Books: The Russian Revolution at 100 Years

‘The Russian Revolution of 1917 is rich in lessons for today’s crisis-ridden world of exploitation, oppression, and violence. The Bolsheviks have much to teach us.’

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Thirty years ago, I strolled through the aisles of an outdoor book festival in Managua, Nicaragua, held in celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The revolution (often referred to as the October Revolution) culminated in early November 1917 and led to the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or U.S.S.R, in 1922.

By 1983, in the heat of the so-called Cold War, President Ronald Reagan was referring to the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire. Yet in Nicaragua, that revolution was being celebrated by a book fair, providing affordable editions of literature, art, and philosophy books to a population that was hungry for knowledge.

Today, the Soviet Union is no more and Russia, or the Russian Federation, under President Vladimir Putin intends to mostly ignore this year’s centennial. March 12, the recognized start of the revolution, was not observed, and official plans for a November 7 commemoration of the victory are dim.

According to The New York Times, the “likely explanation, some Kremlin officials, historians and other analysts say, is that President Vladimir V. Putin loathes the very idea of revolution, not to mention the thought of Russians dancing in the streets to celebrate the overthrow of any ruler. Moreover, 1917 smudges the Kremlin’s version of Russian history as a long, unified march to greatness, meant to instill a sense of national pride and purpose.”

But around the world, in museums, films, symposia, and numerous books, the legacy and lessons of the “ten days that shook the world” are being examined. Three new books in particular came out this spring.

The first of these is A People’s History of the Russian Revolution by Neil Faulkner, a Marxist historian with roots in the British left. His stated goal is to show that the Russian Revolution “was the collective action of millions of ordinary men and women that powered the historical process between 1917 and 1921.” The book seeks to inform and educate a “new generation of people eager for change that another world is indeed possible.”

Faulkner’s book is linear and thorough, taking the reader through the political developments that shaped Russian history and Russian political movements. It ends with the tragic rollbacks that took place under Joseph Stalin. Faulkner is a fierce advocate of the notion of democratic revolution from the bottom.

“The Russian Revolution of 1917 is rich in lessons for today’s crisis-ridden world of exploitation, oppression, and violence,” he writes. “The Bolsheviks have much to teach us.” He sees this centennial as a time to reflect and learn lessons in order to move forward.

Next is the much anticipated October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville. Miéville is best known as a British writer of fantasy fiction and some comic books, but October is definitely a work of nonfiction. As he told The New York Times, “You couldn’t make this up. I did this enormous amount of research, and I kept thinking how genuinely strange, as well as everything else, the story was.”

Miéville takes the reader month-by-month through the earth-shaking events of the year 1917, from the February revolution that ousted Tsar Nicholas II and the Romanovs in March, to the victory of the Bolsheviks on November 7. The book is written in the style of a historical novel—but based on intricate, detailed research and study.

“Exhausted and drunk on history, nerves still taut as wires, the delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets stumbled out of Smolny [where the Revolutionary Government was founded],” he writes, “into a new moment of history, a new kind of first day, that of a workers’ government, morning in a new city, the capital of a workers’ state. They walked into the winter under a dim but lightening sky.”

The book includes an epilogue, which says “the question for history is not only who should be driving the engine, but where,” and an extensive booklist for further reading.

Perhaps the most interesting of these new books is The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution by British-Pakistani author and activist Tariq Ali. The book chronicles the life of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, focusing on the various dilemmas that Lenin faced, and how his thoughts and actions were shaped by them.

“The outcome for the tsarist empire was dramatic: three revolutions—January 1905, February 1917, and October 1917—within the first two decades of the twentieth century,” writes Ali. “Just as defeat in the Crimean War had pushed the tsar towards reforms, so the debacle of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05 helped pave the way for what Lenin described as the dress rehearsal of 1905. The ‘Great’ War of 1914–18 made February 1917 inevitable. Lenin ensured the success of October.”

Tariq Ali spoke with me about his book by phone from his home in London.

“Why not tell the story of the Russian Revolution through a series of reflections on Lenin?” he asked. “He is, in my opinion, one of the more misunderstood figures of the twentieth century. And has a lot to teach us still in terms of how to analyze politics, what to do. But very few people actually read Lenin within the left.”

The book brings together the turbulent history that led to the Bolshevik victory and the struggles of the newly created state. One scene depicts Lenin’s 1919 conversation with anarchist Peter Kropotkin, where he dismisses the use of terrorism to achieve revolutionary ends: “We do not need individual terroristic attempts and the anarchists should have understood long ago. Only with the masses, through the masses [could revolution be achieved].”

“The problems of terrorism, which the whole world talks about now, are not new problems,” Ali told me. “Terrorism was a big current [in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries] in Europe and partially in the United States, but much more so in Europe and in Russia, where the entire intelligentsia supported the terrorist factions. Lenin was opposed to it and explained why, saying these things are not only wrong on principle but they don’t work.”

The book makes historical comparisons between various revolutions, all of which informed the thinking of Lenin and others. “All great revolutions destroy the spinal cord of the old state, which is the military, however big or small it is, and create their own armies,” Ali said.

Oliver Cromwell, he noted, created the New Model Army; the French Revolution created its own army, which Napoleon later inherited; and the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky created the Red Army. “This is a pattern and they can’t do anything until that has been done—especially as successful revolutions.”

As Ali sees it, “The big difference between Lenin on the one hand and Cromwell and Robespierre and others on the other was that they fell into a revolution and a revolutionary process. Lenin was conscious from the very beginning that Russia needed a revolution and worked toward it. Later, on the eve of the revolution, he realized that this couldn’t just be a bourgeois revolution on the French model, it had to be a socialist revolution.”

La Follette’s Weekly Magazine, precursor of The Progressive, covered the newly emerging Russian Revolution in its January 1918 issue, in an article titled, “Russian Uprising; Social Revolution.” The article compared what had happened in Russia with other revolutions, including the American Revolution and the French Revolution.

“These revolutions,” it concluded, “were not of the same family as the one in Russia which began with the unseating of the Czar. For although the working people did most of the fighting in these revolutions, they were not, strictly speaking, working class revolutions. If the Russian Revolution is to be understood, it must be classified not with the series of revolutions which resulted in the existing order of society but as the first of a new series whose aim it is to sweep that order away.”

The proletarian revolution of 1917, Ali believes, required a gigantic awakening of the millions of exploited people. The book concludes with an essay by Lenin titled “On Climbing a High Mountain,” first published a few months after his death. In it he relates the struggles of someone ascending a previously unreached peak, undeterred by the voices of naysayers from below. Lenin concludes that if he could hear these voices, they would nauseate him, “and nausea, it is said, does not help one to keep a clear head and a firm step.”

Lenin kept writing until the end of his life, continuing to dialogue with friends and opponents. At his memorial, his widow, Nadya Krupskaya, said, “Do not raise statues to him, name palaces for him, or stage pompous solemn festivals to his memory . . . . Create a living testament to his ideals.”

I told Ali I was reminded of the scene in the film La Guerre Est Finie where the character played by Yves Montand turns to the younger leftists and says, “Lenin is not a prayer wheel.” Ali concurred: “Exactly. And the way he was really used in the sixties and seventies is not so much on his strategic thinking but more on tactical things, like how do you build a revolutionary political party?” At that time, Ali notes, so many different factions were quoting Lenin in debates against each other that it was “quite ludicrous.”

In the introduction to The Dilemmas of Lenin, Tariq Ali writes: “A recovery of as much historical and political memory as is feasible becomes an act of resistance.” He concluded our conversation in the same vein: “We live in a strange world and we have to fight back with our pens or our computers or whatever.”