The impact on the outside world

RUSSIA: FIFTY YEARS AFTER-3 TIBOR SZAMUELY

Two great social revolutions have shaped modern history: - the French and the Russian. But nothing could be more different than the actual impact of each upon the outside world.

The news of the fall of the Bastille electrified Europe: intelligent people everywhere under- stood that nothing could ever be the same again.

A new era of world history had opened—ex- claimed Goethe, fleeing from the battlefield of Valmy—the era of victory of peoples over kings. A new, blissful dawn had set in, and mankind was young again. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, were the ideas that conquered Europe. In those days 'liberty' and 'progress' were practically synonymous, and whoever favoured them stood for the spirit of '89. The French Revolution was against authority and for the rights of man: therein lay the secret of its ascendancy over the hearts and minds of its contemporaries. But when the promise was seen to be betrayed, the influence of the revo- lution still lived on in that spirit of rebellion against authority that dominated European history for many decades to come. It found its fitting artistic expression in the Romantic movement.

Nineteen-seventeen was no less of a break with the past, with tradition and with the estab- lished order of things than 1789 had been. Both revolutions stood for `progress.' But, unlike its French forerunner, the principles by which the Russian Revolution has changed the intel- lectual climate of our "age and the course of world history have been those of anti-individu- alism, non-freedom, collectivism, state control and—after it had achieved fulfilment—totali- tarianism. Instead of the victory of peoples over kings, the victory of the state over peoples. Appropriately, the specific artistic form born of the Soviet regime has been 'socialist realism.'

The most extraordinary contrast between the two great revolutions of modern times lay in the fact that the Russian Revolution was recog- nised as the formative influence of our century, and acquired world-wide 'progressive' support, not during its short-lived romantic revolu-

tionary phase but only after it had developed into the most- monstrous form of tyranny yet

known to man. The news of the Bolshevik take- over in Petrograd caused comparatively little stir in the West Nor did the outside world feel a quickening of the pulse when the civil war ended and Russia subsided into the humdrum existence of repairing a shattered economy by introducing a modicum of free enterprise. H. G.

Wells visited Russia, took a gloomy look around, talked to Lenin, and returned home sniffing disapprovingly about the 'visionary in the Kremlin.' Neither was Bertrand Russell much impressed. For the first twelve or fifteen years of its existence the 'Great Russian ex- periment' attracted hardly any interest in the West; its influence was virtually niL The main reason for this lay with the western working class: the very social group Whom the 'proletarian revolution' had expected to follow its example. In this respect the Bol- sheviks' failure has been total and conclusive.

Apart from a few sporadic uprisings and sym- pathy strikes in the immediate aftermath of the 1914-18 War, the industrial proletariat of the West has always shown, in no uncertain way, that it wants no part of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat.' As for the Communist parties that sprouted up after 1917—their only real achieve- ment has been to split the Labour movement; with their transformation into foreign-policy agencies of the Russian government they re- treated into total political isolation and impo- tency. There was also that comical institution, the Comintern, established with the object of speedily bringing down capitalism; yet capital- ism still survives, which is more than can be said of the Comintern.

The October Revolution remains unique: it was never repeated anywhere. In the past fifty years communism has come to power in a num- ber of countries—either forcibly imposed by a Russian army of occupation or as a result of national-liberation wars in which communists succeeded, by various devious means, in gaining the upper hand. But 1917 was the first and the last of the 'proletarian revolutions.'

What the Russian Revolution did demon- strate, however—particularly in 1929-39, when it developed into a fully-fledged totalitarian society of a new type—was the possibility of extending the power and functions of the state beyond any previously conceived bounds.

The first people to realise the true potentiali- ties of the new system were the men of the right, always more acutely conscious of the realities of power. The Fascist and Nazi move- ments of the inter-war years were the direct off- shoots of 1917. Only they proved to be evolu- tionary dead-ends: partly for lack of time, but mainly because of the incompleteness of their particular brand of totalitarianism. Even Hitler, the most consistent of the lot, limited himself to only partial control over the economy, and left a certain independence to such institutions as the army—while his party and his ideology were no more than feeble copies of the mono- lithic Bolshevik creations.

