Footnotes to Bolshevism
COHEN, STEPHEN F.
Footnotes to Bolshevism THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION: BEFORE AND AFTER By E. H. Carr Knopf. 178 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by STEPHEN F. COHEN Department of Politics, Princeton University E. H. Carr's...
...But evidence mounts that the Soviet agricultural and industrial policies of the '30s, like many subsequent developments, cannot be fully understood apart from Stalin's special role...
...The October Revolution: Before and After, a small collection of essays and reviews written since 1950...
...By comparison...
...The sympathetic review-essays on Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky—two of history's most dramatic losers—as well as his warm, admiring tribute to the work of the late Isaac Deutscher, make less tenable the complaint that he is deaf to the vanquished...
...Renewed interest in Stalinism, both in the West and in the Soviet Union, has increasingly focused attention on this decision, now considered by many the inaugural act of Stalin's revolution...
...Reviewed by STEPHEN F. COHEN Department of Politics, Princeton University E. H. Carr's monumental and mountainous A History of Soviet Russia, which on its impending completion will number 10 volumes in 11 or more books, has earned a mixed reputation, especially in this country...
...These were rejected by Stalin in favor of collectivization "without limitations...
...While there is no dearth of high praise for his enormous scholarly labors, Carr's unwavering refusal to play the "hanging judge," as he put it in his famous 1961 Trevelyan lectures, has provoked the charge of indifference to betrayed idealisms...
...Carr is surely right in arguing that this operation, "more than any other single event," led to collectivization...
...In "Revolution From Above: The Road to Collectivization" Carr brilliantly refutes the notion that this decision sprang from Bolshevik ideology...
...The longest essay, for example, restates and elaborates on Carr's conception of "the universal aspects of the Russian revolution," not the least of which was that it both signaled and hastened the end of man's belief in "objective and inexorable economic laws"—a faith shared in one fashion or another by most 19th-century thinkers, including Marx...
...For Carr, the answer is the deepening grain crisis of 1928-29, and the obstacles it placed in the way of the leadership's soaring industrial ambitions...
...It is a persuasive rejoinder to the tenacious view that the upheaval and its aftermath constituted an essentially national phenomenon...
...Indeed, as he notes, in late December a commission of Stalin's own supporters twice drafted recommendations urging a more moderate policy than the one ultimately adopted...
...Collectivization was the beginning of what became known as Stalinism...
...Whatever one's reservations about its focus, organization or even conclusions, and although it covers only the period up to 1929, the History remains the greatest work yet produced on the Bolshevik revolution...
...Lucid, insightful and encyclopedic, it is the chronicle with which every student of revolutionary Russia must begin and grapple...
...But, as Carr tacitly acknowledges at the end, the preliminary actions do not really explain the final decision to go all-out or what he calls its "haphazard and impulsive character...
...How, then, is wholesale collectivization (and the virtual civil war that ensued) to be explained...
...It destroyed the already crumbling system of market relations that had linked town and country since 1921, and persuaded the Stalinists that "strong-arm methods paid...
...This should not seem odd...
...Faced with a sharp drop in grain collections, the Stalin group, against the objections of the defeated Right Opposition, resorted repeatedly to forced requisitioning...
...Nonetheless, the book is of considerable interest, partly because its retlections on the Soviet experience are more leisurely than those in the History...
...But the most interesting essay brings the author to a subject not yet treated in his magnum opus, the onset in December 1929 of the forcible collectivization of 25 million peasant holdings...
...A similar corrective emerges from his remarks on The ABC of Communism, an early popular exposition of the Party's program that endures as an inventory of Bolshevik hopes and innocence during the heady Civil War years...
...The persistence of these criticisms in a field with more than its share of agitated political feelings is not surprising...
...At the same time, the collection presents a side of the Cambridge scholar that his critics have often found lacking...
...lost causes, and the victims of revolutionary change generally...
...the year the History began to appear, is minor and unstartling...
...Despite his admiration for political realism, Carr well understands the idealistic impulses invigorating the movement in those times: "The Utopian aspirations of early Bolshevism were an essential part of it, and cannot be neglected...
...Carr has never been happy with hypotheses emphasizing, however tentatively, the impact of single personalities on great events...
...Too frequently, however, they have detracted from the dimensions of Carr's achievement...
...All the pieces except one—an introduction to a forthcoming reprint of Bukharin's and Preobrazhensky's The ABC of Communism—have been published previously...
...and the definitive element in Stalinism was, of course, Stalin himself...
...Briefly, but conclusively, he shows that "nobody seriously contemplated it six months earlier or thought of it as required by Party doctrine...
Vol. 52 • September 1969 • No. 16
