Communism in Historical Perspective

Author(s): David Joravsky

Source: The American Historical Review , Jun., 1994, Vol. 99, No. 3 (Jun., 1994), pp.
837-857
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association

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 Review Article
Communism in Historical Perspective

DAVID JORAVSKY

THE TIME HAS COME FOR HISTORIANS OF COMMUNISM to draw a line and sum up,
although, for the historians as well as the Communists, the difficulties may
overwhelm the need. Historiography of the usual sort-"We have learned this but
need to know that, within such and such contests of interpretation"-assumes a
community of scholars debating a recognizable subject. In this case, the subject
defies recognition and the scholars evade community. Most Communist parties,
after decades of splintering and denouncing each other's claims to be Marxist
revolutionaries, have renounced their own claims. It is as if the Reformation were
ending with Protestant churches not only splitting but dissolving, declaring
themselves Catholic after all. On the scholarly side, historians have mimicked the
fission. Russianists and Sinologists, who must deal with the most significant cases
of revolutionary Marxism, have kept apart, each group concentrating on the
experience of Communism within its chosen country, as have the separate clusters
of historians who study Communist movements and regimes scattered through
the other national and regional divisions of the modern world. "World Commu-
nism" as a subject of scholarly inquiry has withered away since the 1950s, along
with the ideologies that raged in hope or fear of a universal revolutionary party.
Indeed, the most sensible studies of "World Communism" contributed to the
withering away of ideological fury, by disintegrating the supposedly universal
party into particular movements and regimes.'

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Kennan Institute and at several universities. So
many friends have offered useful criticism and advice that I can thank them only in this general
fashion.
I SinolQgists focused on the particularities of Chinese Communism even before its victory, which
provoked an ideological storm against them. See John K. Fairbank, The United States and China
(Cambridge, Mass., 1948); Benjamin J. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge,
1951); Conrad Brandt, Benjamin J. Schwartz, and John K. Fairbank, eds., A Documentary History of
Chinese Communism (Cambridge, 1952); compare Paul M. Evans, John Fairbank and the American
Understanding of Modern China (Oxford, 1988); Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American
Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York, 1984); Kathleen Hartford and Steven
Goldstein, "Introduction," Single Sparks: China's Rural Revolutions (Armonk, N.Y., 1989). Thanks to
Charles Hayford for giving me the last two.
The particularities of Russian Communism were the focus of the best reportage and memoirs from
the start, and of such enduring works as Geroid T. Robinson's Rural Russia under the Old Regime: A
History of the Landlord-Peasant World and a Prologue to the Peasant Revolution of 1917 (New York, 1932),
which forecast the turn to the social history of the revolution. The Cold War brought an obsession
with "the totalitarian model" of "World Communism," which can be seen to recede in such sensible
essays as Robert V. Daniels, The Nature of Communism (New York, 1962); Alfred G. Meyer,

837

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 838 DavidJoravsky

As a longtime participant in that process, I hope to be properly understood if

now I challenge the disintegrating vision, the partial scholarship-in both senses
of partial-by which scholars have contributed to the cooling of ideological
passions. It is fine to be cool and down-to-earth, but we still need to generalize,
and therefore we must confront ideology, in our own minds as well as the minds
of others. The need is most evident when Western specialists attempt discourse
with Russian colleagues, who imagine that they are escaping ideology by changing
the worship of Communist saints into the denunciation of Communist demons.
The need is less evident but more demanding in the West, where complacent
generalities are now the conventional wisdom of public opinion. Communism has
collapsed, we are endlessly told, because it was fatally at odds with these truths we
hold to be self-evident: markets generate wealth and multi-party elections
produce self-government in nation states, which are the natural- units of popular
sovereignty. If scholars recoil from such supra-historical generalities, if they insist
that diverse economic and political systems are slowly growing products of
long-term historical processes, distinctive to particular countries and areas during
particular periods of time, they have not escaped the need to generalize and to
confront the ideologies that inhere in historical generalizations.
They must still ask, most notably, why the revolutions of the twentieth century
have been so different from the classic originals in England, America, and France,
which generated both the self-evident truths concerning markets and elections in
nation states and the twentieth-century revolts against those truths.2 We must ask
why movements professing revolutionary Marxism cropped up almost every-
where in our century but gained significant support only in some places, with
strikingly divergent patterns of belief and practice. With such questions in mind,
I am offering a historical taxonomy of Communist movements and regimes,
concentrating on the main type: preachers of revolutionary Marxism who secured
a large popular base, for electoral politics in some cases, for violent revolutions
in others. My effort is to summarize and to provoke, to disclose generalizing

Communism, rev. edn. (New York, 1963); in the bold turn to comparative history by Theodore H. Von
Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? A Reappraisal of the Russian Revolution, 1900-1930 (Philadelphia, 1964);
and in Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: Lord and Peasant in the
Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966). For subsequent work, see Edward Acton, Rethinking the
Russian Revolution (London, 1990); and Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and
History since 1917 (New York, 1985).
For notable efforts to set Communism within the history of socialism, see G. D. H. Cole, History of
Socialist Thought, 5 vols. (London, 1953-67); Jacques Droz, ed., Histoire generale du socialisme, 4 vols.
(Paris, 1972-78); Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (London, 1949); and his trilogy The
Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1940 (New York, 1954); The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929 (New
York, 1959); and The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940 (New York, 1963). The serials, Problems of
Communism, 1952-92, Studies in Comparative Communism, 1968-, and the Hoover Institution's Yearbook
on International Communist Affairs, 1967- , reveal trends in the field at large. Historical studies of
Communism by scholars working within Communist countries may be ignored here; they evince
the repression of any self-criticism except sharakhan'e, Stalin's term-and Khrushchev's, too-for
spasmodic leaps from one extreme to another.
2 See Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and Chin
(Cambridge, 1979), chap. 1, for a review of the literature. The supposed classic by Crane Brinton, The
Anatomy of Revolution (New York, 1939, 1952), assumes that Western Europe provides a model of
history everywhere. In the preface to a 1965 reprint (p. vii), he has learned from Von Laue the
possibility of "'a new category of modern revolutions,' the 'revolution of backward countries."'

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 Communism in Historical Perspective 839

tendencies that are implicit in special works on Communism, broad opinions that
are concealed within narrow studies of particular cases. I will argue that there is
a community of learned opinion, however elusive, that it is at odds with public
opinion on certain crucial issues, and that it is internally inconsistent, if only
because scholarly minds share in the public opinion they claim to rise above. The
usual antinomies of historical thought-the claim to discover a past we are partly
inventing, mixing "was" with "should have been" and "ought to be"-are greatly
aggravated when we think about the tradition of revolutionary democracy, "our"
tradition, which "they" turned to alien uses in twentieth-century Russia and China,
Yugoslavia and Vietnam, to name the most famous shocks to complacent "us."
Historians need to ask themselves how much of that "us"-"them" thinking links
the scholarly community with the conventional wisdom of public opinion. In
preliminary illumination of the problem, I offer Winston Churchill, supreme
master of the blatantly ideological art that middlebrow readers look for in works
of history. (They are sufficiently inquiring to seek reassurance in history and
sufficiently smug to find it.) Churchill invoked "cold Semitic internationalism" to
explain the Bolshevik agents of "Despair and Treachery," who sank the Russian
ship "in sight of port,. .. at the very moment when the task was done." "The task"
was victory over Germany in World War I and the triumph of democracy within
the Russian empire-under a military dictator, perhaps, but one of the proper
devotion, binding lesser men to the national goal that deserved the limitless
sacrifice demanded by the war to end all wars.3 In time, Churchill and his
middlebrow readers learned to repress talk of "Semitic internationalism" when
explaining the Communist organizers of mass revolt against the first total war.
But they went on believing that the revolt was a greater calamity than the war
itself, and some learned specialists reinforce that sentiment.
Leonard Schapiro, to take a highly esteemed example, pictured the Bolsheviks
as organizing a revolt against justice itself, whose universal and eternal standard
he could define: "the need for reconciling all the conflicting interests which will
always exist in practice in every state."4 Schapiro invoked Augustine in support of
that supra-historical rule for historical judgment, without pausing to puzzle over
the obvious difficulties. Could the interests of slave holders and slaves, of church
hierarchs and heretics, be reconciled in the modern historian's mind as they were
in Augustine's? What conciliatory, nonrevolutionary concept of justice might the
historian bring to bear on such revolting institutions as slavery and state churches?
Schapiro did not stop to brood over such issues. He simply decreed the equation
of modern liberalism with eternal justice and lamented the failure of the Russian
liberals in 1917 to "save the country from chaos by calling on the loyal remnants
of the army in time" to establish "a military dictatorship."5 He took it for granted
that the loyal remnants were right to continue the wholesale slaughter of World
War I, that the disloyal masses were wrong to rebel against it. Somehow, he knew

