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The French Revolutionary Tradition

in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political
Thought, and Culture
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/7/2019, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/7/2019, SPi

The French
Revolutionary Tradition
in Russian and Soviet
Politics, Political
Thought, and Culture
JAY BERGMAN

1
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3
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For Marshall Shatz

teacher, mentor, scholar, critic, friend
exemplary in every respect
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Preface

As revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks in Russia were intent on creating a new society

superior in every way to all those that preceded it. This might suggest that history
had no purpose for them, that, like the Jacobins in France, who introduced a new
calendar to indicate that time began with the French Revolution, they considered
the past devoid of any relevance and value.¹ But the Bolsheviks, in this respect,
were not like the Jacobins. History was useful to them; instead of devising a new
calendar, in 1918 they adopted a different existing one.² Professing a Marxist
world view that considered history a linear process in which seemingly discrete
events were actually a part of a larger and unifying development and design, the
Bolsheviks could no more disregard what had preceded them than they could
ignore what Marx had written, however sketchily, about the communism the
future would bring, and in doing so bring history to an end. Contained within the
sequential dichotomies Marxism posited of the powerful oppressing the power-
less—in slave societies, under feudalism, and under industrial capitalism—there
was, in fact, transcendent meaning: the unfolding over time of a saga of human
suffering that, in its negation, foreshadowed the emancipation of the individual
personality that would occur after history ended, when people would be prosper-
ous, enjoy their labour, and have the leisure to realize, at last, their full potential as
human beings.
History, therefore, was meaningful to the Bolsheviks. But one must be precise
about the benefits it provided. Was the past something they mined selectively for
guidance as to how the communist society they intended to bring about should be
constructed? Could the template of such a society, the way it would be organized,
be found in history—if not in full, then as an adumbration of its actual arrange-
ments? Or was the past useful in an entirely different way, as a source of the
inspiration and moral legitimacy that revolutions, precisely because they are
disruptive, violent, illegal, and almost always unexpected, usually require? These
are some of the questions this study tries to answer.

¹ The first day of the Jacobin calendar, which was introduced in 1793, was 22 September 1792, the
day on which the Convention first met in Paris. By adopting it the Jacobins helped to change the very
meaning of ‘revolution’ from returning to something old to creating something new: Lynn Hunt,
Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley CA, 2004), p. 34.
² By replacing the Julian Calendar with the Gregorian (or Western) one, which in the twentieth
century was thirteen days ahead of it, the Bolsheviks subsequently celebrated the October Revolution in
November.
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Because they were Marxists, the Bolsheviks believed that the past was prologue:
that embedded in history there was a Holy Grail, a series of mysterious but
nonetheless accessible and comprehensible universal laws that explained the
course of history, in all of its multifarious manifestions, from beginning to end;
those who understood these laws would be able to mould the future to conform to
their own expectations. But what should the Bolsheviks do if their Marxist
ideology proved to be either erroneous or insufficient—if it could not explain,
or explain fully, the course of events that followed the revolution they carried out?
Something else would have to perform this essential function. The underlying
argument of this book is that the Bolsheviks saw the revolutions in France in 1789,
1830, 1848, and 1871 as supplying practically everything their Marxism lacked.
The English Revolution and the Puritan Commonwealth of the seventeenth
century were not without utility—the Bolsheviks would cite them occasionally
and at times utilize them as propaganda—but these paled in comparison to what
the revolutions in France a century later provided.³
One must bear in mind that in any revolution carried out for the purpose of
establishing socialism and communism, Marxism postulated that the proletariat
would have to play a leading role, and that, absent its doing so, any revolution
carried out in its name and on its behalf was ideologically illegitimate. The
problem for the Bolsheviks was that by every measure of economic and political
development, Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not
ready for a proletarian revolution. Its proletariat was simply too small and
politically immature. When it would be was anyone’s guess. But the anarchy
and chaos in Russia in 1917 opened a window of opportunity that might quickly
close and never open again. Fortunately, the leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir
Lenin, was as tactically flexible as he was unswerving in his ultimate objectives,
and he took full advantage of this unique constellation of forces in the Russian
capital, and in a few other cities of Russia, to take power in an insurrection that
would not be challenged seriously for almost a year; by the end of it the
Bolsheviks had created an army capable of fighting the forces that had formed
against them. But this did not mean that Lenin’s ideological conundrum had

³ In the early 1920s, A. V. Lunacharskii’s play about Oliver Cromwell achieved considerable
notoriety, particularly in Moscow, where the Maly Theatre produced it as a costume drama rather
than as a play about ideas, thus obscuring the comparison Lunacharskii, who served as commissar of
education in Lenin’s first government, had hoped audiences would draw between Lenin and Cromwell:
Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts
under Lunacharsky, October 1917-21 (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 152–3, 158. Neither Lenin nor any of the
other leading Bolsheviks tried to explain Cromwell or the commonwealth he established in any serious
or systematic fashion, though some Marxist historians of Russia have drawn analogies between the
Puritans and the Bolsheviks; the most enthusiastic, Isaac Deutscher, even compared Cromwell to Stalin,
in Stalin: A Political Biography (New York, 1967), pp. 569–70. The leader of the Socialist Revolutionary
Party, Viktor Chernov, stated in his recollections of 1917, Rozhdenie revoliutsionnoi Rossii (Paris,
1934), p. 405, that the Puritan Revolution, while respected in Russia at the time, was nonetheless ‘more
distant and more foreign’ than the French.
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 ix

disappeared. On the contrary, it required intellectual gymnastics of world-class

caliber to resolve. In taking power in Russia in 1917 Lenin and the Bolsheviks had
reversed the orthodox Marxist relationship between base and superstructure.
Instead of economic conditions determining politics, in 1917 politics prevailed.
Paraphrasing Grigorii Piatakov’s much-quoted comment in 1928, Lenin made a
proletarian revolution and then set about creating the objective conditions
necessary for it to occur.⁴
In the light of this reversal of Marxist cause and effect, Lenin and the Bolsheviks
needed revolutions prior to the October Revolution, preferably proximate to it
temporally and geographically, to justify it and to provide guidance in construct-
ing the new society that would follow it. Revolutions in countries where capitalism
had already emerged would be especially suitable. It would seem, at first glance,
that there was a plethora of revolutions to choose from, even if these were limited
to Europe because it was there that capitalism first existed. But many European
revolutions were not suitable for thoroughgoing Marxists like the Bolsheviks to
utilize, either because these were too liberal (as was the case for Spain in 1820), too
national (Greece in 1821 and Lombardy in 1848), or too liberal and too national
simultaneously (the German states in 1848).⁵ Instead, the Bolsheviks turned for
the antecedents they needed—one presumes with a collective sigh of relief—to
France. Marx, many years earlier, had located the beginning of modernity and
modern history in the French Revolution. And since additional revolutions,
according to Marx, were needed after the Bourbon restoration in 1814 to finish
what the French Revolution began, the subsequent revolutions in France in 1830,
1848, and 1871 became milestones in a revolutionary teleology, a dialectical
unfolding of history, that originated in 1789 and would culminate in socialism
and communism. As a result, by the time they emerged in 1903 as an identifiable
faction in Russian Social Democracy, the Bolsheviks had all the components of a
revolutionary tradition—one that began in France in 1789 and ended in France in
1871—at their disposal.
Of course the relationship between Russian revolutionaries—not just the
Bolsheviks—and their French equivalents in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871 was a
dynamic one. It changed over time. In fact, there developed between the French
revolutions and the Russians who reacted to them a mutually reinforcing rela-
tionship: the conclusions Russian revolutionaries drew about France’s revolutions
affected what they thought about their own prospective revolution, while the
notions they had about their own revolution coloured their evaluation of France’s.
Within the mental universe Russian revolutionaries inhabited, France and Russia
were the polarities in a dialectical process yielding lessons about the history of

⁴ N. Valentinov, ‘Sut’ bol’shevizma v izobrazhenii Iu. Piatakov’, Novyi zhurnal, 52 (1958): p. 149.
⁵ Godfrey Elton, The Revolutionary Idea in France 1789–1871 (New York, 1971), p. 180.
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both countries that, when used properly and to good advantage, would change the
course of history in Russia, and perhaps even the course of history in France.
In brief, my book explores the role French revolutions in 1789, 1830, 1848,
and 1871—which together comprised what can fairly be called a Revolutionary
Tradition—played in the history of Bolshevism and Soviet Communism. It also
sheds light on how these revolutions influenced the evolving mythology of the new
Soviet regime. These are large topics, which can be considered within the rubric of
an even larger one, namely the interaction between two national histories and
culture, in this case those of Russia and France. The specific issues the book is
concerned with, and the conclusions that are stated at the end of it, clearly suggest
that the causal arrow in this interaction travelled mostly eastward—that Russia
received from France more than it gave in return.⁶ As it happens, this view is
consistent with the rough consensus among historians who have concerned
themselves with the relationship between Russia and the West generally that a
similar disparity obtains. Like it or not, Europe influenced Russia more than
Russia influenced Europe.⁷
It is important to bear in mind what this book is not. It is not a study in
comparative revolution, and it certainly is not concerned with developing a
generic template of revolution, in which the factors common to all revolu-
tions—their origins, evolution, and eventual end—are defined and described.
This has been done by historians and political scientists since Crane Brinton’s
pioneering study, The Anatomy of Revolution, appeared in 1938.⁸ Nor is it
concerned with establishing typologies of revolutions, an endeavour that, instead

⁶ Historians are not the only ones who have come to this conclusion. Pëtr Chaadaev, in his ‘First
Philosophical Letter’, composed in 1829, and accessible in P. Ia. Chaadaev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i
izbrannye pis’ma (Moscow, 1991), vol. I, pp. 90–3, argued—with the grandiloquence and propensity for
taking the most extreme position on every issue, to which the Russian intelligentsia was naturally
inclined—that Russia had contributed nothing of value to the world, and to the West in particular.
Other Russians, not surprisingly, disagreed.
⁷ None of this is meant to suggest that Russia’s influence on France is not worth exploring and that a
book that does what this one does ‘in reverse’ is not worth writing. In fact, Martin Malia has written on
the influence of Russia on Europe from the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth century in
Western Eyes from the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (New York, 2000). And David Caute,
in Communism and the French Intellectuals (New York, 1964), and Paul Hollander, in Political
Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (New York, 1981), have explored
the attraction the Soviet Union had for intellectuals in the West. But both ascribed it to the attributes of
intellectuals generally, rather than to factors particular to France or Russia. For that reason this lacuna
in the historical literature on the two countries and the relationship between them remains, regrettably,
unfilled.
⁸ Critiques of Brinton’s thesis can be found in Bailey Stone, The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited: A
Comparative Analysis of England, France, and Russia (New York, 2014), especially pp. 1–44; Martin
Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven CT, 2006),
pp. 302–5; and from the perspective of Marxism–Leninism, Iu. A. Krasin, Revoliutsiei ustrashennye.
Kriticheskii ocherk burzhuaznykh kontseptsii sotsial’noi revoliutsii (Moscow, 1975), pp. 278–82. An
approach more congenial to political scientists than to historians is to distinguish revolutions not by the
ideologies and objectives of the individuals who carry them out, but by the structural differences in the
institutions of governance in the countries where revolutions occur. The result, perhaps unavoidable, is
a universally applicable theory or scenario of revolution in which ‘the realm of the state is likely to be
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of stressing commonalities among revolutions, as Brinton’s did, emphasizes

differences. Chalmers Johnson and Barrington Moore have written extensively
on this; whether the taxonomies they constructed are accurate and useful remains
a matter of debate.⁹
Nor does my book deal with the generic phenomenon of what is sometimes
called ‘thinking by analogy’—although the analogies the Bolsheviks drew with
French revolutions are closely analysed for the purpose of ascertaining the lessons
the Bolsheviks believed they contained.¹⁰ Nor, for that matter, does it purport to
resolve the question of whether thinking by analogy is useful for policymakers,
and it plainly does not evaluate different kinds of analogies for the purpose of
determining their reliability. Richard Neustadt and Ernest May have written
cogently on the former; Robert Jervis has done so on the latter.¹¹ Nor, finally, is
the book a retrospective comparison of French revolutions and the October
Revolution in Russia, much less an attempt to prove a causal relationship between
them; too often this leads to ahistorical absurdities, such as the assertion that the
Convention of the French Revolution was ‘in embryo . . . something resembling
Stalinism’.¹²

central’: Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and
China (New York, 1979), p. 293.

⁹ In Revolution and the Social System (Stanford CA, 1964), Johnson distinguishes six types of
revolution: peasant, millenarian, anarchistic, Jacobin Communist, conspiratorial, and militarized.
These are analysed succinctly in Lawrence Stone, ‘Theories of Revolution’, World Politics, 18
(1965–6): pp. 159–76, and Eugene Kamenka, ‘Revolution – The History of an Idea’, in A World in
Revolution? edited by Eugene Kamenka (Canberra, 1970), pp. 7–8. In Social Origins of Dictatorship
and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, MA, 1967), Moore
considers revolutions—which he believes can originate peacefully ‘from above’ as well as through
violence ‘from below’—a way of navigating the transition from a predominantly peasant society to a
modern industrialized one, and argues that how this transition is managed determines whether the
governments that issue from revolutions will be democratic or dictatorial.
¹⁰ An intelligent analysis of this kind of thinking is Michel de Coster, L’analogie en sciences
humaines (Paris, 1978).
¹¹ Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers
(New York, 1986); Ernest May, Lessons of the Past (New York, 1973); Robert Jervis, Perception and
Misperception in International Affairs (Princeton NJ, 1976). A useful taxonomy of the errors policy-
makers are prone to when they look to history, and specifically to historical analogies, for guidance is
provided in Yaacov Y. I. Vertzberger, ‘Foreign Policy Decision-Makers as Practical-Intuitive Histor-
ians: Applied History and its Shortcomings’, International Studies Quarterly, no. 30 (1986): pp. 223–47.
Much has been written on how specific historical analogies have influenced history. A prime example is
that between the appeasement embodied in the Munich agreement in 1938 and failing to stop
communist expansionism in South East Asia. On how this contributed to American involvement in
the Vietnam War in the 1960s, see Foong Khong Yuen, ‘From Rotten Apples to Falling Dominoes to
Munich: The Problem of Reasoning by Analogy about Vietnam’ (PhD dissertation, Harvard University,
1987).
¹² Philippe de Villiers quoted in Steven Laurence Kaplan, Farewell Revolution: Disputed Legacies:
France 1789/1989 (Ithaca NY, 1995), p. 55. Even more audacious were the efforts of Jacob Talmon, in
The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York, 1952), to locate the intellectual origins of ‘totali-
tarianism’ in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Incisive criticism of Talmon’s thesis can be
found in Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York, 1963),
pp. 279–86.
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What the book is is a study of what the Bolsheviks themselves believed about
these revolutions in France, and of the roles their beliefs played in the mythology
they constructed that would legitimize the nascent Soviet state and justify the
entire enterprise of constructing socialism in the Soviet Union.¹³ In this endeavour
the Bolsheviks of course invoked Marxist doctrine, which long before the October
Revolution had acquired the status of holy writ. But as a guide to actual policy
Marxism was sadly deficient, in large part because it looked to Western Europe,
rather than to Russia, as the place where socialist revolutions would first occur.
The Bolsheviks were well aware of this, and for that reason many of them—
though not Lenin—thought that any revolution they attempted would be prema-
ture: it would either fail or prove so problematical that even if the Bolsheviks took
power, they would not be able to hold onto it. But in 1917 the Bolsheviks did take
power in Russia and ruled it for the next seventy-four years. This did not mean,
however, that, in creating the Soviet state, the problem of reconciling their
ideology with empirical reality was any less forbidding than it was in 1917. The
Bolsheviks had to improvise at many junctures in their rule, and without Marxist
ideology to guide them, for many of them their impulse was to look to France and
its tradition of revolution to provide at least a modicum of assistance. The result
was that large swatches of French history informed a good deal of what the
Bolsheviks did while ruling Russia—from the early disputations over Robespierre
and the Jacobins, through the heated polemics during the NEP over the Soviet
Union’s ostensible ‘growing over’ into Thermidor, to the alleged danger of ‘Bona-
partism’ in the Stalin era and then, under Khrushchev, in the person of Marshal
Zhukov. In the last years of the Soviet Union, the French Revolution and the Paris
Commune were occasionally invoked by the Gorbachev regime to sanction its
policy of perestroika (reconstruction).
The reader should know at the outset that the four French revolutions that
comprise this revolutionary tradition are treated separately and in chronological
order. The result, to take just one example, is that what Russians thought about the
French Revolution from the time it began in 1789 all the way to the Soviet Union’s
collapse in 1991 is followed (in a separate chapter) by what many of these same
Russians thought about the French revolution that occurred in 1830. In other
words, there is in the book ‘a jumping back and forth’ in Russian history—though

