by Bill
Bowring
Crisis
and Critique: Stalin: what does the name stand for?
Volume 3, issue 1, 29-03-2016
Edited by Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza
PDF Link freely downloadable at http://crisiscritique.org/
Volume 3, issue 1, 29-03-2016
Edited by Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza
PDF Link freely downloadable at http://crisiscritique.org/
Abstract:
Leon Trotsky, reflecting on British history, wrote: ‘The ‘dictatorship of
Lenin’ expresses the mighty pressure of the new historical class and its
superhuman struggle against all the forces of the old society. If Lenin can be
juxtaposed to anyone then it is not to Napoleon nor even less to Mussolini but
to Cromwell and Robespierre. It can be with some justice said that Lenin is the
proletarian twentieth-century Cromwell. Such a definition would at the same
time be the highest compliment to the petty-bourgeois seventeenth-century Cromwell.’
In this response to the call for papers, I take Oliver Cromwell, Maximilien
Robespierre, and Vladimir Lenin in turn.
I ask whether Stalin has indeed become
a “screen memory” whose dreadful image and legacy serves to besmirch the honour
of the great European revolutions, in England, France and Russia, to which
Trotsky referred. It is no accident, of course, that Cromwell and Robespierre
have remained, since their respective deaths, controversial and even monstrous
historical figures in their own countries. Would their rehabilitation, which
has also recurred throughout the centuries since their own time, mean that
Stalin too should be rehabilitated and recovered as a revolutionary? My answer
is an unequivocal “no”.
Keywords:
Revolution, Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin
Introduction
On 24-25 February 1956, at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his report, the “secret speech”,
in which he denounced Stalin’s crimes and the ‘cult of personality’ surrounding
Stalin.[1] This was a
catastrophe for much of the left worldwide, even for Trotskyists who had spent
their political lives denouncing the crimes of Stalin. For the loyal members of
Communist Parties all over the world who had taken the greatest political and
personal risks to defend the Soviet Union and Stalin himself against all
criticisms, publication of the report was truly a cataclysm. The brutal Soviet
suppression of the Hungarian Uprising, which lasted from 23 October until 10
November 1956, and in which 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops died[2], put an end to
any remaining illusions.
Many intellectuals abandoned the communist project. Some have sought to
grapple with the significance of Stalin, who, in the name of “socialism in one
country”, consolidated his authoritarian rule over a reconstituted and enlarged
Russian empire. Alain Badiou, perhaps the most significant living intellectual
seeking to reinvigorate the idea of communism, has argued[3] that
Stalinism substituted “great referential collectives” – Working Class, Party,
Socialist Camp – for “those real political processes of which Lenin was the
pre-eminent thinker.” But he recognises that for many “… the only category
capable of reckoning with the century’s unity is that of crime: the crimes of
Stalinist communism and the crimes of Nazism.”[4] I will
have more to say about Lenin later in this paper.
It’s appropriate, then, to recognise the tragedy of the October Revolution:
both its unique emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its
Stalinist outcome. We should have the honesty to acknowledge that the Stalinist
purges were in a way more ‘irrational’ than the Fascist violence: its excess is
an unmistakable sign that, in contrast to Fascism, Stalinism was a case of an
authentic revolution perverted.
In this passage Žižek echoes Trotsky, for whom Stalin was the “personification
of the bureaucracy”, the betrayer of the revolution, although Trotsky would
never have subscribed to the idea of the historical necessity of the Russian
Thermidor.
Trotsky was clear as to Lenin’s antecedents, in a way which has in part inspired
the writing of this article, and also expressed an admiration for Cromwell,
which would not have occurred to Marx or Engels, for whom Cromwell was, as I
will explore later in this article, the petit-bourgeois leader who suppressed
the radical Levellers movements and butchered the Irish. Trotsky, reflecting on
British history, wrote:
The ‘dictatorship of Lenin’ expresses the mighty pressure of the new
historical class and its superhuman struggle against all the forces of the old
society. If Lenin can be juxtaposed to anyone then it is not to Napoleon nor
even less to Mussolini but to Cromwell and Robespierre. It can be with some
justice said that Lenin is the proletarian twentieth-century Cromwell. Such a
definition would at the same time be the highest compliment to the
petty-bourgeois seventeenth-century Cromwell.[6]
This article therefore asks whether Stalin has indeed become a “screen
memory” whose dreadful image and legacy serves to besmirch the honour of the
great European revolutions, in England, France and Russia, to which Trotsky
referred. It is no accident, of course, that Cromwell and Robespierre have
remained, since their respective deaths, controversial and even monstrous historical
figures in their own countries. Would their rehabilitation, which has also
recurred throughout the centuries since their own time, mean that Stalin too
should be rehabilitated and recovered as a revolutionary? My answer is an
unequivocal “no”.