3 See Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 6 vols. (New York, 1923-31), 6: 695-97; and
Churchill, Great Contemporaries (1937; rpt. edn., Chicago, 1973), 128 and et passim.
4 Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First
Phase, 1917-1922 (London, 1955), x-xi.
5 Schapiro, Origin of the Communist Autocracy, 24.

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 840 David Joravsky

that the just war to end all wars was the Wilsonian conflict between nation states-
including the Russian empire-not the Leninist conflict within existing states.
Since the 1950s, most historians of Communist revolutions have moved away
from such mixtures of hasty philosophizing and wishful dreaming about military
dictators who might have saved this or that country for a liberal form of
nationalism. They have moved, as E. H. Carr did, toward a worrisome relativism
in the mixtures of causal analysis and moral judgment that are unavoidable in
writing history. Schapiro's appeal to Augustine for an absolute liberal standard
was provoked by Carr's massive study of the first Communist revolution, which
opened with a chilling dismissal of any absolute standard: "No sensible person will
be tempted to measure the Russia of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin by any yardstick
borrowed from the Britain of MacDonald, Baldwin, and Churchill or the America
of Wilson, Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt."6
Carr might have called in witness Winston Churchill-not Churchill as historian
of World War I and Lenin's revolution but Churchill as Stalin's ally in World War
II, who supported Tito's Partisans while Stalin held back, and squelched a
subordinate's worry about a Communist regime in Yugoslavia with a sneer: "Do
you intend to make Yugoslavia your home after the war?"7 The relativism in that
response lacked the respect that anthropologists bring to the study of cultures
other than their own. When Churchill was not denunciatory, he was disdainful
toward backward "them" in contrast to civilized "us." Carr was not free of
condescension, but he did reach for the anthropologist's vision. His sharp
distinction between standards appropriate to Russia and to Britain and America
is immediately followed by avowal of "the dual task imposed on every serious
historian: to combine an imaginative understanding of the outlook and purpose
of his dramatis personae with an over-riding appreciation of the universal
significance of the action."8
He could have called that a triple rather than a "dual task," perhaps even a
groping for infinity: trying to measure the past both with "our" yardstick and wit
"theirs," while also seeking some "universal significance," which presumably
transcends all particular yardsticks and may therefore be found only in heaven.
Carr was aware of such philosophical problems, as he showed in the essay What Is
History? which has been widely assigned by history professors in the United States
and Britain. Most of them have moved, as Carr did, to the conviction that longing
for a different past is an evasion of serious thought about the real past, the one
that cannot be undone but must be made "usable," although we sometimes say it
is a nightmare from which we are trying to wake up.9 Because I share that messy
conviction, I want to press it to its limits, where ideological preferences are obliged
to come out of concealment within claims of cold-eyed realism.

6 Edward Hallett Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, 3 vols. (London, 1950-53), 1: 5. T
kind of dichotomy has been the rule among Sinologists all along, with occasional brooding over the
philosophic problems it raises. For a recent example, see Stuart Schram, ed., Foundations and Limits
of State Power in China (London, 1987).
7Quoted in Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches (London, 1949), 402.
8 Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, 1: 5.
9 Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (New York, 1961), reprinted many times. The metaphor o
history as nightmare derives both from Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and
from James Joyce, Ulysses.

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 Communism in Historical Perspective 841

In preliminary illumination of such limits, I offer not only a grand master of

middlebrow history but even a policeman of public opinion: J. Edgar Hoover,
whose tract on Communism has served as a textbook in American high schools.
Following Stalin's death, he warned that "the Communist leopard frequently
changes his spots, but the same blood-bad blood-continuously flows through
his veins."'0 This is an uncanny anticipation of the image used by a recent scholar,
struggling to show how Communism in all its "protean" appearances is essentially
one-"Proteus," who "eluded capture by continually changing from one form
into another.""II Most scholars have turned away from such magical metaphors, in
part because they suggest demonology, in part because learned opinion has
grown leery of any search for essences, the unchanging qualities that metaphysics
posits to explain away change and diversification. Yet historians still try to discern
patterns. We must use general terms, such as Communism, as if they had some
persistent meaning, and so we continually skirt such confusions as the search for
mythic Proteus in factual history or for the bad blood that keeps leopards on the
prowl with or without spots.

WHAT CAN ONE FIND IN COMMON between, say, the Italian Communists, who were
already absorbed in multi-party democracy while they revered Stalin, and the
Cambodian Khmer Rouge, who are still guerrillas-or thugs-after ostensibly
renouncing Communism? The most illuminating answer is implicit in this method
of stating the problem, that is, in observing different types of discord between
label and reality. If we expand such observation beyond accusations of deceit, to
include self-deception, some version of the universal discord between the ways
people perceive themselves and the ways they are, we note that most Communist
parties through most of their histories have been merely imaginary vanguards,
claiming a "mass base" that they could not prove to be there. Chronic political
impotence has been the distinguishing feature of such groups, which have called
themselves political parties, though they have in fact been isolated sects of
unavailing believers, thrusting leaflets at indifferent crowds, or calling from
mountains and jungles for armed volunteers who do not appear. That is one type,
the most numerous if one counts by organizations, the least numerous if one
counts by people.'2 In that disproportion lies their challenge. Historians of
Communism must explain another of the ideologies whose failing claims of

10 U.S. Congress, House Committee on Un-American Activities, The Great Pretense: A Sym
Anti-Stalinism and the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (Washington, D.C., 1956), 172.
textbook, see J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to
(New York, 1958).
11 Adam Westoby, The Evolution of Communism (Cambridge, 1989), 4. Compare Geoffrey Stern, The
Rise and Decline of International Communism (Aldershot, 1990), for generalization that is closer to
current scholarly opinion. For an extreme case of essentialist thought, see Jean Ousset, Marxisme et
revolution (Paris, 1992), which traces the revolutionary spirit to original sin and finds it at work in the
Quakers, the Masons, even a pope (John XXIII).
12 See Witold S. Sworakowski, ed., World Communism: A Handbook, 1918-1965 (Stanford, Calif.,
1973); and the Hoover Institution's Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1967- , for continuing
counts on both levels.

