Part of the subtler propaganda for the Red, as it was for the Brown and the Black, totalitarianism, is the “argument from success.” It is made under all sorts of guises, not the least formidable of which is the scholarly. How insidious this university version of “the wave of the future” can be is shown by the largely uncritical reception, at least in this country, of Professor Edward Hallett Carr’s The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923 (Vol. I, The Political Revolution, 430 pp., $5.00; Vol. II, The Economic Order, 400 pp., $6.00; Vol. III, Russia and the World, 614 pp., $6.00; Macmillan). Here an eminent expert in the same field closely analyzes this work’s main assumptions and shows how they affect its presentation of fact.
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Edward Hallett Carr’s three-volume work The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923 impresses us by its massiveness, by the author’s audacity in tackling so overpowering a subject, and by his unerring sense of which Bolshevik utterances and decrees reflect significant turning points in their policies—or in their public accounts of their policies. These three large volumes were preceded by a number of preliminary studies, and, as I write, Professor Carr—who teaches at Oxford—has just launched the first volume of a new series on Bolshevik Russia, The Struggle for Power, 1923-1928.
But when one tries to analyze Carr’s historical method, the organization of his materials, the problems he sets himself to answer, and the problems he ignores, admiration begins to diminish.
The structure is puzzling. Volume I consists of three parts: “Lenin and His Party”; “The Constitutional Structure”; “Dispersal and Reunion.” Part IV, “The Economic Order,” takes up all of Volume II. And Part V, “Russia and the World,” makes up Volume III. But where, the reader asks, is “the Revolution”?
Despite their over-all title, it is to be found literally nowhere in these three volumes. There is doctrine but no clash of ideologies or faiths; famine is without hunger; revolution without bloodshed; titanic social transformations are but documents bereft of clashes, tears, or exultations.
Terror, to Professor Carr, is merely the subject of a doctrinal dispute in Bolshevik circles. For him terror neither measures the magnitude of resistance, nor the degree to which a regime may be incompatible with the normal desires of the people over whom it rules. Never for a moment does he see terror as the war of a government on a people. Nor does he conceive that it may shape the nature of that government, have a lasting effect on those who wield it, or on those subjected to it. Nor does it involve for him any moral issues. As the juggernaut rolls over its victims, not once does professor Carr count them up, consider their human fate, identify himself in imagination with their point of view. Unconsciously, he seems to imagine himself with those in the driver’s seat.
Probably the most important problem for any historian of the Russian Revolution is the nature of totalitarianism and the totalitarian state. This question is examined nowhere in these three volumes. And since the “struggle for power” which is to be treated in the forthcoming books covering the period 1923-1928 is limited by his method to merely the internal struggle between Lenin’s lieutenants after his death, it is not likely to be treated there either.
Professor Carr is aware, as many of his critics have not been, that the Revolution is not in his book, and offers an explanation in his preface. Originally he intended to write of the Soviet Union as an already going concern, “not a history of the events, but of the political, social and economic order that emerged from the Revolution.” In other words, he intended to start from the age of Stalin. He felt, however, that he needed “a long introductory chapter to analyze the structure of Soviet society as it was established before Lenin’s final withdrawal from the scene in the Spring of 1923.” The introductory chapter grew and grew until it became these three volumes.
This may help explain the awkward structure of the work, but not the choice of its title. Nor does it explain the approach and principle of selection—an omission all the more obvious because Professor Carr’s preface sets it as the historian’s task “to combine an imaginative understanding of the outlook and purpose of his dramatis personae with an overriding appreciation of the universal significance of the action.”
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Let us apply the two criteria of Carr’s statement of the historian’s task to his own book. Again we find something unaccountably missing: where is the “overriding appreciation of the universal significance of the action”—the meaning for the Russian people, and mankind, of the seizure and consolidation of Bolshevik power? Nowhere in the three volumes.
