Part 3 The Rear-View Mirror

The Russian Revolution, which began with such hope on Women’s Day in 1917, ended with the horrors of Stalinism and counter-revolution. Analysts have been gazing back at 1917 ever since, hoping—in the spirt of the Owl of Minerva cited in the preface—that, now that “the shades of night” have gathered, genuine understanding and wisdom can finally take flight. But recall that the preface also referenced a more pessimistic outcome, that outlined by Marshall McLuhan. Sometimes hindsight is no benefit, and we “look at the present through a rearview mirror” and end up marching “backwards into the future.” With both of these possible outcomes in mind, part 3 of this book is organized around two of the key contributions of the twenty-first century that have sharpened our understanding of the Russian Revolution in the years since night has fallen.

This takes us into a time warp. As of this writing, the most recent twenty-first-century contribution to our understanding of the Russian Revolution was in fact drafted more than seventy years ago. But it was only in 2016 that we could acquire, for the first time, a complete published version of all the finished and unfinished fragments of Trotsky’s last book—his political biography of Joseph Stalin. In that volume, he articulates, in a manner more compatible with Raya Dunayevskaya and C. L. R. James than with the Trotsky of Revolution Betrayed, the notion that the essence of the Soviet Union in the 1930s can be determined by the criterion of control of the surplus product. In placing Stalin’s authoritarianism within this classic historical-materialist framework, he omits only the conclusion—that Stalin’s elite represented a new class and that nothing progressive remained of what, until then, Trotsky had been calling a “degenerated workers’ state.” Trotsky’s book exists in unacknowledged dialogue with the first great historical-materialist attempt to assess the nature of Stalin’s Russia—that of Boris Souvarine, who broke a taboo of Leninist orthodoxy and explored the idea that there was something in the very nature of the Leninist party machine that created a breeding ground for a political “type” such as Stalin. At first, Trotsky vehemently disagrees with Souvarine on this point, but he then quietly and repeatedly returns to it. Chapters 8 and 9 develop and analyze key themes that emerge from Trotsky’s analysis.

Chapters 10 and 11 are organized around themes developed in the 2015 intellectual biography of Lenin by Tamás Krausz, the most impressive outline of Lenin’s epistemology published in this century. These chapters assert that in order to understand the history of revolution and counter-revolution in Russia, we need to put behind us the quasi-religious reverence toward Lenin that, for more than a century, has been a barrier to sober analysis. Chapter 10 begins with comments on Krausz’s introductory biographical chapter and proceeds with a critical examination of Lenin’s approach to the Russian Revolution of 1905; an assessment of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, a key influence on Lenin; and a survey of some of the other core subjects taken up by Krausz. I then broach the wider issue of historical materialism and the role of the individual in history, comparing the approaches of Krausz, Georg Lukács, and Leon Trotsky and making a case for the need to move beyond a focus on the individual in history—in particular, one imbued with reverence. Chapter 11 looks at one aspect of Lenin’s theory of political organization and challenges a common view that he saw intellectuals as central to that process. In fact, from 1904 on, a profound anti-intellectualism was embedded in the core of Lenin’s epistemology. This and other aspects of Lenin’s epistemology need to be critiqued and transcended—which is impossible unless we finally develop a historical materialism that rises above the reverence analyzed in the previous chapter.