In organizing their
scholarly shindigs, academics tend to favor the centenary—the so-many-hundredth
anniversary of this or that. The last
time I got caught up in centenaries was two years ago, when modern historians
were much caught up with the implications of the Battle of Waterloo (1815)
leaving us medievalists to the comparative obscurity of Magna Charta or the
Fourth Lateran Council six hundred years earlier. As a scholar of Franciscanism, among other
things, I naturally had to opt for the latter.
But should you have no clue what I am talking about, indeed if you have
never even heard of the Fourth Lateran Council, not to worry. It followed the Third Lateran Council and
preceded the Fifth.
Now I am at it
again—on a purely amateur basis. Just at
the protracted moment we are in the midst of assessing the First World War,
formerly known as the Great War (1914-1918) and, with a more particular focus,
the “October Revolution” of 1917, which saw the birth of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. Major war events of
1917 included sensational instances of continuing slaughter (as in the third
battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele) and America’s
belated entry into the hostilities.
However, it is in retrospect pretty obvious that the most important
events of 1917 were those taking place in Russia. For the first time in history ideological
Socialism came to political power in concrete form that amazed, inspired, or
terrified the world and largely dominated its attention for the next seven
decades.
So I have been doing a bit of a refresher course on the Soviet
phenomenon, a subject in which I perforce read fairly widely when I was writing
The Anti-Communist Manifestos. A phenomenon that struck me during those
years was the extraordinary reluctance of Western intellectuals of the Thirties
and Forties—and to a certain extent even of today’s intellectuals—to recognize
and acknowledge the profound political pathologies of the practiced Marxism of
the last century. This began with the
fantasy that the coup d’étât of October
1917 was a “proletarian revolution” rather than a criminal power-grab by a gang
of conspirators, and a general denial that from its very origins Bolshevism
imposed itself by terror, violence, and coercion. It included the utter rejection, expressed
with a kind of theological outrage, of the obvious similarities between
Hitlerian Nazism and Stalinist Communism, and a cultivated blindness to such
world-class atrocities as the Ukrainian famine, the purges, and the growth of
the gulag system.
For a non-specialist I had read pretty widely in English language
Soviet history, but I somehow had missed the essential book. That would have
to be Martin Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy: A History of
Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (1994). I recently completed a slow
reading of this large, conceptually rich work, and have emerged with a feeling
of having seen at last the Big Picture, or at least a much bigger one than I
had ever before grasped. I already knew
something of Malia and the general contours of his own anti-Communism. (He wrote the introduction to the English
language version of The Black Book of Communism.) I was, however, unprepared for the elegance
of the writing and the capaciousness of his thought—always a powerful
combination.
It is not exactly a polemical book, but he does offer trenchant
criticisms of the mainstream of Anglo-American academic “Sovietology”,
especially as represented by two huge and hugely influential works—E. H. Carr’s
Bolshevik Revolution and Isaac
Deutscher’s three-volume dithyrambic biography of Leon Trotsky. Malia’s criticism of the major Sovietologists
is that they constantly mistake a philosophical
question (What is the “best” way to build Socialism?) for a historical question. If you begin from the a priori position that Socialism is highly desirable and should work, you must spend a great deal of time either in denial or in
rationalizing explanations of “what went wrong”.
What “went wrong” was that Russia was too backward, or the peasants too
stolid and obdurate, or that Lenin didn’t live long enough, or that Bukharin
was marginalized, etc., etc. What really
went wrong was that the vast “superstructure” of the Communist Party had no
actual “base” over which to be super, and the unceasing
attempt to create one necessitated ceaseless cruelty, coercion, and homicide on
a staggering scale. Malia is
particularly hard on Trotsky, the great if imaginary hero of a counterfactual
Soviet history still alive and well in the Academy. He calls Deutscher’s three volumes of
biography, which I remember several radical undergraduates of 1970 schlepping
about in their bulging backpacks, a “Marxo-Miltonic trilogy”. But authorial stamina and indefatigability
cannot in themselves command a reader’s assent.
As Malia points out, Trotsky embraced no particular doctrines that would
differentiate him on such issues as mass murder from his fellow
Bolsheviks. They were all required as a
matter of principle to follow out
a sanguinary “logic of history” that directed the seventy-four years of the
life of the USSR.
As we have found in our own recent national discussions, historical
events rarely command a permanent interpretive consensus. The Chinese premier Chou En Lai, when
supposedly asked about the effects of the French Revolution supposedly replied
“Too soon to tell”. Truth may be the
daughter of time, but she has many quarrelsome sisters. Scholars have another big chance coming up
quite soon. 2024 will mark the centenary
of the death of Lenin.