To find out what constitutes for Professor Carr the “universal significance” of the Russian Revolution, one has to go to his earlier studies. In one of the first of these, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, Professor Carr called on his contemporaries to adapt themselves to the fact of rising revolutionary power—conceived of by him at that time in terms of Nazi Germany. But his most explicit and certainly most relevant statement of “the universal significance of the action” came after the war, in a series of lectures delivered at Oxford in 1945 and 1946 (while the present work was in gestation) and published in 1947 as The Soviet Impact on the Western World. Carr’s basic presuppositions are revealed in the grand summary with which this book closes:
The age of individualism now drawing to its close stands in history as an oasis between two totalitarianisms—the totalitarianism of the medieval church and the new totalitarianism of the modern world. . . . The .contemporary trend away from individualism and towards totalitarianism is everywhere unmistakable. If individualism be defined as the belief that the individual mind or conscience is the final human repository of truth, and that every individual must therefore in the last resort make his own judgments, totalitarianism is the belief that some organized group or institution, whether church or government or party, has a special access to truth and therefore the special right and duty of inculcating it in members of society by whatever means are likely to prove most effective.
For four centuries, from 1500 to 1900, individualism was the main driving force of civilization. . . . But during the first half of the twentieth century the tide has turned sharply. The contemporary trend away from individualism and towards totalitarianism is everywhere unmistakable. . . . Of modern political philosophies, Marxism is the most consistently totalitarian and has the widest appeal; the country which has officially adopted it . . . has dazzled the world by its immense industrial progress, the spirit of its people and the rapid development of its power.
Two world wars, a series of major revolutions, and an economic collapse whose severity was mitigated and curtailed only by wholesale departures from the old individualist tradition, have sufficed to produce a startlingly rapid change of moral climate, and to convince all but the blind and the incurable that the forces of individualism have somehow lost their potency and their relevance in the contemporary world.
Seen therefore in the broadest historical perspective, the impact of the Soviet Union on the Western world symbolizes the end of that period of history which began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. . . . Like other great historical movements, the Bolshevik revolution was self-assertive and highly dramatic in its setting and consequences. But like other great historical movements, it owed its success not merely to its own power and to the enthusiasms which it generated among its disciples, but to the inner crumbling of the order against which it was directed.
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This is not the place to consider Professor Carr’s appreciation of our age, but it is necessary to note some of the ways in which it has affected his approach as a historian of the Russian Revolution.
1. To most historians, the term “totalitarianism” does not cover every form of despotism, autocracy, and absolutism, but means specifically a historically new phenomenon requiring the modern great state and modern technology. Before a state can entertain the idea of controlling all organizations, all activities, all thoughts and feelings and utterances within the borders it rules, it must have roads and railroads, autos and planes, telephone and wireless, universal literacy so that all may read and say the same thing, control of all schools, churches, meeting halls, street corners, walls, newspapers, books, movies and photo-making, plus a monopoly of physical force and knowledge of how to condition human beings psychologically.
For Professor Carr, however, totalitarianism is as old as humanity. It is a universal phenomenon only briefly interrupted for a few decades in a single city-state called Athens, and for a few centuries in a lesser peninsula of Asia called Europe. But the day of democracy and individualism is gone, and the shrewd observer should have been able to notice it since the beginning of our century. The issues that democrats, liberals, constitutionalists, democratic and agrarian socialists thought they were fighting over in Russia had really been settled before the Bolsheviks ever seized power. Their opponents lost because they had to lose—why examine their futile opposition? Bolshevism won because it had to win—why concern oneself with its conspiracies and preparations? What does it profit the historian to study the programs, the struggles, the “blind and incurable” illusions, the truths of the defeated? Professor Carr’s sense of historical inevitability even exceeds Lenin’s.
2. Most historians would regard the question of state power as a question of more and less, and would consider the question of this more and less to be a substantive one in the study of institutions and philosophies. The opposite of the total or totalitarian state (“All for the state, all through the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state”) is generally taken to be the limited state, whether its limits be the checks and balances applied by other state institutions or by non-state activities and non-state organizations, or by constitutional law, or by unwritten laws and customs felt as binding by both rulers and ruled—or whether the limits consist simply in the importance and rights conceded to the individual.
