State and Evolution: Russia's Search for a Free Market

3. The Three Sources and Three Components of Bolshevism

The Three Sources and Three Components of Bolshevism1 A dark whirlwind of modern ideology descended upon us from the West . . . . —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn So at the meeting I say what do you mean International? I say what we’ve got here is a revolution, a real people’s revolt, that’s what we’ve got. Like with Stepan Timofeevich. Then they ask me well what about Karla Marksov and I say he’s a German, that means he’s got to be a fool But what about Lenin they say. And I say well Lenin, he’s our man, he’s peasant, he’s Bolshevik, so what that means is all you out there is Communists. —Boris Pilnyak, The Naked Year “Turn this imperialist war into a civil war” must be the proletariat’s watchword, its only watchword. —Vladimir Lenin 1 bolshevism became a serious historical phenomenon on 28 June 1914, when in the city of Sarajevo a man named Gavrilo Princip (who was no Bolshevik at all, who in fact belonged to nationalist group called Mlada Bosna) assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand, and set oª a world war. Aleksandr Potresov, Lenin’s coeditor at Iskra, rightly noted that Bolshevism took fire not so much from this small spark as from 3 44 the great conflagration that followed. Potresov considered the “great, crashing wave of Communism” a direct result of the swell created by the First World War. As Yevgeny Shvarts expressed it: dragon: Do you know the day I first appeared on this earth? lancelot: I know that it was a bad day. dragon: It was a terrible day, a day of battle, the day that Attila himself went down in defeat—you know how many warriors had to fall for that. . . . The earth was soaked with their blood. By midnight the leaves on the trees had turned brown. By dawn huge black mushrooms had sprouted under those trees. I followed them. . . . I crawled up after them, from the depths of the earth. I am the son of war. I am war.2 Bolshevismwasthechildof war,andcarriedtheseedsof warwithin it.Communismwasneveranythingbut“WarCommunism.”Itwasjust that as time went on, war simply took on diªerent forms: war among ourselves (civil war), war against the peasants (collectivization), psychological warfare (the Cold War). When Bolshevism eventually lost all these wars, it perished. But as Bertolt Brecht wrote, “the womb that carried the viper can still bear fruit.” The First World War “Bolshevised” Russian society—first and foremost psychologically. I hardly need to remind anyone of the qualitative change in the nature of social tensions during those years of exhausting, seemingly endless trench warfare in which national goals (loyalty to our allies? annexation of Constantinople and the strait? turning back German aggression? aiding our brothers the Serbs?) seemed increasingly incomprehensible to the average Russian, in spite of all the newspaper appeals to patriotism and calls for national defense. This change in social life and social consciousness can be summarized in a single popular and terrible phrase of the day: “These days gold’s worth less than salt; life’s somewhere in the middle.” But “blood’s a special kind of juice.” The shedding of blood is either a criminal act or a holy act. That is, there is no middle ground. Politics may be wrongheaded, they may be compromised. But war (by which The Three Components of Bolshevism 45 I mean true all-out war, war that requires total exhaustion of a nation’s resources)isnotClausewitz’s“continuationof politicsbyothermeans.” It is the annihilation of politics. When war is seen as holy, the state is immensely strengthened; when war is considered criminal, the state perishes. But in the latter case the state is not the only thing that perishes. All social support structures once considered legitimate also collapse. How wars blast apart the moral framework of a society, how soldiers, believing themselves betrayed, turn into killers, is clearly illustrated in Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel The Quiet Don, where the hero says, “There is no God. He doesn’t exist! If he did, he wouldn’t let this happen to his people. Here on the front we’ve written him oª. . . . we’ve left him to the old folks.”3 And clearly, the frontline soldiers who’d written oª God, who’d come to despise the tsar (as by now did all of Russia, talking of “Tsar Rasputin”), no longer believed in either a nation or a fatherland. The troops who had once been the state’s chief...