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 842 DavidJoravsky

universality crash against the stubborn particularity of human societies, endlessly

fragmented, ceaselessly changing.
Communist parties are commonly typed as "ruling" or "non-ruling," but this
crude dichotomy obscures more than it clarifies. A few Marxist parties gained a
large following without coming to power, as in Germany before World War I and
later in Italy and France. On the other hand, some impotent sects were abruptly
raised to power by foreign armies, as in much of Eastern Europe at mid-century,
or in Cambodia in 1979, and that is a distinct type. It merits study especially for
the divergent ways in which such foreign impositions took native root, with the
Hungarian regime at one extreme of creative adaptation, the Romanian at the
other extreme of degenerative misrule. Analogous interest attaches to another
type, the indigenous regime imposed by a nativejunta that turns Communist after
it seizes power, as in Cuba or Ethiopia. There is no space in this essay to deal with
any of those types: the impotent sect, the foreign imposition, the converted junta.
The basic challenge, to discover patterns of interaction between a supposedly
universal ideology and a diversity of social contexts, is posed most urgently by the
main type, the original source and continuing inspiration from which all others
derived. Both native and massive in its appeal, it is the organization that becomes
a major political force by preaching revolutionary Marxism, the vanguard that
gains widespread support through elections, through upheaval from below, or
through some combination of the two. The type appears first in Germany, then in
Russia, later in China, Yugoslavia, Italy, France, Vietnam, and Angola, creating
and nourishing the dream of revolutionary Marxism for approximately a century.
In these cases, the claim to be a revolutionary vanguard was so realistic to so many
people for so long a time that historically minded observers were frequently
reminded of the Reformation era or of some earlier period of religious upheaval
attended by political violence and social transformation.
No doubt the presence of Germany at the head of the list will provoke objection.
We all know that the first party to gain a large following by preaching revolu-
tionary Marxism emerged in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, but
a conditioned reflex labels that great originator Social Democratic, not Commu-
nist, and thus excludes it from the history of Communism. This verbal shuffle
brushes aside a major historical problem. Lenin's party was also called Social
Democratic until 1918. German and Russian Marxists were comrades until World
War I precipitated the split that attended the German comrades' support of the
war, Lenin's violent denunciation of it, his seizure of power in the course of the
Russian Revolution, and the change of party name to Communist. The change of
names does not explain that split, which brings the main historical problem of
Communism to a sharp focus.
Why was the border between the Russian and the German empires a line that
divided Marxist comrades between the politics of revolutionary civil war and the
politics of parliamentary elections? That division was the original instance in a
persistent pattern. After the first world war, in Italy and in France revolutionary
Marxists succumbed to parliamentary politics even while they called the German
Social Democrats "renegades" and swore vehemently that they were following the
Russian example of Lenin and Stalin. The opposite turn, through the rhetoric of

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 Communism in Historical Perspective 843

revolutionary civil war to the violent practice of it, occurred in "backward"

countries-Russia and China, Yugoslavia and Vietnam-when their state systems
collapsed under the impact of invasion by imperial powers. The problem that
challenges historians is not the Communist derailment of so-called backward
countries from the normal course of history, as conventional wisdom assumes. At
least two different "normal" courses of despotism appear during the age of total
war. Germany, Italy, and France experienced one-party dictatorships of the
fascist type during that time, while Russia, China, Yugoslavia, and Vietnam began
a much longer experience of Communist dictatorships. When dictatorships of the
fascist type were overthrown in Italy and in France, the Communist participants
in the overthrow laid down their rifles and resumed the curious precedent of the
original Marxists of Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany: preaching revolutionary over-
throw, they collected a multitude of followers for parliamentary politics; urging
class war, they brought workers into class conciliation.
Any talk of a normal, progressive course of history requires apologetic
quotation marks. Faith in such a course, which this or that messiah nation reveals
to the rest, justified the outbursts of wholesale slaughter that constitute the age of
total war. The belief that our country and its special allies are the model of
progress, which all other, less fortunate or less virtuous nations must follow, is still
a fixture of popular politics, although academic historians have been trying to get
away from it. We must ask ourselves how far we have moved. That is why I bring
up Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson. They were proud to bridge high
culture and popular politics-in the Enlightened tradition, we must note, which
began with scholarly politicians such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson
and ended with the likes of Churchill and Wilson, learned zealots of a missionary
creed who armed industrial nations with arrogant self-righteousness and accel-
erating fire power, especially angry at Lenin and Trotsky as rival zealots who
would arm "backward" countries with a defiant faith and matching fire power.
Most academic historians nowadays shun the missionary and emulate the
anthropologist-the anti-imperial anthropologist, who approaches alien cultures
unarmed, trying to understand them in their own functioning, in their own right.
I belong to the humble congregation, and I ask the brothers and sisters to confess
the arrogance of our humility. Ideology is concealed within the claim that we
dispassionate scholars have escaped ideology, have overcome the self-serving
identification of our group's beliefs with truth for all. Let us acknowledge that
tension between the missionary and the anthropologist is inescapable, that
understanding of Communism can approach objectivity only if it struggles with
such tension within the scholarly community, indeed, within the individual mind.
Ideology is the secular equivalent of Emerson's Brahma, who boasted, "When me
they fly, I am the wings."'3

13 Thanks to the late Harry Marks for calling my attention to this fine expression of the dialectical
mindset:
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Brahma" (1847).

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 844 David Joravsky

In Churchill's account, Stalin's regime rescued the Russian cause from the
"Semitic internationalism" of Trotsky, but, Jewish or not, "the dull, squalid figures
of the Russian Bolsheviks are not redeemed in interest even by the magnitude of
their crimes. All form and emphasis is lost in a vast process of Asiatic liquefac-
tion."'4 Students of Antonio Gramsci, chief theorist of the Italian Communists,
will recognize the kinship of that "Asiatic liquefaction" with Gramsci's notion of a
"primordial and gelatinous" Russian society beneath an all-powerful state. The
contrast between Western structure and Russian goo was central to Gramsci's
insistence that Italian Communism would respect the Western tradition of limited
government and individual liberties-"a correct relationship between the State
and civil society."'5 Indeed, students of Lenin will recall his urgent impatience for
Russia to leap out of "Asiatic" backwardness, to have done with patterns of history
that differed from the West European.
On the left as on the right, "the West" is not just a place on the map where
democracy and industrial capitalism emerged; it is also an empire of the mind,
imposing belief in an essential form of human society emerging from a progres-
sive pattern of history, including the modern tradition of revolutionary democ-
racy. Russia, on this mental map, laps over into the formlessness of Asiatic society.
China is entirely there; Sun Yat-sen, a Westernizing revolutionary, accepted the
belief of "foreign observers" that "the Chinese are like a sheet of loose sand,"
because they are allegedly loyal only to their families and clans, not to the nation. 16
Progressive change, in this view, could begin only when Europeans and Ameri-
cans breathed upon the formless chaos, creating structure of the Western sort.
The Communist versions of this vision project a great leap ahead of the Western
original. The anticommunist versions perceive such Communist leaps-whether
in Russia or China, Yugoslavia or Vietnam, Cuba or Ethiopia-as monstrous
perversions of the model revolutions in England, America, or France. With
Gorbachev, the Communist perverts began to recognize their protracted mad-
ness, and so at long last they have begun to raise the Russian ship of state, which
their grandfathers sank, and to resume the predestined journey to "the West."
Of course, I am oversimplifying and needling, to provoke the totalistic vision
that shapes conventional beliefs about Communism. It is still present even when
disguised by such sophisticates as Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He opened a
major speech in 1950 with a declaration that "we," the leaders of the Western
democracies, do not claim knowledge of history's goal, much less the course that
must be followed to reach it. Communists make such a claim, to justify their
wicked tyranny, which we must oppose, as good humble people have always

