‘Defenders of the Motherland or Defenders of the Autocracy?’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13, no. 1 (2012): 217-231. (original) (raw)

Waiting for the people's revolution [Martov and Chernov in revolutionary Russia, 1917-1923*]

Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, 1985

/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. EHESS is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique. http://www.jstor.org the Bolsheviks was the nature of the oppo sition that they faced, the pacific, verbal, and vulnerable opposition recommended by the Menshevik and Socialist Rev olutionary leaders. This paper focuses on the decisions made by Martov and Chernov after 1917, and the reasons for their inaction. What paralyzed them in these years was not the confrontation with Bolshevik authority, but the stark contrast between their theories of revolution and the realities of mass behavior. This rude challenge to the conceptions of the socialist leaders gave them no sure footing for action and caused them to draw back from both the Bolshevik gov ernment and militant opposition to the emerging state. The efforts of Martov and Chernov to describe and under stand their situation after the October revolution are chronicled in their political writings from the period. Their articles and letters express the conflict between contemporary events and their pre-revolutionary assumptions, the effect of these dilemmas upon their prescriptions to their parties, and the ultimate impact of the revolution upon their ideas. I will concentrate on two periods-October 1917 through the first half of 1918 and 1921, times of mass discontent and insur gencies before and after the Civil War, formally defined. Martov and Chernov provide the focus of this analysis not as the most brilliant theorists of their respective parties, Cahiers du Monde russe et sovi?tique, XXVI (3-4), juil.-d?c. 1985, pp. 375-394. 376 JANE BURBANK but in their capacities as party leaders after 1917-Both men gained the support of majorities at party congresses held a few weeks after the October coup. Since neither party was able to organize another full-scale congress after December 1917, Martov and Chernov retained their positions of authority despite subsequent shifts in allegiance and opinion. Radi cally unlike in character, Martov frail, c?libataire, a passionate Marxist theorist and ironic polemicist and Cher nov bluff, hearty, a two-family man and a revolutionary romantic of eclectic, precious prose both belonged to Lenin's generation. (4) With Lenin, they represent the three strands of Russian socialism shaped by the ideological ascendancy of Marxism among the intelligentsia and the development of the working class movement in the 1890's, the disappointments of the I905 revolution, and the scrappy exile politics that followed. The Menshevik version of Russian socialism was close to the left European Marxism of its time anti-revisionist, devoted to "scientific socialism" and to class struggle as the means of progress. (5) There was, however, one outstanding and fundamental difference between the Russian and the European parties, a variation in theory and expectation that derived from the Mensheviks' perspective on Russia's economic and social conditions. According to the Mensheviks, Russia was heading for a bourgeois, not a socialist revolution, for the full development of bourgeois society and production had yet to occur. And, because of the peculiarities of Russia's historical development, this bourgeois revolution would be made not by the bourgeoisie but by the working class. This idea was expressed most dramatically in the founding program

From The Decembrists To The Narodniks; The Radical Opposition In The Russian Empire and Its Legacy

Panayotis Goutziomitros, 2018

The paper is an overview of how the opposition was first shaped in the Russian Empire in the first half of the 19th century and focus in the emergence of socialism in the late 40s and its impact in the new current of radical opposition; the Narodniks. The paper was conducted through examining and comparing the different intellectual movements in this time period.

The Russian Revolution: Broadening Understandings of 1917

History Compass, 2008

The rich historiography of the revolution has tended to focus around urban and political elites, labour history and events in Petrograd and to a lesser extent Moscow. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened previously inaccessible archives and shifted the ideological battlegrounds ranged over by scholars of the Russian revolution. New archivally based research is shifting its focus away from the capitals and political elites, and draws together social and political approaches to the revolution. By investigating revolutionary events outside the capitals, and lived experiences of revolution for Russia's ordinary people, most of whom were rural, not urban dwellers, current research draws a complex and multifaceted picture of revolutionary events. Explanations for the failure of democratic politics in Russia can now be found not only in the ineptitudes of Nicholas II, the failings of Kerensky, or the machinations of Lenin and his cohort. Instead, ordinary people, outside the capitals and in the countryside, defined and determined revolutionary events.

The Russian Revolution : an ideology in power neil harding

2003

The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 marked the beginning of the global conflict between communism and capitalism that was to dominate the politics of the twentieth century and redraw the map of modern ideologies. On the mainstream left a bitter schism developed between gradualist ‘Western’ social democracy and revolutionary ‘Eastern’ communism. On the peripheries a host of splinter groupings emerged whose identities revolved around their conflicting interpretations of the Soviet experience. Socialism was, hereafter, organisationally and ideologically fractured: at war with itself. The revolution and the Soviet experience also became, of course, the Other for many ideologies of the right and a cautionary tale for their seminal thinkers. The lapse into authoritarian or totalitarian practices was variously attributed to the pretensions of socialist states to eliminate the free market economy (Hayek 1976), their contempt for the civilising restraints of the rule of law (Friedrich 1...