Bolshevism's Grim Saga
ULAM, ADAM
Bolshevism's Grim Saga A People's Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution By Orlando Figes Viking. 923 pp. $39.95. Reviewed by Adam Ulam Gurney Professor of History and Political...
...Often he is too inclusive in his analyses, adducing several possible explanations without evaluating their importance...
...One must not minimize the sins, flaws and above all sheer incompetence of the old regime...
...At the time, however, Mme...
...How could a system...
...It is vividly written, full of facts, and often insightful in sketching the main actors of the drama...
...Again, social backwardness, compounded by military defeats, doomed attempts at a democratic solution following February 1917...
...and a cult...
...Politically, the system could be characterized as a semi-autocracy, with the executive (especially in the military sphere) controlled by the monarch rather than the legislature, a system very similar to that then prevalent in Imperial Germany...
...believed in and practiced intra-Party democracy...
...as even the greatest skeptics should surely be convinced by now...
...In 1941, within a few months of the beginning of World War II, the Soviet Union lost much more territory to invaders than it had by February 1917...
...After its overthrow those who longed for peace, including most Bolsheviks prior to Lenin's return to Russia in April of 1917, were constrained in their opposition to the war by an apparently very cogent consideration: Russia's unilateral withdrawal was bound to lead to Germany's victory, since even with the German Army engaged on two fronts, the Allies were barely holding their own in the West...
...Many of the books on the subject, and not only those written by Left-wingers, have sought and found under the veneer of violence and human suffering some positive elements in the story of Communism...
...But the author weakens his argument when he writes, "Only a democracy that contained elements of this social revolution had any prospect of holding on to power in the conditions of 1917...
...But the regime's main sin of omission was its failure to realize that to avoid a catastrophe, Russia needed a government that enjoyed the confidence of society...
...This is especially evident as Figes discusses the causes of the Tsar's fall...
...Then history most unfairly awarded its prize: Germany's defeat and the Western powers' exhaustion enabled the Bolsheviks to win their own war against the Russian people...
...Here one wishes the author had sharpened his analysis...
...Even the generally decrepit bureaucracy produced in Count Sergei Witte and Petr Stolypin statesmen of a major caliber...
...What would be Russia's fate if Germany dominated Europe...
...The feeble, irresolute, and intermittently brutal prewar Imperial autocracy was in fact, as the author's own narrative illustrates, quite different from its Communist successor...
...In listing some of the lovers of that fiery Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai, for instance, the author includes King Gustav of Sweden, where she served as Soviet ambassador in the '40s...
...that is, the Tsar and the bureaucracy...
...Yet simply to present them, without taking into account contemporary European reality, is to distort the true picture of the Revolution...
...As the title suggests, Figes considers the October Revolution an unmitigated disaster for the Russian people...
...Kollontai was in her 60s and the king an octogenarian who, having fulfilled his duty to the dynasty, evidently favored what is now described as an alternative lifestyle...
...That's certainly true of the Russian Revolution...
...It was implicit in the regime from the start...
...There had been military defeats, the aura of scandal surrounding the Imperial couple and Grigory Rasputin, and Nicholas II's pathetic incapacity to lead, whether in peace or war...
...That was their ace card, the most important reason for their success...
...The Bolshevik saga is treated by the author extensively and vividly...
...It was only in the ritualistic formula that Nicholas II was "the Autocrat of All Russia...
...and how else could you assure progress in a backward society...
...If not the Tsarist regime then Russian society was taking giant steps toward modernization...
...Here and there a detail leaves one feeling skeptical...
...As for the urban sector, the pace of Russian industrialization during the two preceding decades rivaled that of the United States...
...that were not only reprehensible, but also irrational and, yes, vulnerable have come into being and endured for over 70 years...
...The presence of Social Revolutionary and Menshevik ministers in the Kerensky government should have been sufficient guarantee that once peace came this revolution would be sanctioned by law...
...not with a bang, but with barely a whimper...
...He begins by challenging the view that the "Tsarist system was being reformed, or modernized, along Western liberal lines...
...By December of '41, the Soviet Army's losses far surpassed those incurred by the Imperial forces during all of World War I. Yet the Soviet autocracy did not collapse...
...But here was the rub: The Bolsheviks were the only movement that demanded and promised an immediate termination of the war...
...Then suddenly the Soviet Union and Communism collapsed...
...Was the condition of Russia's countryside markedly different from that in Italy or Spain...
...But the main flaw in his panorama of the Revolution is the above-mentioned tendency tojudge events by the criteria of a later period...
...But later he acknowledges that the two decades preceding World War I saw vigorous economic growth...
...The author's passion for details occasionally carries him into amusing trivia...
...as called for by the moderate Progressive Bloc in the short-lived 1915 Duma...