14 Churchill, Great Contemporaries, 203-04.

'5 Quoted in John M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford,
Calif., 1967), 206. Compare Paul Miliukov, Russia and Its Crisis (Chicago, 1905), passim; and Aleksandr
Herzen, From the Other Shore (Oxford, 1979), 13, for liberal and radical expressions of this view, which
has been traced back as far as the sixteenth century. See Samuel H. Baron, "Introduction," The
Travels of Olearius (Stanford, 1967); and Matthew S. Anderson, Britain's Discovery of Russia, 1553-1815
(New York, 1958).
16 Sun Yat-sen, The Three Principles of the People: San Min Chu I (Taiwan, 1963), 2. Compare
Chu-yuan Cheng, ed., Sun Yat-sen's Doctrine in the Modern World (Boulder, Colo., 1989). Note, too, th
Iranian reformer quoted in the epigraph to Chapter 4 of Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between Two
Revolutions (Princeton, N.J., 1982), 169. Thanks to Carl Petry for directing me to Abrahamian.

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 Communism in Historical Perspective 845

opposed wicked despots who claim to know God's will. With that pride in our
humility, Acheson demanded that the Communists accept, as we do, the goal
required by God-knows-who-or-what: self-determined nation states developing
industrial prosperity under constitutional representative governments. And he
made plain the readiness of his state to wage war, even total war, on behalf of that
goal.'7 Such self-deceptive clinging to a totalistic vision, while condemning the
totalitarian mind, can be found in academic historians, too. Are we not obsessed
with a historical norm-or the myth of such a norm set by "the West" -whether
in Churchill's plainly imperial version or Acheson's smug humility, or in the
rebellious versions of Gramsci or Sun Yat-sen or Lenin?
Two answers leap to mind, each contradicting the other. This obsession cannot
be shaken off, for it is universally accepted as obvious truth; it animates and
organizes even the minds that would dispute it. And, pointing in the opposite
direction: this obsession is conventional wisdom in low or middlebrow culture;
most scholarly historians have abandoned or subverted it. I confess a divided
mind and hope to show that some such division is unavoidable. It is built into the
contention between historical processes, which persistently mock any ordering
myths, and our minds, which cannot help organizing experience in mythic
patterns, since we are conscious and purposeful creatures, who need to know
where we are headed and for what purpose. A particular expression of this
division is the surly stand-off between low culture and high, between beliefs that
mock reason while swaying multitudes and the subversive patterns that reasoning
minds work out within powerless intellectual ghettos.

CONSIDER THE SUBVERSIVE PAT-TERNS that emerge in scholarly studies of the

original revolutionary Marxist movement. The German context shaped a party
that preached working-class revolution while adapting to the gradualist culture of
trade unions and parliamentary politics. That negative integration, as one scholar
called it,18 a self-deceiving drift through clouds of revolutionary refusal into the
politics of status quo, brings smiles of satisfaction only to superficial minds. The
democracy of election campaigns in an age of imperial nationalism carried the
German Marxists and their followers into the wholesale slaughter of our century's
first total war, which no historian any longer even tries to justify. Commitment to
parliamentary politics and aversion to civil war also prevented the German
Marxists from thoroughly destroying the militarist system during the Revolution
of 1918-1919, which created a weak democracy, vulnerable to reactionary
ferocity. Gloomy resignation, as if to a natural catastrophe that overwhelms good

17 See David S. McLellan, Dean Acheson: The State Department Years (New York, 1976), 229-30, for
"an abbreviated resume," which softens the original to show that it "carefully refrained from
espousing the goal of a moral crusade." To me, a student in Acheson's audience, the speech sounded
precisely like such an espousal, the American style of projecting our humble self-image as a model for
the world.
18 Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and
National Integration (Totowa, N.J., 1963).

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 846 David Joravsky

people, is the dominant tone in histories of German Social Democracy, subverting

the myth that gradualistic politics is the way to peace.'9
That is the glory and the shame of the German Social Democrats, history's first
party of revolutionary Marxists. They brought the working class of their country
into an emergent parliamentary process and bent their country's internal policies
toward justice in class relations. But that very process of sensible politics within
Germany disabled those Marxists from effectively opposing the madness of
external politics-until their country and all of Europe went through a blood bath
of such magnitude as to choke off consoling talk of compensating progress in this
model of revolutionary Marxists tamed by the electoral politics of an industrially
developed nation state.
My precis of the German case pushes the scholarly consensus toward explicit
subversion of the conventional belief that Communism is a mad -refusal of the
peace and prosperity that come with parliamentary politics. In Germany, from
1848 to 1945, adherence to such politics imprisoned democratic parties, Marxists
among them, in nationalism and imperialism and therefore in total war. I would
generalize further. The German case was an extreme version of a general pattern
during the age of total war. Parties that engaged in the electoral politics of "great
powers" were agencies of mobilization for wholesale slaughter. I am disputing the
conventional belief that democracy generates prosperity and peace. It is seriously
at odds with historical experience.
Some scholars will bridle at this generalization, especially at the concept of an
age of total war that turned democrats into agents of mass killing.20 Let me
approach a response by distilling more poison from the German case. National
Socialism was an extreme revulsion against Marxist socialism and any other
democratic movement, but Nazism had striking elements of kinship with its
declared adversaries. Conventional wisdom likes to dwell on the one-party state
and the mass terror, which reveal affinity to Communist regimes, and to ignore
the wider kinship with revolutionary democracy in general. When Hitler won
power, Joseph Goebbels went on the radio to boast, "The year 1789 is hereby
eradicated from history."2' But the genealogy denied is still there to observe. The
mobilization of masses for apocalyptic violence emerged with revolutionary
democracy in France and so did chauvinistic pride in the nation chosen to
inaugurate the apocalypse. This is the ideology that most readily inspires citizen
soldiers, forming battalions to fertilize the native fields with the "impure blood" of
vicious aliens.

19 For an elegant summation, with a good bibliography, see V. R. Berghahn, Modern Germany:
Society, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, 2d edn. (Cambridge, 1987), 38-81. Compare the
poignant last chapter of Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905-191 7: The Development of the
Great Schism (Cambridge, 1955).
20 Brian Bond, War and Society in Europe, 1870-1970 (New York, 1983), 168, declares "total war ...
just as much a myth as total victory or total peace," but he notes that "the fragile barriers separating
war from peace and soldiers from civilians,.. . already eroded in the First World War, virtually
disappeared between 1939 and 1945." See also page 224, for "total war" as an ideal type projected
by Carl von Clausewitz, which came close to reality in World War II. Note the estimates of 9.8 million
killed in World War I, 50 million in World War II, in Berghahn, Modern Germany, 44, 176.
2I Quoted in Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of
National Socialism, Jean Steinberg, trans. (New York, 1970), 10. Thanks to Peter Hayes for calling this
to my attention.