But for Professor Carr, constitutional limits on authority are always “bourgeois,” democracy is always “bourgeois democracy” and gets in the way of history and “the proletarian revolution.” The achievements of the 1905 revolution in Russia—“the granting of a constitution, the Duma, the formation of political parties”—are dismissed as “bourgeois.” The overthrow of the Czar by democratic elements was a “bourgeois” revolution. The establishment of a democratic government which, to Professor Carr’s unconcealed disdain, insisted on considering itself “provisional” and saw as its main task the convocation of an assembly to write a constitution, the work of which it did not wish to forestall by faits accomplis—this government, too, was “bourgeois.” But the overthrow of this democratic provisional government and the seizure of power by a well-armed and energetic minority was “the proletarian revolution” (my italics).
When the largest trade union in Russia, backed by many Bolshevik leaders, foreseeing a long period of bloodshed, civil war, and brutal minority dictatorship, tried to force Lenin to agree to a multi-party government in which all the socialist, labor, and peasant parties would be represented, he refused. Professor Carr observes that if he had accepted this proposal it would have “proved that the time was not yet ripe for a specifically proletarian revolution.” Thus all the other socialist and workers’ parties of Russia were “bourgeois,” too.
The Constituent Assembly is a target of Professor Carr’s irony. Elected by the entire people in the only free election held in the entire history of Russia, and containing an overwhelming socialist majority, it is called “the crown of the democratic revolution, but an anachronism once that stage had been superseded by the proletarian socialist revolution.” This sovereign body, convoked with Bolshevik approval to write a constitution, proceeded to adopt the Social Revolutionary agrarian program which Lenin had just openly admitted taking as the basis for his own agrarian program. Carr finds this “coincidence” to be a “proof of the Assembly’s bankruptcy.” The Constituent Assembly showed, moreover, little appreciation of what went on in the “world outside,” for it “ignored the concentration of effective power in the hands of the proletariat,” not seeming to know that “the proletarian revolution had in fact occurred.”
Since Professor Carr had already sympathetically expounded Lenin’s idea that in a backward land “a bourgeois revolution can occur without the bourgeoisie,” one would think that he might at least have raised the question whether a “proletarian revolution” could occur without the proletariat. Or—what is really a central problem for a historian—whether the Bolshevik revolution does not confront us with a new kind of coup d’état that was neither palace nor class revolution, but a seizure of power by a new type of party, the party of a classless elite, which established a new kind of bureaucratic ruling class and a new totalstatism. Such a revolution, unlike Marx’s “proletarian revolution,” can occur just as easily—in fact, more easily—in a backward country with relatively little bourgeoisie, and relatively little proletariat, than in an advanced one.
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The question is never raised whether the class framework is a useful instrument for the analysis of power relations. Class division, class struggle, class rule, and class analysis are taken for granted. It is not a party, a politburo, a dictator, or a bureaucracy that rules, but—the proletariat. Professor Carr takes the Soviet Union’s paper constitution and its decrees at face value, never raising the question of the real relations of power which are any country’s true constitution. He defines the new Bolshevik power as a “dictatorship of the proletariat powerful enough to crush bourgeois opposition.” But he never asks why this dictatorship’s chief job from that day to this should have been the crushing of peasant opposition, worker opposition, and even Communist opposition.
In such a framework, we cannot expect a historical account of how such opposition arose or what it was about. Nor any analysis of alternative paths, moments of choice and contingency, the programs of other groups or parties. All opposition had outlawed itself, Professor Carr announces, “since no opposition party was prepared to remain within the legal limits set by Lenin.” But Lenin himself defined dictatorship as “power based directly on force and unrestricted by any laws”(my italics).
4. Since, for Carr, “totalitarianism is the belief that some organized group or institution, whether church or government or party, has a special access to truth,” all political parties would appear to be totalitarian, and it would be a matter of indifference whether there were a multi-party system in which each party offered its own special “access to truth” to the electorate, or a single party that outlawed all others, and even all differences within its own ranks. Professor Carr would be expected to show no interest, as indeed he does not, in the Bolshevik claim to have “created a party of a new type.” On one of the few occasions in which he uses an emotion-tinged word, Carr warns that “There is some danger in regarding these centralizing tendencies as peculiar to the Russian party—or to Lenin. It was everywhere a period of the rapid extension of large-scale organization. . . . In no great country were political parties immune from these tendencies.”
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II
Carr’s other requirement for the historian is “an imaginative understanding of the outlook and purpose of his dramatis personae.” But we find only one persona in his pages.
