Reviews of the Week
Bolsheviks at_Work
The Bolshevik Revolution: 1917-1923. VoL i. By E. H. Carr. (Macmillan. 2 SS.)
THE first volume of Mr. E. H. Carr's projected History of Soviet Russia has long been eagerly awaited, and the expectations formed of it will not be disappointed. If Mr. Can can carry out his ambitious plan at this level and on this scale, he will have produced one of the few really indispensable books for understanding the age in which we live. And this first volume is by itself far and away the most important book on a Soviet theme that has yet appeared in the English language. One does not know whether to admire more the persevering hunt after the extant original sources that lies behind the work, the intellectual effort involved in reading through their often turgid and repetitive contents so as not to miss what is vital, or the skill and clarity of the author's presentation of his analysis. Even those whose view of the Russian Revolution. is (like the present reviewer's) far removed from Mr. Carr's own, who are oppressed, as he is not, with the essential tragedy for Russia and for the world implicit in the transformation of a movement for liberation into the construction of a newer, more far-reaching and more cruel tyranny than the one it replaced ; even those who feel that no book that omits this aspect of the matter can ever be wholly satisfactory, cannot but acknowledge the intellectual magni- tude of Mr. Carr's achievement. To compare it, for instance, with the Webbs' Soviet Communism, so acclaimed in its day, is to measure our advance in the comprehension of the whole unfamiliar world of continental totalitarianism. It affords the best answer to those who argue, first, that the materials for understanding Soviet history do not exist, and, second, that there is no one qualified to use them. It is not a reflection likely to cause pride in British academic circles that Mr. Carr has written this book as a private individual working with the encouragement of a commercial pub- lishing house, and largely from library resources not in this country but in the United States.
To understand the limitations of Mr. Can's book, it is necessary to be clear what it is he has undertaken to do. The History of Soviet Russia has not been conceived as a narrative history. What Mr. Can is concerned with, is the study of the building-up on Russian soil of an economic and political system based upon the Marxist ideology and owing much to the development of Marxist ideas in the internal struggles of pre-Revolutionary Russian socialism, the story of which forms the prelude to his history. For this reason, the first part of the whole work subtitled The Bolshevik Revolution is itself subdivided into three main headings under which Mr. Can proposes to consider /he development of the Soviet system between the October kevolution and the death of Lenin. The present volume is concerned with the political and constitu- tional structure ; the second and third (promised for next year) will deal with economic affairs and with foreign policy. (Since we shall have to wait for_both bibliography and index until the third volume appears, it is to Whoped that the promised schedule of production is maintained.) The second part of the project is to be entitled The Struggle for Power : 1923-1928. It remains to be seen whether the techniques which served Mr. Can so well for the early period, in which free, discussion, at least within the party, was still largely maintained, will still be fruitful, or whether the clamping down of the mask of unanimity will prove an insuperable obstacle. ..1" The problem presented by this first instalment is a different one. If one concentrates on analysis, on ideas, situations and their inter- action, one is bound to find oneself writing as though what actually happened was in some sense predestined. This is the more likely to be the case when, as with Mr. Carr, the writer appears to accept something of the general outlook of the movement he describes—not in the sense of being a Communist or near-Com. munist as ordinarily defined, but simply in regarding the proletarian revolution and the establishment of socialism as both the ordained end of the historical process and as on the whole desirable. Because, in fact, the working politician, whether a revolutionary or not, has to confront at once all three aspects that Mr. Carr's analysis divides, and because he confronts them not simply with a stock of ideas but with passion and prejudice and with the lust for power without which he would hardly be a politician and certainly not a revolutionary, the narrative historian has advantages over the exponent of pure analysis. Mr. Can does not conceal the fact that the Revolution had its accompaniment of bloodshed and horror ; he does not ask himself whether terror itself was not the obvious weapon of men like Lenin and his associates, and whether the heart of the matter does not lie in the very fact that they were prepared to stop at nothing to retain the power that accident almost had thrust into their hands. It is a tale of desperate men—and of this we get little hint.
But what Mr. Carr does clear up magnificently is the whole tangled relation of Party and Soviets—a clue not only to the history of Soviet Russia but to much that has since happened elsewhere, and above all to the whole complex of questions that are usually -referred to under the heading of the " nationalities policy." The complicated process by which the Tsarist Empire was broken up and then again lagely reassembled, and its implications in and for Marxist thought, have never been dealt with in so masterly a fashion. These are difficult subjects and it would be idle to pretend that Mr. Carr's handling of them will attract or hold a careless or superficial reader ; but for those who genuinely seek to understand what happened and how—and often why—this book will provide the essential foundation for all serious work.
MAX. BELOFF.
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