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 Communism in Historical Perspective 847

I am echoing an ominous verse of the Marseillaise and calling attention to every

day's news of democracy expressing itself in a frenzy to drain impure blood from
the body politic, whether internally in civil war, externally in international war, or
in wild mixtures of the two. To be sure, the tradition of revolutionary democracy
rests on the dream of civil peace and fraternal internationalism-after the
enemies of the dream have been destroyed in a "last and decisive battle" (thus the
Internationale) or a "war to end all wars" (thus Woodrow Wilson). This ideal of
peace and brotherhood was a major instrument of the Russian Communists in
gaining power and holding it for seventy years-in violent and dictatorial fashion.
The bitter irony is not unique to Communist regimes. In the two centuries since
the American and French revolutions initiated the irresistible surge of democratic
ideologies throughout the world, intermittent civil wars and persistent violence
between nations have provoked us believers to blame not our sacred beliefs but
villainous fiends, such as the Communists, or mistakes and accidents and
unfortunate necessity.
Scholars need not be ashamed of the ideological judgments embodied in
historical generalizations, if the judgments are not assertions of naked wishes and
fears. They can be chastened by the scholarly ideology of facts, the faith that our
beliefs must endure confrontation with factual reality or else we will change them.
This is why I am disputing the conventional belief. We like to believe-let me spell
out the common meaning of democracy-prosperity-peace-that nation states are
the natural units of popular sovereignty, that constitutional representative gov-
ernment within them is linked both with increasing wealth that is equitably shared
and with the avoidance of war at home and abroad, in a spiral of mutually
reinforcing virtues lifting humanity toward beatitude. We sustain that belief by
pointing to cases that seem to bear it out, brushing aside subversive exceptions
even though they are very common. We ignore the failure of the West for a
century and a half following the French Revolution to exhibit the supposedly
interdependent development of economic growth, democratic government, and
peace.
A grim inversion of the ideology would be closer to historical reality. Economic
growth and the advance of democratic government brought on the age of total
war: total mobilization of minds, bodies, and resources for mass slaughter that
recognized no limits until the enemy was totally destroyed or reduced to
unconditional surrender. The interlocking mechanisms of the process had
national variations, but a generic diagram can be sketched. Military training of all
healthy young males and a reserve system to keep them productively employed
while instantly available for the call to arms (a Prussian improvement on an
invention of the French Revolution) were linked with economic and cultural
changes that made such mobilization increasingly efficient. An arms industry was
paid for by a state that commanded the support of subjects trained to fancy
themselves participants in the power that rules over them. That modern miracle
required not only a network of rapid communication and transportation but also
universal education and a mass press to make all minds participant in mass politics
and beliefs. Elections nourished the belligerent faith in popular sovereignty, while
a civic religion elevated the spirit above the pettiness of electoral politics through

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 848 David Joravsky

ceremonies of reverence for the dead of past wars, with ubiquitous monuments
for local celebrations and an awesome sacred space at the nation's capital, where
pilgrims come to initiate their children and rededicate themselves. Add to those
nineteenth-century inventions the accelerating progress of military technology
and finally an alliance system that bundles together all particular international
hostilities in a single conflict between two blocs.22
With that final twist, all the elements for the age of total war were in place, as
perceptive observers realized even before 1914. There is no moral equivalent of
war, a worried William James pointed out after the shocking news that American
troops were liberating the Philippines by killing Filipinos; without war, there is no
inspiring enterprise that turns a sheet of loose sand into a community of lofty
endeavor.23

DOES THIS GENERIC DIAGRAM OF THE WESTERN MODEL erase the distinction between
democratic and totalitarian regimes? No. It calls attention to underlying similar-
ities that conventional wisdom ignores or explains away, blaming totalitarianism
for the age of total war, even though the sequence of cause and effect points the
other way. A century of democratic and industrial advance brought on the first
cataclysm of total war, which generated totalitarian parties and regimes. In the
second, wilder cataclysm, one great totalitarian regime was an indispensable ally
of the democracies. Indeed, the Soviet Communists insisted all along that their
one-party state was also a democracy, qualitatively different from Nazism or
Fascism, and conventional wisdom wobbled on that claim until the Cold War set
in.24 Then, in the late 1940s and the 1950s, students of Communism rallied to the
belief that the two different types of one-party state were equally totalitarian,
utterly different from democracy. But the Cold War alliance of scholarship and
conventional wisdom was brief.
Since the 1960s, historians of Communist movements and regimes have moved
away from "the totalitarian model," as they like to say, for two good reasons. It is
too obviously a self-serving contrast between virtuous "us" and sinful "them," and,
as a moral claim rather than a scholarly category, it obscures instead of clarifies the
nitty-gritty search for sequences of historical cause and effect. As dissident
Communists began using "totalitarian" to accuse their own system, calling for
radical reforms to achieve a truly democratic form of socialism-another process

22 For an incisive sketch, see William L. Langer, European Alliances and Alignments, 1871-1890, 2d
edn. (New York, 1950), 3-6; and Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 2 vols. (New York, 1968), vol.
1, chap. 3. Compare Gerhard Ritter, The Sword and the Sceptre, 4 vols. (London, 1972), vol. 2, chaps.
1-5. Thanks to Michael Geyer for calling my attention to the excellent essays in John R. Gillis, ed.,
The Militarization of the Western World (New Brunswick, N.J., 1989). For further leads to the large
scholarly literature, see Bond, War and Society in Europe.
23 See Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven, Conn., 1986), 436-45.
24 The obvious evidence of wobbling is in the great swings of public opinion, as expressed by
reporters. Their enduring works took for granted the democratic elements within the first
Communist revolution. See, most notably, Louis Fischer, The Soviets in World Affairs: A History of the
Relations between the Soviet Union and the Rest of the World, 2 vols. (New York, 1930); and W. H.
Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921, 2 vols. (New York, 1935). For analogous reporters
on Chinese Communism, see Edgar Snow, Agnes Smedley, and Harold Isaacs, vividly portrayed in
John K. Fairbank, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir (New York, 1982).

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 Communism in Historical Perspective 849

beginning in the 1960s-Western scholars felt strcngthened in their determina-

tion to avoid the epithet "totalitarian."25 Over there as here, it has been a missile
in ideological combat rather than a concept in objective thought. Even more so
when the highest officials of the chief Communist system adopted the dissident
accusation and started the radical reforms, only to suffer a collapse of ideological
self-confidence and conversion to a new dream of a utopian leap out of history,
this time through worship of "the market."
This historical sketch of the concept needs more substance, if "totalitarian" is to
be used for precise analysis rather than crude accusation. The term emerged in
Italy of the 1920s as part of a three-way conflict, not a simple polar opposition
between democrats and fascists on the issue of terror and the one-party state but
an attendant division among democrats. The Left was embarrassed by the liberals'
accusation: admiration of the Russian Revolution puts one in the totalitarian
camp along with the fascists.26 I have already alluded to Gramsci's effort to shake
off the accusation by separating the Italian way to socialism from the Russian way.
I find a similar embarrassment or bad conscience on the Russian Left, not only
among "fellow travelers," people who supported the Soviet experiment without
joining the party. Bad conscience was a major source of conflict within the
Communist mentality; it expressed itself in furious denial of obvious realities and
also in perennial bursts of dissidence and reform, leading to the ultimate collapse
of ideological self-confidence. If space permitted, I would offer in evidence not
only such obvious cases of inner conflict as Khrushchev and Gorbachev, Zhou
Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, but also inward division in Lenin's evolving thought,
even within the dark little minds of Stalin and Mao, energized and crippled by a
blinding vision.27 Communists believed themselves to be democratic agents of
popular sovereignty, and they could not avoid the contradiction entailed by that
faith: the sovereignty of the people's agents, the power of the vanguard party,
must be limited, if only in the interest of efficiency; the pretense of constitutional
rule must become real.
Oblivious of such complexities, popular usage has established totalitarian as the
polar opposite of democratic, as a pejorative term that simultaneously designates
and disapproves of one-party states and mass terror. Scholars try to avoid such

