8. The Bolshevik Gamble

Abstract

THERE are two main explanations of the Bolshevik overthrow of the provisional Russian democracy. According to one, the October Revolution was the product of the deepest historical trends in the Russian past. The other maintains that it was a willful imposition on those trends, arbitrarily reversing them. Marxist historiography naturally holds to the first view, though Soviet historians have always contended at the price of a certain inconsistency that Lenin's personal genius had to be present to make the inevitable revolution happen. It is also possible to see the Bolshevik Revolution as something natural if not inevitable, without being a Marxist and without even approving the outcome. However, most non-Communist historiography represents the Bolshevik coup as a deliberate and untoward reversal of what is presumed to be Russia's natural evolution toward constitutional democracy. The Bolshevik success, in this view, has to be explained by the singular qualities of monolithic organization, brilliant chicanery, and unabashed willto-power which presumably characterized V. I. Lenin and his 'instrument, the Bolshevik Party. But neither this personal will theory nor the inevitability theories is particularly convincing if evaluated critically in the light of the historical record. There is another range of considerations which needs more stress, in the often neglected realm of contingency and default. There are at least four distinct interpretations of the October Revolution as the natural course of Russian history: one, of course, is the official theory of the proletarian revolution; another is the theory of the revolutionary wave; a third is the theory of the modernizing dictatorship; a fourth is the notion that Russian cultural traditions made a democratic solution impossible. All of these theories, however, suffer from serious weaknesses. GCopyrighted by the author [Ed. ]. 331