Thoughts on the October Revolution The Human Cost

...One of these negative judgments stems from the acceptance of the premises of orthodox Marxism This may appear surprising to those unfamiliar both with doctrine and with the form of the fundamental question we are seeking to answer The question is whether the industrialization and modernization of the Soviet Union which followed the October Revolution required the totalitarian system established by Lenin and Stalin, and its various degrees of terror' One increasingly popular answer is that those costs are comparable to those paid m England, Japan, Germany and other European countries for their industrialization and modernization And since these costs are accepted almost as a matter of course by liberals, it is the veriest sentimentalism to indict the Soviet Union and other Communist countries embarked on the same social program of modernization for moral callousness and the systematic brutalization of man...

...There is a surprising moral callousness in many assessments of the costs of the Russian Revolution This stems from a failure to realize that any willed social action carries with it a degree of responsibility that cannot be ascribed to unwilled actions The issue is not one of miscalculating the effects of a specific policy The error consists m what is being taken as the basis of the calculation Discussing the calculus of revolutionary violence, Barnngton Moore JR writes in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (by Wolf, Moore and Marcuse, Boston, 1965) " one has to weigh the casualties of a reign of terror against those of allowing the prevailing situation to continue, which may include a high death rate due to disease, ignorance??or at the other end of the scale, failure to control the use of powerful technical devices (The 40,000 deaths a year in the United States due to automobile accidents come to mind here What would we think of a political regime that executed 40,000 people a year...

...During the purge years when hundreds of thousands were sent to death camps on grounds of industrial sabotage, it was clear that the regime was equating industrial errors and mistakes with crimes, particularly crimes against the state??in other words, with treason As subsequent revelations have confirmed, under such circumstances hardly anyone could be found who was willing to take the initiative, to assume the chance and risk of fresh and original judgment Almost everyone played it sate, marked time while he protected himself behind a barrier of documents that spread the responsibility and shared it with others similarly engaged in a protective avoidance of industrial leadership If anything can make the political terror worse than it was, it is the fact that it had no industrial rationale what so-ever It involved the sheer and immense waste of human and material resources...

...The very doctrine of collective responsibility and/or guilt is self-defeating, since the descendents of the victims of any action justified by the dogma can invoke it to initiate a contemporary massacre...

...Even if there were some way of making an objective estimate of the sufferings of human beings in the past and in the present, there is something absurd in justifying the evils of today by reference to the allegedly equal or greater sufferings of yesterday Comparisons of this kind are worse than useless to the extent that they distract us from recognizing that intelligent choice is always between the evils of alternative courses of action m the present Whatever the evils of yesterday, they are beyond our control...

...The costs of the industrial revolution in the Soviet Union were to an extent already paid for in the pre-revolutionary regime, whose social welfare legislation was in several respects m advance of some Western countries But the dislocation of the population after the Civil War, the government monopoly of employment and housing, and the absence of free and militant trade unions restored some of the old conditions and introduced others Nothing comparable to the phenomenon of the Bnziporm, the hordes of wild children, resulting from the disappearance of their parents, which I myself observed in Moscow in 1929, developed in other countries as incidental to their industrial revolution...

...They are being made on all sides For some November 7 will be a day of jubilation, for others a day of mourning We can disregard the official celebrations And we can set aside at the outset some negative judgments...

...It is in this connection that the discussion of the costs of the Russian Revolution has acquired an additional interest Some critics of Soviet development argue that these costs have been of a dimension which renders any attempt at a rational assessment of this period grotesque Other critics believe a rational assessment can be made, and that m the light of the costs of industrialization in other countries, as well as the alternatives open at various times to the Communist leadership of the Soviet Union, these costs were much too high Both forms of criticism have been rejected on several grounds by writers who claim to be not altogether sympathetic to Communism It has been argued, as I have noted, that the costs of industrialization in the Soviet Union are comparable to the costs of the industrial revolution in Great Britain, Japan and Germany The inevitable references to the conditions of the English working class in Engels' early work and in Marx's Capital are introduced It has also been argued that the costs of revolution have been unfairly computed insofar as the costs of normalcy and the status quo, and even of reform and gradualism, have been ignored If millions have starved under a given regime and are expected to starve if it is preserved, it is morally inadmissable to indict a revolution designed to change the system that permits starvation on the ground that the victims are counted in the hundreds of thousands Finally, it is pointed out that there is an historic injustice in condemning even the excesses involved m implementing the program of social revolution m the light of the excesses committed m the past in the name of both freedom and tolerance It is asserted that there is a legitimate sense in which the red terror is an answer to a "white terror " The latter, even if not so intense and dramatic as the former has endured tor a longer time...