Of course, as Slavoj Žižek reminds us, Stalin is indeed being rehabilitated
in contemporary Russia, but not at all as a revolutionary, but as an authentic
Tsar, precisely what Lenin at the end of his life warned against[7].
Stalin was returning to pre-Revolutionary tsarist policy: Russia’s
colonisation of Siberia in the 17th century and Muslim Asia in the 19th was no
longer condemned as imperialist expansion, but celebrated for setting these
traditional societies on the path of progressive modernisation. Putin’s foreign
policy is a clear continuation of the tsarist-Stalinist line.
No wonder Stalin’s portraits are on show again at military parades and
public celebrations, while Lenin has been obliterated. In an opinion poll
carried out in 2008 by the Rossiya TV station, Stalin was voted the third
greatest Russian of all time, with half a million votes. Lenin came in a distant
sixth. Stalin is celebrated not as a Communist but as a restorer of Russian
greatness after Lenin’s anti-patriotic ‘deviation’.[8]
And indeed, on 21 January 2016, President Putin told the Russian Council on
Science and Education that Lenin was an ‘atomic bomb’ placed under the
foundations of the Russian state.[9] Such
denunciations of Lenin are now becoming a significant ideological marker for
the Kremlin and its supporters. On 3 February 2016 General (retired) Leonid
Reshetnikov of the SVR, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, and now
Director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Research (RISI), a think-tank
for the SVR[10], applauded
Putin’s words, and blamed Lenin also for the creation of Ukraine and its
zombified anti-Russian population now controlled by the USA.[11]Perhaps we can
now expect the pulling down of the many statues of Lenin in Russia. Lenin, who
would have detested such political idolatry, would be delighted at such an
action, just as he would have preferred to be buried next to his mother rather
than embalmed as a sacred icon in Red Square.
As to Stalin, in a press conference on 19 December 2013, Putin said, when
asked whether statues of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky should be restored in front of
the FSB’s Lubianka headquarters:
What in particular distinguishes Cromwell from Stalin? Can you tell me?
Nothing whatsoever. From the point of view of our liberal representatives, the
liberal spectrum of our political establishment, he is also a bloody dictator.
And this very bloody man, one must say, played a role in the history of Great
Britain which is subject to differing interpretations. His monument still
stands, and no-one has cut him down.[12]
In the following section of this article I will turn to the figure of
Cromwell, and to his “screen memory” as it functions in England.
A leading representative of contemporary Russian liberal thought, Andrei
Medushevskii, has stated, taking me one step ahead to the next section of this
article, which turns to Robespierre[13]:
The most characteristic attributes of totalitarian states of recent times
are everywhere the presence of a single mass party, usually headed by a charismatic
leader; an official ideology; state control over the economy, the mass media,
and the means of armed struggle; and a system of terrorist police control.
Classic examples of totalitarian states possessing all of these attributes are
Hitler’s Germany, the USSR in the Stalin period, and Maoist China.
And he was clear that the roots of this phenomenon were to be found in
Rousseau:
When Robespierre created the cult of the supreme being, he was consequently
only acting as the true pupil and follower of Rousseau and at the same time as
a predecessor of those many ideological and political cults with which the
twentieth century has proved to be so replete.[14]
Of course, Medushevsky necessarily referred to the ardent follower of
Rousseau, Maximilen Robespierre.
In this response to the call for papers, I will take Oliver Cromwell,
Maximilien Robespierre, and Vladimir Lenin in turn, before returning to the
questions posed in this Introduction. The approach I adopt is not that of a
professional historian or even of a historian of ideas. I want to bring out
some of the ways in which reflection on the destinies of the “screen memories”
of each of these historical figures can help us to come to terms with the
significance of “Stalin” for contemporary politics.
Cromwell
Christopher Hill has done more than any other historian to explore the
minute detail and to defend the actuality and honour of the English Revolution
– and a revolution it certainly was, bourgeois or not. England was utterly
changed. The English constitutional model to this day, parliamentary supremacy,
is the direct consequence of Cromwell’s execution of Charles I in 1649. What is
certain also is that as a result of the victories of Cromwell’s New Model Army,
his Ironsides, England could not follow France in the direction of an Absolute
Monarchy.