Military defeat put an end to right-wing totalitarianism. But already long before 1945 a significant proportion of the western leftist 'progressive' intelligentsia had succumbed to the lure of totalitarian 'socialism.' By that time the eighteenth century concept of 'progress' had undergone a notable metamorphosis. It vtas no longer synonymous with 'liberty,' and indeed, in many of its aspects, even opposed to it. The change had been wrought by industrialisation, the emergence of mass-man, the worship of science. 'Progress' now meant industrial growth, planning, the expansion of education, the im- provement of health and sanitary standards, birth-control Progress, obviously, could be effected only from above. No wonder that while Russia in the 'twenties still retained the image of romantic, anarchic peasant revolt and a sem- blance of revolutionary freedom it was in effect cold-shouldered by the latter-day descen- dants of Wordsworth, Shelley and Tom Paine. But with the onset of industrialisation and collectivisation—coinciding as it did with the great depression and the apparent failure of capitalism—everything changed overnight, and 'Mr Stalin' became the toast of the western 'pro- gressive' intellectual. The way for imposing their cherished doctrines of beneficial social change upon an uncomprehending populace had been successfully demonstrated. Power was what counted—power and 'planning.' Russia repre- sented the 'wave of the future': as Shaw ex- plained, 'we must face it: things are going Russia's way.' Professor Laski saw the odious Vyshinsky as a new Bentham, Dr Edith Sum- merskill (as she then was) announced that a few million lives sacrificed meant comparatively little when set against progress in medicine, while G. D. H. Cole explicitly declared that .'great suppression of personal liberty was un- avoidable if the new order were to survive at *all' But the real impact of the Russian Revolution on the outside world began to be felt only when decolopisation and the 'modernisation' of Afro- • Asia got under way. How was one to modernise? Prior to 1917 the world had known only the European type of modernisation, evolv- ing along broadly similar lines: liberal indus- trial capitalism, free enterprise, constitutional- ism and parliamentarianism, the rule of law, the multi-party system, and a remarkable degree of freedom of speech, press, conscience, travel asad association. For all the local differences, it seemed incontrovertible that there could exist only one path to a modern society, and only one type of a modern society. This well-estab- y lished path was the one taken by such com- parative newcomers as Tsarist Russia and Japan; it was the path chosen by every reformer or would-be reformer in pre-1917 China, Tur- key, India, Persia or Egypt. Naturally—no other model existed. • It was in the backward lands of Asia and Africa that the Russian Revolution finally came into its own. For though it had failed to build socialism, it had certainly created an alterna- tive model of modernisation, based upon en- tirely new principles Here is a country, the

Russians proclaimed, that has been transformed at lightning speed from a state of abysmal back-

wardness into the second industrial power in the world—thanks to its own efforts and to its -miracle-working political and social system. Why not try our model?—it is far better suited to your conditions than the western one.

After 1917 the new generation of colonial revolutionaries—Nehru, Kenyatta, Padmore and others—began to see Russia as their future model. The turn from the western to the Soviet path of modernisation can be seen with especial clarity in the career of Sun Yat-sen, who began

as a western-type reformer and ended his life an ally of Leninism, the USSR and the Chinese

Communist party. Today much of Afro-Asia is ruled by regimes patterned to a lesser or greater degree upon that of the Soviet Union. The attractions of the Soviet example are con- siderable: it is 'progressive,' anti-imperialist, anti-western; it premises a short cut to econo- mic and military power; it is simpler to run than complicated 'Westminster' constitutions, legal checks and balances, or market-orientated capitalist economies; it is much closer to their traditional authoritarian patterns and promises rapid progress without the liberal freedoms re- pugnant to the new rulers. Finally, and most important of all, the totalitarian system offers the new elites an instrument for unifying these largely artificial nations, for strengthening their shaky control, and for enjoying the fruits of total economic and political power.

Whether western development methods would ever work in Afro-Asia remains an open question—but there can be little doubt that the Soviet path will prove a total failure. To begin with, the whole concept is based on a complete misrepresentation of pre-revolutionary Russian reality. Soviet industrialisation did not start from scratch: it was able to build on very solid foundations. Tsarist Russia was certainly back- ward by West European and North American standards, but even to compare it with the pre- sent backwardness of Afro-Asia is the height of mendacity—or ignorance. Russia's indus- trialisation had started well before the turn of the century; between 1893 and 1913 her coal production had increased five-fold, her iron-ore and cast-iron production four-fold, her oil pro- duction, railway mileage. grain production and cattle herd had doubled (the Soviet regime has proved incapable of reproducing these last thrfe results even in fifty years). During eighteen Of the last twenty-five prewar years Russia had bad the highest rate of industrial growth in the world. In 1913 she was already overtaking France as the world's fourth industrial power. Russia held the second place in the world in oil production, third place in railway construction and cotton manufacture, fourth place in mach- ine building. Her industry was highly concen- trated; she possessed a large force of skilled labour and highly qualified technical and ad- ministrative personnel; in many fields she stood in the forefront of world science (she had two Nobel prize winners).

These facts alone make nonsense of the idea that a Soviet-type industrialisation offers a cure for Afro-Asian 'underdevelopment.' But per- haps even more pertinent to the issue: this method, based on a command economy, forced savings, the deliberate lowering of living stan- dards, etc, is possible only within a fully-fledged totalitarian system led by a monolithic party and inspired by a dynamic ideology. In reality nothing of the kind exists in any one of the Third World states. The Nkrumahs, Sukarnos, Nassers, Ben Bellas, Nyereres et at established merely the external forms of totalitarianism, with neither its organisation, its driving force, nor its genuine social revolution. The whole thing is an elaborate confidence trick: single- party states without the party, ideological states without ideologies, socialist states with- out socialism—without even the communist'

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total state ownership of the economy.

Just as in an earlier age Latin-American dic- tatorships and other pseudo-modern nations imitated the constitutional and economic forms of the advanced capitalist countries without acquiring the genuine dynamic of capitalist progress, so today the inept dictators of Afro- Asia parade the outward aspects of the totali- tarian society to conceal corruption, stagnation, and lack of real progress. Instead of a debased westernisation we now see a bastardised type of lotalitarianisation.' There is only one pos- sible exception: the totalitarian development model might conceivably succeed in China, as earlier the capitalist path succeeded in Japan. But we shall have to wait a long time to find out.

Such, in short, have been the international repercussions of the Russian Revolution. Taken in conjunction with the balance-sheet of its internal achievements over fifty years, one can only conclude, with Albert Camus, that, how- ever impressive the results, 'none of the evils which totalitarianism claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.'

(Concluded)