...The answer is obvious Even it the accident rate is not likely to diminish in the future, we would not regard ourselves as benefactors of mankind if we paid the price asked for the magic carpet, we would consider ourselves murderers, because our deliberate decision would make us responsible for the deaths There are many other reasons for refusing to cancel out the distinction between accident and murder, but this one is sufficient The assumption that our action is limited to a choice between accepting the accident figures of the past and deliberately destroying human beings to avoid future accidents is, of course, one that is easily challenged Once we permit assumptions of this grim kind to stand, then the door is open to any fanatical savior or wilful political adventurer to try to introduce a reign of terror in order to eliminate the errors and accidents and evils that are bound up with ordinary human bungling In the world of historical reality, there is no guarantee that accidents and errors would be less where freedom, and especially freedom of criticism, is sacrificed on the altars of efficiency Some of the greatest follies of the past dictatorships, often fatal to them, could have germinated only m an atmosphere where the cult of efficiency or personality or party infallibility silenced dissent There is another point of great importance ignored by those who compare the evils of the industrial revolution in the West with the evils of industrialization in Communist countries This is the difference which the presence of political democracy makes It was because of the processes of political democracy that the costs of the industrial revolution in Western countries were exposed, diminished and controlled, and some of the greatest evils abolished The reports of the English Factory Inspectors??to whose moral integrity Marx paid a tribute his own theory of morality cannot account for??led to the social welfare legislation that brought the excesses of the industrial revolution to a halt That they were excesses can hardly be doubted The reports naturally centered around extreme rather than typical illustrations A free press, a free literature, and an unmuzzled Parliament proclaimed the evidences of industrial inhumanity to the entire world...

...What are these considerations worth??in their bearing on the assessment of the Russian Revolution, or of any other revolutionary transformation of an under-developed country by violent, dictatorial and terrorist methods...

...The Marxist rejects the whole question out of hand as irrelevant to the problem When is a revolution justified'' According to him, this problem has actualite in modern society only when industrialization and the phenomena integral to it already have occurred For Marxists, the political revolution that marks the development from capitalism to socialism presupposes that industry and technology, without which socialism spells merely the socialization of poverty, have developed To the extent that the costs of revolution are calculated, in the eyes of the Marxist they refer only to the advisability of the immediate political action of taking and keeping power The question for a Marxist is not whether the costs of revolution are to be weighed against the benefits of industrialization, it is only whether the existing forms of industry are to be socialized through due legal process or by the extra-legal act of revolution...

...This position would be denied by the architects of the October Revolution Leon Trotsky, the most brilliant of the Bolshevik-Marxists, concludes his extremely partisan and colorful History of the Russian Revolution by asking the question "Do the consequences of a revolution justify in general the sacrifices it involves9" only to dismiss it as an idle and fruitless speculation "It would be as well," he writes, "to ask m the face of the difficulties and griefs of personal existence Is it worthwhile to be born...

...as indicative of the "breaches of legality" of which Stalin, in complicity with his opportunistic detractors, was guilty—in any way furthered the industrialization and modernization of the Soviet Union In no other country of the world was political murder on such a vast scale among the methods used to introduce the industrial revolution...

...This comparison between the revolutionary event and the event of being born is singularly instructive, especially coming from one who belonged to a group of professional revolutionists dedicated to the goal of destroying an old and building a new society It assimilates revolutions to natural, inescapable events unaffected by human deliberation, volition and courage It overlooks the fact that while men do not choose to be born, they choose, plan and plot revolt It engenders an attitude of diminished responsibility for the actions, including the crimes, required to bring about the revolution It implies that there are no real alternatives, therefore blinding the revolutionists to their presence It nurtures the illusion that the inexorable processes of revolutionary change are merely manifested through them, that they simply help bring to fruition developments, no matter how bitter and bloody, already in motion and for which they are not morally accountable The inconsistency in this fetishism of the historical process is revealed in the fact that the Communist thinkers who declare it is pointless to ask whether a revolution can be justified by its costs, do not hesitate to ask whether a war is worth the costs of fighting it, particularly when they disapprove of a war Logically, the same generic analysis applies to both historical phenomena...

...And is it altogether meaningless to ask in the face of the misfortunes, and sometimes horrors of personal existence, if it is worthwhile to be born, is life worth living'' No one chooses life, but he can choose death and he can choose to bring life to others There are individuals who in a rational state of mind have voted against continued life and liberated themselves from the burdens of existence There are many more who in times of great trouble have refused to bring children into the world...