¹³ To be sure, one historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, Dmitry Shlapentokh, has produced
works that, taken as a whole, constitute a study similar to mine: The French Revolution in Russian
Intellectual Life 1865–1905 (New Brunswick NJ, 2009); The French Revolution and the Russian
Anti-Democratic Tradition: A Case of False Consciousness (New Brunswick NJ, 1997); The Counter-
Revolution in Revolution: Images of Thermidor and Napoleon at the Time of the Russian Revolution and
Civil War (New York, 1999); and ‘The Images of the French Revolution in the February and Bolshevik
Revolutions’, Russian History, 16, no. 1 (1989): pp. 31–54. But none of these works go much beyond the
Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and in any event were written no later than two decades ago. Perusal of
the source material in my own book will show that it takes into account the scholarship both in the
West and in the former Soviet Union that has been produced since then on many of the issues
Shlapentokh addressed.
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not in French history—that may, for some readers, be disconcerting. But the only
alternative to this approach—tracing chronologically from 1789 to 1991 what
Russians thought of all four French revolutions—would be untenable: readers
would have to keep separate in their minds what, say, Lenin was thinking about
four revolutions at any particular time, while simultaneously remembering how his
views on one, some, or all of them changed from one period in his life to the next.
The last thing the reader might want to bear in mind before proceeding to the
actual text of the book is that definitions of revolutions in history and politics—in
contrast to how the word is used and understood in science as a form of spin or
rotation—are legion, and no single definition is immune to criticism or falsifica-
tion. Every definition, in other words, is either incomplete or deficient in one way
or another. But analysing revolutions without defining the phenomenon itself, as
it has manifested itself in history, would be unwise. The result would not be clarity
but rather even greater confusion. What seems the least objectionable definition—
and the one that informs the analysis in this book—is Samuel Huntington’s:
‘a rapid, fundamental, and violent domestic change in the dominant values and
myths of a society, in its political institutions, social structure, leadership, and
government activity and politics’.¹⁴ To this definition one might object that it
underestimates the ambitions of modern revolutions like the French and the
Bolshevik that were driven by ideologies promising the transformation not only
of the entities Huntington mentions, but of humanity itself. In fact, the very
magnitude of what these revolutions intended required not just a radical break
with the status quo, but the conviction that the past had meaning primarily for
what it revealed, in embryonic form, of what the future, in all of its salubrious
manifestations, would bring not just to the French and the Russians, but to
everyone. Although the Bolsheviks, unlike the Jacobins in France, chose not to
alter their calendar, they were, if anything, even more committed to the radical
transformation of humanity. But one of history’s many ironies is that, in attempt-
ing to achieve this grandiose objective, the Bolsheviks often found themselves
looking backwards to a series of revolutions in France that had ended before
almost all of them were born.
To be sure, the French Revolutionary Tradition, by providing legitimacy,
inspiration and, not least, a vocabulary useful in ad hominem polemics intended
to gain political advantage, proved helpful to the Bolsheviks. But it also hampered
them, at times severely. The analogies the Bolsheviks drew with the four revolu-
tions comprising this tradition usually generated more heat than light, not only in

¹⁴ Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven CT, 1968), p. 264.
Other works concerned with revolutions that provide a working definition are, among others,
Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley CA, 1991); Charles
Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (New York, 1996); John Dunn, Modern Revolutions: An
Introduction to the Analysis of a Political Phenomenon (Cambridge, 1989); and Noel Parker, Revolu-
tions and History: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge, 1999).
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explaining the course of events in the Soviet Union, but also in the Bolsheviks’
understanding of the original revolutions in France to which these events were
analogized. For that reason the Bolsheviks would have been better off either
ignoring the French Revolutionary Tradition entirely, or at least drawing analo-
gies while bearing in mind the stubborn refusal of historical events to corroborate
facile comparisons that belie, or seriously minimize, their singularity. To the
extent that my book demonstrates that reality, it may have utility for all historians,
not just those of Russia and France.
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Acknowledgements

Writing a book is not an entirely solitary task. In ways large and small, many
people helped me.
The idea for this book originated in discussions with Eric Edelman, my
roommate and closest friend in graduate school, who encouraged me to write it.
Years later, my colleague at Central Connecticut State University, Bolek Biskupski,
prodded me first to start the project, and later on to finish it. In between, he was
always willing to read passages I sent him and to comment on them perceptively.
Other colleagues, in different ways, were just as generous with their time and
assistance. Paul Karpuk provided guidance on the finer points of Russian–English
translation, and Glenn Sunshine, whose knowledge of the ancien régime in France
I could never hope to match, patiently answered my many questions about its
demise. Perhaps my most valuable resource at the university was Sarah White,
the Interlibrary Loan Manager at the Elihu Burritt Library, who responded to my
seemingly interminable requests for obscure documents in a language she did not
understand with unfailing good humour and impeccable efficiency. I could not
have written this book without her assistance.
I was also fortunate in the historians elsewhere who assisted me. Marisa Linton
of Kingston University kindly answered queries about the Jacobins and the
Girondins; Jonathan Sperber of the University of Missouri clarified the proven-
ance of Marx’s writings on the French revolutions with which my book is
concerned. Matthew Rendle of the University of Exeter read an early version of
the manuscript and made valuable suggestions for improvement. Christopher
Read of the University of Warwick did the same and even proposed a title—
which I quickly adopted—that reflected his belief that what Russian revolution-
aries prior to the Bolsheviks thought of the French Revolutionary Tradition
should constitute the opening chapters of the book. Finally, I will be forever
grateful to Martin Conway of Balliol College, University of Oxford, who selflessly
took time away from his own scholarship to read and comment on the original
manuscript insightfully and at considerable length, thereby demonstrating that
the Atlantic Ocean is no impediment to collegiality. His quip in the evaluation he
sent me that the French held their revolutions so that Russians could comment on
them seems from my perspective to contain a truth more profound than he may
have imagined.
All books, irrespective of their authors, are in many ways only as good as their
publishers. In this regard I was exceedingly fortunate; the editors I dealt with at
Oxford University Press easily met my expectations. The consideration Christina
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xvi 

Perry and Cathryn Steele unfailingly showed me at various junctures in the

multistage process of transforming my manuscript into a book was exceeded
only by their professionalism and cool efficiency. Happily, the same was true of
Saranya Jayakumar, the Senior Project Manager for SPi Global, one of the partner
production companies of Oxford University Press, who oversaw the copyediting,
which was done by Brian North with maximal precision and kind understanding
of my cris de coeur when a function on Microsoft Word proved recalcitrant. His
‘jeweller’s eye’ for the errant citation and the wrongly-worded bibliographical entry
was remarkable. No less so was the deftness with which Christopher Summerville
prepared the index.
Others made this book possible without even knowing it. Mary and Gerry
Crean kept my spirits up when the drudgery of research and revision would
otherwise have left me too tired and depressed to persevere. Geraldine Lenz was
a source of much-needed moral support, and her insights on matters far removed
from the French Revolutionary Tradition had the surprising effect of enhancing
my understanding of it. My cousins Neil Corday and Paul Stanzler kept my mind
sharp with probing questions about the objectives and larger purpose of the
project, while my oldest and closest friend, Scott Seminer, provided an example
of quiet courage in the face of adversity that showed my own occasional difficulties
in writing chapters to be trivial by comparison. He and his wife Diana opened
their home to me whenever I needed to get away from my notes and rough drafts
with the same hospitality his late parents, Edith and Maxwell Seminer, showed me
earlier in my life. And I would be remiss if I did not thank Drs Jeffrey Laut and
Stuart Kesler for saving my life.
Whatever virtues inhere in this book are traceable ultimately to inspiring
teachers in college and graduate school. As an undergraduate at Brandeis Univer-
sity many years ago I had the good fortune to take a course on civil liberties in
America taught by Jerold Auerbach. The analytical rigour he demanded of his
students became for me a standard of academic excellence that I have tried to
uphold in my own scholarship and teaching. As a doctoral candidate at Yale
University I learned from both Barbara Malament and Firuz Kazemzadeh the
skills that writing history requires; the latter ably directed my doctoral disserta-
tion. In the lucidity and concision with which he boiled down complex issues of
historical interpretation to their essentials, another of my teachers at Yale, Robert
Crummey, impressed me to the point where I almost abandoned modern Russian
history for its pre-Petrine antecedent, which was his specialty. And it was at Yale
that Henry A. Turner, Jr., in a marvellous course on fascism informed by his
insistence on rigorous argument and scrupulous analysis of empirical evidence,
became for me the embodiment of the professional historian at his best; the
wisdom he imparted has remained vivid in my mind to this day. One of my few
regrets about this book is that he did not live to see it.
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 xvii

The same, unfortunately, is true for my parents, Moe and Hannah Bergman,
who passed away not long after I had begun my research. But their unstinting
support of my earlier academic endeavours, and their conviction that I could
overcome all obstacles and achieve whatever goals I set for myself, still resonate.
For that reason I believe that my writings help to honour and perpetuate their
blessed memory.
My wife Julie has been my most helpful critic while sharing her life with me. She
endured with remarkable equanimity the long hours on weekends when I was
away from home, ensconced in my office attending to something about which she
had little reason to care other than for the fact of our marriage. I could not have
completed this project without her love, forbearance, and encouragement. Of all
the joys we have experienced together, by far the greatest has been to watch the
development of our son Aaron from childhood into a wonderfully empathic and
highly ethical adult. In ways too numerous to mention, he also reminded me while
I was researching and writing that there is more to life than Jacobins and
Bolsheviks.
Marshall Shatz was my first teacher of Russian history. It was his example at
Brandeis that inspired me to follow him into his profession, and throughout the
many years since our paths diverged he has remained, in some sense, at my side,
commentating on my work with the lucidity and critical intelligence that inform
his own impeccable scholarship. My dedication of this book to him, no matter
how profuse and all-encompassing it may appear, cannot capture the full extent of
my indebtedness.
Of course I alone am responsible for any errors and omissions readers may
discover.
Jay Bergman
January 2019
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Contents

Note on Transliteration xxi

PART I. 1789
1. The Initial Reception of the French Revolution 3
2. The French Revolution in the Russian Revolutionary
Movement 31
3. The Marxist Inheritance of the French Revolution 51
4. Lenin: The Russian Robespierre 79
5. Bolsheviks and Mensheviks on the Jacobins and
the Girondins 110
6. 1917—Russian Jacobins Come to Power 139
7. Mythologizing the New Soviet Regime 170
8. The Phantom of the Soviet Thermidor 234
9. Stalin: The Jacobins as Proto-Stalinists 274
10. Returning to the Leninist Line under Khrushchev
and Brezhnev 301
11. Transgressing the Leninist Line in the Gorbachev Era 318

PART II. 1830

12. The Revolution That Stopped Too Soon 339

PART III. 1848

13. The Revolution That Failed 357
14. The Phantom of the Russian Bonaparte 393
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xx 

PART IV. 1871

15. Revolution as Martyrdom 455

PART V. CONCLUSION
Conclusion 491

Bibliography 499
Index 525
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Note on Transliteration

Transliteration of Russian words follows the Library of Congress system. The only
exceptions are to render the ‘ks’ in, for example, Aleksei, as ‘x’—hence, Alexei—
and the names of persons well known in the West in the way they are spelled in the
West—hence ‘Trotsky’ instead of ‘Trotskii’, ‘Kerensky’ instead of ‘Kerenskii’, and
‘Mikoyan’ instead of ‘Mikoian’.
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‘The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible

historical analogies’
James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (1908)
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PART I
1789
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1
The Initial Reception of the French
Revolution

The French Revolutionary Tradition began in 1789 with the commencement of

the French Revolution.¹ In Russia the reaction to it, by supporters and opponents
alike, was vehement, unequivocal, and often unconstrained by accurate informa-
tion about it. Long after it ended in 1799 in Napoleon’s coup d’état, the revolution,
for many Russians, was more the expression of subjective needs long predating
the revolution than a sequence of objective events informed by the political
and ideological requirements of the individuals who carried it out. For this reason,
instead of changing minds, the French Revolution froze them, turning assump-
tions into beliefs, and beliefs into dogma. Supporters of the Russian monarchy and
its autocratic rule became even more supportive once they realized that what
was happening in France might happen in Russia. That the execution of Louis
XVI might serve as a precedent for regicides elsewhere in Europe was too horrible
a prospect to ignore. At the same time, Russians who found in the revolution
confirmation of the rationalism and the belief in progress and man’s perfectibility
that had earlier characterized the Enlightenment were emboldened by the revo-
lution to deny the moral and political legitimacy of the very same autocracy,
with its conservatism, paternalism, and penchant for acting capriciously and
arbitrarily. This was precisely what motivated the Decembrists—who had learned
about the revolution while serving as army officers stationed in Paris following
Napoleon’s abdication in 1814—to mount in 1825 the first challenge to the
existing order in Russia that was based on moral principle, rather than by a desire
merely to substitute one ruling elite, drawn from the nobility, for another.
Of course to many Russians the French Revolution remained unknown or was
of no interest. Peasants, who comprised the majority of the population, were

¹ Although historians generally agree on when the French Revolution began, there is no consensus
on when it ended. Here it is assumed, admittedly arbitrarily, that the latter occurred in 1799 with the
coup d’état that brought Napoleon to power. For that reason the history of ‘Bonapartism’, as it pertained
to Soviet politics and culture, will not be described and analysed in any of the chapters on the French
Revolution; instead, it will be dealt with in the section on the revolution in France in 1848 that follows it.
It was not until Louis Napoleon had taken power in the aftermath of that later revolution that the
concept even existed, largely as a result of Marx’s belief that it helped to explain the second Bonaparte’s
rise to power, which he considered a parody, rather than an actual replication, of that of the first. And
only much later than that—specifically in 1917—was the term first used in Russia as a synonym for a
military dictatorship or a dictatorship that required the military’s support to survive.
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mostly illiterate, and too concerned with physical survival to care about, much less
to imitate, events that were unfolding hundreds of miles away. But those who
worked in towns and villages, or had reason, in the course of their daily lives, to
visit them might pick up bits and pieces of information from soldiers or govern-
ment officials. And while Soviet historians understandably exaggerated peasant
unrest in Russia after 1789, and also the extent to which the French Revolution
prompted it, dissatisfaction in the Russian countryside and among the masses
generally was nonetheless real, and the revolution’s contribution to it not
nonexistent.²
As for the educated elite in Russia, its knowledge of the revolution was exceeded
only by the degree to which it was influenced by it. One is hard pressed to think of
another foreign event or series of events in Russia’s history, in a pre-industrial age,
when modern means of communication did not exist, that was as profound and
long-lasting in its consequences as the French Revolution. To be sure, Russians’
infatuation with all things French predated it. During the reign of the Empress
Elizabeth (1741–62), French fashions spread widely, and by the time the revolu-
tion began, the Russian nobility had already adopted French as its language du
jour; even Peter III, who remarked that serving as a private in the Prussian army
would be preferable to being tsar, spoke French very well.³ But it was the French
Revolution, even more than the Enlightenment that preceded it, that polarized
opinions about France itself. Indeed, it mattered greatly, in terms of the personal
politics of many Russians, whether they applauded the French Revolution or
abhorred it, or were able to evaluate it with an equanimity conducive to a mixed
evaluation. Among the first group, France remained the country to which they first
looked for guidance because they found their own country’s politics and culture so
deficient. On the emerging intelligentsia of the early nineteenth century, which
enlarged principles largely traceable to France and the French Revolution into
moral and philosophical absolutes, the influence of French socialism was equalled
only by that of German philosophical idealism. Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth
century, Russians pursued for their politics by the tsarist police were often drawn
to France, and to Paris in particular, by its large émigré community of radicals and
revolutionaries, which provided sustenance, support, and a subculture not
altogether different from their own; no doubt many of them would have agreed
with Engels’ comment that Paris in the nineteenth century was ‘the head and the

² K. E. Dzhedzhula, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia burzhuaznaia revoliutsiia kontsa 18 veka (Kiev,

1972), p. 160. For a largely ‘lexical’ analysis utilizing French ‘loanwords’ of this at times seemingly
mindless reverence for French culture, see the PhD dissertation of Adam Nathaniel Coker, ‘French
Influences in Russia, 1780s to 1820s: The Origins of Permanent Cultural Transfer’ (University of
Exeter, 2015).
³ See, for example, Dzhedzhula, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia burzhuaznaia revoliutsiia, espe-
cially pp. 97–126; Michael T. Florinsky, Russia: A History and Interpretation (New York, 1953),
vol. I, p. 497.
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heart of the world’.⁴ But Russian revolutionaries, who tended to dichotomize

the world on the basis of moral principles they considered timeless, universal,
and absolute, were enamoured of the French capital also because it seemed to them
the geographical embodiment of moral virtue itself.⁵ It was hardly a coincidence
that the Okhrana, a separate and largely autonomous police force established in
1881 to fight revolutionaries, had its principal foreign headquarters in the French
capital.⁶ Writing in 1880, P. V. Annenkov described the almost hypnotic effect
Paris had on Russians who came to consider the city the antithesis of everything
that was antediluvian in St Petersburg and Moscow:
Owing to various aspects of its political life, Paris had a captivating effect on
Russians who made their way there always in a more or less secret, stealthy way,
since it was officially forbidden in those days to have the word France inscribed
in one’s passport. The impression Paris produced on the travellers from the
North was something like what ensues upon a sudden windfall; they flung
themselves on the city with the passion and enthusiasm of a wayfarer who
comes out of a desert wasteland and finds the long-expected fountainhead.⁷

For most of the nineteenth century, England was actually more hospitable than
France to exiles and émigrés because the individual liberties it provided its own
people benefitted foreigners as well. But England did not have a legacy of revolu-
tion as compelling as the French, and throughout the nineteenth century (except-
ing only 1848) a revolution there seemed unlikely. The Glorious Revolution lacked
the drama of the French Revolution, and arguably was not a revolution at all,
while the protests of the Chartists and the anarchic violence of the Luddites two