Lenin enters on page 5, and on page 6 we read: “In 1901, Lenin first began to emerge head and shoulders above his fellow editors.” They included the veterans Plekhanov and Axelrod, who were surely more than his peers at that time, and Martov, who was his equal. “From the foundation of Iskra Lenin became the pace-maker of advanced ideas within the party.” Since Lenin’s only difference with his fellow editors at that time was his belief in more rigid centralization and an elite guardianship over the rank and file and the proletariat, we must conclude that these were the advanced ideas. “Lenin ran further ahead of his Iskra colleagues . . . .” Not apart but ahead. His “central plan” of organization was “built upon a sound basis of theory . . . .” Then come “his immense learning,” “his unique greatness,” “the greatest revolutionist of all time,” “his genius,” which “was far more constructive than destructive,” etc., etc. His “major achievement came after the bloodless victory of October 1917, and was that of a great constructive statesman.”
Clearly, this historian will have no difficult problems of evaluation, no great need to search alternative paths, little room for “an imaginative understanding of the outlook and purposes” of other dramatis personae. Where the hero is so heroic the conflicts cannot be dramatic; the other personages are mere embodiments of fragments of momentary opposition, shadows flitting past the sun, foils to luminous greatness, objects of quiet irony and vast, condescending scorn.
Kamenev and Zinoviev, when they oppose Lenin, are “united in an inglorious partnership”—although what was inglorious about it except that they opposed first Lenin, then Stalin, and died under executioner’s bullets, is hard to say. Lunacharsky and Bogdanov are said to have “broken with Lenin” when actually it was he who broke with them by expelling them from the party for differing with him on a tactical matter.
Throughout these three volumes we get Lenin’s side of every serious controversy, and only that side. His doctrines, categories, and modes of reasoning are so expounded that it is frequently difficult to tell whether Carr is merely paraphrasing them without subscribing to them, or advancing opinions he holds in common with Lenin, or working out a more “reasonable” statement and defense of Lenin’s views and acts than Lenin himself had thought of. Often all three types of exposition are so subtly woven together as to make it impossible to separate them.
The section on Lenin’s nationalities policies (Part III: “Dispersal and Reunion”) expounds his views so uncritically that it is hard to believe Professor Carr is not being ironic. He draws up a “balance sheet of self-determination” that proclaims: “‘The right to separate,’ in the phrase once used by Lenin, was being replaced by the ‘right to unite.’” “In principle,” Carr continues, “it was unthinkable that any socialist nation should wish to secede from the socialist community of nations; in practice it was unthinkable by the end of 1920 that any one not irrevocably hostile to the Soviet order should wish to break up such unity as had already been achieved. Unity was as necessary for full economic development as it had been for military security. The plain interest of the workers and peasants was unity on the widest possible basis.” Thus the “balance sheet of self-determination” turns out to be apologetics for annexation.
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III
Volume II, The Economic Order, offers massive evidence which would lead any other historian or economist to conclude that Lenin understood little of the actual economic machine, of incentive, money, banking, production, exchange, and other economic processes, and that he bears a heavy responsibility for the economic breakdown and the famine in Russia after the civil war. Professor Carr’s unerring instinct for the crucial decree or utterance actually makes an overwhelming case for Lenin’s economic illiteracy, but his unbounded admiration for Lenin, plus his own economic preconceptions, prevent him from drawing the obvious conclusion.
If the Bolsheviks were clearer about what political institutions they wanted to destroy than about what they wanted to put in their place, they were even surer about what they wanted to destroy of the economic fabric and even less clear about what they wanted to replace it with. Carr tells us that Lenin thought he could eliminate all “bourgeois specialists” and substitute “the armed workers”—only to acclaim him a moment later for his wisdom in recalling the specialists and to blame the latter for their hostility to a program that envisaged their liquidation. We find Lenin believing that he could publicly condemn the bourgeoisie to extinction yet expect them to continue to stay and run their factories until he got around to getting rid of them. He thought he could confiscate all the crops and stores that the peasants produced beyond what was necessary to their mere subsistence, yet have them continue to produce surpluses. He called for the shooting on the spot of the “bagmen,” peasants who brought to market a few pounds of bread, a few eggs or chickens to trade for city-made goods after the Bolsheviks had broken the normal ties between town and country. Carr writes as if the break between town and country had been due to some act of God, or to the civil war alone and the ungrateful recalcitrance of the peasant, and quotes admiringly Lenin’s later decision to restore private trade and to view the “bagman” as “a creature who instructs us extremely well in economics.”