Hill wrote:
Historians have given us many Cromwells, created if not after their own
image at least as a vehicle for their own prejudices… But there is a validity
in the image of Cromwell blowing up the strongholds of the king, the
aristocracy and the church: that, after all, is what the Revolution had
achieved.[15]
That is precisely why Cromwell has remained an enduring point of sharp
division in England, with educated people to this day identifying as Roundheads
or Cavaliers, Parliamentarians or Royalists. The ‘Sealed Knot’ is the oldest
re-enactment society in the UK, and the single biggest re-enactment society in
Europe. To join and to refight the battles of the English revolution, you must
identify as a Cavalier or a Roundhead, and there is no shortage of Roundheads.[16]
I must declare a family interest in this matter. Hill describes the fact
that in the early 18th century Whigs had portraits of Cromwell,
and “so did John Bowring, a radical fuller of Exeter, grandfather of the
biographer of Jeremy Bentham”.[17] This
biographer and Bentham’s literary executor and editor of the first edition of
his works, also named John Bowring, my ancestor, wrote
My grandfather was a man of strong political feeling, being deemed no
better in those days than a Jacobin by politicians and a heretic by churchmen.
The truth is that the old Puritan blood, inherited from a long line of
ancestors, flowed strongly in his veins, and a traditional reverence for the
Commonwealth was evidenced by a fine mezzotint print of Oliver Cromwell, which
hung in his parlour. He took a strong part with the Americans in their war of
independence, was hustled by the illiberal Tories of the day, and was, I have
heard, burnt in effigy in the cathedral yard at the time of the Birmingham
riots, when Dr Priestley was compelled to flee his native land. Many prisoners
from America were, at the time of our hostilities, confined at Exeter, and my
grandfather was much persecuted for the attentions he showed them, and for his
attempts to alleviate their sufferings. When John Adams was in England, he,
with his wife (who, by the way, was a connection of our family), visited my
grandfather at Exeter as a mark of his respect and regard.
To keep up the family tradition, I have a portrait of Cromwell, warts and
all, in my study. The sentiments of those who hang portraits of Stalin in their
homes are quite different, as I have shown.
As Vladimir Putin correctly noted, in the quotation above, Oliver
Cromwell’s statue still stands, sword in hand, a lion at his feet, outside the
House of Commons in Westminster[18]. This is a
relatively recent, and very controversial monument. It was erected in 1899, but
only following a narrow victory for the government on 14 June 1895, saved by
Unionist votes. All the 45 Irish Nationalists present voted against, as did
most Conservatives including Balfour.[19] On 17 June
1895 the Nationalist, Home Rule, MP Willie Redmond declared that every
newspaper in Ireland, of all shades of opinion, had condemned the proposal, and
that erection of the statue would give great offence to a large portion of the
community.[20] The proposal
was withdrawn the next month, and the statue was finally erected in 1899,
following a personal donation by Lord Rosebery, the Liberal statesman and Prime
Minister in 1894-5.
The statute has not ceased to be an object of intense debate. In May 2004 a
group of MPs including Tony Banks proposed removing the statue to the “Butcher
of Drogheda”.[21]
Indeed, many on the left in Britain remember Cromwell as the conservative
leader who, shortly after the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649,
arrested in a lightning night attack and executed, in the town of Burford on 17
May 1649, three leaders of the radical republican Levellers: Private Church,
Corporal Perkins and Cornett Thompson.[22] Every year
since 1975 Levellers Day has been held in Burford, and in 1979 Tony Benn
unveiled a plaque at the church there to commemorate them.[23] He said of
the Levellers:
Their cry was Power to the People; they demanded free schools and hospitals
for all – 350 years ago. They were the Levellers, and, despite attempts to
airbrush them from history, they are an inspiration, especially in the current
election.”
In Ireland Cromwell is remembered with horror and disgust as the “Butcher
of Drogheda”, responsible for the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford in
September and October 1649. After his troops had killed more than 3,500 at the
siege of Drogheda, Cromwell declared, in his characteristic mangled English, in
his report to Parliament on 17 September 1649:
I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these
barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood and
that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are
satisfactory grounds for such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse
and regret.”[24]
The Irish have by no means forgiven Cromwell not only for his shedding of
so much blood, but also for his characterisation of them as ‘barbarous
wretches’.
Cromwell remained in the historical shadows, England’s brief republican
history before the Restoration and the ‘Glorious Revolution’, a disgraceful
episode better to be forgotten. As Christopher Hill noted[25], it was Thomas
Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell[26] which “finally allowed Cromwell to speak for himself”. Carlyle’s
argument was with the Scottish Enlightenment 18th century
sceptic David Hume and others for whom Cromwell was an insincere hypocrite,
ambitious for himself.
For the romantic reactionary Carlyle, Cromwell was precisely the Hero
needed to save 19th century England from Chartism, the
franchise and extended democracy, and other socialist evils. Cromwell was
selected as an example of “The Hero as King” in Carlyle’s On Heroes,
Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History.[27]
Carlyle was at any rate clear as to the significance of the English
Revolution, and wrote, remembering England’s characteristic history of internal
strife in a way which is forgotten by those who seek to highlight England’s
essential decency and peaceableness, ‘British values’:
We have had many civil-wars in England; wars of Red and White Roses, wars
of Simon de Montfort; wars enough, which are not very memorable. But that war
of the Puritans has a significance which belongs to no one of the others… One
Puritan, I think, and almost he alone, our poor Cromwell, seems to hang yet on
the gibbet, and find no hearty apologist anywhere.[28]
It is not hard to understand why Cromwell so appealed to Trotsky, the
organiser of the Red army in Russia’s Civil War, even if Cromwell was hardly
mentioned except with distaste by Marx and Engels. Carlyle recognised the
revolutionary nature of the New Model Army.
