Nobody dast blame this man
Raymond Carr
A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION by Richard Pipes Harvill, f25, pp. 431 Not so long ago, Pipes' works on the Russian Revolution might have been regarded as the outpourings of a disgrun- tled, if scholarly, conservative. His radical revisionism is directed against apologists for Lenin and the Bolsheviks as architects of a brand new socialist society which would redeem humanity from the moral morass of capitalism; but this heroic endeavour took a wrong turning, ending up in the horrors of Stalinist totalitarianism. Apologist historians, determined to save something from the wreck of vanished hopes, argue that Lenin, who died in 1924, bears no responsibility for this catastrophic failure. But for Pipes, the Bolshevik revolu- tion of October 1917 was flawed from the start. Stalin did not pervert the legacy of Lenin; he carried it to its logical conclusion. Pipes' revisionism has become accepted as orthodoxy. The statues of Lenin that stood in every town lie destroyed on the ground, and the Lenin museums are closed.
Pipes' revisionism starts with his treat- ment of the revolution of February 1917. He sees it as a political revolution that ended with a political act: the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II when the Petrograd garri- son mutinied and refused to shoot rioters. A local mutiny was transformed into a nation-wide revolution. With the Tsar gone, the state apparatus disintegrated in a matter of days. The provisional govern- ment could not master the ensuing anar- chy. Lenin, who had not foreseen this sudden collapse, almcist alone saw the opportunity it offered for a seizure of power by the Bolshevik party in a classic coup d etat organised as a military opera- tion by a handful of professional revolu- tionaries.
The October coup turned a private organisation, the Bolshevik party, with no popular mandate, self-appointed and self- perpetuating, into the public authority. Lenin ran the party and the party the state, carrying into public life the morality and ruthlessness, prophetically described in Dostoevsky's The Devils, of a clandestine party created in exile. Professing to repre- sent the Russian Congress of Soviets, it represented no one but itself.
Lenin was unique in that he conceived of politics as warfare — he had studied Clausewitz. The enemy was provided by Marx: the capitalist bourgeoisie and the state it manned as an instrument of its interests. This must, he held, be 'smashed'. Since the state had disintegrated, it remained to smash bourgeois society and private property as such. Smashing would be the work of professional, paid revolu- tionaries as the self-appointed representa- tives of the working class, whose revolutionary capacity, absorbed as they were in earning a living, Lenin distrusted.
Lenin is to Pipes a typical representative of the Russian intelligentsia, composed of frustrated individuals who, despairing of incremental reformism, even when such a possibility existed, became all-or-nothing men. Having smashed the past, Bolsheviks saw themselves as the armed prophets of a revolution that would perfect mankind; revolution in Russia would be the spring- board of a revolution that would destroy capitalism in Europe. This sense of mis- sion, Pipes insists, is rooted in the 18th- century French philosophes' interpretation of Locke, making a Christ Church don, an enemy of absolutism, the intellectual father of the Bolshevik Revolution. If men's minds, as Locke was held to believe, are a blank, a mere receiving apparatus for the messages of exterior sensations, it follows that, if the environment which conveys these messages can be perfected, men themselves can be perfected. Intellectuals start as philosophers and end up as kings, as members of an intelligentsia with a blue- print for humanity. If human beings reject the blue-print, so much the worse for them. As the early communist slogan put it, 'We will drive humanity to happiness by force'. Terror, necessary to keep in power a party that represents only itself, is justified as a means to keep the missionary enterprise a going concern.
Pipes' book is a catalogue of Red Terror- ism when the Cheka set to work in Decem- ber 1919. Nothing is more striking than Lenin's crudely violent language, not only against bourgeois 'hyenas' but against peas- ants — 80 per cent of Russia's population — and against the superstitious priests whose religion the peasants preferred to that of the Bolsheviks — 'The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary bourgeoisie we manage to execute in this affair, the better'.
This concise history is a summary of Pro- fessor Pipes' two magisterial volumes on Russia from 1899 to 1924. Inevitably, com- pression sacrifices colour, but the lucidity and the intellectual power of his analysis remain. By concentrating on Lenin, this review misleads in that Pipes' book gives a full account of the social, political and cul- tural causes and consequences of the Bol- shevik Revolution. It is part of a silent historiographical revolution that has restored personality and accident to their place in history. If a brick had dropped on Lenin, Isaiah Berlin is wont to say, there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution. `Was the revolution inevitable?' Pipes asks.
It is natural to believe that whatever happens has to happen and there are historians who rationalise this primitive faith with pseudo- scientific arguments; they would be more
convincing if they could predict the future as unerringly as they claim to predict the past.
In its crudest form this means that histori- ans — E. H. Can is an example — must side with success.
Just as Edmund Burke saw the French Revolution as the work of philosophes, so Pipes sees the Russian Revolution as the work of the Russian intelligentsia. Like Burke, Pipes will raise the hackles of pro- gressives for having reduced a great social experiment to the level of the vulgar con- spiracy of a minority of malcontents. Pipes does not share Burke's romantic vision of the ancien regime — Tsarism failed miser- ably to forge any organic link between the autocrat and his subjects — but both share a passionately held belief that human nature cannot be moulded according to a master plan conceived by radical intellectu- als. It is not only immoral to employ politi- cal authority for ideological ends; it will end in failure. Reason cannot lead 'human- ity from its known imperfections to an imagined perfectibility'. 'Lenin', Mussolini concluded as early as July 1920, is an artist who worked on human beings as other artists work on metals. But human beings are harder than granite and less malleable than iron. No master-work has emerged. The artist has failed. The task has proven beyond his powers.
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