Vengeance and Ressentiment in the Russian Revolution

Arno Mayer’s The Furies turns our attention to vengeance and ressentiment as part of the complex of practices and discourses of revolutionary violence. Following Mayer’s lead, this essay explores the phenomena of vengeance and ressentiment in the context of the Russian Revolution, which is broadly defined as the four decades of upheaval in Russia/the Soviet Union starting in 1917. It argues that vengeance/ressentiment in the Russian Revolution was not a fixed constant but something that changed over time, notably with respect to its targets: prerevolutionary (“bourgeois”) elites in the early revolutionary period, the Russian intelligentsia at the end of the 1920s, the Communist administrative elite in the Great Purges of the late 1930s, and Jews in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Finally, it suggests a comparable question for French historians: Is there a history to be written of vengeance/ressentment in the French Revolution?