Cromwell’s Ironsides were the embodiment of this insight of his; men
fearing God; and without any other fear. No more conclusively genuine set of
fighters ever trod the soil of England, or of any other land.[29]
Without the religion, this is no doubt what Trotsky thought of the Red Army
he created in the Russian Civil War.
And in the Introduction to the Letters and Speeches Carlyle
stated, in a language which prefigures Badiou’s emphasis on truth:
And then farther, altogether contrary to the popular fancy, it becomes
apparent that this Oliver was not man of falsehoods, but man of truths whose
words do carry meaning with them, and above all others of that time, are worth
considering.[30]
And finally, Carlyle understood, as only perhaps a romantic reactionary
could, the nature of the continuing revolution in Europe:
Precisely a century and a year after this of Puritanism had got itself
hushed up into decent composure, and its results made smooth, in 1688, there
broke out a far deeper explosion, much more difficult to hush up, known to all
mortals, and like to be long known, by the name of French Revolution.[31]
Scott Dransfield cites Carlyle in even more rhapsodic vein, replete with
arcane phraseology and many Germanic capital letters:
Very frightful it is when a Nation, rending asunder its Constitutions and
Regulations which were grown dead cerements for it, becomes transcendental; and
must now seek its wild way through the New, Chaotic – where Force is not yet
distinguished into Bidden and Forbidden, but Crime and Virtue welter
unseparated, – in that domain of what is called the Passions.[32]
Crime and virtue are indissolubly linked to the name of Maximilien
Robespierre, to whom I turn next.
Robespierre
Hegel devoted a section of his 1807 (written soon after the Terror) Phenomenology
of Spirit to a reflection on the French Revolution, entitled ‘Absolute
freedom and terror”[33]. This contains
two very disturbing passages (Hegel’s italics):
Universal freedom, therefore, can produce neither a positive work nor a
deed; there is left for it only negative action; it is merely
the fury of destruction.[34]
And
The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death,
a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is
the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest
of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or
swallowing a mouthful of water.[35]
Hegel, the absolute idealist, frequently used very concrete examples!
However, some decades later, in his lectures on the philosophy of history,
Hegel recovered the revolutionary enthusiasm he had shared while at the
Tübinger Stift from 1788-1793 with his fellow students, the poet Friedrich
Hölderlin, and the philosopher-to-be Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and
declared:
It has been said that the French revolution resulted from philosophy, and
it is not without reason that philosophy has been called Weltweisheit [world
wisdom]; for it is not only truth in and for itself, as the pure essence of
things, but also truth in its living form as exhibited in the affairs of the
world. We should not, therefore, contradict the assertion that the revolution
received its first impulse from philosophy… This was accordingly a glorious
mental dawn. All thinking being shared in the jubilation of this epoch.
Emotions of a lofty character stirred men’s minds at that time; a spiritual
enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the
divine and the secular was now first accomplished.[36]
But Hegel’s enthusiasm was not characteristic of the majority of
conservative (if Hegel was indeed a conservative) and mainstream thought.
In a pithy and accurate remark, Slavoj Žižek wrote
The identifying mark of all kinds of conservatives is its flat rejection:
the French revolution was a catastrophe from its very beginning, the product of
a godless modern mind; it is to be interpreted as God’s punishment of the
humanity’s wicked ways, so its traces should be undone as thoroughly as
possible… In short, what the liberals want is a decaffeinated revolution, a
revolution that doesn’t smell of revolution.[37]
Indeed, for perhaps the majority of commentators, Robespierre epitomises
all that is catastrophic in the revolution, and acts as a potent “screen
memory” almost to the extent that Stalin is taken to show that any attempt to
change the course of history in the name of socialism or emancipation must end
in disaster.
A leading exponent of this school of thought was François Furet[38], who died in
1997. He led the rejection of the “classic” or “Marxist” interpretation of the
French Revolution, and his polemics overshadowed the grandiose celebrations in France
of the bicentenary of the Revolution in 1989. He joined the intellectual
mainstream by proceedings from the perspective of 20th century totalitarianism,
as exemplified by Hitler and Stalin.
This path had been blazed at the onset of the Cold War, by Hannah Arendt’s
in herOn Totalitarianism of 1950[39]. However, in a
footnote, Arendt wrote
Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography. (New York and
London, 1949), is indispensable for its rich documentary and great insight into
the internal struggles of the Bolshevik party; it suffers from an
interpretation which likens Stalin to—Cromwell, Napoleon, and Robespierre.
