Revolution, Modernization and the Paradox of Twentieth-Century Russia

Abstract

ARTICLES A key challenge faced by historians of the 1990s all over the world has been to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union and Communist rule in Russia. But more fundamental question, less often addressed, is the real nature of the Soviet system that was finally swept away. Understanding the convulsions of the recent past demands reconsideration of the tumultuous history of the entire century. The astonishing events of 1991 have implanted an almost universal stereotype about the fallen regime. It is considered, in Russia as well as abroad, to have been a 74-year experiment that failed, or some variation on that theme. This judgment flows from literal, simplistic reading of Communist ideology as the main determinant of the Soviet experience. It differs from official Stalinist and neo-Stalinist propaganda only in putting negative rather than positive value on that record. The entire Soviet experience is thus presumed to have had simple historical unity, as the direct, undeviating pursuit of disastrous revolutionary utopia. It follows from this assumption that any proclaimed goals or practices associated with the Soviet system must be rejected without qualification. This reasoning has led the post-Soviet regime into historical vacuum, pursuing its own form of counter-utopia to the point of new national disaster. The main dissent from this viewpoint in Russia has not been based on any new alternative, but only on the opposite valuation of the undifferentiated Soviet past, the nostalgic faith that everything associated with the Soviet regime was essentially correct and heroic. Both attitudes, government and opposition, have been equally oblivious to the real Russian past, and neither has offered the guidance needed to lead the country out of its post-Soviet impasse. Today's profoundly unhistorical misunderstanding of the Soviet experience revolves around three basic problems. First is the nature of the Russian Revolution as long-term process, and its significance as the framework for the overall development of Russian society. The second problem is the challenge of modernization that Russia has faced all during its revolutionary experience, along with the ambiguous relationship between Russia and the West in this respect. A related question is to define the character of post-revolutionary society in Russia, and its relation to modem social trends around the globe. The problem of modernization and social change leads in turn to the third main question about the Soviet regime, namely the relation between ideology and reality, and the confusion that Communist doctrine has created about the social nature of the system. Finally, out of an investigaton of these foundations of Soviet reality some conclusions can be derived about the alleged successes and failures of the revolution and about the assumptions that have governed the post-Soviet regime. THE PROCESS OF REVOLUTION Revolution, obviously, is the central fact in the history of Russia in the twentieth century, as well as cardinal theme of global history in this era. Russians do not need to be reminded that revolution is tragic experience. It is tragic not only in the human suffering it entails, but in the hopes for better world that it feeds on and then betrays. But it would be misguided to blame those hopes, and the ideologies that convey them, for the crimes that may have been committed in their name. This is the approach of ideological reductionism, familiar error in the understanding of revolutions and their consequences, and nearly universal mistake in the post-Communist atmosphere. All the misery of revolution is attributed to the wrong-headed ideas of revolutionaries whose thinking supposedly traces back to the Enlightenment and the hubris of rational intervention in the affairs of society. In reality, revolutions are far more complex and multi-dimensional, far more deeply embedded in the historical evolution of given society, than the simple explanations of dangerous ideas or nefarious plots imply. …