...The Communist state never recognized such limitations upon its powers...
...The description of the Civil War and its role in setting the main characteristics of the Soviet state is the best part of Figes' book...
...Lenin justified Red Terror by saying that the violent deaths of some bourgeois were but a small prize for getting rid of capitalism, which had destroyed the lives of millions of people...
...But again one has to take exception to one of the generalizations: "By 1921, if not earlier, the Revolution had come full circle and a new autocracy had been imposed on Russia which in many ways resembled the old...
...It was Lenin's brilliant insight that the road to power lay through anarchy...
...We have also been warned against confusing Leninism with the horrors of the Stalin era...
...Then there's Lenin's allegedly benevolent intentions, not realized because of his illness and early death...
...Though logically and quantitatively specious, this argument as a general justification of Communism did not sound so unconvincing in the aftermath of the war...
...No one can quarrel with the themes of the weakness and obtuseness of the Provisional Government and the naivete of the democratic Left...
...Development would have come much faster and more solidly, without exacting the terrible price in human suffering, had almost any other conceivable set of rulers been enthroned in the Kremlin...
...Within a few months his party's defeatist propaganda succeeded in completely destroying the Army's morale, and in setting the stage for the Bolshevik coup...
...On the face of it, his criticism is largely justified: The regime...
...There was a deep irony in the situation...
...He is correct in writing of Lenin that "like all dictators he was fiercely jealous of his own power...
...Still, there is no denying that the author has absorbed the vast body of literature about the Revolution and its antecedents...
...We are told what the Bolshevik leaders ate after they had decided to carry out an armed coup, and also the repast of the ministers of the Provisional Government as they awaited what is usually and mistakenly referred to as "the storming of the Winter Palace...
...in fact (and this goes back to the prewar period) he lacked the force and resolve to be an autocrat, and the intelligence to recognize that his only alternative lay in a constitutional monarchy...
...Figes very rightly does not consider such pleadings as deserving of extensive rebuttal...
...Lenin, while ruling autocratically...
...was being reluctantly dragged by events rather than consciously followingthe path of reform...
...rather than one composed of discredited bureaucrats...
...A social revolution was going on in 1917...
...Tsarism was overthrown very largely because politicians of all persuasions believed that Nicholas II's government was too incompetent to carry the war to a successful conclusion...
...What once seemed ordained by the grim forces of history is now hard to explain...
...And when its rulers attempted to loosen its grip upon its subjects, it fell to pieces...
...had the author devoted more space to intra-Bolshevik politics, he could have exposed the hollowness of the notion of "intraParty democracy" in Lenin's time...
...Reviewed by Adam Ulam Gurney Professor of History and Political Science Emeritus, Harvard University It is difficult to avoid judging events of the past in the light of the present...
...It is credited with propelling Russia toward modernization and industrialization...
...Or that both would be with us for the foreseeable future...
...Not so long ago, we had sociologists and political scientists prattling about "the Soviet model of development" as an example to the emerging nations of the Third World...
...Communism...
...But again one misses a focused explanation of how a party with a clandestine membership of perhaps 30,000 in February and some 300,000 in October was capable of seizing and keeping power...
...The Tsarist system did not fall because it was reactionary, it fell because it was both reactionary and weak...
...As to what actually set in motion the events leading to February 1917, this account rightly recognizes several factors...
...While no single book could answer that question, Orlando Figes' bulky volume should prove of considerable help...
...in fact acted as a brake on Russia's economic progress...
...The Tsarist regime was a classical police state that observed some legal forms, and still left room for free social activity and individual freedom...
...Had he but lived a few more years...
...The Red Terror did not come out of the blue," he writes...
...Indeed, how could a country so richly endowed by nature, and with such a body of eminent scientists and engineers, have missed becoming modernized under any social system...
...Had either of them been at the helm during the war years, events might well have taken a different turn...
...The Great War also helped turn Communism into a viable social movement...
...The term democracy is out of place in describing any facet of the Communist system...
...What Figes' argument adds up to, then, is that Russia's backwardness was responsible for the fall of the Imperial regime and for the country's subsequent tribulations: The antiquated political and social structure could not withstand the hard test of the war...
...Until quite recently no historian, however conservative, could deny that for all its regrettable consequences the Revolution of 1917 gave birth to two of the basic realities of our time: the Soviet Union as a superpower, and Communism as a major secular faith...
...Figes amply illustrates the unsoundness of such views without tackling the question directly...
...Yet if we look at the general European picture in 1914, was Russia really so backward compared with the West...
...While Figes seldom errs in describing the flow of events embracing the two revolutions of 1917, he is less successful in explaining why those cataclysms, the fall of the Tsarist regime and the Bolshevik seizure of power, took place...
Vol. 80 • May 1997 • No. 9
