What Is to Be Done with Soviet Russia? The Politics of Proscription and Possibility

Self-conscious reflection on the state of Russia and the shape of a future Russia was a mainstay of Russian intellectual and political life throughout the nineteenth century, Russian intellectuals oscillating between the philosophical and material worlds for their answers. A year after the 1861 Emancipation, the writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky imagined in his novel What Is to Be Done? a secular collective paradise on earth, fought for by selfless, ascetic, and dedicated revolutionaries. The famous novelist Leo Tolstoy asked the same question in 1883, but imagined a quite different paradise based on the renewal of the religious and moral responsibility of the individual. Vladimir Lenin's What Is to Be Done? in 1902 envisaged a political organization—the Communist Party—capable of ushering Russia's working classes toward the secular promised land. Leon Trotsky, political outcast since the mid-1920s, saw in Soviet Russia in 1926 a country on the road to economic stability, although ten years later he mused on a Soviet future in which a new workers' revolution would cast off the repressive Soviet bureaucratic machine and its cynical rulers. "Where Is Russia Going?" academics continue to ask about post-Soviet Russia.¹

Even given his uncompromising belief in the inevitability and finality of the class struggle in Russia, Lenin could scarcely have imagined the sheer scale and viciousness of European history in the twentieth century. For its part, Russia's political history in that century was seismic even by European standards, bringing enormous human suffering, much inflicted by the state on its own people, much inflicted by foreign states. Through revolution and civil war, the Bolsheviks intentionally fractured Russian society, turning the traditional order on its head, physically destroying or exiling—and politically marginalizing—the formerly dominant elites. Old modes of peasant life were broken by the internal exile and persecution of millions of "rich peasants" (the political anathematization of the so-called kulak) and the forcing of farmers into collective farms into the 1930s and beyond. Rapid, heavy industrialization telescoped a century and a half of European industrial and urban development into a few decades—with the attendant brutalization of man and environment. Through the gates of the Soviet corrective labor-camp system, the gulag, streamed millions, many to die, many to languish for decades, and some to riot against their captors. Millions were dumped unceremoniously back into a society wholly unprepared to accommodate them, their experiences and their memories. In two world wars, millions of citizens of the tsarist empire and Soviet Russia experienced modern total war firsthand, as soldiers, citizens, refugees, deportees. Experience garnered during these wars—not only of the limits of lives brutalized, but also of the possibilities of lives triumphant—generated future social and political changes scarcely conceivable to either Tsar Nicholas II or Joseph Stalin.

In the twentieth century, the very idea of Russia was fractured, as four waves of emigration washed across its borders: the up to 3 million people who fled revolution or hunger in Soviet Russia between 1918 and 1922; the involuntary emigration of Soviet citizens as national borders were ruptured by World War II between 1941 and 1944, maybe 700,000 of them never returning to the Soviet realm again; the "Cold War" emigration from 1948 to 1989, numbering some half a million people, some deported against their will, some emigrating legally; the present—and continuing—fourth wave of "economic" emigration from post-Soviet Russia.² Disparate communities formed abroad to challenge Soviet Russia with their own claims to be Russia's true heirs.

The Great Story

Throughout this fragmentation of the political and social body, intended and unintended, Soviet Russia's leaders aspired to produce a coherent metanarrative, a Great Story, to explain these upheavals and to justify the unique role being played by their revolutionary new state in world historical development.³ With their eyes cast back at the revolutionary precedents and symbols of the bourgeois French Revolution, Russia's revolutionaries had seen history fail to turn in 1848, and again in 1871. They would make sure that in 1917 it had turned...