...This is absurd, as we can easily see by considering the parable of the magic carpet Suppose we were offered a modern version of a magic carpet that requires neither oil nor gas to take us anywhere we want to go at speeds of our desire It could be rolled up and stored in a closet, is accident proof and unaffected by technological obsolescence Compared to the carpet, our automobile is a very crude contraption And all the ingenious inventor wants for it is the lives of 10,000 people Having read Moore, he argues "If you are prepared to pay the price of 40,000 lives tor such an inefficient and costly machine as the automobile, why do you hesitate to pay me my reasonable price...

...This begs all the important issues It ignores the fact that the orthodox Marxist dogma, according to which no social order disappears until all the potential productive forces within it have been actualized, has been proved to be a myth The Bolshevik-Leninists succeeded precisely m doing what the theory of historical materialism declared to be impossible The industrialization of the country did not prepare the way for the revolution, the revolution prepared the way for industrialization By jettisoning Marx, the Bolshevik-Lenin-ists gave sense to a question which had no significance on Marxist premises but had worlds of meaning on other premises It is a question that has become focal in every underdeveloped country striving to modernize itself and tempted to adopt totalitarian methods to achieve that modernization It did not exist tor Marx because for him no underdeveloped country could be ready for socialization Underdeveloped countries could only become less underdeveloped by following in the path of those more developed, which showed them the face of their future...

...It is this concern for past rights and wrongs which bedevils so much of contemporary history and prevents an intelligent approach and resolution of problems in the present The legacy of the past and the consciousness of the past weighs too heavily on the complex of Israeli-Arab problems And the same is true in the Far East and Central Europe Wisdom requires an adoption of something like a statute of limitations upon the drive for absolute historic justice, and the substitution of a policy of limited peaceful gains There is no such thing as absolute justice in this world The evils Hitler, and not only Hitler, did to the Jews in Europe will never be atoned for or repaid, the only good reason for remembering what he did is to avoid m the present and future the kind of thought and action that led him to his unspeakable barbarities From this point of view, the assessment of the Russian October Revolution, as of all other revolutions, must be primarily m terms of the possibility of other alternatives that could have been considered and taken The misdeeds of Ivan the Terrible and the cowardly weakness of Nicholas II do not mitigate the actions of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalm Their purges and terror, based on the unlimited rule of force, could only be justified if there were no other alternatives One can establish this for some phases of some actions By and large, however, every decisive turning point m the history of the Soviet Union from the forcible dissolution of the Constituent Assembly to the forcible collectivization of agriculture, to the Moscow Trials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and the resumption of the cold war against the United States and the West could have been avoided without any threat to its justifying principles of freedom and welfare The incontestable fact remains that the working masses of the Western democratic world have secured for themselves a greater freedom and a higher welfare at a far lesser cost than that paid by their Russian brothers for their present lot...

...If terror against the Jews is justified by the alleged terror of their ancestors against the ancestors of the present-day terrorists, then terror against the children of today's terrorists would be waged by the descendents of their victims This can only set up a never ending cycle of hatred and bloodshed Some Irish terrorists are still revenging themselves upon the English for the crimes of Cromwell This makes as little sense as would an apologia for Cromwell's excesses on the ground that the Irish are not without guilt, since, after all, they wiped out the indigenous population of Ireland...

...But all of these costs of the expanded industrialization of the Soviet Union were as nothing compared to the political excesses of the regime The millions of casualties of the continued civil war waged by the Kremlin against the Russian population had nothing to do with the processes of industrialization, except to hamper them The claim made by some Western apologists, including the Webbs, that the organized terror by the regime was necessary for the expansion and functioning of industry??that the Russian workers had to be driven to a modernized economy against their own will??violates the assumptions of every democratic variant of Marxism and sets on its head the simple truths about the prerequisites of industry...

...What possible bearing on the costs of industrialization did myriads of crimes have from the Katyn massacre to the murder of Ehrhch and Alter, leaders of the Jewish Bund, as agents of Hitler7 Not a single one of the incidents reported by Khrushchev m his speech before the 20th Congress of the Communist Party...

...Whatever our answers to the questions concerning the justification of life, the question of the justification of revolution remains a very live option in our age An evaluation after a time span of 15 years??Trotsky dismissed the problem in 1932—may not provide an adequate perspective for assessing the consequences of the vast transformations produced by the October Revolution But after 50 years such judgments are surely legitimate...

...The first striking but pervasive confusion m computing the costs of social transformation in the Soviet Union stems from speaking of the terror under Lenin and the horrors of the Stalin regime as if they were necessarily involved in the processes of industrialization and collectivization The costs of the industrial revolution in England and other countries are measured in terms of crowding, lack of hygiene, disease, malnutrition, physical discomfort, long hours, child labor, and other privations of a similar order These costs were the object of bitter criticism at the time A great deal of the data dramatically used by Marx comes from the reports of the official factory inspectors The alleviation of these hardships of the industrial revolution became the active object of parliamentary and trade union activity Before Marx's death many of them had disappeared There were no mass purges, deportations, executions, and forced labor concentration camps for millions...