⁴ Quoted in Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History
(New York, 1972), p. 203.
⁵ For insights into the mentality of the Russian intelligentsia, from which the Russian revolutionary
movement emerged in the late nineteenth century, see Marshall Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical
Perspective (New York, 1980), pp. 12–63, and Isaiah Berlin’s four essays, collectively titled ‘A Remark-
able Decade’, that appeared in Encounter in 1955 and 1956, and are reprinted in Isaiah Berlin, Russian
Thinkers (New York, 1978), pp. 114–209.
⁶ Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York, 1974), 301–2. In the 1920s Paris would
again be the destination of many Russians, this time mostly opponents of the new Soviet regime; among
those who settled in the French capital were Alexander Kerensky, Pavel Miliukov, the wife of Viktor
Chernov, and, in the early 1930s, Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov, whom the People’s Commissariat for
Internal Affairs (NKVD) murdered in 1938. Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of
Russia (New York, 2002), p. 531. Marc Raeff, in Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian
Emigration 1919–1939 (New York, 1990), p. 37, calls Paris ‘the true political and cultural capital of
Russia Abroad’.
⁷ P. V. Annenkov, Extraordinary Decade (Ann Arbor MI, 1968), p. 165. To be sure, Russian
revolutionary émigrés generally did not assimilate into the countries where they took up residence,
preferring self-contained communities instead. They did so not necessarily out of any political or
philosophical rejection of Europe and the West, but rather because they never relinquished their
original objective of fomenting revolution in Russia. Martin A. Miller, The Russian Revolutionary
Emigres 1825–1870 (Baltimore MD, 1986), p. 4. This was also true of those who, after leaving Russia in
1917, thought the new Soviet regime would soon collapse, thereby rendering assimilation unnecessary.
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centuries later were hardly the work of revolutionaries seeking the overthrow of
the existing order in its entirety.
The degree to which Russian writers and intellectuals were fascinated by all
things French even after the revolution ended should not be underestimated.
Russian nobles who admired and idealized France appeared frequently in Russian
literature and theatre. The character Chatskii in Griboedov’s ‘Woe from Wit’ is a
prime example. In addition, Russian writers who bemoaned the absence in the
Russian language of words for concepts they deemed important, such as privacy,
sympathy, and imagination, often adopted the French equivalents.⁸ And while
Napoleon’s Russian campaign diminished this Francophilia considerably, it did
not extinguish it. In keeping with the traditions of the Russian nobility, Leo
Tolstoy learned French as a child, and possibly replicated his own experience in
Anna Karenina by including a scene in which Dolly Oblonskaia forces her
daughter to speak French instead of Russian.⁹ How successful this forcible
immersion in French could be is implicit in the confession of Vladimir Nabokov’s
uncle—on whom the character of Humbert Humbert in Lolita may have been
based—that while as an adult he spoke French fluently, he still made grammatical
mistakes in Russian.¹⁰ But France was attractive and appealing for more than its
language. For many Russians it was an exact antithesis of their own country.
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s description of the alienation he and others experi-
enced in the 1840s—and of its amelioration by their identification with France—
makes this point clearly and simply:
We existed only in a factual sense. . . . We went to the office, we wrote letters to
our relatives, we dined in restaurants, we conversed with one another, and so on.
But spiritually we were all inhabitants of France.¹¹

One must bear in mind that the French Revolution spoke so directly to the whole
issue of Russia’s national identity because the debate about it had begun well before
the revolution did. Countries just beginning to modernize, as Russia was under Peter
the Great in the early eighteenth century, often define themselves in relation to
others that are technologically and militarily superior. For Russia, this meant that
Europe—particularly England, Holland, and Sweden—became the standard by
which its military prowess and its scientific and technological advancement were
judged.¹² Later in the century, during the reign of Empress Elizabeth, the comparison

⁸ V. Vinogradov, Ocherki po istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka XVII–XIX vv. (Leiden, 1949),
p. 239.
⁹ Figes, Natasha’s Dance, p. 57; Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (New York, 1961), p. 279.
¹⁰ Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York, 1999), p. 71.
¹¹ Quoted in Figes, Natasha’s Dance, p. 55. He also stated that Russians have two fatherlands: Russia
and France. John Keep, ‘The Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd’, Soviet Studies 20, no. 1 (July 1968): p. 22.
¹² These were precisely the countries in Europe Peter looked to for the technology from which he
thought Russia could greatly benefit, and for the institutional arrangements he considered transferable
to Russia. Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven CT, 1998).
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came to include cultural matters and social institutions; under Catherine the Great,
the Enlightenment itself, with its models of governance based on reason and natural
law, contrasted sharply with the conservatism and paternalism that for centuries had
served to justify Russian autocracy. The result, when the French Revolution began,
was that it served as a surrogate for Western Europe as a whole: Russians who
wanted their own country to pursue the historical path Europe was following were
likely to approve of the revolution, while those who rejected the West and thought
Russia’s future best informed by the principles of Orthodox Christianity considered
the revolution the ultimate degradation of another and very different culture in a
country hundreds of miles from Russia’s western border; for that reason Russians
should ignore the French Revolution or, if that was not possible, try to minimize its
deleterious effects. Not surprisingly, no synthesis of these two diametrically opposite
views of the revolution—and of Russia’s national culture and historical destiny—
proved to be possible until the Soviet era, when Russia was ruled by leaders espousing
a Western ideology that nonetheless rejected the West.
The French Revolution, of course, was not monolithic. All sorts of distinctions
could be drawn between its phases, and one could even argue plausibly that the
revolution was actually several revolutions combined into one. Depending on
one’s point of view, these ‘revolutions within the revolution’ could be simultan-
eous or sequential. In arguing for the simultaneity of these separate revolutions,
one could reasonably claim, for example, that while the urban bourgeoisie worked
with the peasantry and the sans-culottes to overthrow the monarchy, its objectives
were fundamentally different from those of its allies—and could thus be said to be
engaged in a revolution of its own. In arguing, instead, that these revolutions were
actually sequential, one could praise the original revolution of 1789 while distin-
guishing it from subsequent events, such as the Jacobin Terror, that could be
considered largely or entirely malevolent.
But however one interpreted it, the French Revolution divided Russia’s educated
elite like nothing else since Peter the Great’s reforms nearly a century earlier. Every
educated Russian in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had to express an
opinion of it. It is true that in the thirty-six years separating the outbreak of the
revolution and the Decembrist Revolt in 1825 there were no street demonstrations
in Russia like those of the sans-culottes, no political clubs like the Jacobins, nor any
cottage industry producing pamphlets resembling Sieyès’s that openly advocated
the transformation of the country as a whole. Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from
St. Petersburg to Moscow, written in 1790 and rightly seen by Catherine as subver-
sive of the existing social order, was intended as a warning to the nobility of the
nefarious consequences that would follow its refusal to emancipate the serfs, rather
than as an exhortation to revolution.¹³ But the French Revolution changed the way

¹³ Alexander Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, ed. Roderick Page Thaler
(Cambridge MA, 1966). This of course was how the Bolsheviks interpreted the book, and at least
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opponents of the Russian monarchy condemned it—not just by accentuating the

monarchy’s moral illegitimacy, but also by helping them conceptualize the insti-
tutions and the principles of governance that would replace it. In just the way the
French Revolution made subsequent revolutions seem necessary for Frenchmen of
later generations who for whatever reason found it insufficient, so, too, in Russia
were there revolutionaries who believed that the French Revolution, while laudable,
was incomplete; that it failed to address fundamental issues of class and economic
deprivation; and that it required an additional revolution, or several additional
revolutions, to achieve the universal social justice—in Russia as well as in France—
that was beyond the imagination and power of the original revolutionaries of 1789;
while succeeding in some respects, the French Revolution failed in others. But
however one evaluated its accomplishments, the moral gloss Russians placed on the
revolution affected profoundly their view not only of their own society and culture
but also, to a significant degree, of themselves.
In the minds of many of its participants, the French Revolution was seen as the
first step in the emancipation of humanity. This was certainly true for Jacques-Pierre
Brissot, the Girondin who, in December 1791, called for ‘a crusade for universal
liberty’.¹⁴ In June 1794, Maximilien Robespierre, the leader of the Jacobins, lauded
the revolution for what it had already accomplished. ‘A new world’, he said, ‘has
appeared that exceeds the limits of the old one. Half of the revolution in the world is
already done.’ But he cautioned that ‘the other half ’ remained unfinished.¹⁵ In Russia
statements like Robespierre’s were taken seriously. Opponents of the autocracy
obviously welcomed the possibility of the revolution’s replication in their own
country. But what for the autocracy’s opponents was a promise of better things to
come was received by its supporters as a threat. Although until Napoleon’s campaign
in 1812 Russia seemed too far away from France for any revolutionary army to attack
it, its government was vulnerable to the notion implicit in the revolution that any
political system like the Russian that denied its people liberty and equality was
irrational and therefore morally and politically indefensible.

* * *
Of those in Russia who opposed the French Revolution, the empress herself,
Catherine the Great, who ruled during all but the last three years of it, had the

one delegate to the Estates General. Jean-Louis Kapp did so as well, even including five pages of it, in
translation, in a revolutionary pamphlet he had written. M. M. Shtrange, Russkoe obshchestvo i
frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia 1789–1974 gg. (Moscow, 1956), p. 78.

¹⁴ J. P. Brissot, Second discours sur la nécessité de faire la guerre aux Princes allemands (Paris, 1791),
p. 27. See also Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French
Revolution (New York, 2013), p. 109.
¹⁵ Quoted in Albert Mathiez, ‘Robespierre et le culte de l’être suprême’, Annales révolutionnaires 3,
no. 2 (April–June, 1910): p. 219.
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most to lose from its replication in Russia. Long after Louis XVI went to the
guillotine, she realized that that would be her fate should anything like what was
engulfing France occur in Russia.¹⁶ Accordingly, in 1794 she forbade the teaching
of the French Revolution in schools, which effectively made studying it a crime.¹⁷
Even works like Radishchev’s Journey that did not call explicitly for revolution
were banned and their authors punished, in Radishchev’s case because by depict-
ing Russian serfs as human beings, he provided moral justification not just to free
them, but to grant them legal and political rights that no autocrat, not even one as
enamoured of the Enlightenment as Catherine, could provide without jeopardiz-
ing her own security and perhaps even the monarchy itself. For this reason it made
sense for her to consign Radishchev to Siberian exile, and to call his friend
P. I. Chelishchev, whom she suspected of assisting him in producing the book,
the ‘second propagandist’ in Russia of the French Revolution.¹⁸
Not surprisingly the French Revolution awakened memories of the Pugachev
Revolt in 1773, the greatest upheaval in Russia since the Time of Troubles in the
early seventeenth century. Despite their obvious differences, Catherine con-
demned the deputies to the National Assembly established in 1789 as little more
than ‘Pugachevs’—a comment that by seeming to Russify the French Revolution
made it more threatening.¹⁹ That Pugachev’s army had come close to toppling the
autocracy only heightened the danger the French Revolution seemed to pose not
only to Catherine, but to Russia and to the Russian nobility in particular. Count
Vorontsov was hardly the only noble to consider the objectives of the French
revolution identical to Pugachev’s, and one might legitimately wonder if his fears,
and those of his class, were heightened by the presence in Russia of nationalities,
such as the Poles, who resented their minority status and sought moral and
political justification for changing it.²⁰ As if in anticipation of this, Catherine, in
a letter to Baron von Grimm in 1792, vowed ‘to fight Jacobinism in Poland and to
defeat it’.²¹ The Poles were proving notoriously difficult to assimilate following the
first partition of Poland in 1772, and with additional ones likely to follow—as they
did in 1793 and 1795—Catherine understandably considered them especially
receptive to a revolution carried out in the name of universal liberty. In 1791
she claimed the new constitution that had been drafted in Poland to redress the
deficiencies of its political system to be the work of Jacobins.²²

¹⁶ John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (New York, 1989), p. 305.
¹⁷ B. S. Itenberg, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1988), p. 89. Because the
Third Section, the institution Nicholas created in 1826 that was tasked with enforcing the ban, was so
incompetent, it was easily circumvented.
¹⁸ Paul Dukes, ‘Russia and the Eighteenth Century Revolution’, History 118 (1971): p. 384.
¹⁹ Paul Avrich, Russian Rebels: 1600–1800 (New York, 1976), p. 253.
²⁰ Shtrange, Russkoe obshchestvo i frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, p. 71.
²¹ Quoted in B. Lesnodorski, La Pologne au X-ieme Congrès International des Sciences Historiques à
Rome (Warsaw, 1955), p. 216.
²² William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (New York, 2002), p. 166. In the
minds of many of those serving in Catherine’s government, Jacobinism infected her own subjects as
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But self-interest and an instinct for self-preservation cannot by themselves

explain the lengths to which Catherine was willing to go to seal off Russia
hermetically from the contagion in France. Catherine’s hostility to the French
Revolution also reflected her belief that it was a repudiation of the Enlightenment
rather than an affirmation of it. Catherine had once tried to bring to Russia a form
of governance informed by the rationalism of the Enlightenment, only to conclude
in the late 1760s that doing so might jeopardize her own prerogatives as an
autocrat. The Pugachev Revolt a half-decade later confirmed the wisdom of her
decision. But she never denied the abstract validity of ruling on the basis of rational
principles. Writing to Grimm in February 1790, Catherine said she saw in the
French Revolution ‘the destruction of everything that has been linked with the
system of ideas of the beginning and middle of this century, which brought forth
rules and principles without which, however, it is impossible to live one day’.²³ As
Catherine viewed them, the revolutionaries in France were not merely wrong or
misguided. They were ‘full of the French madness’, and ‘filled with venom’.²⁴ In her
mind, they were not just evil. Far worse than that was their irrationality. At bottom,
the revolution was a form of collective hysteria and insanity, a mass delusion
‘infecting with fury twenty million people in the name of “freedom”, of which
they do not possess even the shadow, after which these madmen rush forward
to ensure that it will never be achieved’.²⁵ For that reason, those leading the
revolution, such as Mirabeau, should be hung ‘not once, but many times over’.²⁶
Unlike Catherine, who opposed the French Revolution from its inception, there
were Russians who, after praising the revolution for its moderation, turned against
it as it became more radical; no doubt the execution of Louis XVI played a
significant role in this transformation. Some who did so were influenced by the
French émigrés who had settled in Russia; others had actually participated in the
revolution before it became, in their estimation, too extreme.²⁷ For example,
Dmitrii Golitsyn and his older brother Alexander, who as young men had joined
the Parisian sans-culottes in storming the Bastille, years later made their peace
with autocracy in their homeland and actively worked on its behalf: after serving
as an officer in the Russian army, Dmitrii accepted the position of Military
Governor-General of Moscow in 1820, while Alexander served as Procurator of
the Holy Synod, which oversaw the Orthodox Church, and then as Minister of

well, namely those who read newspapers. Dzhedzhula, Rossiia i velikaia frantszuskaia burzhuaznia
revoliutiia, pp. 272–3.

²³ Quoted in Dukes, ‘Russia and the Eighteenth Century Revolution’, p. 381.

²⁴ These were among the many comments she made on Radishchev’s Journey, pp. 239, 242.
²⁵ Quoted in Paul Dukes, World Order in History: Russia and the West (London, 2002),
pp. 31–2.
²⁶ Radishchev, Journey, p. 249.
²⁷ N. I. Kazakov, ‘Napoleon glazami ego russkikh soveremennikov’, Novaia i novaeishaia istoriia, no
3 (1970): pp. 36–7.
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Education, in which capacity he directed a purge in Russian universities of

everything deemed subversive of the state.²⁸
The political views of Nicholas Karamzin, the future author of a multi-volume
history of Russia stressing the necessity of an autocratic government, followed a
similar trajectory. In the winter and spring of 1790, he spent three months in
Paris, during which he came to consider France ‘the most pleasing country in the
world’, largely because he found much to admire in the political arrangements that
had been put in place in the country in the year before.²⁹ To Karamzin, the
National Assembly closely resembled the republican oligarchy he then considered
the best form of government, in which the percentage of the population that
elected it did so on the basis of rationality and reasoned judgement. For a time,
Karamzin even admired Robespierre; reading one account of his execution caused
him to cry.³⁰ But he soured on the revolution as it seemed increasingly driven by
emotion rather than reason. This, in turn, caused him to stress the necessity, if
anarchic violence like that of the sans-culottes was to be avoided, for ordinary
people to relinquish sovereignty voluntarily to their intellectual superiors. From
that conclusion it seemed to follow that in Russia, no less than in France, a
political system run by a single individual was even better than an oligarchy
because the policies it produced would be implemented more efficiently and
obeyed without any protests or even objections. As for the French Revolution
itself, Karamzin suggested that, by submerging the Enlightenment principles it
inherited in a miasma of ‘blood and flames’, it risked plunging not only France but
humanity itself into ‘the depths of barbarism’.³¹
Another Russian who turned against the revolution after initially welcoming it
was the aforementioned Alexander Radishchev, who has been called, with justi-
fication, ‘the first Russian radical’ and ‘the father of the Russian intelligentsia’.³² In
light of these laudatory appellations, one would expect his admiration of the
French Revolution to be boundless or, at the very least, considerable. But that
was not the case. During his Siberian exile in the 1790s, Radishchev was so
impressed by the vastness of the territory that surrounded him that he became a
Russian nationalist and imperialist. This, in turn, caused him to view autocratic
government more favourably: in such a system the country’s resources could be
mobilized more easily and applied against its enemies more effectively. For that