The communists are pictured as destroying the cottage industries, the home and one-man knitting, weaving, baking, and shoemaking shops, and the other tiny enterprises that supplied so much of Russia’s consumer goods, when they could neither “socialize” these dwarf enterprises nor set up anything to replace them. We find that neither Lenin nor Professor Carr shows any understanding of the price mechanism or of money. The Bolsheviks seriously thought that they could abolish money and claims on money by running their printing presses full speed until all monetary claims were worthless and until gold, as Lenin wrote, would be used only to build public toilets. And we see Lenin mistakenly assuming that under capitalism the banks actually run all industries and “control” them, so that all the Bolsheviks had to do was take over the banks in order to get control of industry and run it.
To be sure, war and civil war, as Carr suggests, wreaked their frightful toll, but he tells the story too well not to provide the evidence with which to refute his own tendency to blame everything on sabotage, war, and civil war. It becomes clear that the Bolsheviks destroyed a lot of Russia’s going economic order simply out of blind doctrinaire hostility and their own failure to understand that order—destroyed so much of it that, as Professor Moseley, reviewing the volume in the New York Times Book Review, has tartly remarked, Carr’s “Economic Order” could equally well have been entitled “Economic Disorder.”
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IV
Volume III deals with “Soviet Russia and the World.” Its primary concern is with foreign policy in the conventional sense, although it also deals with the Comintern and world revolution. As might be expected from a writer who came to history from diplomacy, this is Professor Carr’s best documented and, indeed, only well-organized volume. It, too, gives ample evidence of Lenin’s failure to understand the outside world and of the countless errors he made because of his belief that the proletariat everywhere was waiting to be liberated and that the Russian Revolution was the beginning of an immediate world revolution. Yet Professor Carr’s faith in Lenin’s genius and the clarity of his vision still does not waver.
One can deduce from the evidence he presents, though he himself has no sympathy with this view, that Lenin, like the Mensheviks, believed until 1914 that what Russia needed and was facing was a democratic revolution. It was the war, which Lenin took to be capitalism’s “final crisis,” and his belief that the war could only be ended by revolution, that made Lenin decide to disregard Russia’s immediate future and the democratic revolution, and stake all on the hope that a revolution in backward Russia would set off a world proletarian revolution. Professor Carr explains it otherwise: “World revolution was the counterpart in Soviet foreign policy of war communism in economic policy. . . . It was in fact imposed upon the regime, not so much by doctrinal orthodoxy, as by the desperate plight of the civil war.” In another passage, he writes that the slogan of world revolution was the Bolshevik reaction to foreign intervention and was adopted “if only in the interests of self-preservation.”
Thus the author actually denies the whole system of thought, the very creed by which Lenin lived and on which he acted. Professor Carr believes that totalitarianism is the wave of the future, and believes in the Bolshevik Revolution for Russia, but he cannot quite get himself to believe that, in the matter of world revolution, this power-concentrated, dogmatic man was in deadly earnest. This is why the weakest section of his third volume is the one dealing with the Comintern.
One other element of Professor Carr’s analysis of Soviet foreign policy is worth noting for what it reveals of his approach and method. Both in this volume, and in a special study published during the same period, Professor Carr discusses Soviet-German relations as a key to the future of both countries and of Europe. His knowledge of diplomatic history being superior to his mastery of political history, not to speak of economic history, the special study is highly illuminating. It is Carr’s thesis that Germany has been successful in its foreign policy only when it has “cooperated” with Russia, whether Czarist or Soviet. He finds a pinnacle of “success” in the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939-41—which, to quote from Professor Moseley’s review of this volume, once more can only lead one to suppose that “‘success’ means the conquest of numerous independent nations and the calling into being of a worldwide coalition against Germany. It is not clear what new ‘success’ present-day Germany could achieve through ‘cooperation’ with the Soviet Union unless it be to cooperate in over-running the rest of Europe, and thus in perpetuating Soviet rule over itself as well.”