It is a great shame that it is not now possible to ask her exactly what she
meant.
Furet’s Penser la Révolution Française (1978; translated
as Interpreting the French Revolution)[40] led many
intellectuals in France and, after translation, in the English-speaking world,
to re-evaluate Communism and the Revolution as inherently totalitarian and anti-democratic.
In a reflection on Furet, Donald Reid has asked whether the historical
figure of Robespierre had actually become harmless:
If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would
be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will
not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words,
theories and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no
one. There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once
in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.[41]
As explained by Reid, Furet was not at all of that view. For him
Robespierre remained a continuing dreadful threat not only to France but to the
whole world, a threat of the eternal return of totalitarianism:
Furet, like Tocqueville, saw the American and French revolutions as quite
distinct. The American Revolution was predicated on the demand for the
restoration of rights and the continuation of an earlier democratic experience;
the decision to emigrate from Europe to the United States had been Americans’
revolutionary rejection of a repressive past. The French Revolution sought to
establish a radical break with an aristocratic past and to create a novel
social regime. The American Revolution was a narrative that ended with
independence and the ratification of the Constitution; the French revolutionary
narrative remained open to the future and fearful of a return of the past.[42]
A number of French historians led by Sophie Wahnich[43] of the
National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) are leading a counter-attack
against Furet. In her introduction to her 2003 La Liberté ou la mort:
Essai sur la Terreur et le terrorisme[44], provocatively if inaccurately translated as In Defence of the
Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution[45], Wahnich wrote, referring to Furet and to Marc Fumaroli’s 2001 Cahiers
de Cinéma article ‘Terreur et cinéma’:
We see here the conscious construction of a new reception of the French
Revolution which, out of disgust at the political crimes of the twentieth
century, imposes an equal disgust towards the revolutionary event. The French
Revolution is unspeakable because it constituted ‘the matrix of
totalitarianism’ and invented its rhetoric.
A splendid chapter in Wahnich’s recent collection[46] is written
by Joléne Bureau, who is researching the ‘black legend’ of Robespierre,
constructed by the Thermidoreans immediately after Robespierre’s execution, and
its destiny since his death. She writes elsewhere in English:
Maximilien Robespierre has reached legendary status due to his ability to
embody either the many forms of revolutionary and State violence, or a set of
seemingly unaccomplished revolutionary ideals. Long before François Furet
demanded the French Revolution become a “cold object”, Marc Bloch had made the
following plea: “robespierristes, anti-robespierristes, nous vous crions grâce
: par pitié, dites-nous, simplement, quel fut Robespierre”[47]. However, this
demand was not met.[48]
And in her chapter[49] in Sophie
Wahnich’s collection[50], she poses
precisely the question of the “screen memory” of Robespierre:
Robespierre therefore shares Christopher Hill’s characterisation of
Cromwell referred to above. Minchul Kim has recently added:
… from 1794 up to the present day, there has been no one Robespierre, no
one positive or one negative view of Robespierre, no one Robespierre the
demonic dictator or one Robespierre the revolutionary hero. There have always
been so many ‘Robespierres’ even within the positive and within the negative…[52]
The most controversial aspect of Robespierre’s career is of course the
so-called ‘Reign of Terror’ from 5 September 1793, to 27 July 1794, culminating
in the execution of Robespierre himself on 28 July 1794.
Robespierre explained what he meant by terror, and its relationship to
virtue, in his speech of 5 February 1794:
If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the
mainspring of popular government in revolution is both virtue and terror:
virtue, without which terror is disastrous; terror, without which virtue is
powerless. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is
therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a specific principle as a
consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our homeland’s
most pressing needs.[53]
The novelist Hilary Mantel, who entered into the period imaginatively in
her famous novel A Place of Greater Safety (1992), has
provided a convincing account of the real meaning of ‘virtue’ for Robespierre:
There is a problem with the English word ‘virtue’. It sounds pallid and
Catholic. Butvertu is not smugness or piety. It is strength,
integrity and purity of intent. It assumes the benevolence of human nature
towards itself. It is an active force that puts the public good before private
interest.[54]
In any event, there are many myths as to the nature of the Terror and the
number of casualties. Marisa Linton, the author of Choosing Terror:
Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution[55] and of many other works on the period, recently published a popular
blog[56] to set the
record straight. On the Terror she wrote:
The revolutionaries of 1789 did not foresee the recourse to violence to
defend the Revolution and some, like Robespierre in 1791, wanted the death
penalty abolished altogether. Execution by guillotine began with the execution
of the king in January 1793. A total of 2,639 people were guillotined in Paris,
most of them over nine months between autumn 1793 and summer 1794. Many more
people (up to 50,000) were shot, or died of sickness in the prisons. An
estimated 250,000 died in the civil war that broke out in Vendée in March 1793,
which originated in popular opposition to conscription into the armies to fight
against the foreign powers. Most of the casualties there were peasants or
republican soldiers.[57]
It is evident that Robespierre cannot be compared with Stalin.
