The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation, 1917–41 by Lara Douds James Harris Peter Whitewood (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 779 review), in which regular justice could be fair, impersonal and predictable, while political dissidents could expect extrajudicial repression. Kirmse goes too far, however, when he suggests that ‘[o]rdinary people including ethnic and religious minorities could take state officials to court’ (p. 250). This was not true in imperial Russia, although it would have been, thanks to a law on administrative justice scheduled to take effect in the summer of 1917. The author also misfires regarding the Security Law of 1881: its basic provisions affected the entire empire right down to 1917. Despite these criticisms, the book is an excellent introduction both to the most successful of the great reforms and to how ordinary people, and in particular ethnic and religious minorities, resorted to the new courts in the first decades of their functioning. Department of History Jonathan Daly University of Illinois at Chicago Douds, Lara; Harris, James and Whitewood, Peter (eds). The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation, 1917–41. Library of Modern Russia. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2020. x + 319 pp. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £24.99: $34.94 (paperback). AlthoughthecentennialoftheBolshevikrevolutionhascomeandgone,debate about its aims and consequences continues. How did a regime that promised to secure full human liberation and raise the world on new foundations become a dictatorship that slaughtered millions? In the 100 years since ‘Great October’ various answers have been given, but most of them reflect what the editors of this volume consider to be the mentality of the Cold War era, setting American or Western liberal democracy against Soviet authoritarianism. In their introduction Professors Lara Douds, James Harris and Peter Whitewood state that the goal of their collection is to go beyond this Cold War paradigm. The aim of the Soviet experiment, they maintain, was indeed to emancipate the masses but to do so by means of an ‘illiberal liberation’, a form of class-based democracy that, its creators believed, was very different from and superior to that provided by rule-of-law states with their constitutions, freedom of speech and limited government. The editors believe that the revolution should not be viewed as a ‘journey from liberation to tyranny’. Rather it should be seen as an experiment that, from its inception, displayed both ‘emancipatory and authoritarian tendencies’ that waxed and waned in accordance with changing political, social and economic circumstances (p. 14). The sixteen essays in this volume are presented under six broad rubrics: Ideology and Practice; Workers’ Democracy and State Building; Internal Party SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 780 Democracy; Repression and Moderation; National Tensions and International Threats; Culture and Society. The question of the founders’ original intent hangs over the collection and, not surprisingly, Lenin’s problematic and nevercompleted work, The State and Revolution, receives considerable attention as a blueprint for a future Communist society created by means of ‘illiberal liberation’. Most of the contributors to this volume accept the notion of Lenin’s liberationist goal, but the initial essay by Erik van Ree strikes a somewhat discordant note. To his way of thinking the radical utopian element of Lenin’s thought was ‘overshadowed by powerful dictatorial, even tyrannical instincts’ (p. 28). Admitting that he might be ‘(just a tiny bit) too harsh’, van Ree writes further that ‘no one else in the history of political thought ever formally stated the despotic principle in Lenin’s outrageous form of a state power limited by absolutely nothing and exclusively based on force’ (p. 29, italics in the original). Theseideashave‘auniquenihilistic qualityandasheerweirdnessthatisdifficult to fathom’ (p. 29). At this point some readers may decide to go no further, but those whose judgments are less ‘harsh’ will press on and be rewarded. While not refuting van Ree, Lars Lih shows that one of the features of Bolshevik rule, the permanent campaign, was not entirely an example of ‘sheer weirdness’ but was rooted in the practices of European, particularly German, Social Democracy. Ferdinand Lassalle had seized and expanded the ‘bourgeois’ notion of free speech to create a technique of constant unrelenting propaganda and agitation covering every facet of life. Lenin adopted this idea in the years before 1917, but after October he adapted it to new circumstances. Abandoning the SPD model...