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When Lenin leaves the scene, Professor Carr’s story comes to an end. The party at the time of Lenin’s exit from active life; the constitution and state structure; the economy when Lenin was no longer able to intervene; foreign relations and the Comintern as Lenin left them—these are the terminal points in the various sections of the three volumes.
“A month after Lenin’s final incapacity,” reads one of the closing sentences, “under the shadow of an imminent economic crisis which was already compelling rival leaders to take up positions . . . .” Thus does our historian lay the basis for his further books, on The Struggle for Power, 1923-1928.
The difficulty is that 1923 did not mark the imminence of an “economic crisis,” but saw a visible economic recovery which was to continue until the end of 1928 and which, in retrospect, can be seen as the golden age of the Soviet economy and of mass well-being. It was not “imminent economic crisis” but Lenin’s exit, and the struggle for the succession, that “compelled rival leaders to take up positions.”
True, these “positions” dealt, among other things, with the question of whether the economic recovery was to be permitted to run unchecked, or whether it was to be deflected, controlled, and altered by a new revolution from above. It was the triumph of one of the contenders for the leadership and his application of unstinting force to the peasant and the worker which led, in the 1930’s, to a one-sided development of heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods and mass well-being: to a crisis of imbalance in industry, and a permanent crisis in agriculture, that have continued to the present day.
In view of Professor Carr’s statements that “the pitiably low productivity of Russian agriculture . . . could not be raised . . . on a basis of individual peasant holdings,” that “the adequate feeding of the towns was ultimately incompatible with a system of small-scale peasant agriculture,” and that “the arguments in favor of large-scale agriculture, whether from the standpoint of theoretical socialism or of practical efficiency, were irrefutable,” one wonders what he makes of Khrushchev’s reluctant admission, a few months ago, that Russia now produces less cattle, meat, butter, cheese, and grain per capita than she did in 1928. One has the uneasy feeling that Professor Carr’s new work on the years 1923-28 will have a pro-Stalin bias equal to the pro-Lenin bias in those at hand—and the same totalitarian assumptions.
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A word should be said on Professor Carr’s reputation for scholarship and objectivity. His footnotes, impressive for their volume and pertinence, testify to the fact that he has waded through an incredible amount of documentary material in fugitive books and pamphlets scattered all over the world. They show an unerring sense for the key sentence of the decrees, speeches, pamphlets, and pronouncements which marked the changing Bolshevik attitudes or apologetic explanations. But the fundamental documentation is invariably from the Bolshevik point of view, and, within Bolshevism, from the Leninist one. Thus the scholarship is at one and the same time documentation and unavowed apologetics.
As for Professor Carr’s reputation for objectivity, one is a bit more puzzled. Can it be that in academic circles, and more particularly in British ones, an urbane tone, and the air of saying the most horrendous things as if one were expounding, not advocating, their gist, is sufficient to win a reputation for objectivity? For actually, Professor Carr is saying truly horrendous things. He is telling us that totalitarianism has already won the battle for the world, that the struggles, the programs, the hopes, and the truths of the defeated are no longer worthy of the historian’s attention.
Professor Carr is dazzled by power and success. When the Nazis seemed to wield absolute power and enjoy absolute success he was quietly urging that other powers accommodate imagination and policy to the inescapable historical reality Hitler constituted. Now with the same imperturbable appearance of objectivity, the same is said with regard to Lenin, Stalin, and their new order. In his earlier studies of revolutionaries—Bakunin, Marx, Herzen, and the “revolutionary romantics”—Professor Carr took refuge in irony. Now irony has deserted him. Marxism is “the most attractive of the totalitarianisms,” Lenin is genius incarnate, and the arguments in favor of Stalin’s war on the peasants are “irrefutable.” Professor Carr’s coolness is due to the lack of a historical imagination capable of digesting the magnitude of the issues and of the struggle still in progress; and it is due, also, to an imperturbable conviction that the struggle today involving Bolshevism is a mere rearguard action, with its issues already settled. Thus one has to conclude that the cold hard core of this history of the Bolshevik Revolution is undoubtedly apologetics for what Professor Carr is convinced is the wave of the future.
“Morituri te salutamus.”
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