If you condemn revolutions, you should condemn virtually the whole Russian intelligentsia, and the whole of Russian history for that matter, since it provided the soil for these revolutionary events. Revolutions do not appease; they do the opposite. They always disappoint expectations, but they open a genuinely new page. The important thing is to understand what this page consists in – without placing too much faith in what either the victors or the vanquished say… Our socialism was in fact a ‘capitalism à la Russe’ – capitalist in its technological content and anti-capitalist in its form.
On this point, Mezhuev reviews the opinions of such thinkers as Berdyaev, Fedotov, Bogdanov and others. He himself leans towards the following interpretation. It is difficult for a country located on the periphery to combine modernization with democracy and freedom. For a time, one of them must give way to the other. The Bolsheviks understood this, and that is why they won the Civil War and why the USSR emerged victorious from the Second World War. China too appreciates this: it has opted to combine rapid modernization via the market with an undemocratic political system. Whatever the regime in question, wisdom consists not in refusing the past as if it were a barren desert, but in regarding it as a springboard for further development and preserving its genuine (not its mythical) grandeur.
In this respect, the Russian variant of socialism must be credited with its faith in science. The prestige of the scientist and engineer was never higher in Russian history than during the Soviet period and the regime opened the doors of science to many. Here its rulers were realists and pragmatists. Taking their speeches literally, the West was wrong to perceive any hostility in this. Contemporary Russia, with its nostalgia for pre-revolutionary times, is more distant from the West than the Bolsheviks were:
Our liberals have nothing to boast about except the destruction of these achievements. Russia’s future must be constructed on the basis of preserving and developing past achievements. Continuity must be preserved even as new tasks are defined. As of now, this link with the past has been broken. But it will be restored one day. This does not involve returning to a pre- or post-revolutionary past. Ask what in the past is dear to you, what must be continued or preserved, and that will help you to face the future… If the past contains nothing positive, then there is no future and there is nothing left to do but ‘forget it all and sink into slumber’… Those who want to erase the twentieth century – an era of great catastrophes – must also bid farewell to a great Russia.
Mezhuev remains convinced that the Russian revolution will one day receive the same recognition as revolutions in the West – a recognition that would hopefully open the way for a genuine Russian renaissance.
The preceding paragraphs do no more than summarize a long and impassioned address. Mezhuev is not a historian, and his interpretation is not unproblematic. The terms ‘socialism’, ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘communism’, but also a whole set of ideas about the revolution, derive from a terminology and approach that need to be reconsidered. But we are here in the presence of a real challenge to ‘nihilism’ and an illustration of the battle for history as a remedy making it possible for a nation in the throes of a painful decline to rediscover its identity and discover its future.
It is well known that history is subject to constant use and abuse. Listening to a non-historian plead for an objective historical knowledge as indispensable to a nation, whether in its torment or its glory days, is unusual in a media and computer-dominated age fixated on the present instant. But the instant is just that – it passes – whereas history remains. It continues to provide some of the building-blocks for the future, whether sound or defective. It is the basis that nations rest on and which they add to. It is not absurd to believe that history, in common with the applied sciences, has a practical dimension – even if it cannot provide immediate, guaranteed remedies.
GLOSSARY OF RUSSIAN TERMS
apparat: party administration. (We sometimes use apparaty for administrative bodies in general, but apparatchik always refers to an official of the party apparatus.)
belye: the ‘Whites’ – the predominantly monarchist camp that fought the ‘Reds’ (krasnye) during the Civil War.
derzhava: an old Russian term for the state. It derives from the verb derzat’, meaning to hold or keep, and implies a holding or someone’s property. It refers directly to the political essence of the Tsarist state: samoderzhavie (autocracy) and samoderzhets (autocrat). The term derzhavnost’, which is also found, refers to a conception of the state as a great power.
Esery: Socialist Revolutionaries (or SRs) – non-Marxist socialists who were very active in the soviets and the Provisional Government. They cooperated with the ‘Whites’ on and off. Their left wing briefly cooperated with the Bolsheviks, but broke with them over the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with the Germans, which they opposed.
generalnyi sekretar’ (shortened to gensek): General-Secretary of the CPSU, elected by the party congress. In addition, there existed Central Committee secretaries, whose status varied. Some were in charge of spheres of activity, but not members of the Politburo. Members of the latter (with the exception of the general-secretary) could not have secretarial functions. This was true of Gromyko, for example, who was in charge of the Foreign Affairs Ministry.
Gosplan: State Committee for Economic Planning.
Gossnab: State Committee for Material and Technical Supplies – a kind of super-ministry organizing supplies of the raw materials, machinery and finished products required by enterprises. The remainder of the exchanges between economic ministries and their enterprises were carried out by their own purchasing (snaby) and marketing (sbyty) agencies.
Gulag (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei): the General Camp Directorate, located in the NKVD. The official name for the camps was ITL (ispravitel’notrudovye lageria, corrective labour camps). Under Stalin, ITK (ispravitel’notrudovye kolonii, corrective labour colonies) were reserved for lesser offenders and juveniles. There were also spetsposeleniia (places of deportation) for those condemned to periods of exile: they were supervised by the NKVD, but not subject to the camp regime. Camp inmates – zakliuchennye – were referred to in shorthand as zeki (singular: zek).