Comrade Lenin and the longest goodbye
We may not all be Soviets these days, but there was a time we came pretty close. The collapse of what is known as the Second World, otherwise celebrated as actually existing socialist states, has led to a strange and unexciting world. It has surely given birth to the cretinization of American politics, a strange overconfidence and lapse of concentration which breeds exemplary political mediocrity. If the soviet bear were still alive, the west would have given more thought to the quality of its current leadership.
The collapse of actually existing socialist states has ushered in a brave new world of minimal and miniaturist leaders all over the globe. They are the luckless heirs and epigones of an aborted attempt to remake the world and to reset the clock of human progress towards genuine self-actualization. Millions, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, are still trapped in the abyss of confusion, utter wretchedness, sub-human poverty and alienation.
Ever since its triumph over the feudal mode of production, modern capitalism has infected every corner of the globe with its viral imperative: the internationalization of slavery, globalism, the advent of unviable nation-states in Africa, the phenomenon of the African strongman as a bulwark against communist threat, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, end of ideology zealots and hordes of refugees threatening to overwhelm the capitalist cartography of the modern world.
One hundred years ago, the greatest challenge to the capitalist global order materialized in the Russian tundra. It has been a hundred years that shook the world to its very foundation. In the current climate of ennui and sheer boredom, it is possible to forget the great historical drama and the agonized trauma of the not too distant past when two violently contending visions of human society squared up to each other leading to bloodshed and global turmoil. But history will not forget us simply because we forget it.
The centenary of the Bolshevik uprising passed unnoticed in many western and non-western quarters, particularly and most bizarrely—but understandably—in Russia itself. It did not rate as much as a commemorative stamp from the modern heirs of Lenin. Vladimir Putin, Lenin spy-successor, had let it be known that as far as he was concerned, the end of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”.
In other words, the de-nationalization and conscription of other autonomous nations under the rubric of a Slavic master-nationality is far more important than any workers uprising. The modern heir of the Russian revolutionary troika knows that it is not politic to mention ancient bones when an old woman is passing. With Russian workers chafing and restive, a Putin acolyte famously quipped: “What is there to celebrate?” Indeed what is there to celebrate in contemporary Russia about an uprising against autocratic rule and injustice? The sublime irony cannot be lost.
Putin does not leave anyone in doubt these days that his main driving ideology is a hearty pan-Slavic supremacist order which brooks no contradiction. He had earlier cancelled the old November 7th holiday and substituted it with a November 4th holiday which marks the occasion of a historic Russian uprising against their Polish tormentors in 1614. If this can be happening in the land of the Bolshevik Revolution itself, it is not expected of hired mourners to weep more than the bereaved.
Yet the Russian Revolution remains the greatest uprising in the history of humanity, far more comprehensive in scale, scope and ambition than the French and American Revolutions put together. Whereas the earlier uprisings aimed only at toppling the dominant order, the Russian Revolution, according to an authority, “set out to do nothing less than destroy an entire social system and replace it with a society superior to anything that had hitherto existed in human history”.
It was some gargantuan ambition formulated by men with extraordinary focus and energy to match. A hundred years after, it still reads like the stuff of outlandish fiction; a cameo from an epic still motion film. It was a saga of extraordinary heroism and exceptional human courage and bravery. When human beings are fired by this kind of superhuman idealism and towering distaste for injustice, anything is possible. Without having ever been trained as a soldier, Leon Trotsky became an outstanding general of the Red Army.
But despite the superhuman heroism, the unimaginable sufferings on all sides, the epic sacrifices and the Homeric bloodletting, everything seems to have gone up in smoke, a damp squib, or so it seems. The informed opinion is that old Russia should have been the last place that this kind of revolution should have taken place in the first instance. It was a classic instance of voluntarism, that is, heroic instigation of circumstances rather than the ripeness and readiness of objective conditions.
Famously dubbed a “revolution against capital”, the Russian Revolution occurred against the classical conditions of a perfect revolutionary situation as enunciated by Karl Marx. Nineteenth century Russia was a primitive and backward society with a veneer of western modernity all held precariously together by Tsarist cruelty and autocratic repression. It is instructive that serfdom was only abandoned in 1861.
Perpetually aping developments in the west, Russia began a rapid headlong industrialization which created hordes of workers without the minimal conditions for their welfare. This was to be the ultimate nemesis of the Tsarist Empire. The country was teeming with the ultimate unwashed: hungry semi-serfs, wretched peasants, dehumanized workers and demoralized soldiers reeling from serial defeats inflicted on the crumbling Tsarist Imperial army. They eventually linked up with the radical Bolshevik leadership and were to be the foot soldiers in the assault on principal state institutions. The rest is history.
But despite revolution, the old objective conditions subsisted. While the strength of the state resided in its capacity for coercion and repressive ferocity, the countervailing institutions of civil society remained weak and stunted. In the absence of these moderating and modulating institutions, the road led inexorably to a new type of autocracy more devastating and ferocious than the old because it was freighted with high-minded and messianic self-righteousness.
In the event, the new Russia succumbed to a perfect post-revolution storm, and it was a terrible storm indeed. It is argued that had Lenin survived his horrific injuries, the situation could have been different. On his deathbed, it was known that Lenin denounced Stalin for his bovine rudeness and incivility, urging his colleagues to ease him out of power. But it was too late. Stalin would have laughed this to scorn, having gathered the levers of power irreversibly into his hands.
Rather than being a strange affliction, the virus of Stalinist autocracy was already present in Leninist dictatorship of the mythical proletariat. The very condition of political and economic underdevelopment which made revolution possible in Russia also made the transition to a politically freer and more economically equitable society impossible. As it was famously noted, the historical remit of Stalin was to drive barbarism out of Russia through sheer barbarity.
But the grand historical conundrum remains with humanity. The flame of liberation and revolution lit in Russia quickly caught on in other parts of the globe, particularly in feudal and backward China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba and many decolonising movements in Africa and Latin America which quickly adopted its trope and ideology as the leitmotif of the struggle against internal and external colonization. Within fifty years, one third of the entire human society found itself living under regimes that owed their historic motivation and inspiration to the Russian Revolution.
Yet in virtually all of these societies with the possible exception of China which boasts of an ancient civilization with a sublime contempt for western norms, the post-liberation condition is uniformly depressing: atrophied and sclerotic party dictatorships lording it over a cowered and pauperized populace. Like Zimbabwe this past week, like Angola earlier and like Romania much earlier in 1989, massive discontent of the masses has seen off aging autocrats presiding over devastated fiefdoms. Revolutions as enunciated by western theology have become a grand historical cul de sac.
Despite the horrors and the millennial sufferings, the heroism and self-sacrifice of the Russian revolutionists remain unrivalled in modern history. The lesson to take away from this is that no politician has been born who will ban revolutions, just as there will never be a philosopher however gifted who can theorize their trajectory. As long as injustice, persecution and oppression remain part of the human condition, the urge to revolt will also remain a primal imperative of the human psyche no matter where it leads or how it pans out.
The revolutions of the future will borrow their tropes from the great human uprising of the past dating back to Spartacus, the iconic Roman slave-leader, who led a revolt of his fellow slaves against the Roman Empire. But in all likelihood, they will owe more to mental duels and intellectual battles rather than the physical battering down of Winter Palaces. We may not have heard the last word from the Finland Station.