And as to Robespierre himself, in particular the allegation that, like
Stalin, he was a bloody dictator, Linton commented:
Robespierre’s time in power lasted just one year, from July 1793 to his
death in July 1794 in the coup of Thermidor and even in that time he was never
a dictator. He shared that power as one of twelve members of the Committee of
Public Safety, its members elected by the Convention, which led the
revolutionary government. He defended the recourse to terror, but he certainly
didn’t invent it.[58]
And Eric Hazan, in his recently published in English A People’s
History of the French Revolution, is even more a partisan of Robespierre:
Under the Constituent Assembly… Robespierre took up positions that were
remarkably coherent and courageous – positions in which he was always in a
minority and sometimes completely alone: against the property restriction on
suffrage, for the civil rights of actors and Jews, against martial law, against
slavery in the colonies, against the death penalty, for the right of petition
and the freedom of the press.[59]
And as to Robespierre as dictator, Hazan added:
… Robespierre was never a dictator. All the major decisions of the
Committee of Public Safety were taken collectively… One could say that within
the Committee Robespierre exercised a moral leadership, but can he be
reproached for what was simply his elevated perspective? The proof that
Robespierre was not a dictator is his end… Isolated and at bay, he let himself be
brought down… A dictator, a Bonaparte, would have behaved rather differently.
Stalin died in his bed, having executed all his political competitors and
enemies, and having directly caused the deaths of untold millions of Russians
and Ukrainians through his policy of forced collectivisation, and having
consigned many more to the horrors of the Gulag.
Perhaps we should give Slavoj Žižek the last word as to Robespierre’s
ideology:
Can one imagine something more foreign to our universe of the freedom of
opinions, or market competition, of nomadic pluralist interaction, etc, than
Robespierre’s politics of Truth (with a capital T, of course), whose proclaimed
goal is ‘to return the destiny of liberty into the hands of truth’?[60]
Lenin
It is my contention that Stalin was in no way Lenin’s successor. If
Vladimir Putin now regards Lenin as anathema, as the ideologist who through his
insistence on the right of nations to self-determination laid an atomic bomb
under the foundations of the Russian state, Stalin is honoured as a great heir
to the Russian tsars. The Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 mirrors
Catherine II’s annexation in 1783. Lenin would have been horrified. Equally,
Lenin was very well aware of the history of the French Revolution.
Alistair Wright speculates as follows in his highly relevant article, ‘Guns
and Guillotines: State Terror in the Russian and French Revolutions’ – I hope I
will be forgiven for quoting from it at some length:
The impression that the French Revolution and in particular the Jacobin
Terror left on the Bolshevik party during its seizure and consolidation of
power is a broad and contentious subject. However, there can be little doubt
that the party’s leading figures, namely Lenin and Trotsky, were acutely aware
of these precedents from French history. Indeed, this may well have been
significant in shaping their policies during and after 1917. Admittedly there
is more controversy surrounding the depth of Lenin’s knowledge of the French
Revolution but the same cannot be said for Leon Trotsky. It is fairly evident
that the latter was steeped in the history of the French Revolution. He regularly
looked at the Bolshevik Revolution through the prism of the French and was even
keen to stage an extravagant trial for Nicholas II in the manner of that
arranged for Louis XVI between November 1792 and January 1793.[61]
Stalin, although a voracious reader, did not have the multilingual and
cosmopolitan intellectual formation of Lenin or Trotsky, and in particular did
not suffer their prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe, and there is no
reason to believe that he shared their anxious consideration of historical
precedents. Wright continues:
Some consideration of the fact that Robespierre became strongly associated
at the time and subsequently with the Great Terror during the French
Revolution, regardless of whether or not he should really be held personally
accountable for it, may well have influenced Lenin’s course of action.
In fact, the Bolsheviks succeeded in the longer term because they
consciously learnt from the mistakes made by their French counterparts.
Consequently, during the Russian Civil War a different path was taken to that
followed by the Jacobins when it came to tackling the Bolsheviks’ political
opponents, the established church and peasant disturbances.[62]
As Wright shows, it was not only in his approach to the national question
that Lenin’s political strategy and methods differed sharply from Stalin’s, but
in his relations with comrades with whom he often had acute disagreements,
denouncing them in his fierce and often very rude polemics.
