The Russian revolution has been the only one among the modern revolutions which has so far not led to a military dictatorship. But the ghost of Bonaparte has haunted it for three decades; and both Trotsky and Stalin, each in his own way, wrestled with the ghost. Trotsky repeatedly warned the Bolshevik Party of the military dictator who one day might rise above its head and crush it. Stalin suspiciously scrutinized the faces of Tukhachevsky, Zhukov, and other marshals to see which of them might secretly nourish this dangerous ambition. As in Dante's tale about the man who wrestles with a snake and in the struggle himself assumes the snake's shape, Stalin assumed some features of a Soviet Bonaparte when, as Generalissimo, he placed himself above his generals. But this was in part a masquerade. Stalin remained the civilian party leader in uniform, representing only a diluted and adulterated Bonapartism.
The mere need for such an adulteration shows that the trend towards Bonapartism was latent in Soviet society; it was no mere invention of the lovers of historical analogy. The trend remained only latent, in part because Russia was until recently too weak to breed a Bonaparte. A Bonaparte cuts no figure if he cannot conquer a continent. The Soviet generals of the past were incapable of such a feat—Russia's industrial-military strength was altogether inadequate for that. At the close of the Stalin era this may no longer be true. Nobody can say whether a real general, whom the uniform of a Bonaparte would fit much better than it fitted Stalin, may not appear in the Red Square one day. It is not irrelevant to the situation in Russia that the trend towards the ‘rule of the sword’, to use an old-fashioned expression, has been so much at work in the non-communist world as well.
There are as yet no signs of the advent of a Soviet Bonaparte. But if the peace offers made by Stalin's civilian successors were to fail, it may be with him that the West will have to deal next.
The day on which a Russian Bonaparte rises in the Kremlin may see the end of all self-containment, for the Bonaparte would disperse the party secretaries and make straight for the English Channel.
CHAPTER TEN
FUTURE PROSPECTS:
DOMESTIC AFFAIRS
The close interplay of domestic and foreign factors will determine the outlook of post-Stalin Russia. Just as an aggravation of the international situation may contribute to the emergence of a military dictatorship so domestic developments, in their turn, will exercise a powerful influence on foreign policy. It may, therefore, not be out of place to consider here the alternative directions in which the Soviet regime may evolve.
There are, broadly speaking, three possible variants of development:
(a) a relapse into the Stalinist form of dictatorship;
(b) a military dictatorship;
(c) a gradual evolution of the regime towards a socialist democracy.
The conditions under which each of these variants is likely to materialize deserve to be examined. An analysis of these conditions leads to the general conclusion that the balance of domestic factors favours a democratic regeneration of the regime. A prolonged relapse into Stalinism is highly improbable. The essential prerequisite for a military dictatorship would be a war-like threat from the West. The real alternative seems to lie therefore between military dictatorship and democratic evolution.
The great bourgeois revolutions, which were in a sense the predecessors of the Russian revolution, resulted in the establishment of military dictatcrships. In Puritan England and post-Jacobin France these dictatorships came into being only a few years after the beginning of the revolution. The Soviet regime is well advanced in its fourth decade; but throughout this time it has preserved its character as a civilian, not a military, dictatorship.
Before exploring further the prospects for the future, we must briefly consider the main reason for this difference between the Russian and the other revolutions.
Every great revolution begins as a broad popular movement, whose leaders strive to establish a system of government very much more representative and broadly based than that which prevailed under the old order. Cromwell started by defending the rights of Parliament against the Crown. The French revolution represented at first all the Estates against the Court. The Russian revolution sought to establish the rule of Councils of Workers', Peasants', and Soldiers' Deputies in place of Tsarist autocracy and the political vacuum of the Kerensky regime.
Each revolution defeats the defenders of the old order, because it enjoys massive popular support. But the end of civil war brings about a state of weariness, frustration, and political apathy. On the one hand, the new government loses popular support; on the other, society is incapable of governing itself. The old ruling classes are destroyed or dispersed. The revolutionary classes are exhausted, divided against themselves, confused, and lacking in political energy and will. This was the state of the middle classes in the English and French revolutions; and this was also the state of the Russian working class in the early 1920's.
A disintegrated society, close to the brink of anarchy, is incapable of producing a stable and representative government, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary. Since it is not in a position to govern itself, that is be governed by its elected representatives, it of necessity comes to be ruled by revolutionary ‘usurpers’.
In such a disintegrated and politically amorphous society power can be usurped and exercised only by an organization which, by its very nature or by force of tradition, has maintained a high degree of cohesion, discipline, and unity of will. In Puritan England and Thermidorian France only one such body existed: the army. The army was therefore predestined to act as trustee and guardian of post-revolutionary society. Cromwell was both the leader of the revolution and the commander of the Ironsides. In this double role he embodied both stages of the revolution: the representative —
Parliamentary stage — and the later stage of the usurpatory Protectorate. In France there was a definite break between the two phases, and each was represented by different men. Bonaparte, who had played no significant role in the first phase, embodied the second.
The Russian revolution, too, developed from government by Soviet representation into a Protectorate by usurpation. But the Bolshevik Party, not the army, in this case provided that closely knit, disciplined body of men which, inspired by a single will, was capable of ruling and unifying the disintegrated nation. No such party had existed in previous revolutions. The Jacobin Party came into being only in the course of the upheaval. It was part of the fluctuating revolutionary tide; and it broke up and vanished at the ebb of the tide. The Bolshevik Party, on the other hand, had formed a solid and centralized organization long before 1917. This enabled it to make a revolution, to win a civil war, and then, after the ebb of the tide, to play the part the army had played elsewhere, and to secure by ‘usurpation’ the stability of the post-revolutionary government. The Bolsheviks alone were able to integrate forcibly the dislocated and splintered nation. It was they who created, inspired, and — what was more important — supervised the Red Army. Thus the same civilian body of men that had stood at the head of the revolution in the proletarian-democratic period, also acted as the dictatorial guardian of society throughout the protracted phase of unrepresentative government.
The party wielded the two main instruments of power, political police and army. It built up the political police into such a formidable instrument that it has had no need to call on the army to ensure stability of government. Nevertheless, the army has always been in the background as a potential counterbalance to the political police. The party has ensured its own predominance by keeping these twin instruments of power mutually in check. Each had an inherent tendency to make itself independent; but neither army nor police could assert its independence as long as the party was able to use one of them to suppress the other's appetite for power.