be difficult for us at least to visualize the possibility seriously...
...This review was written just before Malenkov's latest demotion was announced—Ed.] The prime source of the difficulty which Hunt and some others appear to encounter in approaching the problem of post-Stalin Russia is not the shortage of factual information...
...To my mind, on the contrary, Marx was the supreme Utopian of the 19th century, a prophet of revolution who made a long incursion into political economy (the "economic filth," as he privately called it) to document his preconceived myth of history...
...Embassy in Moscow, 1944-1953 First published some years ago, at the darkest depth of the Stalin period, this book offered a short critical survey of Marxism and its sequel in Soviet Russia...
...His system was the articulation of a categorical imperative, which he formulated as follows: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point is, to change it...
...It is a mental block...
...And broad psychological generalizations even about its Bolshevik section are very risky...
...In other words...
...The new chapter on "The Post-Stalinist Situation" does not illuminate the situation...
...attache, U.S...
...He holds that a knowledge of the theoretical principles of Communism is indispensable for understanding Soviet Russian political practice from Lenin to the present...
...To put it crudely, he tends lo view Soviet political history as Communist theory in attempted application...
...However, this would not be quite accurate...
...Hunt, who is attached to St...
...If the circle of would-be apostles has lately been expanding, and if, in general, events point more and more to the limitations of such an approach, this in no way detracts from the value of a great deal of the material presented here...
...Further, "the four apostles of Communism are Marx, Fngels, Lenin nnd Stalin, whoso works alone possess authority, no others having been added to the canon of scripture...
...The rudiments of its revolutionary idea were fully developed in Marx's mind as early as 1843, xi hen he was still steeped in Hegelian thought and had scarcely even begun the serious study of economics...
...One misses in Hunt's treatment a feeling for the fact that this myth of history is the central thing in Marx's Weltanschauung, and that it always had behind it a driving force of fanaticism in Marx's makeup, a fanaticism of revolt against (in Marx's own phrase) "existing reality...
...Hunt, for example, concurs in the judgment of Isaac Deutscher that original Marxism was "the illegitimate and rebellious offspring of 19th-century Liberalism...
...My own study of the genesis of Marx's thought in the formative years from 1837 to 1845 would force me to take strong issue with this view...
...As the author must know, only a part of the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia embraced Marxism, and only a section of this part became Bolsheviks, who were the chief exponents of uncompromising dogmatism...
...The translation from Hegel to Marx was from a philosophy of history to a myth of history...
...In particular, the sections of the book in which Hunt expounds the content of the original Marxist doctrines, the history of European socialism in the 19th century, and Lenin's contributions to Communist theory and practice, are and will remain first-rate critical introduction to these subjects...
Vol. 40 • August 1957 • No. 31