²⁸ Dukes, ‘Russia and the Eighteenth Century Revolution’, p. 380; Émile Haumant, La culture
française en Russie (1700–1900) (Paris, 1913), p. 172; Janet M. Hartley, Paul Keenan, and Dominic
Lieven, eds, Russia and the Napoleonic Wars: War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850 (New York, 2015),
p. 217.
²⁹ N. M. Karamzin, ‘Lettre au spectateur sur la littérature Russe’, in Pis’ma N. M. Karamzina
k I. I. Dmitrievu (St Petersburg, 1886), p. 480.
³⁰ Dzhedzhula, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia burzhuaznaia revoliutsiia, p. 148.
³¹ Figes, Natasha’s Dance, p. 67.
³² David Marshall Lang, The First Russian Radical: Alexander Radishchev 1749–1802 (London,
1959); Marshall Shatz and Judith Zimmerman, eds, Vekhi/Landmarks: A Collection of Articles about
the Russian Intelligentsia (Armonk NY, 1994), p. 166.
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reason Ivan III was Radishchev’s model of an effective ruler, responsibly ‘laying
the foundation for Russia’s subsequent greatness’.³³ To be sure, Radishchev
continued to find the rationalism of the Enlightenment attractive even as he
regretted what he considered its political perversion in the French Revolution. It
was precisely Ivan’s careful calculus, based on reason, of all the variables he had to
consider before taking action that made him so effective an imperialist, and thus
so attractive to Radishchev. But by 1802, Radishchev’s conservatism had deepened
to the point where he felt compelled to explain precisely what it was about the
French Revolution he found objectionable. Shortly before his suicide later in
the same year, he composed what he called a Historical Song, in which, inter
alia, he reiterated his admiration for the revolution in its earliest stages, but argued
that it lost its moral virtue with the establishment in 1792 of the Convention,
which he condemned as a collective dictatorship that eliminated the freedoms
Frenchmen had previously enjoyed. Like the philosophes of the Enlightenment,
Radishchev found much in the Ancient World that was admirable, but he also
found in it instances of irrationality and moral depravity; some of these were
strikingly similar to the worst excrescences of the French Revolution. For example,
he analogized Robespierre both to Sulla, the Roman general who, as consul,
violated the existing constitution and killed many innocent people, and to Calig-
ula, the Roman emperor notorious for his capriciousness, despotism, and psycho-
logical instability.³⁴
In assessing the role the French Revolution played in Radishchev’s life, it is
impossible to determine the degree to which the French Revolution affected the
conclusions he drew about events he observed in Russia, and conversely the degree
to which events he witnessed in Russia influenced what he thought of the French
Revolution. What can be said with some assurance is that Radishchev was driven
to suicide in 1802 partly by the realization that the reforms he proposed as a
member of a commission tasked with devising a new law code for Russia were too
radical for Tsar Alexander I and other members of the commission. One cannot
help but note how many of these reforms corresponded to the ideals of the French
Revolution: freedom of the press, religious toleration, a more equitable and fair
means of assessing different levels of taxation, the equality of all classes before the
law, and the abolition of the table of ranks, which by the late eighteenth century
had degenerated from a hierarchy based on merit, which was how Peter the Great
intended it, to one dependent on favouritism and seniority.³⁵ For all of his
appreciation of the practical advantages of autocracy, in the end Radishchev
remained faithful to the mostly liberal political principles that revolutionaries in

³³ Allen McConnell, A Russian Philosophe: Alexander Radishchev, 1749–1802 (The Hague, 1964),
p. 149.
³⁴ V. G. Revunenkov, ‘Problem Iakobinskoi diktatury v noveishikh rabotakh sovetskikh istorikov’, in
V. G. Revunenkov, Problemy vseobshchei istorii: istoriograficheskii sbornik (Leningrad, 1967), p. 90.
³⁵ Thaler, Introduction to Radishchev, Journey, p. 17.
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France advocated before the establishment of the Convention. But to what

happened in France after that critical event he remained unalterably opposed.
Of course there were Russians who opposed the French Revolution for less lofty
reasons. Among them, in the late 1790s, was Paul, Catherine’s (almost certainly
illegitimate) son and successor, one of whose more ridiculous orders forbade his
subjects from uttering the word grazhdanin (‘citizen’) because its French equiva-
lent, citoyen, was the preferred term of address during the revolution; they were
expected to use zhitel’, the Russian word for ‘inhabitant’, instead.³⁶ In addition,
Paul’s government considered reading newspapers, irrespective of their content,
evidence of ‘Jacobinism’.³⁷ It attached the same stigma to anyone who believed
either that Russia’s army under Suvorov’s command was incapable of defeating
the French in the War of the Second Coalition, or that France’s army was a good
one.³⁸ In the late 1790s, during the performance of a play, a member of the
audience applauded an actor who stated that ‘without equality there cannot be
friendship’; for his apostasy he was arrested for his ostensibly Jacobin convic-
tions.³⁹ Paul’s murder in 1801, while diminishing hostility to the revolution, did
not extinguish it. Paul’s successor, Alexander I, initially contemplated reforms
similar to some of those the French had carried out, and even after the tsar
abandoned plans to implement them, the presence among his ministers of Mikhail
Speranskii, who sought a government ruled by law, with interpersonal relation-
ships mediated by a Russian facsimile of the Code Napoleon, was enough to revive
the spectre of Jacobinism. Speranskii never contemplated an end to the monarchy,
and even with its powers limited by the vertical hierarchy of assemblies he
favoured, it would bear no resemblance to the Committee of Public Safety, the
only government in the French Revolution run solely by the Jacobins.⁴⁰ But none
of this prevented Alexander’s other advisors and prominent figures in St Peters-
burg whose opinions Alexander took seriously from stigmatizing Speranskii as a
Jacobin, and three months before Napoleon’s army entered Russia, which retro-
actively lent the charge a certain credence, the tsar dismissed him.⁴¹
Alexander’s fear that he would suffer the fate of his father was real, and it
contributed to his unwillingness to reform Russia more than he did. A similar
apprehension consumed his successor, his youngest brother, Nicholas I, who saw
the French Revolution and the Decembrist Revolt—which he thought the revo-
lution had made possible—not only injurious of Russian autocracy. The threat
the revolution posed, even long after it ended, was also, for Nicholas, intensely

³⁶ Dukes, ‘Russia and the Eighteenth Century Revolution’, p. 384.

³⁷ Dzhedzhula, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia burzhuaznaia revoliutsiia, p. 272.
³⁸ Ibid. ³⁹ Ibid.
⁴⁰ Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772–1839 (The Hague, 1957),
pp. 119–227.
⁴¹ Anatole Mazour, The First Russian Revolution 1825: The Decembrist Movement (Berkeley CA,
1937), p. 27.
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personal. One cannot help but suspect that Nicholas had himself in mind when he
berated Louis XVI, a quarter-century after his execution, for acquiescing, from
1789 to 1791, to the demands of the revolution; by doing so, he ‘betrayed his holy
duty’, and for that reason God imposed the ultimate punishment.⁴² Indeed, with
the emergence during Nicholas’ reign of an intelligentsia bent on the radical
transformation of Russian government and society, supporters of the monarchy
and the status quo thought some intelligenty bore a striking resemblance to the
principal figures of the French Revolution. This was the case for Vissarion
Belinskii in the 1840s and Nicholas Chernyshevskii in the early 1860s.⁴³ In the
case of the latter, several of those in the government who were demanding
his arrest called him ‘Marat’ and ‘a Russian Saint-Just’.⁴⁴ In 1865, the censor
noted that contributors to the illegal journal Russkoe slovo—of which Dmitrii
Pisarev was among the most influential—were ‘desperate radicals and nihilists
[who were] consciously imitating French revolutionaries in the 1790s’.⁴⁵ In much
the same way, the prominent conservative and supporter of autocracy, Mikhail
Pogodin, expressed in 1854 his fear that Russia might soon experience a revolu-
tion resembling the French—with results he believed would be catastrophic.⁴⁶
A few years later, after Nicholas’ successor, Alexander II, had made clear
his intention to emancipate the serfs, another conservative, P. V. Dolgorukov,
believed emancipation would be the catalyst for the conflagration he feared
as much as Pogodin did even if the freed serfs received parcels of land.⁴⁷
Alexander’s reforms, far from destroying the autocracy, prolonged its exist-
ence, even though the tsar himself fell victim to a terrorist’s bomb in 1881. By
that time everyone who was alive during the revolution was dead, and one
would think it would no longer provoke heated and often intemperate criticism
and condemnation. But that was not the case. Alexander allowed discussion of
the French Revolution in Russian schools and universities—perhaps because he
thought it had lost its ability to inspire radical opinions—and it figured prom-
inently in the lectures of historians such as Vasilii Kliuchevskii, Vladimir Ger’e,
and N. I. Kareev, whose influence exceeded the limits of Russian universities.⁴⁸
In addition, French histories of the revolution could now be published in

⁴² Quoted in B. S. Itenberg, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, (Moscow, 1988), p. 139.

⁴³ V. Kuleshov, ‘Otechestvennye zapiski’ i literatura 40-kh godov XIX veka (Moscow, 1959),
pp. 184–5.
⁴⁴ Quoted in V. A. Gavrilichev, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v publitsistike revoliutsionnykh
demokratov A. I. Gertsena, V. P. Popova, D. I. Pisareva (konets 50-x-60-e gody XIX v.)’, Frantsuzskii
ezhegodnik: stat’i i materialy po istorii Frantsii 1989 (Moscow, 1989), p. 374.
⁴⁵ F. F. Kuznetsov, Russkoe slovo’ (Moscow, 1965), p. 232; A. V. Nikitenko, Dnevnik (Moscow, 1955),
vol. II, pp. 545–6.
⁴⁶ M. P. Pogodin, Istoriko-politicheskie pis’ma i zapiski v prodolzhenie Krymskoi voiny (Moscow,
1874), p. 250.
⁴⁷ P. V. Dolgorukov, Petersburgskie ocherki: Pamflety emigranta. 1860–1867 (Moscow, 1934), p. 54.
⁴⁸ Tamara Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy i prizrak termidora (Moscow, 1993), p. 61; Robert
F. Byrnes, ‘Kliuchevskii’s View of the Flow of Russian History’, in Thomas Sanders, ed.,
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translation, and read freely by potential supporters and opponents. As was the
case in France itself, some came to oppose the revolution after initially support-
ing it; Taine’s and Tocqueville’s works’ proved especially influential in changing
readers’ minds in that direction.⁴⁹ By reading their works, Russians previously
sympathetic to Alexander’s moderate reforms could easily see how reforming
another country’s government, even absent any desire to transform it, could set
in motion a sequence of events resulting in its downfall. Others, who never
believed reforms of any kind could have salubrious effects, found in the histories
Taine and Tocqueville had written additional corroboration of their opinion.
Alexander Pobedonostsev, the head of the Holy Synod and tutor of the last two
tsars, Alexander III and Nicholas II, rejected Loris-Melikov’s proposal for a
consultative assembly in Russia—which Alexander II agreed to mere hours
before his assassination—partly because he thought the institution would resem-
ble the Estates General, the establishment of which, in Pobedonostev’s jaundiced
opinion, would lead inexorably, as the Estates General did in France, to the
execution of the monarch.⁵⁰
Pobedonostsev never formally explained his objections to the French
Revolution—though from his casual remarks one can easily infer what they
were. The same can be said, more or less, for Dostoevsky, Vladimir Soloviev,
and Konstantin Leontiev.⁵¹ But other opponents of the French Revolution took
the trouble to explain precisely what it was about the revolution they found
abhorrent. Nikolai Danilevskii, in 1885, argued that the French Revolution, in
the evils it produced, was indivisible. It could not be considered to have had a
salubrious beginning, a malevolent middle, and an inconclusive end. By producing
uninterrupted ‘anti-social anarchy’, it was a monstrosity and a horror from its
inception—even though, paradoxically, the reforms it carried out were largely
inconsequential, hardly ameliorating the social ills afflicting France before the
revolution began. Its most abhorrent expression, the Jacobin Terror of the mid-
1790s, evolved organically from the original objectives of 1789.⁵² Other opponents
of the Russian revolutionary movement, such as Nicholas Fedorov, Nicholas
Strakhov, and Ivan Aksakov, located the origins of the French Revolution in the

Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State
(New York, 1999), p. 252.

⁴⁹ Kondratieva, Bol’shevik-iakobintsy, p. 215, 149–50. Alexander’s reform-minded Minister of War,

Dmitrii Miliutin, read the works of both historians in retirement, and in his diary commented on the
similarities he saw between Russia and the ancien régime in France. Dnevnik D. A. Miliutina,
1881–1882 (Moscow, 1950), vol. III, p. 103.
⁵⁰ Ironically, Alexander had long resisted the proposal for the same reason Pobedonostsev did.
Itenberg, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, pp. 144.
⁵¹ Dmitry Shlapentokh, The French Revolution in Russian Intellectual Life 1865–1905 (New Bruns-
wick NJ, 2009), pp. 53–71.
⁵² Nikolai Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa. Vzgliad na kulturnye i politicheskie otnosheniia slavianskogo
mira k germano-romanskomu (St Petersberg, 1995), pp. 156, 415–16 and passim.
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Enlightenment, specifically in its rationalism and secularism, which not only

substituted man for God as the repository of all moral principles, but presumed
their universality while ignoring everything that distinguished Russians (or Slavs)
from other peoples.⁵³

* * *
Russians who in Western terminology would be considered liberals had a more
favourable opinion of the French Revolution. They approved of its objectives and
believed that the abolition of the monarchy was required to achieve them. But in
Russia the latter would not be necessary because the monarchy was stronger there
than in Western Europe. In fact, to Russian liberals who lived through the
revolution, Alexander I seemed precisely the monarch they desired, because he
had spoken favourably of reform before becoming tsar in 1801—he even hinted
that serfdom might be eliminated, or at least significantly restricted; in some cases,
they even served in his administration. Pavel Stroganov, for example, had joined a
Jacobin Club in Paris in August 1790 and attended its meetings when he was not
in Versailles observing the proceedings of the National Assembly. He even
dreamed of becoming the Russian equivalent of Mirabeau, whom he admired
greatly, and of leading a revolution in Russia no less virtuous than the French.⁵⁴
Just before leaving France to return to Russia, he wrote that ‘the cry of freedom
rings in my ears and the best day of my life will be that when I see Russia
regenerated by such a revolution’.⁵⁵ But Alexander’s liberal rhetoric prior to
becoming tsar convinced Stroganov that a revolution was no longer necessary,
and after 1801 he served on the ‘unofficial committee’ Alexander created to reform
Russia in ways Stroganov believed would be consistent with the principles of the
French Revolution and the Enlightenment. Another member of the committee,
Viktor Kochubei, had once referred to himself as ‘a true partisan’ of the French
Revolution.⁵⁶ Although in the end the committee produced little of lasting value, the
sobriquet that was applied to it—it was known collectively as ‘the Jacobin gang’—
captured very nicely the enormous influence the French Revolution had on the
policies its members favoured, which included the emancipation of the serfs.⁵⁷
Russians liberals generally responded to the revolution with a mixture of
nuance and ambivalence, the precise proportions of which fluctuated with chan-
ging conditions in Russia. The Russian who most personified this inconsistency,
borne out of ambivalence, was Alexander Pushkin, generally considered Russia’s

⁵³ Shlapentokh, French Revolution in Russian Intellectual Life, pp. 13–52.

⁵⁴ Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Roots of Revolution (New York, 1971), p. 19; Haumant, La culture française
en Russie, p. 172.
⁵⁵ Quoted in Dukes, ‘Russia and the Eighteenth Century Revolution’, p. 380.
⁵⁶ Dzhedzhula, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia burzhuaznaia revoliutsiia, p. 149.
⁵⁷ Yarmolinsky, Roots of Revolution, p. 25. Allen McConnell, Tsar Alexander I: Paternalistic
Reformer (Northbrook IL, 1970), p. 75.
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greatest writer. A measure of the universality of his appeal is that in the twentieth
century he would be praised by figures as dissimilar as Trotsky and Nicholas
II. But the range of Pushkin’s admirers was not just the result of the fact that his
works raised issues of universal importance and appeal. It also reflected the fact
that his politics were extraordinarily elusive. One finds in his works views that
could be fairly characterized as liberal or even radical, such as his championing
intellectual and artistic freedom. One also finds, however, much that could be
considered conservative, such as his paeans to Nicholas I. Moreover, Pushkin’s
views changed over the course of his life, and one senses that his beliefs were at
least partly the result of indecision, of an innate inability to reduce the complex-
ities he saw in politics to certitudes like those of persons both to his left and to his
right politically.
This was certainly true of his views on the French Revolution. Pushkin intended
to write a history of the revolution. But the project was unfinished at the time of
his death in 1837; all that existed were drafts, apparently of specific chapters,
bearing the titles ‘On the French Revolution’ and ‘On the Estates General’.⁵⁸
Nevertheless, it is clear that he was genuinely horrified by aspects of it, such as
the Terror, and that he strongly identified with those of its victims who believed in
individual liberty, such as the poet, André Chernier, who was guillotined in 1794,
just a few days before Robespierre suffered the same fate.⁵⁹ It may, in fact, have
been senseless murders such as Chernier’s and that of the Girondins, whom
Pushkin admired, that caused him to call Sodom ‘the Paris of the Old Testa-
ment’.⁶⁰ But he also on one occasion termed Robespierre ‘a sentimental tiger’—
which suggested that the Jacobin executioner was not entirely without praise-
worthy qualities. Moreover, he befriended several of the Decembrists, before they
tried to overthrow the government in 1825, after their return from France a
decade earlier.⁶¹ In light of all this it seems reasonable to believe that Pushkin
had the Decembrists in mind when he called certain critics of Karamzin’s defence
of autocracy ‘young Jacobins’—because they were appalled by the ‘barbarism and
destruction’ for which the autocracy was responsible—and that at least in this
instance he did not mean his description to be pejorative, but rather a reflection of
his (qualified) admiration and respect.⁶²
A similar ambivalence pervaded what Russian liberals believed about the French
Revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The jurist and
political philosopher Boris Chicherin was upbraided by revolutionaries for what
they considered his unconscionable moderation, a prime example of which was his

⁵⁸ A. Z. Manfred, Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1983), p. 392.

