Thoughts On Revolution from a Volume by Richard Pipes

This year I've been reading quite a bit about the Russian Revolution. Though primarily Solzhenitsyn's perspectives, I've gleaned some from Leon Trotsky's book on the Russian Revolution. In sharing insights from Solzhenitsyn on Medium, someone left me three other book recommendations including two volumes by Richard Pipes, a Baird Professor of History at Harvard. I found Pipes' books in our library and have begun the smaller volume, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution. (416 pages)

The following two excerpts from the introduction caught my attention, specifically in light on the ongoing night time protests and violence in some of our cities, particularly Portland and Seattle. Pipes wrote:

Nineteenth-century Europe witnessed the emergence of professional revolutionaries, intellectuals who devoted themselves full-time to studying the history of past upheavals in quest of tactical guidelines, analyzing their own time for signs of coming upheavals, and once they occurred, stepping in to direct spontaneous rebellion into conscious revolution. Such radical intellectuals saw the future as marked by violent disturbances, and progress as requiring the destruction of the traditional system of human relations.

A little further on he writes:

It is radical intellectuals who translate these concrete concrete complaints into an all-consuming destructive force. They desire not reforms but a complete obliteration of the present in order to create a world order that has never existed except in a mythical Golden Age.

How much are we paying attention to what is going on right now? How concerned should we be about the threat to our way of life? 

* * * *

Unlike any other book on this subject that I've read, Pipes lays groundwork by explaining a few concepts that I've never had pointed out. Chapter one is about life in Russia in 1900. It is essential for establishing the context in which these events took place.

For example, 80% of the population consisted of peasants living off the land, totally untouched by the Westernization that had been occurring in the rest of Europe. Pipes explains the three key institutions of peasant culture: the family, the village and the commune.  

Another definition early on was also helpful. All my life I've heard reference to the "intelligentsia" when reading about the Revolution. I also assumed it was just another word for the educated or the intellectuals. Pipes notes that intelligentsia and intellectuals are two separated categories. Intellectuals are those who merely talk about about issues. They may be erudite, but not personally invested in the social upheaval their ideas toy with. 

On the other hand, the intelligentsia that Pipes describes are opportunists actively looking for opportunities to disrupt, to change the course of history. Philosophers interpret the world, the intelligentsia seek to reshape it. 

* * * *

How concerned should we be when we go online and see people calling for revolution today? Or when I come across tweets like this one: 

When we choose revolution, we do what is morally right

instead of picking a lesser or greater evil. Choose revolution.

The image at the top of the page here is from 1905 where revolutionaries set up a barricade in the streets of Moscow. Except for the clothing, it's not too different from Seattle earlier this summer.

Leon Trotsky and the Russian Revolution

Here are some interesting passages from Leon Trotsky's The Russian Revolution. (Originally published in 1939 by Simon & Schuster.)

The history of a revolution, like every other history, ought first of all to tell what happened and how.

But at those crucial moments when the old order, because it’s no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new regime.

The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny

These words are found in the introduction to Trotsky's book.

The first sentence is what this 450 page account is about. The second explains the motivation for revolution. The "situation" is no longer endurable. Hence, the powerless masses erupt, and take control by force.

* * * *
Most Americans have little understanding of the situation in Russia at the time of the revolution. Nor do they know what really happened. I'd be curious how many people know there were actually two revolutions in 1917. The first took place in February/March. The Tsar was brought down and the whole structure of government around the Monarch system of rulership. Then in the late fall Lenin and the Bolsheviks pushed out the first wave of revolutionaries and crafted a Totalitarian-ruled Soviet Union.

These things didn't happen overnight. Solzhenitsyn's August 1914 was written to show the history that preceded these revolutions and set them up.

Leon Trotsky

Trotsky adds:

The dynamic of revolutionary events is directly determined by swift, intense and passionate changes in the psychology of classes which are already formed themselves before the revolution. (Emphasis mine)

The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime.

* * * *
Under Lenin's administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party Marxist-Leninist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Leninism.

Regarding Trotsky's role in all these things Vladimir Cherniaev, a leading Russian historian, summarized it in this manner:

Trotsky bears a great deal of responsibility both for the victory of the Red Army in the civil war, and for the establishment of a one-party authoritarian state with its apparatus for ruthlessly suppressing dissent... He was an ideologist and practitioner of the Red Terror. He despised 'bourgeois democracy'; he believed that spinelessness and soft-heartedness would destroy the revolution, and that the suppression of the propertied classes and political opponents would clear the historical arena for socialism. He was the initiator of concentration camps, compulsory 'labour camps,' and the militarization of labour, and the state takeover of trade unions. Trotsky was implicated in many practices which would become standard in the Stalin era, including summary executions.

Despite all this, Trotsky overstepped and made enemies. As a result, by 1929 he found himself exiled from the State he helped create. He first went to Turkey, then Italy, then France. When France signed an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1935, Trotsky was no longer welcome there either, in part because of his rabble-rousing writings and the encouragement of mass strikes.

From there he went to a farm in Norway, then left for Mexico where he worked for a while with painter and muralist Diego Rivera. Together with Andre Breton he helped write the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art.

Trotsky continued to write and agitate, and became such a burr in Stalin's butt that Stalin sent an NKVD hit squad to eliminate him. The first attempt in May 24, 1940 failed. The second attempt was more successful, by means of a mountaineer's ice axe in August. Even so, he survived the initial blow for a day before succumbing under surgery.

* * * *
TRIVIA
I probably first noticed and took interest in Leon Trotsky in sixth grade because his name was Leon. (My birth name is Leon Edward. I later took interest in Leon Russell for the same reason.) I believe it was while reading about Rasputin's assassination, which Trotsky covers somewhat in The Russian Revolution.

When my wife and I prepared to go to Mexico in 1980 to work at an orphanage we studied some of the history of that nation South of the Border. I learned that after the Communists failed in the Spanish Civil War more than 40,000 found refuge in Mexico. Hence, we occasionally saw graffiti featuring the hammer and sickle, international symbol of the Party.