… it is noteworthy that the Bolsheviks’ approach to the threat posed by
their political opponents was somewhat more tolerant than that of the Committee
of Public Safety during 1793–94. The latter, albeit after a number of heated
disputes and resistance, sent their main political opponents, the Girondins, to
the guillotine, where they were shortly to be followed by the Hébertistes and
the Indulgents. In comparison, relative tolerance on the part of the Bolsheviks
was evident both in their sharing of power with the Left
Socialists-Revolutionaries (Left SRs) up until March 1918 and in their limited
co-operation with their other socialist rivals, the Mensheviks and the
Socialists-Revolutionaries proper, by allowing them, intermittently, to take
part in the soviets and to print their own newspapers.
Admittedly, the number of political opponents actually killed during the
period of the CPS was by no means comprehensive but the fact remains that no
prominent opposition leader would die as a result of the Red Terror.
Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that any political executions were
planned. Even at the 1922 trial of the SR leaders, although several defendants
were sentenced to death they were quickly granted amnesty and no one was
actually executed. In part this was because of the pressure applied by Western
socialists but nevertheless the Bolsheviks could quite easily neutralize their
political rivals during the civil war by other means.[63]
In my view, Lenin’s restraint in relation to political opponents had
nothing to do with pressure by Western socialists, but on the contrary flowed
from his political outlook, his theoretical understanding, and his commitment
to the application of a dialectical method, fortified by his deep study not
only of Marx and Engels but also of Hegel. Stalin, on the contrary, once he had
accumulated full power in his hands, began systematically to eliminate the
Bolshevik leadership as it had been constituted at the time of the Revolution.
Vladimir Dobrenko adds as to the Moscow Trials, orchestrated by Stalin:
… why should the Moscow Show Trials warrant a separate investigation from
other show trials throughout history? The answer to this lies in the fact that
while the Moscow Show Trials share common links with other political trials,
chiefly that of the ruling regime willingness to use their adversaries in a
judicial context to legitimise their own rule, they are distinguished in
several crucial respects. The Trial of Louis XVI is a case in point. All the
leading Bolsheviks were conscious of the historical parallel between their
revolution and that of the French Revolution, most notably Trotsky, whose
critiques of Stalin in the 1930’s drew historical parallels between Stalin and
Robespierre. Yet in retrospect, Trotsky only scratched the surface. True, the
Moscow Show Trials, like the trial of Louis of XVI, were less a judicial process
rather than foregone political decisions to kill and that the trials resembled
ritual murders.[64]
Wright adds, reinforcing his earlier comments:
Executing factions within the Bolshevik Party was, of course, an eminent
feature of Stalin’s Great Terror during the late 1930s. But, it is worth
stressing that Lenin and his followers did not resort to terror against any
Bolshevik dissidents during the civil war, despite the existence of such
groupings as the Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition. Of course,
the Bolsheviks did move towards disabling their political rivals but certainly
not through the same process of open executions as their French counterparts
had done.[65]
Wright’s highly apposite conclusion is as follows, comparing Robespierre’s
role to that of Lenin:
Although Robespierre came to be regarded as the leading spokesman for the
Committee, he was in an entirely different position to that held by Lenin as
the leader of the Bolshevik government. By no means did he possess the same
popular following within the CPS or the Convention, nor did he have anything
like the same influence as Lenin did within the Bolshevik Party. In this
respect, the political climate in France during the revolution and the Terror
was quite different to that pervading Russia during the civil war.
The Bolsheviks also showed relative clemency when it came to dealing with
the leading figures of the political opposition. Often, this was perhaps due to
the personal role of Lenin. For example, Victor Serge (V.L. Kibalchich), the
Belgian-born anarchist and socialist who worked with the Bolsheviks during the
civil war, believed that Lenin protected Iurii Martov from the Cheka (that is,
from execution) because of his former friendship with the man with whom he had
part founded and developed Russian Social Democracy. Moreover, Lenin would also
intervene to save the lives of the Mensheviks Fedor Dan and Raphael Abramovich
when the Petrograd Cheka was preparing to shoot them for allegedly being
involved in the Kronstadt revolt in March 1921. Serge noted that ‘once Lenin
was alerted they were absolutely safe’. Although a great advocate of the use of
mass terror, Lenin was apparently willing to show mercy when it came to the
case of individuals with whom he was acquainted or simply individuals in
general.[66]
Trotsky himself wrote, with hindsight, as to the bloody revenge of the
Thermidors of France and of Russia:
The Jacobins were not destroyed as Jacobins but as Terrorists, as
Robespierrists, and the like: similarly, the Bolsheviks were destroyed as
Trotskyists, Zinovienists, Bukharinists.[67]
The Thermidoreans systematically exterminated the Jacobins; Stalin
annihilated the leaders of the Bolshevik Party, and, while cynically taking
their name and elevating Lenin to sacred status, ensure that none of the Old
Bolsheviks apart from his cronies survived.