⁵⁹ D. S. Mirskii, Pushkin (Moscow, 1926), pp. 57–60.
⁶⁰ Ibid; Shlapentokh, French Revolution in Russian Intellectual Life, p. 63.
⁶¹ Manfred, Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, p. 392.
⁶² A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1965) vol. VIII, pp. 67–8.
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preference for the Girondins over the Jacobins.⁶³ Like Pushkin, Pavel Miliukov, the
most influential Russian liberal despite the defeat liberalism suffered when the
Bolsheviks took power in 1917, had trouble deciding what to think of the French
Revolution. Prior to the 1905 Revolution, when violence and force appeared to him
to be the only means by which liberal objectives might be achieved in Russia,
Miliukov seemed to justify the terror the Jacobins inflicted, or at least to consider it
understandable. However, once a duma, or parliament, had convened in 1906, he
changed his mind. Convinced that his liberal goals, which included individual
rights and the rule of law, could now be achieved peacefully, through negotiation
and compromise, he accordingly found the Jacobins less attractive, and even
dangerous, their dictatorship sounding the death knell in the French Revolution
for the liberal principles that had previously informed it.⁶⁴
Perhaps the most celebrated liberal in Russia in the entire nineteenth century
was the novelist Ivan Turgenev, who during his lifetime was far better known in
Western Europe than either Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, and for many of his Western
readers was their only source of information about the mysterious and seemingly
limitless empire to the East. Turgenev’s references to the French Revolution were
few and, as befitting a novelist, mainly elliptical. Unlike Pushkin, he seemed not to
have thought deeply about the revolution. The most one can glean from his
comments, which he offered when Russian terrorists in Narodnaia Volia were
acting on their belief that regicide was the only means of inspiring peasants to
overthrow the monarchy, was that whatever one might think of the French
Revolution, conditions in France when it began in 1789 bore little resemblance
to those in Russia almost a century later. The latter was more heterogeneous
ethnically, and opponents of autocracy too few and fragmented politically for a
mass revolution, presumably with its liberal principles intact, to succeed.⁶⁵ More-
over, France, for all its virtues, which included the charm of its people and the
refinement of its culture, was hardly the model to which Russians of goodwill who
sought a more humane society and government should aspire. The French people,
he implied, lacked emotional and intellectual depth; that that particular quality
disqualified their country from moral and political leadership might have been the
critical consideration behind the cool detachment with which Turgenev viewed
the increasingly perfervid efforts of the narodovol’tsy to assassinate the tsar.⁶⁶

* * *
Further left on the political spectrum, opinions about the French Revolution
were based more on ideology and political philosophy than on aesthetic

⁶³ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, pp. 31–2, 209. In his memoirs, Herzen condemned Chicherin
as ‘this Saint-Just of bureaucracy’. Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts (New York, 1974), p. 534.
⁶⁴ Shlapentokh, French Revolution and the Russian Anti-Democratic Tradition, pp. 94–5.
⁶⁵ Itenberg, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, pp. 130–1.
⁶⁶ Ivan Turgenev, A Nest of Gentlefolk and Other Stories (London, 1959), passim.
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sensibility. They were also, for Russians who were experiencing the revolution
contemporaneously, informed by emotional attachments and allegiances. The
French Revolution polarized opinion in Europe like no other event since the
Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, and in Russia, where political
opinions and theories could not be tested empirically, it was especially easy to
apply to politics generally, and to the French Revolution in particular, a moral
and political absolutism. Ideologies were adopted, and revolutions supported,
either totally or not at all. According to F. V. Rostophchin, the mayor of
St Petersburg during the reign of Alexander I and hardly sympathetic to the
revolution, ‘hundreds of [Russian] youth want[ed] to be called the sons of
Robespierre and Danton’.⁶⁷ This sentiment was particularly evident in St Petersburg.
In memoirs written nearly forty years after the fall of the Bastille, the French
ambassador to Russia at the time recalled his own surprise on seeing in Russia
‘the enthusiasm which was excited among the merchants, the tradesmen, the
citizens, and some young men of a more elevated rank by the destruction of that
state prison, and the first triumph of a stormy liberty’.⁶⁸ Ekaterina Vorontsova-
Dashkova exaggerated only slightly when she stated that there was hardly an
aristocratic family in Russia without a member of it sent to Siberia for words or
deeds displeasing Catherine II; among them were many whose crimes included
praising the French Revolution.⁶⁹ Among the few nobles capable of rendering a
measured opinion of it was A. M. Saltykov, who, while expressing a preference
for the Girondins, admitted that because their differences with the Jacobins were
small, he could support the latter should they defeat the Girondins—as they did
in 1793—and take power themselves.⁷⁰
By the time of the Decembrist Revolt in 1825, much of the passion the revolu-
tion had engendered had dissipated. For that reason the Decembrists—Pavel Pestel
in the Southern Society no less than the more ‘moderate’ revolutionaries in the
Northern Society—were able to separate the aspects of the revolution they admired
and intended to replicate in Russia from those they found irrelevant, unattainable,
or even abhorrent. To be sure, their admiration of the Enlightenment remained
strong. For A. A. Bestuzhev, Voltaire and the philosophes who produced the
Encyclopedie were ‘tribunes of their century’, their message one that in its univer-
sality transcended national boundaries, while to Pestel it was axiomatic that
‘without understanding Voltaire and Helvétius one could not be useful to oneself,
to society, or to one’s fatherland’.⁷¹ But when it came to the revolution itself,

⁶⁷ Quoted in Arkhiv Vorontsova (Moscow, 1876), vol. VIII, p. 297. The same might have been true of
Marat, whose fiery oratory and subsequent murder by Charlotte Corday were well-known in Russia
contemporaneously.
⁶⁸ Count Ségur, Memoirs and Recollections (London, 1827), vol. III, p. 420.
⁶⁹ Zapiski Dashkova (St Petersburg, 1907), p. 234.
⁷⁰ Dzhedzhula, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia burzhuaznaia revoliutsiia, p. 150.
⁷¹ A. V. Semenova, ‘D. Diderot i dekabristy’, Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik: stat’i i materialy po istorii
Frantsii 1989 (Moscow, 1989), p. 369.
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opinions among the Decembrists were mixed. For one thing, the revolution was of
dubious value tactically. Nothing about it, with the possible exception of Babeuf ’s
Conspiracy of Equals, conformed to the Decembrists’ vision of a revolution in
which the Russian people were the beneficiaries, but not the instruments, of their
own emancipation. The Decembrist Revolt, in the end, was a coup d’état, rather
than an actual revolution, its tactical inspiration more the palace coups in Russia in
1730, 1741, and 1762 than the mass politics of the French Revolution, to which the
Decembrists were oblivious. For another, the Decembrists looked to England and
the United States, even more than to France, for guidance in devising the political
system that would replace the autocracy.⁷² Several of them, in fact, considered
constitutional government like the American the only safeguard against ‘the
horrors of the French Revolution’.⁷³
Of course there was much about the revolution that Decembrists like Muraviev
and Nikolai Turgenev admired. But it is worth recalling that a good deal of what
they knew was transmitted through the works of Benjamin Constant, whom the
former had actually met and conversed with in 1815.⁷⁴ Both men found Con-
stant’s liberalism attractive, and there is every reason to believe that the other
Decembrists who were cognizant of his politics found them appealing as well.⁷⁵ In
Turgenev’s opinion, it was Constant who, along with the actual events of the
French Revolution, did more than any other single individual to introduce to the
Decembrists the fundamental concept of ‘political rights’.⁷⁶ And looking back on
the revolution with the benefit of hindsight, Turgenev concluded in 1818 that
while ‘England forced Europe to love freedom, France forced Europe to hate it’.⁷⁷
A similar ambivalence pervaded Pestel’s views. While he considered the Com-
mittee of Public Safety easily transferable to Russia, and frequently expressed his
admiration of Napoleon, he stated under interrogation prior to his execution in
1826 that he had hoped to avoid in Russia ‘the horrors that [had] occurred in
France’—by which he meant the Jacobin Terror.⁷⁸ One wonders, of course,
whether in his testimony Pestel downplayed his admiration of the Jacobins, and
of the French Revolution as a whole, to avoid the death penalty. But the govern-
ment he intended to establish was modelled closely on the Jacobin constitution,

⁷² See, for example, the arrangements Nikita Muraviev proposed in the constitution he prepared for
the Northern Society, which like the American Constitution stressed the separation of powers, even
including the impeachment of government officials among the legislature’s prerogatives. The influence
of English political practice is obvious in the retention of the monarchy, albeit with restrictions like
those in England after the Glorious Revolution. Marc Raeff, ed., The Decembrist Revolt (Englewood
Cliffs NJ, 1966), pp. 101–18.
⁷³ Vosstanie dekabristov:materialy (Moscow/Leningrad, 1925), vol. I, p. 34.
⁷⁴ N. M. Druzhinin, Dekabrist Nikita Murav’ev (Moscow, 1933), p. 74.
⁷⁵ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 14.
⁷⁶ Nikolai Turgenev, Rossiia i russkie (Moscow, 1915), vol. I, pp. 60–1.
⁷⁷ Quoted in V. A. Diakov, Osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie v Rossii 1825–1861 gg. (Moscow, 1979), p. 25.
⁷⁸ M. Pokrovskii, ed., Vosstanie dekabristov; materialy po istorii vosstania dekabristov (Moscow,
1925–31), vol. IV, p. 90.
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with its rationalism and rigid centralization of authority. Moreover, the amalgam
of imperialism and political radicalism that informed Russkaia pravda, Pestel’s
uncompleted compendium of the policies he would pursue on taking power, bore
an uncanny resemblance to the Jacobins’ goal of radicalizing the revolution at
home while exporting it to the rest of Europe. The terminology Pestel adopted to
describe what he intended was drawn to a large degree from the distant semi-
mythology of Kievan Rus’.⁷⁹ But the political and philosophical imperatives it
reflected were at least partly traceable to Pestel’s estimation of the French
Revolution.
Nicholas I, whose accession to the throne triggered the Decembrist Revolt, did
his best during the thirty years of his reign to suppress the expression of anything
he considered subversive of the status quo; not long before his death he even
considered ellipses in mathematics politically dangerous because of their irregular
shape.⁸⁰ For that reason the revolutionary intelligenty of this period, lacking any
opportunity to test their ideas empirically, defended them with a ferocity uncom-
mon in more open societies or even during the reign of Alexander I. This was
certainly true of Vissarion Belinskii, who apotheosized Marat as a ‘lover of
humanity’ and considered Robespierre worthy of emulation.⁸¹ Even during a
brief ‘Hegelian’ phase in the late 1830s, when he rejected the notion the Jacobins
had embraced that the French Revolution should be the first step in the emanci-
pation of humanity, Belinskii still considered ‘Robespierrism’ a genuine expres-
sion of the idealism and German nationalism of Johann Fichte, which he then
found profoundly admirable.⁸² On most of the other occasions when Belinskii
invoked the revolution, he made sure to justify both morally and politically the
Jacobins’ physical destruction of their enemies. In a letter to Vasilii Botkin in
April 1842, he proclaimed his preference for ‘the sharp sword of Robespierre and
Saint-Just [to] the saccharine and rapturous phraseology of the high-minded
Girondins’.⁸³ Only through the ruthless application of force and coercion, Belinskii
concluded, could ‘the thousand year reign of God’—Belinskii’s synonym for
socialism—be established and defended against its implacable enemies.⁸⁴
Belinskii seems to have been spurred to his moral absolutism by Timofei
Granovskii, with whom he carried on a lively correspondence in which they
disagreed on many issues in addition to the French Revolution. But it was

⁷⁹ I. Shchipanov, ed., Izbrannye sotsial’no-politicheskie i filosofskie proizvedeniia Dekabristov

(Moscow, 1951), vol. I, pp. 295–329.
⁸⁰ Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley CA,
1969), p. 222.
⁸¹ George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New Haven CT, 1996),
p. 336; V. G. Revunenkov, Marksizm i problema iakobinskoi diktatury (Leningrad, 1966), p. 19.
⁸² V. G. Belinskii, ‘Pis’mo M. Bakuninu ot 12–24 oktiabia 1838’, in V. G. Belinskii, Sobranie
sochinenii (Moscow, 1982), vol. IX, p. 201.
⁸³ V. G. Belinskii, ‘Pis’mo k V. P. Botkinu (15–20 April 1842)’, in Belinskii, Sobranie sochinenii,
vol. IX, p. 511.
⁸⁴ Ibid.
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Granovskii’s comments on the revolution, in particular his preference for the

Girondins’ moderation, in comparison to the fanaticism of the Jacobins, that
Belinskii found not merely disquieting but morally abhorrent and even offensive.
No doubt Belinskii would have had no objection to A. Z. Manfred, a prominent
Soviet historian of the French Revolution, upbraiding Granovskii for what Man-
fred termed his ‘bourgeois liberalism’.⁸⁵ Responding to Belinskii’s aforementioned
letter to Botkin after its contents became known to him, Granovskii began by
chiding its author for seeming to prefer Robespierre to the other Jacobins;
if anyone should be praised for ‘narrow-minded fanaticism’, as Belinskii did
Robespierre, it should be Saint-Just.⁸⁶ What is more, Granovskii continued, both
Mirabeau and the Girondins were more eloquent than any of the Jacobins,
especially Robespierre; whatever their failures politically, Mirabeau and the
Girondins understood that a political revolution had to be accompanied by a
social revolution, without which revolutionaries would be tempted to justify self-
serving policies by appealing to abstract and universal moral principles. Unlike
Belinskii, Granovskii sensed danger in the moral absolutism to which he believed
revolutions and revolutionaries especially susceptible, and he admired the
Girondins because they eschewed this kind of rhetoric—and thus the terror it
can easily legitimize—more than most of the revolution’s other principal actors.⁸⁷
In short, the Girondins did not take the revolution beyond what its moral and
political principles permitted. For that reason, Granovskii concluded, the Giron-
dins ‘went to their graves pure and holy’.⁸⁸
However much they differed on the French Revolution, Granovskii and
Belinskii—with the exception of the latter’s brief infatuation with Hegel—were
quite consistent in their respective opinions of it. Very different, in this respect,
was Nikolai Ogarev, who is remembered mostly as Herzen’s intellectual compan-
ion and confidant, but whose views on many issues, including the French Revo-
lution, were distinctive. In brief, Ogarev mostly praised the revolution before the
failure of the 1848 Revolutions in Europe caused him to repudiate certain aspects
of it. As a young man, Ogarev wrote a poem expressing his admiration of
Robespierre and the Jacobins, the willingness of whom to inflict terror to achieve
their objectives he found so laudable and impressive that he wanted to do the same
thing himself: ‘My heart is filled with love of the masses and with the rage of a
Robespierre. I yearn to erect the guillotine anew as an instrument of justice.’⁸⁹
To Ogarev the terror the Jacobins inflicted was an expression, rather than a
repudiation, of public opinion in France, and for that reason it advanced the
revolution, which had the virtue of being popular politically. But Ogarev drew

⁸⁵ Manfred, Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, p. 394.

