"The Wave of the Future"?
Studies in Revolution. By Edward Hallett Carr. (Macmillan. 9s. 6d.) THESE essays are modestly described as " by-products " of Mr. Carr's forthcoming book on the origins of the Russian Revolution, but they deserve a higher classification than that. For they are concerned with one of the great problems of our time, the place in history of the Russian Revolution and of its embodiment, the Soviet Government and the world movement that it leads. Mr. Carr's method is mainly biographical, his subjects ranging from Saint-Simon to Mr. William Gallacher, and he poses questions rather than answers them, as is legitimate enough in a collection of this kind There is, it is true, one question that he does not seem to pose—whether the whole idea of a necessarily drastic transformation of industrial society was not an illusion and whether it is not the idea of " revolution," the emphasis on the sudden, complete aesthetically satisfactory breach with the past, that is the basic error, and the parties and the doctrines of this tradition the real dope- peddlers for the proletariat. If that view be tenable, it is not only true (and obvious) that the Russian Revolution is as great as the French, but that it is the same thing, the legitimate child or grand- child.
The endless controversy in French left-wing circles about who be- trayed the first Revolution suggew1he permanence of the dilemma, and a historical-polemist like M' Guerin might well say there are more ways than one of putting over Thermidor or Brumaire, and that Stalin is a master of all of them, of the methods of Prairial, of Thermidor and of Brumaire—Robespierre, Barras and Bonaparte in one. And these reflections have relevance to the French revolu- tionary writers who are dealt with here, with Saint-Simon, Proudhon, Sorel, all critics of the Revolution, all, implicitly or explicitly, dis- cussing its failure to create a society that would be novel enough to justify the cost. But the main theme is the ancestry of the Russian Revolution
and its course. Some of the articles here reprinted may be rathe stiff reading for those (it such there be) who come to this book will no knowledge of the highly involved and controversial history the nineteenth-century Russian parties. So many of the names an not even names today, and the whole tangled story is inevitably non seen by hindsight, as is the early history of the Church. But the main themes, suggested rather than stated by Mr. Carr, are simple enough. He is too learned to ignore the fact that the Russian Revolution was, and is, a Marxist revolution, and he reminds us (what is easy to forget) that the Marxist tradition is certainly one of the main and now, perhaps, the only effective link between con temporary Russia and the Western tradition. Whether Marx was or was not a Marxist, he was a " Westerner " in the Russian sense, and the rulers of Russia, if they continue their xenophobic and nationalistic cultural programme, may have to expurgate both Mart and Engels, if only for the sin of not knowing about the numerous suppressed Russian contributions to the making of modern technology.
But the Russian Revolution was—and is—also very Russian, and much of what we fear or detest in present-day Russia has old Russian roots. If there had been a successful revolution in Germany or France, it might have been more humane or more cultured or technically more rapidly successful. On the other hand, a point not dealt with fully here, the revolution didn't happen in Germany or France, and that it succeeded at all was, again, in part due to Russian tenacity, indifference to Western ease and facilite. Indeed, Mr. Carr returns again and again to the paradox of the Russian Revolution. It occurred in a country where, on Marxist doctrine, its chances were pocifest ; it jumped at least one theoretically neces. sary stage in the revolutionary process, and its leaders, Lenin as well as Trotsky, did not believe it possible to carry out the revolution successfully in a country so backward and so isolated.
But did they ? That is the question, the final question that Mr. Carr poses without answering. Is the present Russian State any thing like the State or society planfied by Marx or Lenin ? There is no doubt of the completeness of the Revolution, and Mr. Can hints that Stalin's decision to industrialise at all costs, to collectivise at all costs, with all that this meant in misery and degradation, may have been the only way to save the Leninist achievement, and that, in turn, leaves open the question raised here whether the Mensheviks were not right, whether Russia was ripe in 1903 or 1917 for that jump into the future imposed so ruthlessly by the Bolsheviks on the peoples of the dissniting Russian Empire. A revolution occurred, but was it the Tel/Million hoped for in Siberia, in Switzerland, in the Tottenham Cotyt Road ? And today, with the same jump into the future possibly boutOr. be imposed on a society even more numerous and even less ripe, one is forced to wonder what the
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