25 See H. J. Spiro, "Totalitarianism," International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 16 (1

106-13. For samplings of scholarly efforts to preserve the concept, see Konrad Low, ed., Totalitaris-
mus (Berlin, 1988); and Ernest A. Menze, ed., Totalitarianism Reconsidered (Port Washington, N.Y.,
1981). Compare Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 2d edn
(London, 1989), 12 and following, for explanation of the special commitment of German scholars,
along with a brilliant critique.
26 See especially Meir Michaelis, "Zum italienischen Totalitarismusbegriff," Quellen und Forschungen
aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 62 (1982). I wish to thank Ian Kershaw for sending me a
copy. Thanks also to Abbott Gleason for valuable insights and bibliographic suggestions.
27 See "Comrade Stalin and His Party," in David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical HIistory (N
York, 1989), 311-34. Stuart Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York, 1989), does not use such
terms as "little" or "dark," partly because his main concern is the relationship between Mao's vision
and the basic problems of China's development. Lucien Bianco, The Origins of the Chinese Revolution,
1915-1949, Muriel Bell, trans. (Stanford, Calif., 1972), praises Mao for ignoring theory, but see his
harsher view in a later edition: Les origines de la revolution chinoise, 1915-1949 (Paris, 1987), esp.
333-40. For a Sinologist whose horror of Mao resembles the common view of Stalin among
Russianists, see Simon Leys, La f6ret en feu: Essais sur la culture et la politique chinoises, 2d ed
1988); and Leys, L'humeur, I'horreur (Paris, 1991), esp. 132-33.

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 850 David Joravsky

combinations of naming and blaming, especially in a case like this, where Cold
War talk of totalitarianism mobilized believers for an armed crusade against
revolutionary movements in general. But the ideal of objectivity is poorly served
by the self-righteous pretense of using no words that combine description and
judgment. Tyranny, oppression, exploitation, which revolutionary democracy
tries to overthrow-all these concepts are of the thorny type, which may be called
ideological. Indeed, ideology is itself that kind of term: unavoidably pejorative, in
its accusation of reason distorted by fanaticism or special interests, yet unavoid-
able, even in the analysis of our own thinking. Vicious circularity threatens the
scholarly mind in its struggle with ideology, as we can see in works of the late
1940s and 1950s that tried to locate the totalitarian poison in certain traditions of
Western thought and to purge it. A few products of that red-eyed philosophizing
may facilitate abstract theorizing about ideas.28 They obstruct the search for ideas
at work in historical processes, for they reify or hypostatize some Idea. They
imagine It as an almighty force that shaped incredibly powerful leaders who
shaped incredibly passive societies to fit the Idea.29
Many historians dislike such excursions into the sociology of knowledge, which
threatens infinite regress by claiming to know the biases that warp any claims to
know. For the sake of such scholars, I can return to the magisterial manner of the
conventional historian, who sees all, knows all, and selects what is needed for a
coherent story, without any bias. If totalitarianism is a name for an idea that
creates a social system, it is a figment of the inflamed ideological imaginations of
those who arm themselves for combat.30 If it is a name for the actual process of
mass mobilization for total war, then it was a nineteenth-century development,
intrinsically connected with the rise of democracy and industrial progress. If it is
a name for a particular way of achieving such mobilization-the single-party state
and mass terror, as distinguished from mobilization with competing parties and
the rule of law-then it is a twentieth-century consequence of total war and of
democratic revolutions in backward or underdeveloped countries. Popular usage
has firmly established this last meaning, and scholars should subject it to historical
analysis, as they classify systems of mobilization, their levels of effectiveness and
durability.
Let me offer a simplified classification. Fascism and Nazism explicitly extolled
wars of national conquest and contemptuously rejected such democratic ideals as
free thought, constitutional representation, the equality of nations and races and
sexes, the dream of freedom as the absence of state power. Their frenzy for

28 See Albert Camus, L'homme revolte (Paris, 1951), translated as The Rebel (New York, 1953); J. L.
Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1952); Hannah Arendt, The Burden of Our Time
(London, 1951), which was retitled The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1958).
29 A belated masterpiece of the genre is Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 3 vols.
(Oxford, 1978), an exceptionally rich account of the ideas clustering within and about the Marxist
legacy, which intermittently declares that one cluster created the political and social systems of Russia,
China, and so on.
30 In its greatest inflation, "totalitarian" describes any social system that implicitly denies a liberal
notion of individual freedom, in which every action is supposed to be "either a duty or a sin." So
Marxism is lumped with Calvinism; even pre-literate societies can be put in the lump. See, for
example, Maurice Duval, Un totalitarisme sans etat: Essai d'anthropologie a partir d'un village burkin
(Paris, 1986).

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 Communism in Historical Perspective 851

external wars of conquest was the major cause of their comparatively short life
span; they drove their nation states to self-destruction. The Communist species of
one-party state with mass terror emerged out of civil war, insisting that violent
recasting of society is the way to achieve genuine liberty, equality, and fraternity
while catching up with the world leaders of industrial development. This
Communist species appeared in "backward" or "underdeveloped" countries, and
it lasted far longer than the Nazi and fascist types, not least because it espoused
democratic values and tended to avoid rather than seek international war and
because its furious struggle for economic development achieved notable victories
before suffering stagnation and collapse.
Civil war became a chronic disease of Communist states, flaring up or dying
down according to many circumstances, among them the clash of zealotry and
rationality within the ruling party, which could not conceal the long-term discord
between its ideological justifications and the actualities of its rule. Ultimately, the
self-confidence of the Communists collapsed, with consequences that are now
unfolding. To understand such an astonishing combination of contradictory
features, scholars are obliged to focus on the transformation of democratic
ideologies by the social contexts that we call "underdeveloped" or simply "back-
ward." The concept of totalitarianism is of little help in such inquiry, until one
digs into the self-contradictions, the bad conscience, and the ultimate self-defeat
of democratic revolutionaries who build one-party states while denying that they
are totalitarian.

THAT IS WHY I BEGAN WITH "THE WEST" as the mythic concept that shaped the
thought of "Third World" revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen and V. I. Lenin.
They yearned to overtake and surpass the West in a journey through efficiently
organized violence to democratic peace and prosperity. I picked two countries in
which twentieth-century revolutions turned Communist but suggest that all the
revolutions in our century have been fundamentally different from the classic
originals-in their class base, in their organizing ideologies and parties, in their
economic and political consequences. Whether in Russia or China or Iran or
Mexico, revolutions broke out almost simultaneously at the start of the century
now ending, and each has flagrantly diverged from the supposed Western norm.
So, too, with the many revolutions that erupted later in the century: none has
engendered prosperous capitalist democracy, let alone international peace.
Conventional wisdom responds to those unsettling realities with some reflex of
reassurance, usually the leap to good guy-bad guy melodrama, such as Churchill's
picture of Treachery playing on Despair to put Communists in power. Driven by
fanaticism and lust for power, bands of evil men take advantage of temporary
difficulties in the development of Third World countries and subvert the
emergence of the First World model. Such tales are still favored by the Western
public and now by the Russian public, too. Middlebrow readers are not aware that
this taste is being satisfied by a dwindling cohort of elderly men, increasingly at

