Russian Utopians and Soviet Ideologists

Abstract

S OME years ago, an odd question was frequently being asked which dealt with the meaning or motivation of Soviet world politics. It took the following form: Are Soviet policies to be understood as a continuation of Russian imperialism or are they dictated by the interests of revolutionary communism? After being debated hotly for some time, the question died down, either because the debate turned out to be inconclusive or because the problem was happily solved by a verbal synthesis-in other words, by a phrase: Communist imperialism, which many of us use today. Of course, phrases do not solve such problems, and the question still remains whether Soviet policy is a continuation or restoration of tsarist policies, or is based primarily on motivations superimposed onto the Russian scene by Marxist-Leninist ideology. Similar problems of continuity and change are inherent in the examination of any society; for among the questions we have to ask ourselves are some of the following: What are the society's links with the past? What is old and what is new? And, of the features which have remained from the old society, which are form and which are content, essential or incidental? Problems of this kind are particularly acute in the study of revolutions not only because revolutions are, by definition, periods of rapid and sweeping change, but also because revolutionary thought implies a very specific attitude toward the past. If we glance at some outstanding revolutions, we find that this attitude usually is far from simple. While revolutionary thinkers inevitably reject the immediate past, they have often thought of their revolution as the restoration of old values. Numerous examples could be given for this. Other revolutions change their minds (if we may thus endow them, figuratively, with this human attribute), the Russian revolution among them. To its more extreme adherents, writes Ernest J. Simmons, in