Lenin's crowning work was Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia (State and Revolution, 1917). Taking the experience ofthe Paris Commune as his guide, Lenin asserted that a socialist revolution should entail the ruthless destruction of the old, bourgeois administrative machinery by the armed masses and the insertion in its place of a proletarian dictatorship. He imagined that, in the socialist state, workers themselves would execute most governmental functions, for simple 'bookkeeping' could be done by any literate person. For as long as the proletarian state remained in power it would exercise the strongest possible control over production and consumption and would maintain its vigilance over the remnants ofthe bourgeoisie. Only at the end ofthe socialist stage, after an equitable scheme of economic distribution had been established and after class antagonism had been annihilated, would the state begin to 'wither away', as Marx had predicted. Nowhere in State and Revolution did Lenin enumerate protections for individual liberty, for he was interested only in the workers' collective freedom from want.
It is valuable to compare Lenin's view of the socialist state to that of Bog- danov, the most prolific philosopher among the early Bolsheviks. In his science fiction novel Krasnaia zvezda (Red Star, 1908) Bogdanov imagined communism as a stateless order wherein individual workers would select their jobs based on statistical employment projections, and citizens would be clothed androgynously, be fed manufactured rations and be offered free medical care.
Simultaneously, however, Bogdanov projected a desperate collective effort to keep social production ahead of population growth, technology ahead of nature, and the human spirit ahead of satiation and depression. He was suggesting that communism would not constitute the end of history after all. Moreover, Red Star depicted within 'stateless' communism a directorate of intellectuals, an exclusive group of scientific experts, who would make society's most crucial decisions. In Bogdanov's prophetic reckoning, the socialist state as a formal legal entity might dissolve only to re-emerge in a new, supra- legal form.
Russia and the legacy of 1812
ALEXANDER M. MARTIN
Russia stood at a historical crossroads when it experienced the trauma of the 1812 Napoleonic invasion. Like Germany's 1813 Befreiungskrieg and Spain's 1808-14 Guerra de independencia, Russia's Otechestvennaia voina - War for the Fatherland - became the stuff of ambiguous patriotic legend.
Speaking for many who saw 1812 as a unique opportunity to transcend Russia's bitter internal divisions, Leo Tolstoy argued in War and Peace that the heroes of the war had been the Russians of all social classes whose deep roots in Russian culture and spirituality made them selflessly patriotic and intolerant of social injustice, but also generous towards their nation's defeated enemies. Tolstoy's villains, by contrast, were 'Westernised' aristocrats, cynical cowards whose shrill wartime xenophobia reflected the same spiritual rootlessness and disdain for their own people that had also conditioned their pre-war Francophilia. According to this vision, the 'War for the Fatherland' had proved the Russian people's civic maturity and ought to have been followed by Russia's transformation into a liberal nation-state. Tolstoy's original idea for the novel had actually centred on the liberal Decembrist uprising of 1825 against the autocracy, a blow for freedom that he and many others regarded as a natural outgrowth of 1812. Of course, that coup had failed, and Russia remained a dynastic, autocratic, serf-based empire; as collective memories, however, the war and the Decembrist revolt raised Russians' national consciousness and created an impetus to expand the realm of human freedom and dignity that was often suppressed but never snuffed out.
This liberal nationalist reading of the war contains an element of historical truth and is itself a part of history thanks to its place in Russian society's cultural consciousness, but it should not hide from view the more illiberal aspects of the legacy of 1812. Like the Second World War and the collapse of the Soviet system in the early 1990s, it gave Russians the heady sensation of witnessing a turning point in history, thereby encouraging a sense of empowerment and a long-term quest for emancipation. However, also like those other traumas, it too convinced many Russians of their own vulnerability in the face of vast, malevolent forces, and that only a stern, authoritarian order could shield them against foreign hostility and the brittleness of their own social order. This chapter will develop that argument by discussing the challenges Russia faced on the eve of the war; the war's contribution to a xenophobic and reactionary nationalism, a reflexive social conservatism, and what might be called (to borrow Richard Hofstadter's phrase) 'the paranoid style in Russian politics';[132]and the efforts to use an authoritarian religiosity and militarism as tools for post-war state-building and for closing the social fault lines exposed by the war.
Russian culture and society before 1812
At the turn of the century, Russian elite culture faced three main challenges.
One involved the meaning of'Russianness'. Cultural Europeanisation had given the elite an identity separate from everyone else's; as Richard Wortman has argued, 'by displaying themselves as foreigners, or like foreigners, Russian monarchs and their servitors affirmed the permanence and inevitability of their separation from the population they ruled'.2 The regime had also sketched out ambitious imperial projects, from Peter I's dream of making Russia the trade route between Europe and the Orient to Catherine Il's 'Greek Project' of creating a Greco-Slavic empire that would give Russia hegemony in southeastern Europe and - in a bold non sequitur - identify Russia, qua successor to Orthodox Byzantium, to be the true heir to pagan classical Greece and hence a senior member in the family of European cultures.3 The Russian elite thus had to come to terms with both its own national identity and an ill-defined imperial destiny, issues that became all the more urgent once the French Revolution crystallised modern nationalism and shattered the old international system.
1 See. R. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965).
2 R. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth andCeremonyinRussianMonarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995-2000), vol. I, p. 5.
3 L. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 57; E. V Anisimov, Vremia petrovskikh reform (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1989), p. 418; A. Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla... Literatura i gosudarstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVIII-pervoi treti XlXveka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), pp. 35-8.
Furthermore, Russia's sociopolitical order was neither stable nor just. Sensitive, educated Russians worried that their vast empire, with its oppressive serfdom, corrupt officials and nouveaux riches aristocrats, represented - to borrow Robert Wiebe's description of the United States in the Gilded Age - 'a peculiarly inviting field for coarse leadership and crudely exercised power'.[133]The dynastic turmoil of the eighteenth century and the parade of unaccountable favourites who dominated court politics, together with the threat of popular revolts like the one led by the Cossack Emelian Pugachev in 1773-5, also rendered the system disturbingly unpredictable.
Lastly, the Russian elite faced conflicting cultural imperatives as they alternated schizophrenically between exercising untrammelled power on their estates and suffering the most pedantic regimentation in their own service as army officers or civilian officials. Religion and state service demanded ascetic self-discipline, while the fashionable 'Voltairean' scepticism of the Enlightenment, combined with the social pressure to flaunt one's wealth and the atmosphere of legal impunity created by serfdom, made it acceptable to indulge one's whims with little regard to the consequences. One manifestation of the conflicts this bred was a sexual morality torn between conservative modesty and unbridled hedonism, as we see in the pious noblewoman Anna Labzi- na's bitter tale of her marriage to the libertine Karamyshev.[134] Another was the quasi-suicidal propensity of many noblemen in state service for staking their well-being on a literal or figurative roll of the dice, for example, in high-stakes card games or lethal duels; thus wilfully abandoning one's fate to chance was also a form of rebellion against the stifling power of the regime.[135]Hesitating between conflicting models of individual conduct, Russian nobles remained deeply uncertain about what it meant to live a good and honourable life.
132
thank Olavi Arens, Mariia Degtiareva, Janet Hartley, Deniel Klenbort, Dominic Lieven, Michael Melancon and Katya Vladimirov, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
133
R. H. Wiebe,
134
135
Iu. M. Lotman,