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 852 DavidJoravsky

odds with their professional colleagues.3' Since the 1960s, Western historians of
modern Russia have moved away from accusation of their subject, returning to
the sympathetic inquiry that Sinologists never abandoned.32 The classroom
crusader, mobilizing domestic virtue by denouncing fiends abroad, has become an
embarrassing anachronism. Both sides of this development, the continuing public
taste for the history of Communism as moralistic melodrama and the scholarly
aversion to serving that taste, are opposite responses to a huge question that
embarrasses everyone: Why are constitutional democracy and capitalist prosper-
ity persistently frustrated out there in the East and South?
The myth of the West as norm is implicit in the question, and most First World
historians of Third World countries have long since turned away from celebration
of that myth. Pandering to the hunger for imperial self-congratulation becomes a
humiliating trade as the age of imperial democracy and total war recedes.
Chastened scholars want to grasp the experience of exotic nations from within,
not to measure it against a mythic image of our Western selves, the model for
humanity. They search within the experience of those others out there for social
developments of sufficient magnitude and duration to explain such vast and
complex processes as the Russian and the Chinese revolutions. Of course I
applaud the turn from melodramatic accusation to serious historical inquiry. I
have contributed bulky monographs of my own to the growing heap. But we
should not be content with formless heaps of monographic insights. We should
not allow historical particularity to become an end in itself, however commend-
able our distaste for invidious contrast between our "developed" selves and the
"underdeveloped" multitudes to the east and south.
Permit me then to concede a major point to middlebrow culture. The blatantly
ideological question-Why have "they" been so unsuccessful in following "our"
example?-deserves a considered response. With needles and barbs to remind
Western philistines of the boastful pretensions and the fearful anxieties concealed
within their self-congratulatory question, scholars should extract the genuine
question that is also concealed in it. Why do democratic ideologies take on
drastically different meanings in "backward" contexts?
Marx's theory is part of the answer. His mixture of utopian vision and grim
realism challenged the intelligentsia of poor despotic countries to seek a "mass
base" for a great leap, not merely out of poverty and despotism but also out of the
hypocritical pretensions to genuine democracy and equitable prosperity that
Marx exposed in advanced countries.33 Most of the parties created to achieve such

31 The most notable recent addition to the genre is Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New
York, 1990), which has provoked strong criticism from an impressive array of leading young
scholars. See especially Peter Kenez, "The Prosecution of Soviet History: A Critique of Richard Pipes'
The Russian Revolution," Russian Review, 50 (1991): 345-51; William Rosenberg, The Nation, 252
(1991): 202-04; Catherine Merridale, Historical Journal, 35 (1992): 959-68; Ronald Grigor Suny,
review, AHR, 96 (December 1991): 1581-83; Diane Koenker, Journal of Modern History, 65 (1993):
432-35; John Bushnell, The Historian, forthcoming.
32 Hartford and Goldstein, Single Sparks, describe such an abandonment in the 1950s, but very few
of the authors they cite were Sinologists.
33 See Shlomo Avineri, Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization (New York, 1968); and Stuart
Schram and H. Carrere d'Encausse, Marxism and Asia: An Introduction with Readings, new edn.
(London, 1969).

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 Communism in Historical Perspective 853

a utopian goal proved to be politically impotent sects. But a few discovered a

genuinely realistic political sociology for revolutionaries. It is apparent in the 1898
manifesto that proclaimed the emergence of a Marxist party in Russia:

The further east one goes in Europe, the weaker, the more cowardly, and the meaner in
political relations becomes the bourgeoisie and the greater are the cultural and political
tasks that fall to the lot of the proletariat. On its strong shoulders, the Russian working
class must and will carry the work of winning political liberty. This is a necessary step, but
only the first, toward accomplishing the great historical mission of the proletariat-the
creation of a social structure in which there will be no place for the exploitation of man
by man.34

That was the common outlook of future Mensheviks as well as Bolsheviks, and of
Socialist Revolutionaries, too, if "working class" includes peasants as well as urban
workers. Utopian vision enabled them to perceive an emergent reality that liberal
democrats tried to ignore: the "Third World" was generating a new social basis of
democratic revolution, radically different from the "third estate" of times gone by.
On the field of combat with decaying despotism, an absence is noted-"bourgeoi-
sie"-and a presence-"working class." Add another momentous presence-the
radical fringe of the "intelligentsia," whose vanguard role was emphasized by the
Socialist Revolutionaries-and we are well started toward understanding the trans-
formations that "Third World" contexts wrought in revolutionary democracy.
Meticulous scholars have picked apart the notion that "the bourgeoisie" won the
battle for democracy in the West, but the fact remains that men of property were
major leaders and major beneficiaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century
battles to replace absolute monarchy with constitutional representative govern-
ment. And a swift rise of industrial capitalism ensued. The pattern has not been
repeated in Russia or China or indeed in any other democratic revolution of the
twentieth century. In the Russian and Chinese revolutions, men of property were
conspicuously feeble as leaders, and they were sacrificial victims rather than
beneficiaries in the aftermath. As the old state systems collapsed, workers and
peasants revealed great hostility to their social superiors and to the system of
property that sustained them; the radical fringe of the intelligentsia mobilized
that hostility, and a minority of the fringe was sufficiently inflamed with anger and
hope to identify the democracy of the lower classes with the dictatorship of their
single party.
Russia was the first-born of the "backward" or "underdeveloped" countries,
that is, countries in which the sense of social inadequacy and the urge to correct
it are focused on invidious comparison with "the West." The sense of backward-
ness originated in borrowings of advanced technology in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, as an emergent nation state beat its way out of subordina-
tion to neighboring powers. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sense
of backwardness became an obsession that shaped the thinking of statesmen as
well as the emergent intelligentsia. Conservative statesmen could not find a way to
correct the condition without fatally undermining the social and political institu-
tions they wanted to conserve. That has been a common failure of conservative

34 Pervyi s"ezd RSDRP, mart 1898 goda (Moscow, 1958), 80.

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 854 David Joravsky

statesmen in backward countries over the past two centuries. Of course, there
have been exceptions-aside from Japan, how many can we list? Their exception-
ality underscores the common rule.35
The sense of backwardness and the painful realities that feed it have been the
source of the intelligentsia, a class that is different from the intellectuals or
professionals of advanced countries. Bearers of a culture that derives from
advanced foreigners, members of the intelligentsia are keenly aware of isolation
within their native lands and of a consequent obligation to achieve wholesale
change. They resist the specialization that replaced the philosophes and the
ideologues of the Enlightenment with pure professionals and pure intellectuals,
whose purity is defined by abstention from politics while selling the use of
blinkered minds. The intelligentsia of backward countries succumb to such
specialization, but they do so with great resistance, clinging to the vision of
themselves as a fellowship of critically thinking individuals devoted to something
more than careers, to the transformation of their backward countries. Given the
political timidity of the bourgeoisie, political leaders in such countries often come
from the intelligentsia, including the so-called military intelligentsia, that is,
officers with an analogous sense of a political mission. All this within "the tendency
to an equilibrium of poverty" and "accommodation to the hopelessness of the
prospect," as John Kenneth Galbraith summed up his observations on India.36 He
neglected to add a chronic incitement to seizure of power at the top, occasional
precipitation of mass revolutions from below, and heady moments when the two
merge to produce a Communist revolution.
I am summarizing the common opinion of scholars who have been studying the
Russian and Chinese revolutions.37 They do not support the conventional notion
that the fall of the Russian tsar and the Chinese emperor brought those countries
within reach of liberal democracy, only to have it snatched away by Communist
fanatics. Scholars picture antique despotisms struggling ineffectually against
mounting tensions from within and imperial pressures from without, culminating
in armed invasion, political collapse, and civil war. The lower classes are shown
entering the political arena with hatreds and hopes that realistic leaders felt
obliged to repress, for the hatreds were destructive of any feasible order and the
hopes were utopian. Thus would-be democrats were forced to choose between
different notions of realism linked with different forms of tyranny. In the civil
wars of Russia and China, the Communists won, not only by force of party
discipline and terror but also by mobilizing lower-class hatreds and hopes. The
utopian ideology of the Communists made them the supreme realists of such civil
wars precipitated by international war, which occurred also in Yugoslavia and in

35 See Moore, Social Origins of Democracy; and Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions.
36 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Nature of Mass Poverty (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 46 and following.
37 See again the historiographical works of Edward Acton, Paul Cohen, Kathleen Hartford and
Steven Goldstein, as cited in note 1. For the scholarly consensus that reaches beyond specialists, see
the favorite assignments for courses in modern history: Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution; Von
Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin?; and Von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? Why Gorbachev? 3d edn. (New
York, 1992). There are no analogues in the Russian field to such large sympathetic works as Jona-
than D. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980 (New York,
198 1); and John K. Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985 (New York, 1986).