Conclusion
It is my contention, as explained at greater length in my 2008 book[68], that the
English, French and Russian Revolutions were most certainly Events in the sense
given to that word by Alain Badiou. That is, Events which have, in each case,
dramatically changed the course of human events in the world. As Badiou would
put it, these are Events to which fidelity should be and was owed by millions.
Indeed, these were Events which now call upon the human participants in the
politics of the present day to honour their decisive and explosive shattering
of the hitherto prevailing situation, while at the same time exploring and
taking full account of their human tragedy. Just as in the case of St Paul and
the universalisation of Christianity, so lucidly explained by Alain Badiou[69], great human
figures stand out in each case, the subjects of this study: Cromwell,
Robespierre and Lenin. There is no need to subscribe to Carlyle’s acclamation
for Heroes in order to explain why in each case precisely these particular
individuals rose to the occasion, through long individual experience of
internal turmoil, as in the case of Cromwell, lack of charisma as in the case
of Robespierre, and on occasion complete isolation, as in the case of Lenin in
April 1917, when he stood alone against his Party.[70] In each
case the individual has indeed become a “screen memory” for conservatives and
reactionaries, dreadful examples used to prove that all revolutions are
necessarily disasters.
What is perfectly clear is that neither Cromwell, nor Robespierre, nor
Lenin, could become an icon or avatar for the reactionary and historically
outmoded regimes they helped to overthrow. Stalin had none of the personal
characteristics of the three leaders examined in this article. He was a
revolutionary, and a leader of the Bolshevik Party. But his trajectory was to
destroy utterly that which he had helped to create. That is why the present
Russian regime seeks to elevate him to the status of the murderous Tsars of
Russian history.
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[2] UN
General Assembly Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary (1957), athttp://mek.oszk.hu/01200/01274/01274.pdf (accessed on 8 February 2016)
[7] Seehttps://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm(accessed on 12 February 2016)
[9] “Захоронение дела Ленина: Апофеозом встречи с учеными стала идея Владимира Путина о том, что Владимир Ленин — это разорвавшаяся атомная бомба” Kommersant at http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2897527 (accessed on 8 February 2016), and “Vladimir Putin accuses Lenin of
placing a ‘time bomb’ under Russia: Russian president blames revolutionary’s
federalism for break up of Soviet Union and creating ethnic tension in region”, The
Guardian 25 January 2016, athttp://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/25/vladmir-putin-accuses-lenin-of-placing-a-time-bomb-under-russia (accessed on 8 February 2016)
[10] See also
Paul Goble ‘Russian Think Tank That Pushed for Invasion of Ukraine Wants
Moscow to Overthrow Lukashenka’ at http://www.jamestown.org/regions/russia/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=43458&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=48&cHash=271db31b04e7a79825d85178132b9a8a#.Vr2vxfIrLIU(accessed on 12 January 2016)
[11] http://www.aif.ru/politics/world/leonid_reshetnikov_ssha_visyat_na_voloske(accessed on 12 February 2016)
[12] Stenogram
in the official Rossiiskaya Gazeta athttp://www.rg.ru/2013/12/19/putin-site.html; and Ian Johnston “Stalin was no worse than Oliver Cromwell. The Russian
President made the comments at a press conference after he was asked about a
monument to Stalin being put up in Moscow”The Independent 20
December 2013 athttp://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/vladimir-putin-soviet-leader-joseph-stalin-was-no-worse-than-oliver-cromwell-9016836.html (both accessed on 8 February 2016)
[23] Tony Benn
‘Set my People Free’ The Guardian 13 May 2001, athttp://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/may/13/election2001.uk10 (accessed on 9 February 2001)
England: These.’ Dublin, 17th September, 1649. in Vol 2, Carlyle 1850,
p.128
[43] Agrégée et
docteure en histoire, habilitée à diriger des recherches, elle est directrice
de recherche au CNRS rattachée à l’Institut Interdisciplinaire du Contemporain
(IIAC) et directrice de l’équipe Tram, « Transformations radicales des mondes
contemporains »
[47] “Robespierrists,
anti-Robespierrists, we ask for mercy: for pity’s sake, tell us, simply, what
Robespierre did.”
[48]https://www.academia.edu/12387445/Robespierre_meurt_longtemps_the_Construction_and_Evolution_of_a_Black_Legend_Through_Time(accessed on 9 February 2016)
[51] Bureau
2013, p.91 ‘This black legend acts as a filter which blocks our access to the
historical Robespierre’
[60] Slavoj Zizek
‘Robespierre or the “Divine Violence” of Terror’, at http://www.lacan.com/zizrobes.htm (accessed on 10 February 2016)
[70] See the
incisive Introduction, ‘Between Two Revolutions” to Slavoj Žižek’s important
collection of Lenin’s writings from this period, Žižek 2011.
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