⁸⁶ ‘Pis’mo T. H. Granovskogo opublikovano v kommentariiakh k perepiske Belinskogo’, in
V. G. Belinskii, Pis’ma, edited by E. A. Liatskago (St Petersburg, 1914), vol. II, p. 424.
⁸⁷ Ibid. ⁸⁸ Ibid.
⁸⁹ E. L. Rudnitskaia, N. P. Ogarev v russkom revoliutsionnom dvizhenii (Moscow, 1969), p. 58.
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from the failures in 1848 the conclusion that the centralization of power in France
he had previously praised the Jacobins for advancing in fact had had the effect of
diminishing, or even, perhaps, of eliminating political freedom in France entirely.
In short, Ogarev now condemned what he had previously praised:
The French Revolution of 1789 long ago destroyed freedom on the European
continent by destroying those aspects of life that had been swallowed up by the
monolithic state. Everything was, as it were, subordinated to a voluntary cen-
tralization. The centralised republic advocated freedom by means of the
guillotine . . . and engaged in genuinely imperialistic centralization. From that
time onward, France has been faithless to its own ideal of civic freedom.⁹⁰

By phrasing his criticism as he did, Ogarev made clear that he was rejecting not
only the Jacobins for using terror, but also the masses for their complicity in it—
though in fairness it is hard to see how ordinary people could have toppled a
regime that was waging war on them. In fact, the only way in which the promise of
the original revolution could have been fulfilled after the Jacobins betrayed it was
if Babeuf and his fellow conspirators had come to power. Babeuf, according to
Ogarev, was not like the Jacobins because the conspiratorial tactics he adopted
were dictated by political necessity, which Ogarev now believed had not been the
case for the Jacobins, who chose to avail themselves of tactics that required the
application of terror.⁹¹ Through Buonarroti’s Conspiration pour l’égalité, Ogarev
was well aware of Babeuf, and the glowing portrait Buonarotti painted of the
hunted conspirator probably enhanced Ogarev’s opinion, which S. V. Utechin has
argued strongly influenced Lenin’s.⁹²
The archetypical intelligent and revolutionary of the mid-nineteenth century
was Alexander Herzen, who from early childhood was not only cognizant of the
French Revolution but aware, if only vaguely at first, of its centrality in history,
which he came to believe was a process of moral improvement leading to the
liberation of the individual personality.⁹³ The very first sentence of his memoir
and autobiography, My Past and Thoughts, makes clear the frequency with which,
as a child, he asked his nurse to tell him ‘how the French came to Moscow’.⁹⁴

⁹⁰ Quoted in N. P. Ogarev, Konstitutsiia i zemskii sobor. Izbrannye sotsial’no-politicheskie i filosofskie

proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1952), vol. I, p. 635.
⁹¹ S. V. Utechin, ‘Who Taught Lenin?’ Twentieth Century (July 1960): pp. 9–10.
⁹² Ibid. There is reason to reject Utechin’s conclusion. Lenin’s knowledge of the intelligentsia was as
broad as it was deep, and he surely learned about Babeuf and the utility of conspiratorial tactics from
many intelligenty in addition to Ogarev, among them Tkachev and the narodovol’tsy.
⁹³ In his biography of Herzen, Martin Malia astutely observes that for socialists like Herzen the
French Revolution was admirable for its professions of individualism, which its principal actors
believed was part of natural law and therefore universally applicable. Only later would socialists like
Marx—and critics of Marxist socialism like Bakunin—consider socialism an ideology conferring
primacy on a collective entity such as the proletariat, rather than the individual and his inherent
worth and dignity. Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (New York,
1965), pp. 112–13.
⁹⁴ Herzen, Past and Thoughts, p. 3.
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Herzen’s tutor, in fact, was a former Jacobin who had left France and emigrated to
Russia after Robespierre’s fall on 9 Thermidor. He often described for the boy, no
doubt in lurid detail, the execution of Louis XVI.⁹⁵ Later in life, Herzen read the
works of Michelet, Thiers, Blanc, Lamartine, Tocqueville, and Guizot that con-
cerned or included the French Revolution, and he probably learned of Babeuf
from Buonarroti’s Conspiration, which provided European radicals and socialists
in the nineteenth century with a model of revolutionary organization emphasizing
the necessity of conspiracy and the centralization of political authority—
requirements that were especially appropriate in a country such as Russia,
where politics of any kind was forbidden.⁹⁶ That Buonarroti’s political roots and
ideology (as opposed to his tactical models) were Jacobin and Rousseauean, rather
than Babouvist, may explain Herzen’s early apotheosis of Robespierre, whom
he described as ‘truly one of the great figures of the French Revolution’, while
‘steeped in blood, [Robespierre] was not stained by it’.⁹⁷ In contrast to Babeuf,
whose communism Herzen then considered laudable but well beyond what
France and Western Europe were ready for in the late eighteenth century (and
what Russia was capable of in the mid-nineteenth century), Robespierre combined
unimpeachable idealism with practicality.⁹⁸ Indeed, Herzen’s belief that at no
other time in history were hopes for the future higher than in France in the
1790s was at least partly the result of his seemingly limitless admiration for
l’Incorruptible.
To be entirely successful, a revolution like that which France experienced had to
change the moral character of people as well as the institutional arrangements
under which they lived. This, at any rate, was a conviction Herzen retained
irrespective of changes in his view of particular revolutions. But he professed it
especially emphatically in the early 1840s, and his high opinion of the French
Revolution was a factor, after his leaving Russia in 1847 and settling in Italy, in his
decision to continue on to France in 1848, fully expecting the revolution that had
begun there in February to meet this particular requirement of his. To Herzen,
writing in 1843, the French Revolution was ‘a completely logical second
negation—after the Reformation—of feudalism, and by demonstrating that
authority was not of divine origin, it closed the preparatory stage of the transition
to the new world’.⁹⁹ But Herzen’s admiration of the revolution was not just a

⁹⁵ Gavrilichev, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v publitsistike revoliutsionnykh demokratov’,

p. 375. ‘9 Thermidor’ was how 27 July 1794 was rendered in the Jacobin calendar.
⁹⁶ Elizabeth Eisenstein, The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti (1761–1837)
(Cambridge MA, 1959), pp. 81–92; Arthur Lehning, ‘Buonarroti’s Ideas on Communism and Dicta-
torship’, International Review of Social History 2, no. 2 (1957): p. 286; Shlapentokh, French Revolution
in Russian Intellectual Life, p. 109.
⁹⁷ Herzen’s friend, Nikolai Ketscher, preferred Marat to Robespierre: ‘Instead of praying for a radiant
future, he read Marat’s speeches’. Quoted in Manfred, Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, p. 376.
⁹⁸ Herzen viewed the atheism and extreme hostility to Christianity of Anacharsis Cloots and the
Hébertists more critically. Herzen, Past and Thoughts, p. 510.
⁹⁹ Quoted in Malia, Alexander Herzen, p. 317.
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matter of logic or the application of reason. The exhilaration he felt on arriving in

Paris showed that the revolution’s moral virtue was, for him, an article of faith,
and the socialism that was already germinating in his mind reflected a commit-
ment that was as much psychological as it was cerebral. Paris was where the most
iconic moments of the revolution had occurred, and for that reason Herzen’s
arrival there was as much a coming home, like that which people in the Ancient
World experienced when they entered Rome or Jerusalem, as it was an act of
carefully calculated self-protection.¹⁰⁰ In his memoirs, he elaborated on what it
was precisely about the French capital that he found so captivating and
enchanting:
In Paris—the word meant scarcely less to me than the word ‘Moscow!’ Of that
minute I had been dreaming since my childhood. If I might only see the Hôtel de
Ville, the Café Foy in the Palais Royal, where Camille Desmoulins picked a green
leaf, stuck it on his hat for a cockade and shouted à la Bastille!¹⁰¹

The trouble with this kind of euphoria was that when circumstances changed, it
could dissipate completely and turn into its opposite. This was what happened to
Herzen. Even before the 1848 Revolution, he began berating the Parisians for their
bourgeois corruption, and explained his preference for Italy after arriving there for
a visit in December 1847 on the grounds that it was not nearly as centralized
politically as France.¹⁰² Nevertheless, as Martin Malia has emphasized, it is too
simple to ascribe Herzen’s disillusionment with France, the French Revolution,
and the West to what happened in France and in Europe in 1848.¹⁰³ One finds in
his writings in the decade that followed an ambivalence that was not resolved until
the 1860s, when he finally turned against the revolution irrevocably—though even
in these last years of his life he retained an affection for the sans-culottes of Paris
because they were ‘urban peasants’, no less hostile to private property and
capitalism than the peasants in Russia, whose obshchina (the peasant commune)
he now considered a microcosm of the socialist society he desired.
One can quote selectively from Herzen’s writings to show that even after the
cruel disappointment occasioned by the June Days, his approval of the French
Revolution did not diminish. In 1849, he compared the so-called revolutionaries
of 1848, whom he considered ‘short-sighted and weak-willed dilettantes [who

¹⁰⁰ Alexander Herzen, ‘Pis’mo deviatoe (10 June 1848)’, in A. I. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii, edited
by M. K. Lemke (Moscow, 1964–5), vol. V, p. 141.
¹⁰¹ Herzen, Past and Thoughts, p. 323. Of course it is also possible that Herzen, writing many years
after the fact, exaggerated the positive reaction he had on entering Paris for the first time to underscore
his later disillusionment. If that was indeed the case, only what he wrote contemporaneously about his
arrival can be considered truly descriptive of his feelings at the time.
¹⁰² A. I. Herzen,‘Pis’mo k E. O. Korshu, T. N. Granovskomu i K.D. Kavelinu (31 January 1848)’, in
A. I. Herzen, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, edited by M. K. Lemke (St Petersburg, 1915–25), vol. V,
pp. 181–2.
¹⁰³ Malia, Alexander Herzen, p. 336.
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wanted] to freeze the wheel of history’, to the original revolutionaries of 1789,

whom he judged to be their polar opposites.¹⁰⁴ Marat, in particular, continued to
please him: the great orator felt the people’s suffering acutely, and the absence of
leaders like him in the revolution in France in 1848 helped to explain why it ended
with the French people just as oppressed as they were when it began.¹⁰⁵ Looking
back at the Jacobin Terror, Herzen proclaimed it ‘majestic in its somber lack of
mercy’ and credited it with saving the revolution from destruction at the hands of
its enemies inside France and in the rest of Europe.¹⁰⁶ Also in 1850, Herzen made
clear that the admiration he had earlier expressed for the Jacobins should now be
enlarged to include the revolution as a whole, which he deemed one of the most
consequential events in history, its purpose nothing less than showing humanity
how to proceed to the state of moral perfection that will exist when history ends:
[The French Revolution] accompanies humanity from generation to generation,
proving instruction, an example to emulate, advice, comfort, and consolation,
support in case of misfortune and, still more, in case of happiness. Only the
Homeric heroes of antiquity, great in their purity and in the beauty of their entire
persona . . . share these attributes with the heroes of the revolution.¹⁰⁷

In 1854, in an article written while living in London, Herzen called ‘the cult of the
French Revolution . . . the first religion of a young Russian’, and asked his readers
rhetorically if there are any ‘who do not possess portraits of Robespierre and
Danton’.¹⁰⁸ Shortly after the Crimean War ended in 1856, he wrote an essay
entitled simply ‘1789’, in which he predicted that ‘we will soon see an États
Généraux on the Neva’.¹⁰⁹
But Herzen’s writings after 1848 also include passages that suggest the opposite:
that Louis Napoleon’s new regime embodied all that was rapacious and fanatical
in Jacobinism, and that Anarcharsis Cloots and the Hébertists, notwithstanding
their pretensions of rationality, were no less fanatical than medieval priests who
burned sorcerers at the stake.¹¹⁰ The French people, in fact, were incapable of
moral improvement, and the ideals not only of 1848 but of 1789 were realizable
not in a country like France, where its paradigmatic revolution occurred mainly in
cities and towns, but in a predominantly agrarian country like Russia, the peasants
of which embodied precisely the virtues of egalitarianism and altruism that
townspeople in France, with the notable exception of the sans-culottes, conspicu-
ously lacked. But the deficiencies Herzen diagnosed actually afflicted the French

¹⁰⁴ A. I. Herzen, ‘Pis’ma iz Frantsii i Italii’, in Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. V, p. 427.
¹⁰⁵ A. I. Herzen, ‘Sharlotta Korde’, ibid., vol. VI, pp. 244–6.
¹⁰⁶ A. I. Herzen, ‘Opiat’ v Parizhe’, ibid., vol. II, p. 347.
¹⁰⁷ Herzen, ‘Sharlotta Korde’, ibid., vol. VI, p. 243.
¹⁰⁸ A. I. Herzen, ‘Au Citoyen redacteur de l’homme (7 February 1854)’, ibid., vol. XXX, p. 502.
¹⁰⁹ A. I. Herzen, ‘1789’, ibid., vol. XIX, p. 46.
¹¹⁰ Herzen, Past and Thoughts, pp. 455–6, 510.
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people as a whole. In his opinion, they suffered from ‘a veritable passion for police
and authority. Every Frenchman is at heart a police sergeant; he loves parade and
discipline. . . . Place any sort of military insignia on a Frenchman’s cap and he
becomes an oppressor.’¹¹¹
In the 1860s this dichotomy seemed to Herzen even more stark and unyielding.
In 1862, he criticized Molodaia Rossia, a proclamation of the younger and even
more radical revolutionary, Pëtr Zaichnevskii, for adopting ‘the metaphysics of
the French Revolution’—by which Herzen meant a mindset conducive to the
ideological fanaticism to which the Jacobins, in particular, had shown themselves
susceptible; the terror they practised caused their passions to be freed from all
constraints.¹¹² Essentially conflating the Jacobin Terror and the French Revolution
as a whole, Herzen seemed now to be calling into question the moral legitimacy of
the revolution itself, arguing that it was corrupt from its inception and that despite
its many laudable consequences, it was, on balance, a bad thing for France and a
bad thing for the West. Moreover, the revolution distracted attention from Russia,
where peasants should not be instructed in ‘the writings of Feuerbach or Babeuf ’,
but instead encouraged to develop ‘a religion of the land’ it can comprehend.¹¹³ In
1864 Herzen clarified the objections he had articulated two years earlier, arguing
now that the French Revolution was ‘too aristocratic’ in its leadership, even under
the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety, and that that was why it did
not provide ‘genuine equality’ for the masses, who failed to resist the counter-
revolution that began on 9 Thermidor.¹¹⁴ Even the Jacobins, Herzen wrote in his
memoirs, hardly resembled the Spartans and the Romans, whom he greatly
admired; rather, they were mere murderers, ill-equipped ethically and politically
to address the needs and aspirations of the masses.¹¹⁵ In 1867 Herzen observed
matter-of-factly that, whatever their original relevance, ‘the principles of 1789’,
had become, for him, ‘mere words, like the liturgy and the words of a prayer’.¹¹⁶
By this time in Herzen’s life, just three years before his death, the French
Revolution had become a cautionary tale, a warning to the current generation of
revolutionaries in Russia that, because it was Western, the revolution was at best
irrelevant, and at worst an example of everything in word and deed they should
avoid if they did not want their own revolution to degenerate into mindless terror,
and in doing so benefit only themselves. Still, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that
Herzen was not entirely convinced of this, and that at no time in his long career as

¹¹¹ Quoted in Malia, Alexander Herzen, pp. 377–8.

¹¹² A. I. Herzen, ‘Molodaia i staraia Rossia (15 July 1862)’, in Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. XVI,
p. 203; A. I. Herzen, ‘Zhurnalisty i terroristy (15 August 1862)’, ibid., vol. XVI, p. 221.
¹¹³ Herzen, ‘Zhurnalisty i terroristy’, ibid., vol. XVI, p. 225.
¹¹⁴ A. I. Herzen, ‘Cho zhe dal’she’, ibid., vol. XVIII, p. 308.
¹¹⁵ Herzen, Past and Thoughts, p. 387. Earlier Herzen had said that the revolution was led by
meshchane (the Russian term used pejoratively by revolutionaries for the petit-bourgeoisie). Gavrili-
chev, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v publitsistike revoliutsionnykh demokratov’, p. 380.
¹¹⁶ Herzen, Past and Thoughts, p. 616.
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a revolutionary was he ever entirely sure about what the French Revolution was
and what he should think of it. Perhaps the only thing one can say with assurance
is that, in an age of romanticism, Herzen’s thoughts were shaped considerably by
his emotions, and by an aesthetic sensibility more appropriate in an artist or writer
than a revolutionary.
Very different from Herzen temperamentally was his contemporaneous and
fellow ‘gentry revolutionary’, Mikhail Bakunin. In an early, ‘conservative’ phase of
his life, in which he expressed admiration for Russian autocracy, Bakunin, not
surprisingly, was hostile to the French Revolution. But he quickly changed his
mind when his politics were radicalized to the point where he became the most
cosmopolitan of all the Russian revolutionaries prior to the October Revolution,
managing to appear, as an observer or a participant, at many of the European
revolutions from 1848 to 1871. For Bakunin revolution was something from
which all nations benefitted, and his new-found opinion of the French Revolution
reflected this conviction. In both its actions and its rhetoric, he saw ‘the spirit of
pure humanity’, which would inform everything people did once they had rid
themselves of their parochial prejudices and preconceptions.¹¹⁷ The result would
be a world made virtuous by ‘the holy spirit of freedom and equality’ which first
manifested itself in France in 1789.¹¹⁸ Liberté, égalité, and fraternité, he wrote
in 1873, were ‘great words’ that in their universality transcended the temporal
and geographical limits of the revolution that had given rise to them.¹¹⁹
But Bakunin tempered his praise with severe and unrelenting criticism. As an
anarchist, he could not help but condemn the Jacobins for their authoritarianism.
However much he admired them for their personal qualities—their energy,
enthusiasm, and passion—the Jacobins fostered ‘a cult of state control’ that
facilitated Napoleon’s dictatorship and in doing so cost the French people their
freedom.¹²⁰ At best misguided, at worst immoral, the Jacobins may have sup-
ported rhetorically the noble objectives of the revolution, but by centralizing
political authority to the extent that they did they drained the revolutionary
triad of liberty, equality, and fraternity of its meaning. Only Danton, for whose
melodramatic oratory Bakunin might have had harboured a special fondness,
escaped the Russian anarchist’s rhetorical wrath.¹²¹
As Bakunin described it, the French Revolution was virtuous precisely to the
extent to which it kept political power from being exercised exclusively from Paris
until the Jacobins, in 1793, betrayed the revolution by doing precisely the reverse.