...This cruelty is frequently concealed in the echoes of rhetorical denunciation of past evils Thus even Mark Twain, misled by some French historians, in speaking of the excesses and cruelties of the "red terror" of the French Revolution, declares that it was nothing but a reply to or a consequence of "the white terror" begun with Louis XIV and continued for a longer period and with a greater loss of life than the terror of 1793-5 Yet Louis XIV and those of his courtiers who counseled him had long since mouldered in their graves when Mane Antoinette and her entourage, as well as thousands of French workers and peasants, were guillotined...

...The industrialization undertaken in Communist countries was a consequence of deliberate decision It was willed together with its costs m the face of various alternatives, ranging from postponement of an overall plan to plans of a more modest scope and pace of realization An intelligible choice, aside from its wisdom, is a choice made among viable alternatives in the contemporary spectrum of realistic possibilities Its justification must be grounded on the differential consequences of pursuing one course of action rather than another A policy that requires a reign of terror to implement it, if justified, must be grounded on the evidence that this is the only way to avoid what is sure to be a greater reign of terror By no stretch of common sense can it be justified on the ground that some state of affairs which, like the industrial revolution in England, was not the outcome of a policy, had led to an equal or greater amount of suffering and evil m the past...

...The Human Cost By Sidney Hook The 50th anniversary of the Russian October Revolution is an appropriate occasion for assessing its rationale as a social revolution By this I mean something more than a mere inventory of its material achievements over the last half-century, these do not signify very much in the light of comparable achievements by other countries I mean, rather, a weighing of the human gains and costs of those violent measures undertaken to bring about not the Bolshevik program of a socialist society ?that is still in the limbo of the unrealized ?but the incontestable, complex social changes that differentiate pre-Revolutionary Russia from the Soviet Union today...

...The actual costs of the industrial revolution m Communist countries have gone largely unreported, partly because there were no agencies independent of the government to describe them or facilities for distributing eye-witness experiences, and partly because the outrage of the political terror dwarfed the sufferings and privations of ordinary life There were no reporters on the scene to write up what happened to the hands of the child silk-workers in Tashkent, or to give an account of the lives of those "lumber workers" m the Northern forests, except escapees and refugees whose revelations were discounted or dismissed as prejudiced judgments reflecting only their personal experiences...

...There is something odd about the comparison between the costs of industrialization m the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, and the costs of industrialization m Western countries What is odd is that the industrial revolution in the West, a series of events which no one agency or institution willed, is being compared with a series of events resulting from a deliberate program or policy While the costs in the West were not any less for not being willed, the moral responsibility was less It was limited to the range of actions open to the community when the unintended consequences of the unintended industrial revolution unrolled themselves in time...

...All one need do to test this is to select some of the specific outrages committed by the Communist high command, notably Stalin, and to inquire what industrial purpose it served It a victim of the Moscow Trials confesses that he organized a group to sabotage machinery or to put glass or tacks in butter, what possible effects could his punishment have on those producing machines or butter, except to limit production by more conscientious effort to avoid furnishing any pretext for the charge of sabotage...

...Such an inquiry is difficult yet not impossible The questions related to it certainly make sense We ask similar ones about many different issues Looking back on our past, individual or social, we judge important actions on the basis of what is presently known We do this not to determine whether we would perform them again, but whether they were justified by their consequencies??whether, in short, the gains or the glory or the freedoms won were worth the pains or the agony or the freedoms lost An experience may be justified by its consequences even though we have no desire to live it over again Unless judgments of this kind can be validly made, there can be no such thing as wisdom in human affairs Or foolishness for that matter...

...Presumably, the author believes, in answer to his question, that we would think equally poorly of such a regime Presumably, it the political regime executed only 20,000 people a year it would be only halt as bad as if it executed 40,000, and halt as bad as a regime which has 40,000 traffic accidents Accidents and executions are put on the same moral plane1...

...To make comparisons with evils of the past and to attempt to guide present action m their light sometimes leads to an acceptance of the dogma of collective responsibility in its most pernicious form It is bad enough to hold all members of a group collectively responsible for actions of some individual members of that group unless the entire group was aware of those actions, and in a position to control them or at least condemn them But it is monstrous, and a source of great and continuous cruelty m world history, to hold a present generation responsible for the sins of omission and commission of its ancestors...