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 Communism in Historical Perspective 855

Vietnam. (Of course, there were crucial differences among these four cases, but
there was also this underlying pattern of similarity.)
The outcome was terrible not only for believers in liberal democracy but also for
the Communist victors. They won with promises they could not keep: direct
democracy of the lower classes; all land to the tiller and the fruits thereof; the
same for factories and industrial workers; escape from international wars to
enduring peace, based on the solidarity of working people across national
boundaries. It is too easy to turn the democratic paradox into angry accusation of
the Communists, indignant insistence that they should not have mobilized
lower-class hatreds and hopes. Indignation of that sort is too easy because it avoids
the other, the liberal side of the bitter paradox. In Russia and in China, believers
in liberal democracy were obliged to support repression of the lower-class
majority, while the mobilizers of the lower-class majority were obliged to support
a dictatorship over it. Both sides tended to deny the terrible choice even as they
drifted into it.

THIS IS NOT AN ARGUMENT FOR the inevitability of the Communist victories in

Russia and China, whether the ruinous victory in the initial revolution from below
or the still more ruinous victory in the "revolution from above" that came soon
after, when the Communist chiefs used a combination of frenzied enthusiasm and
mass terror to assault the peasantry and the intelligentsia while building an
industrial base of advanced military power. When scholars brood over the
revolution from below and the one that followed from above, they tend as usual
toward a vision of vast processes involving millions of people, with contingencies
accumulating into high orders of probability, as masses of human beings inter-
acting with each other sweep toward catastrophes and achievements that no one
intended or could have foreseen.38 Effects of great scope and long duration must
be explained by causes of appropriate magnitude.
It is shortsighted to call that sort of vision "revisionist social history," as if it was
born yesterday, out of revulsion against a transient style of Cold War scholarship.
The revulsion of the 1960s returned historians to a sense of history that emerged
irresistibly in the nineteenth century. It may be called Marxist-or Darwinian or
Tolstoyan. In their different ways, those thinkers undermined faith in the
capacity of reason to discover lines of historical progress that reason can master to
achieve further improvement. Each of those great minds had a subversive
tendency to replace the vision of history as manageable progress with a vision of
history as blind process. Each recoiled into ideological preaching, which could not
restrain the drift of high culture toward the sense of history as tragic irony,
irremediable by Marx's socialist revolution, or by the Victorian ethic that Darwin
read into natural selection, or by Tolstoy's religion of love.
Indeed, the notion of tragedy was itself transformed. The classic tragedy of
noble heroes entangled in a grand conflict of right with right gave way to the

38 See, most notably, Spence, Gate of Heavenly Peace; and Fairbank, Great Chinese Revolution
absence of similar masterpieces among histories of the Russian Revolution reveals the greater
ideological difficulty Western historians have when dealing with Communism in a European country.

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 856 David Joravsky

absurd tragedy epitomized in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which presents
the dialectic of master and slave as a circus act. (At the master's command, the
slave leaps about babbling wildly while three men beat him back into his
customary silent submission.) I return to the basic division that I am confessing
within my own mind. Beckett's vision is part of an irresistible tradition in Western
high culture, reaching back to Voltaire's Candide. Showing how we are trapped
within self-deceptive hopes of progress, such works trap us further, laughing at
ourselves. Twentieth-century historians know that we cannot figure out where we
are going by discovering where we have come from, yet we cannot abandon the
effort. We are obliged to create a usable past; so we must expose the self-deceptive
ideologies that are intrinsic to such creation.
That ambiguous "we" is the crux of my dispute with the conventional wisdom
on Communism, whether in popular culture or in academic scholarship. Russians
and Chinese need to create a usable past out of their own revolutionary history;
neither Western scholars nor Western politicians can do that for them. Unctuous
talk of "us" helping "them" continues the arrogant assumption that "we" in the
West know better than "they" out there in the East and South. Better to challenge
that conventional assumption, in the first place by confronting the incongruity
between the Western model of revolutionary democracy and the twentieth-
century experience of democratic revolutions in the East and South. On this level,
studying the world-wide discordance between ideological expectation and histor-
ical experience, Western scholars may overcome the smugness that is endemic in
conventional views of the "Third World." When speaking of the Russian and
Chinese revolutions, Western scholars can earn the right to say "'we" only by
confronting the persistent failures of Western ideologies to fit the realities of those
other countries. If scholars join in the popular celebration of "the West" as the
model of progress, their voices should be a counterpoint of mockery and warning,
of chastening and challenge. The ideological bankruptcy of Communism should
be part of a world-wide liquidation of false promises and phony claims in the
tormenting quest for genuine liberty, equality, and fraternity.
In 1648, it would have seemed absurd to project separation of church and state
and the right of free thought as major results of the Reformation. Just now, it
seems absurd to hope that the Communist revolutions of the past century may
result in a new kind of democracy, based on federations of nationalities rather
than unitary nation states, and a new kind of prosperity, sustained by equitable
entitlements rather than invidious differences of ownership and income. Indeed,
speculation of this sort is likely to provoke the observation that those intertwined
socialist dreams-international fraternity and equitable entitlements-seem less
utopian in the advanced countries than in the countries now emerging from
Communist rule, which are still intensely aware of "backwardness," revolted by
any talk of socialism as a mask for tyranny, period. Accusation of the past is the
dominant mood, blocking discussion of how to make it usable. Outside observers
may hope for a new birth of creativity, recalling the ideological exhaustion of
Western Europe in the mid-seventeenth century and the subsequent recuperation
that sought in "reason" the antidote to "enthusiasm." But analogies in the minds
of outside observers hardly matter.

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 Communism in Historical Perspective 857

Imagine a monument to the victims of Communist tyranny in Red Square,

confronting the tomb of Lenin, founder of Communism. (A group called
"Memorial" has been pressing for such a monument and may yet succeed.)
Imagine, later on, a similar confrontation in Tiananmen Square, a remembrance
of Mao's victims facing the tomb of the Great Helmsman. Still later, when the
mummies have turned to decent ashes, adoration and denunciation may give way
to debate over the contending elements within the revolutionary legacy. We
outsiders can hardly predict what those conflicting symbols will convey to each
other in the minds of Russians and Chinese, and to the other nationalities
entangled with them, as they reflect on their tumultuous experience. We can only
hope that their arguments will involve some constructive dialectic of tragic irony
and of achievement-such as the United States might experience if it decided to
carve "Slave Holder" on the Jefferson Memorial or to confront the monument to
the American dead of the Vietnam War with a reminder that Vietnamese were
also killed, in much greater numbers, too great for individual remembrance. Of
course, such extremes of self-criticism are quite unlikely in the United States; it is
still an advanced country.

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