¹¹⁷ M. A. Bakunin, ‘Kommunizm (June 1843)’, in M. A. Bakunin, Sobranie sochineniia i pisem,

1828–1876, edited by Y. M. Steklov (Moscow, 1934–6), vol. III, p. 230.
¹¹⁸ Ibid.
¹¹⁹ Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, edited by Marshall Shatz (New York, 1990), p. 18.
¹²⁰ Arthur P. Mendel, Michael Bakunin: Roots of Apocalypse (New York, 1981), pp. 357, 371.
¹²¹ P. Péchoux, ‘Bakunin et la Révolution française’, Revue des Études Slaves lxi, no. 1–2 (1989):
p. 168. Bakunin may also have admired’ a special fondness for Danton because after advocating and
practising terror, he fell victim to it.
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The French Revolution was originally an ‘anarchist’ revolution, and as such it

successfully avoided, if only for a time, the centralization of power that was
anarchism’s antithesis. But one must bear in mind that in his own career as a
revolutionary, Bakunin’s rhetoric was sometimes contradictory, and his actions
sometimes contradicted his rhetoric. While condemning the Jacobins for their
authoritarianism, he also praised Blanqui and the Blanquists in France, who
favoured the centralization of political authority, as genuine socialists.¹²² More-
over, Bakunin ran the so-called World Revolutionary Alliance he established in
the late 1860s much the way the Jacobins had ruled France. To be sure, the alliance
was a chimera concocted mostly to impress Sergei Nechaev, at the time his young
disciple and putative successor; Bakunin may also have conjured it to convince
himself that he had not lost his relevance politically. But he said enough about its
(mostly non-existent) organization to reveal a genuinely authoritarian streak in
his personality that directly contradicted his anarchist principles and might well
have caused him to run dictatorially any political party or genuine organization he
established. In that respect Bakunin was more of a Jacobin than he ever imagined.¹²³

* * *
The multiplicity and variety of opinions in Russia on the French Revolution show
the degree to which Russians in the educated elite, from Karamzin and Catherine
the Great at one end of the political spectrum to Herzen and Bakunin at the other,
considered the revolution sufficiently relevant to conditions in their own country
to write about it. Even more significantly, the severity with which these opinions
were expressed suggested that any consensus, any ‘regression to the mean’, was
unlikely to occur for the foreseeable future. This was indeed the case. Indeed, this
polarization of opinion continued into the late nineteenth century, when the
revolutionary intelligentsia gave rise to a genuine revolutionary movement. Mod-
erates still existed. But many felt compelled to choose sides. This was largely the
result of a political system repressive enough to prevent ideas from being tested

¹²² Arthur Lehning, ed., Archives Bakounine (Leiden, 1977), vol. VI, p. 50. Because the Bolsheviks,
like Bakunin, so often contrasted Blanquism and Jacobinism, usually as a means of illuminating what
they disliked about the former and admired in the latter, the role Blanqui and the Blanquists played in
the history of Bolshevism and of the Soviet Union will be considered in a later chapter, also concerned
with the French Revolution, even though Blanqui would not be born, and Blanquism would not exist,
until long after the revolution had ended.
¹²³ Citing previously unknown private correspondence, the Soviet historian, Viacheslav Polonskii,
made the same argument in ‘Bakunin–Iakobinets’, Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi akademii, no. 18 (1926):
pp. 42–62. Bakunin, he wrote, should be judged by the tactics he said he would use to achieve his
objectives, as well as by the objectives themselves. And because his tactics entailed conspiracy and the
centralization of power—both of them attributes of Jacobinism—Bakunin could fairly be called a
Jacobin. One would have thought that, since Lenin and the Bolsheviks centralized political authority in
their underground party before doing the same after taking power in Russia in 1917, Polonskii would
have called Bakunin a proto-Bolshevik or a proto-Leninist. But because Marx had been so hostile to
Bakunin (though no more than Bakunin had been hostile to Marx), Polonskii could not do this, at least
not in print.
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empirically, but not repressive enough simply to exterminate its enemies, as its
Soviet successor would be willing and able to do. Absent empirical corroboration,
ideas, especially as they pertained to politics, were adhered to with a ferocity
equalled only by their increasingly radical (or reactionary) content.
It is this fractionalization of opinion on the French Revolution, within this
revolutionary movement in particular, on which our attention will now be
focused.
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2
The French Revolution in the Russian
Revolutionary Movement

The Russian revolutionaries who came of age in the late nineteenth century were
different from Herzen and Bakunin. Most were of non-noble origin and could not
subsidize their activities, as Herzen was able to do even while in exile in Western
Europe, using income on properties he had inherited in Russia. The result was a
more severe and ascetic temperament, quite dissimilar from Herzen’s, that
stressed the absolute necessity of ‘moral wholeness’, according to which a revolu-
tionary’s life was indivisible. Every aspect of it, even those that might seem
extraneous to politics, was open to scrutiny, and revolutionaries could be deemed
morally deficient if their private life was not as virtuous as their public one.
In short, nothing was off limits because everything mattered.¹
For that reason the French Revolution, as a subjective idea as much as an
objective external event, assumed even greater significance for this new gener-
ation of revolutionaries than it had for earlier ones. Not only were ideas a
substitute for action in an autocracy in which politics of any kind was forbidden,
but because of this insistence on moral wholeness, every idea a person expressed
was considered revelatory of personal character. What a revolutionary thought of
the Jacobins and the National Assembly and the Convention showed nothing less
than the kind of person, and the kind of revolutionary, he was. In the opinion of
N. V. Shelgunov, himself an active participant in the revolutionary movement at
the time, what distinguished the new generation from earlier ones was that ‘the
spirit’ it manifested resembled that which had existed in France in 1789 and
thereafter.²
Evidence of the tenacity, even the fanaticism, with which these younger revo-
lutionaries expressed and defended their views on the French Revolution is
abundant. Sergei Nechaev, while writing nothing about it, nevertheless read
Robespierre’s Memoires, attended discussions of Buonarroti’s Conspiration in

¹ In one of the essays that were published serially in Encounter in 1955–6 under the title ‘A
Remarkable Decade’, Isaiah Berlin argues, in my view correctly, that this insistence on moral wholeness
was one of the defining features of the Russian intelligentsia as a whole. The essay, entitled ‘The Birth of
the Russian Intelligentsia’, is reprinted in Berlin, Russian Thinkers, pp. 114–35. That the Bolsheviks
possessed many of the attributes of the intelligentsia and can fairly be considered its heir and successor
is shown conclusively in Shatz, Soviet Dissent, pp. 64–92.
² N. V. Shelgunov, ‘Vnutrenee obozrenie’, Delo, no. 3 (1881): pp. 161–2.
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St Petersburg in 1868, and included among his meagre possessions pictures of

Robespierre and Saint-Just; one can reasonably infer from this that Nechaev
considered the fall of the Jacobins proof that revolutionaries everywhere, includ-
ing and especially in Russia, would be safe only after their enemies had been
obliterated.³ To another revolutionary of that era, A. V. Nikitenko, there seemed
a strong resemblance between Louis XVI and Alexander II; fires raging in
St Petersburg in the 1860s were one of several reasons he believed Russia to be
on the verge of a revolution comparable to the French.⁴ In the same decade,
D. F. Shelgunov (not to be confused with N. V. Shelgunov) praised the Jacobins as
‘passionate to the point of being extremists, but consistent and pure in their
convictions’.⁵ Robespierre, he said, was a fanatic, but not evil or bloodthirsty.⁶
Pëtr Zaichnevskii, whose pamphlet, Molodaia rossiia (‘Young Russia’), best
captured the weltanshauung of the new generation, evidently vacillated in
deciding which Jacobin he most admired: Robespierre, Saint-Just, or Marat.⁷
Perhaps his considerable knowledge of the French Revolution—Lamartine’s and
Michelet’s histories recounting it were apparently his favourites—made it hard
for him to make up his mind. But about his passion for the subject, and his praise
for most of its participants, there cannot be any doubt. Zaichnevskii so admired
the French Revolution that he deliberately pronounced Russian words particular
to it, such as burzhuaziia, the way they were in French.⁸ And as far as the Jacobins
were concerned, he apotheosized them in Molodaia rossiia for their willingness to
shed blood to achieve their objectives. But since the forces opposing the revolu-
tionaries in Russia were more intractable than those the Jacobins encountered,
Zaichnevskii pledged to exceed them should that be necessary: ‘we will not shrink
from shedding twice as much blood as the Jacobins did’.⁹
Rare among these revolutionaries was the opinion, expressed by N. I. Utin,
that the Jacobins betrayed the revolution and thereby paved the way for Napoleon’s
dictatorship. However effectively the Jacobins advanced their ideological object-
ives, the Girondins were actually the more practical of the two factions in organ-
izational matters and thus immune to the temptation to centralize political power
to the extent the Jacobins did, which Utin considered the reason for their demise.¹⁰
Far more representative of his generation, indeed its secular saint in the minds of

³ Zemfir Ralli-Arbore, ‘Sergei Gennadevich Nechaev (Iz moikh vospominanii)’, Byloe, no. 7 (July
1906): pp. 137, 142, 144. Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 200; Paul Avrich, Bakunin and Nechaev
(London, 1987), p. 5.
⁴ Nikitenko, Dnevnik, vol. II, p. 279.
⁵ N. A. Dobroliubov v vospominaniakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1986), p. 240.
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ M. P. Golubeva, ‘Vospominaniia o P. G. Zaichnevskom’, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 18/19
(1923): p. 29; N. S. Rusanov, Na rodine 1859–1882 (Moscow, 1931), p. 99.
⁸ Rusanov, Na rodine, p. 99.
⁹ Quoted in Itenberg, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, p. 76.
¹⁰ N. I. Utin, ‘Staraia i novaia Frantsii’, Vestnik evropy (March 1871): pp. 16, 33–8.
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many who belonged to it, was Nicholas Chernyshevskii, a bust of whom would
adorn Lenin’s desk in the Kremlin after 1917 and whose novel, What is to be
Done?, provided the title for Lenin’s seminal essay, which has justly been called
‘the Bible of Bolshevism’.¹¹ Chernyshevskii was well acquainted with the French
Revolution. In Sovremennik, the journal he edited until it was shuttered by the
government for its incendiary articles and editorials, Chernyshevskii included
articles on Napoleon and on the ancien régime, relying mainly on Guizot’s for
information on the revolution itself.¹²
Chernyshevskii’s admiration for France and its revolutions, however, had its
limits. He worried that an unsuccessful bourgeois revolution in Russia, like that
in France in 1848, would lead to a Bonapartist dictatorship, as it did in France
shortly afterwards—but also that a successful bourgeois revolution, like that in
France in 1789, would yield the same result.¹³ Nevertheless, Chernyshevskii
identified personally with Robespierre, to the point, according to some contem-
poraneous accounts, of worshipping him.¹⁴ In a sense, this personal identifica-
tion with Robespierre and the Jacobins, which exceeded his admiration of their
tactics and objectives, and even their principles, was consistent with Cherny-
shevskii’s principal contribution to the Russian revolutionary movement, which
was to provide a composite of the individual attributes revolutionaries needed
in addition to a coherent vision of the society they favoured and of how it
should be organized and governed. In What is to be Done? the reader is meant
to recognize one character in particular, named simply Rakhmetov, who sleeps
on a bed of nails and eats huge quantities of beef to toughen himself for the
struggles ahead, as the prototype of the professional revolutionary; one can
easily imagine him operating the guillotine in 1794. In light of Chernyshevskii’s
admiration for the Jacobins, and for Robespierre in particular, it seems reason-
able to suggest that, in his mind, irrespective of their differences in appearance
and personality, Robespierre was a French Rakhmetov, and Rakhmetov a
Russian Robespierre.¹⁵

¹¹ V. I. Lenin, What is to be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement (New York, 1969); Adam
B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual, Personal and Political History of the Triumph of Communism
in Russia (New York, 1965), p. 167.
¹² Shlapentokh, French Revolution in Russian Intellectual Life, p. 128.
¹³ E. G. Plimak and V. G. Khoros, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia i revoliutsionnaia traditsiia v
Rossii’. In Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik: stat’i i materialy po istorii Frantsii 1989 (Moscow, 1989),
pp. 222–72, p. 243.
¹⁴ Nikolai Valentinov, The Early Years of Lenin (Ann Arbor MI, 1969), p. 128; S. G. Stakhevich,
‘Sredi politicheskykh prestupnikov’, in V. Ye. Vatsuro, ed., N. G. Chernyshevskii v vospominanii
sovremennikov (Moscow, 1982), p. 336, cited in Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 31.
¹⁵ That the Jacobins, along with several others prominent in the French Revolution, were the first in
Europe to consider revolution their profession would seem to corroborate this particular analogy.
R. R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton NJ, 1971),
p. 20.
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Chernyshevskii’s contemporary and fellow revolutionary, Dmitrii Pisarev,

viewed the French Revolution with a degree of detachment of which Cherny-
shevskii was incapable. The achievements of the revolution, as Pisarev enumerated
them, were considerable: ending feudalism, redistributing land equitably, and
introducing ‘bourgeois rights’.¹⁶ Neither the Thermidorians nor Napoleon vitiated
these salubrious effects significantly. But the revolution should have gone further,
and the reason it did not Pisarev ascribed to a failure of leadership. Lafayette,
Mirabeau, and Barnave, in his jaundiced opinion, were hypocrites promising to
serve the French people while enacting legislation, such as the Loi le Chapelier of
1791, passed by the National Assembly in 1791, that, by abolishing the guilds of
merchants and artisans, severely restricted their rights.¹⁷ The Jacobins, after they
came to power, certainly did the best they could. Robespierre was an especially
effective spokesman for what they favoured. But because the French people
remained apolitical and apathetic, he lacked popular support, and in the summer
of 1794, dangerously unprotected politically, he suffered a martyr’s death.¹⁸ In
Pisarev’s words, ‘the poverty of the French people, and as a consequence, the
poverty of the French government, formed the basis, directly or obliquely, for the
tragic events of the French Revolution’.¹⁹ As Pisarev imagined it, the revolution
was a limited one because its original leaders and the people they claimed to lead
suffered from personal failings—hypocrisy in the case of the former, apathy in the
case of the latter—that ensured that the Jacobins, the only leaders of the revolution
who deserved to lead it, were unable to do so for more than a very limited time.
Russian populists, like Russian revolutionaries generally in the late nineteenth
century, radicalized what they understood to be the meaning and the lessons of
the French Revolution. But the populists were especially insistent that the revolu-
tion was predominantly an urban affair and that the industrial capitalism it
(supposedly) fostered was harmful to peasants everywhere, not just in Russia
and in France, destroying all that was admirable in their unique culture and way
of life. For that reason the French Revolution had to be handled carefully. In the
propagandistic possibilities of its central events, the French Revolution was unsur-
passed by any other European revolution. Many populists casually referred to the
Schlusselberg Fortress in St Petersburg, where many of them were incarcerated,
as ‘the Russian Bastille’.²⁰ Like their predecessors, these Russian revolutionaries,

¹⁶ D. I. Pisarev, ‘Doklad o Genrikhe Geine’, in D. I. Pisarev, Sochineniia (St Petersburg, 1867),

vol. IV, p. 71; Plimak and Khoros, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia i revoliutsionnaia traditsiia v
Rossii’, p. 246.
¹⁷ D. I. Pisarev, ‘Istoricheskie eskizy’, Russkoe slovo: zhurnal literaturno-politicheskii, no. 2, sect. 1
(January 1864): pp. 32, 39.
¹⁸ Ibid., p. 22. ¹⁹ Ibid., p. 56.
²⁰ Instead of seeking the fortress’s destruction, N. N. Morozov, who was confined there for twenty
years, wanted it preserved as a symbol of tsarist repression. In 1917 a rampaging mob, probably
cognizant of its functional resemblance to the Bastille, tore it down. Richard Stites, Revolutionary
Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989), p. 67.
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both in Russia and in emigration in Western Europe, read the works of French
historians of the revolution such as Louis Blanc; according to O. V. Aptekman,
Russian populists knew enough from their reading about ‘Robespierre, Danton,
and Marat’ to recognize that uncritical praise for their achievements obscured their
undeniable defects, which included the application of otherwise laudable prin-
ciples in ways that harmed the very people whose interests they claimed so loudly
to represent.²¹ One Populist, I. I. Mainov, even went so far as to claim audaciously,
after stating that ‘we were raised on the teachings of the French Revolution’, that
he and the revolutionaries in his circle knew these teachings better than the French
did.²² For other revolutionaries it was not the ideas and ideologies of the revolution
that made it attractive, but the personal qualities of its principal actors. To students
in Kiev professing allegiance to the virtues they saw in peasants and the peasant
commune, the ideas and objectives of Mirabeau and Robespierre—how they were
similar, how they were different, and whether or not they were relevant to Russia a
century later—were unimportant; what they were drawn to was their bravery and
commitment to principle. Nor were these students terribly interested, when they
were looking to the revolution for inspiration, in distinguishing winners from
losers; the Kievans admired Desmoulins and Danton just as much as they did
Saint-Just.²³ For that reason the centenary of the revolution in 1889 was cause
in Russian revolutionary circles for celebration and affirmations of solidarity with
the French people. Even revolutionaries exiled to Siberia tried to send them a
congratulatory message.²⁴
But these same revolutionaries remained cognizant that France and Russia were
different, that the Romanovs, with few exceptions, were more repressive and
hostile to change than the Bourbons, and that in any event the French Revolution
simply did not go far enough for it to serve as a precedent for what Russian
revolutionaries intended in their own country. Russian populists, in particular,
because they believed that the legacy of the French Revolution included industrial
capitalism, which they loathed but thought Russia could avoid if its peasant
communes became the principal institution of governance, generally qualified
their admiration for the revolution. While some populists, in particular the
followers of Nicholas Chaikovskii, hoped that any zemskii sobor (Council of the
Land) peasants established would resemble the National Assembly in France,
most populists coupled praise for the achievements of the revolution with a

²¹ Itenberg, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, pp. 106, 240. The example Aptekman cites to
support his contention is that the Jacobins’ perfectly proper commitment to ending all ‘monopolies’
in France caused them simultaneously to oppose the formation of guilds for urban artisans, which in
the Jacobins’ unfortunate estimation by their mere existence somehow stifled political freedom.
O. V. Aptekman, ‘Pis’mo k byvshim tovarishcham (8 December 1879)’, Chernyi peredel, no. 1
(16 January 1880): p. 125.
²² Saratovets [I. I. Mainov], quoted in Itenberg, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, p. 212.
²³ Ibid., p. 110. ²⁴ Ibid., pp. 212–13.
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recognition of its insufficiency and even, from their perspective as Russians, its
irrelevance.²⁵ The French Revolution stressed political freedom; the populists
considered economic freedom more essential. The French Revolution was carried
out in towns and cities, leaving the peasantry as passive beneficiaries of its
benevolence; the populists considered peasants the agents of their own liberation.
And in contrast to the role the populists believed the revolution played in
stimulating industrial capitalism in France, the revolution they intended in Russia
would avoid it.
Among the conclusions the populists drew from the French Revolution was
that without economic freedom, political freedom was not only worthless, but
actually conducive to dictatorship and tyranny. Nikolai Mikhailovskii, who was
perhaps the archetypical populist, expressed this conviction succinctly:
The Great French Revolution did not lead Europe to the Promised Land of
Brotherhood, Equality, and Freedom. Rather, the constitutional regime it created
delivered political authority to the bourgeoisie, which used the political freedom
it possessed to oppress the people economically.²⁶

Chernyi Peredel, a loose organization of populists that rejected terrorism in favour

of mass agitation among the peasantry, shared Mikhailovskii’s belief that the
political freedom the Revolution provided was illusory, at least under the Jacobins.
Pavel Axelrod, who before converting to Marxism was a populist and a member of
Chernyi Peredel, wrote in 1878 that Robespierre was an idealist who, by central-
izing political power excessively, became a tyrant.²⁷ Five years later, he went
further, arguing that while the revolution deserved praise for ending feudalism,
which oppressed peasants more than it did any other class, its rhetoric about
assuaging the masses’ suffering was meaningless because the revolution was
driven by a class, the bourgeoisie, the urban identity of which rendered it oblivious
to the French people as a whole. Representing little more than itself, by the early
1790s the bourgeoisie had become an oppressive force, the Committee of Public
Safety its principal instrument.²⁸ But Russian Jacobins like Pëtr Tkachev were no
better than the French originals. In his memoirs Axelrod condemned Tkachev and
his followers—who ‘loved to cite Robespierre and Saint-Just and with pride called
themselves “Jacobins” ’—for making ‘the merciless elimination of enemies the
alpha and omega of revolutionary politics’.²⁹

²⁵ P. A. Kropotkin, Zapiski revoliutsionera (Moscow, 1966), p. 280. Kropotkin himself analogized

the assembly to the consultative body Alexander II agreed to on the day of his assassination. Ibid.,
p. 391.
²⁶ Quoted in Itenberg, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, p. 129.
²⁷ Abraham Ascher, Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism (Cambridge MA, 1972),
pp. 35–9.
²⁸ P. B. Axelrod, ‘Sotsializm i melkaia burzhuaziia’, Vestnik narodnoi voli, no. 1 (1883): p. 163.
²⁹ P. B. Axelrod, Perezhitoe i peredumannoe (Berlin, 1923), p. 197.
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Like other Russian populists, Pëtr Lavrov believed that the French Revolution
transcended its geographical and temporal limits. But Lavrov was the only one
who considered the lessons of the revolution relevant irrespective of whether one
admired the revolution, condemned it, admired it while cautioning against its
mistakes and failures, or considered it largely irrelevant. The French Revolution
had a message for everyone. For Lavrov himself the French Revolution was more
than something the French began and that Russians like himself would finish—
although it was certainly that. On one occasion he repeated the reigning ortho-
doxy in revolutionary circles that while the French Revolution was mostly a
political revolution, and thus incapable of achieving the social justice that was
ostensibly one of its principal objectives, in Russia revolutionaries would bring
about an economic transformation; Lavrov made clear how essential this trans-
formation was by including in his description the requirement that it be ‘com-
plete’.³⁰ For Lavrov the French Revolution was really part of a larger phenomenon
both temporally and geographically—part of a veritable Age of Revolution that
included not only European revolutions but the American Revolution as well.³¹
That said, Lavrov honed in on the French Revolution as the most relevant of
these revolutions—and his evaluation of it was decidedly mixed. Prior to the
emergence of the Jacobins, the revolution met with his qualified approval: though
more political than economic, it at least had popular support. But the Jacobins
introduced an element of ambiguity, and after taking power they rendered the
revolution untenable. No longer was it, nor could it ever again become, a ben-
evolent and progressive phenomenon. In both 1874 and 1876 Lavrov expressed
his objections indirectly, by invoking Tkachev, almost an exact contemporary of
his who, unlike Lavrov and the populists, preferred conspiracy to mass propa-
ganda and agitation as the means by which to rouse the peasantry to revolution.
Tkachev and his supporters, several Russian populists wrote pejoratively, were
‘Jacobin-socialists’—a sobriquet suggesting that while Tkachev’s objectives went
beyond those of the French Revolution, the means he chose to achieve them
emanated from the revolution generally, and from the Jacobins specifically.³²
What the Jacobins created in France was ‘a revolutionary dictatorship of a
minority’, and Tkachev, by emulating them, would bring the same thing to
Russia.³³ Such a dictatorship, he wrote, would be inherently exploitative, and by
its nature could not be anything else. For the Russian revolutionary movement,
Lavrov insisted, Russian Jacobinism, as he and others termed it, was an alluring

³⁰ P. L. [Lavrov], ‘Zametki o novykh knigakh’, Vestnik narodnaia volia, no. 3 (1884): p. 17.
³¹ By considering the French Revolution one component of a larger, transatlantic phenomenon,
Lavrov adumbrated by nearly a century the thesis R. R. Palmer advanced in The Age of Democratic
Revolution, 2 vols (Princeton NJ, 1959–64).
³² P. L. Lavrov, ‘Rol’ naroda i rol’ intelligentsii’, Vpered’, no. 34 (1 June 1876): p. 318.
³³ P. L. Lavrov, ‘Russkoi sotsial’no-revoliutsionnoi molodezhi po povodu broshiury “Zadachi
revoliutsionnoi propagandy v Rossii (1874)” ’, in P. L. Lavrov, Izbrannye sochineniia no sotsial’no-
politicheskie temy v vos’mi tomakh (Moscow, 1934), vol. III, p. 360.
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but ultimately disastrous cul-de-sac, a dangerous diversion from the task of

making a mass revolution. To Tkachev’s protestations that conspiracy would
yield to mass politics once the peasants had been properly radicalized—a claim
that prefigured Lenin’s after being attacked in 1903 and 1904 by many of his fellow
socialists as a Russian Robespierre—Lavrov responded with disbelief. The Russian
Jacobins, he wrote in 1876, might lead what initially would be a broad coalition,
but once they had seized power they would jettison their allies and rule dictatori-
ally. The result would be something very different from the worker’s socialism the
Russian Jacobins said they favoured.³⁴
To be sure, Lavrov changed his mind in the early 1880s about the efficacy of
conspiracy. The political terrorism he had previously rejected he now considered
morally admissible. But the reason for his reappraisal was tactical, not political or
philosophical. The mass agitation he had long advocated had simply yielded
unimpressive results. Should circumstances change, he would happily realign
means and ends to conform to the scenario he had previously conjured of mass
agitation producing a mass revolution.³⁵ Moreover, nothing in Lavrov’s tactical
improvisations caused him to change his original view of the French Revolution as
a partially positive and progressive phenomenon that provided political freedom,
but because of the Jacobins’ penchant for authoritarianism, did not provide
economic freedom.³⁶
According to Pëtr Kropotkin, who with Bakunin was the most prominent
exemplar of Russian anarchism, the French Revolution accomplished little for
the class that needed it most: French peasants may even have been worse off as a
result of it. But he considered the revolution significant in so many other ways that
he wrote an entire history of it.³⁷ In this work and in others, Kropotkin interpreted
the revolution in a way that was consistent with both his hostility to centralized
authority and his belief, which he shared with the populists, that the peasantry was
the repository of moral virtue in every society it inhabited. But it was in his
writings on the French Revolution that he stated most clearly his belief that being
a peasant was more a matter of temperament and inclination than of where one
lived and the kind of work one performed. In fact, in the revolution it was often
hard to distinguish the urban poor—the sans-culottes and les enragés—from the
peasantry in their desires, needs, and aspirations.
In Kropotkin’s estimation, the French Revolution was ‘above all a peasant
insurrection, a movement of the people to regain possession of the land and to
free it from the feudal obligations which burdened it’.³⁸ Despite their urban

³⁴ Lavrov, ‘Rol’ naroda i rol’ intelligentsii’, p. 318.

³⁵ P. L. Lavrov, Vzgliad ha proshedshee i nastoiashchee russkago sotsializma (St Petersburg, 1906),
especially pp. 26–7. The essay was first published in 1883 in Kalendar’ Narodnoi Voli.
³⁶ See, e.g. Lavrov, ‘Zametki o novykh knigakh’, p. 17.
³⁷ P. A. Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution 1789–1793 (New York, 1909).
³⁸ Ibid., p. 97.
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surroundings, the lower classes in Paris and other towns and cities in France were
sufficiently similar to the peasantry to lend it the support it needed to force an
otherwise unyielding and recalcitrant urban middle class to abolish feudalism in
France. In fact, these ‘urban peasants’ even established an institution, the Paris
Commune, to ensure that the middle class did not repudiate the reforms it
promised to carry out. To Kropotkin the Commune was the urban equivalent of
the peasant commune in Russia and thus would have prevented the emergence in
France of the hypertrophied state Kropotkin’s anarchism considered conducive to
tyranny.³⁹ But once the objective of eliminating feudalism had been achieved, the
middle classes either dropped out of politics, rejected any further radicalization of
the revolution, or supported leaders like the Girondins and the Jacobins who
remained true to their class interests, selfishly betraying the French people while
fighting one another for political supremacy.⁴⁰ In this endeavour the Jacobins
proved more competent, and beginning in 1793 they ruled France illegitimately as
a politically centralized dictatorship. In that way a revolution committed initially
to social and economic equality and the decentralization of political power ended
with neither of these objectives achieved.⁴¹
For Kropotkin the French Revolution was more praiseworthy for what it
promised than for what it delivered. Its aspirations were more laudable than its
results. With that in mind, he could write, as he did in his history of the
revolution, that the French Revolution served the legitimate function of elimin-
ating old, anachronistic economic relationships while failing to make permanent
more progressive ones.⁴² Not surprisingly, Kropotkin seriously minimized the
September Massacres of 1792 while claiming simultaneously that the Paris Com-
mune should not be blamed for them.⁴³ But while largely absolving the peasants
and townspeople who drove the revolution of responsibility for its crimes and
moral transgressions, Kropotkin strongly criticized virtually all of its leaders,
thereby implying that the mere act of leading a revolution—which required the
centralization of political authority—was itself morally corrupting, and would
cause the revolution eventually to repudiate many, or even all, of its presumably
laudable objectives. Excepting the proto-communist Jacques Roux and the Jacobin
Marat, whom Kropotkin called ‘the people’s most devoted friend’, none of the
principal personages of the revolution escaped his wrath: the Girondins, because
of their passivity and moderation, were crypto-royalists; for falsely proclaiming
themselves ardent tribunes of the people, the Jacobins were not much better.⁴⁴

³⁹ Ibid., pp. 180–1. ⁴⁰ Ibid., pp. 258, 263–4, 273.

⁴¹ Kropotkin reiterated his condemnation of the Jacobins in an article on anarchism he contributed
to the Encyclopedia Britannica, reprinted in Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other
Writings, edited by Marshall S. Shatz (New York, 1995), pp. 237–8.
⁴² Kropotkin, Great French Revolution, p. 97. ⁴³ Ibid., p. 298.
⁴⁴ Ibid., pp. 450, 484–92; Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, pp. 53, 59. Kropotkin may have
preferred Marat to the other Jacobins because he was murdered before the Jacobin Terror gained
momentum.
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Jacques Hébert, whose radicalism one would think sufficient to gain Kropotkin’s
approval, he nonetheless dismissed as too easygoing in temperament to be
effective, while even Babeuf, whose communism was surely no less genuine than
Roux’s, was in reality a crypto-authoritarian who preferred conspiracy to mass
action not just as a political necessity but as a matter of principle.⁴⁵
Kropotkin lived to see the October Revolution, which only confirmed his view
of the corruptibility of its ostensible precursor in France. Indeed, in Kropotkin’s
mind the evils of the two revolutions were remarkably similar, although the
Russian one, by ‘striking deeper into the soul of Russia, into the hearts and
minds [of the Russian people]’ than its counterpart did in France, had far less
to recommend it.⁴⁶ That the French Revolution left all sorts of pressing social
issues unresolved should not blind one, as Kropotkin admitted not long after the
Bolsheviks took power in Russia, to its very real and lasting achievements. In place
of the feudalism it rightfully destroyed, it introduced to Europe and the world the
concept and the practice of legal equality and representative government. By
contrast the October Revolution lacked a spiritual dimension, principally because
its economic materialism had produced among its leaders a selfish individualism
that was already generating tyranny. In fact, the regime the Bolsheviks had created
reminded Kropotkin, in the last years of his life, of what he had once called ‘the
Jacobin endeavor of Babeuf ’—a formulation that linked together the actors in the
French Revolution he despised the most: the Jacobins for using the power they
possessed to create a dictatorship, and Babeuf, who lacked power, for resorting to
conspiracy to obtain it.⁴⁷
In spite of the vitriol Kropotkin directed at the Bolsheviks, Lenin’s respect
for the Russian anarchist surprisingly remained intact. He always considered
Kropotkin’s history of the French Revolution ‘remarkable’, and sometime between
1917 and 1921 asked and received his permission to publish it, which the Soviet
government did.⁴⁸ Given Lenin’s penchant for reserving his harshest rhetoric for
critics who attacked him from the left, his exclusion of Kropotkin, in this respect,
was remarkable. According to his secretary, V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, the reason was
that, for all his disagreements with the old anarchist, Lenin thought the latter’s
history of the French Revolution would ‘enlighten the masses’.⁴⁹ Bonch-Bruevich
may not be the most reliable witness in this particular instance, but whatever the
reason, Lenin’s forbearance would be more than compensated by criticism of
Kropotkin in the Soviet Union that continued well into the 1960s, when the Soviet

⁴⁵ Kropotkin, Great French Revolution, pp. 491, 501.

⁴⁶ Quoted in Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (Garden City NY, 1923), p. 155.
⁴⁷ Roger S. Baldwin, ed., Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets (New York, 1927), p. 254.
⁴⁸ V. M. Dalin, ‘K istorii izucheniia Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii v SSSR’. In Frantsuzskii ezhe-
godnik: stat’i i materialy po istorii Frantsii 1989 (Moscow, 1989), p. 106.
⁴⁹ V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, Izbrannye sochineniia: Vospominaniia V. I. Lenine 1917–1924 gg. (Moscow,
1963), vol. III, p. 405.
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historian V. G. Revunenkov took issue with Kropotkin’s characterization of les

enragés as both anarchist and communist in their ideology, arguing that while they
qualified as communists, they could hardly be considered anarchists.⁵⁰

* * *
Prior to the Bolsheviks, virtually all revolutionaries in Russia believed, not
implausibly given the predominantly agrarian nature of its population, that the
autocracy would be destroyed in a cataclysmic conflagration in which peasants
played the dominant role. But beginning in the late 1870s, after revolutionaries
earlier in the decade had failed to convince peasants that their needs could not be
satisfied unless they became revolutionaries themselves and acted as the agents of
their own liberation, disagreement over tactics emerged. Some continued to
dispense propaganda among the peasants. Others, including the chernoperedel’tsy,
who soon would become Marxists, drew from the peasants’ apathy the conclusion
that Russian workers were far more likely than peasants to see revolution as the
only solution to their own oppression, and that any workers’ revolution should
be made by workers themselves—not by professional revolutionaries like
Robespierre, Marat, and Danton, all of whom in 1880 they condemned as frauds
only pretending to care about the French people.⁵¹ Still others advocated terrorism
as the only tactic that could incite a peasant revolution. By killing persons in
positions of authority, the terrorists would demonstrate the government’s weak-
ness, which would cause the peasants finally to revolt. The principal organization
that, beginning in the late 1870s, actually practised terrorism was a group num-
bering at no time more than 500 members and active supporters. It called itself,
misleadingly, the Narodnaia Volia (The People’s Will). At first it limited its targets
to government officials it considered sadistic and cruel. But when peasants
remained inert, it attacked officials indiscriminately. And when that did not
achieve its objective, the group targeted the ultimate source of the oppression it
decried—Tsar Alexander II himself. On 1 March 1881, it succeeded in killing him.
The role of the French Revolution in the genesis of all of this was more complex
than one might imagine. There was no equivalent in the revolution to the
terrorism the narodovol’tsy practised. The Jacobins, when they killed people, did
so while in power and in control of the state, and for that reason what they did is
best referred to as ‘terror’.⁵² The narodovol’tsy, by contrast, did what they did as

⁵⁰ Revunenkov, Marksizm i problema iakobinskoi diktatury, p. 72. In 1923 Max Eastman criticized
Kropotkin for suggesting that the origins of the Soviet Union, which Eastman called ‘the world-
shattering Communist experiment’, were traceable to Babeuf, whose failed attempts at revolution
Eastman dismissed as a ‘petty fiasco’: Max Eastman, ‘Jacobinism and Bolshevism’, Queen’s Quarterly
31 (1923): p. 73.
⁵¹ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 37.
⁵² One of the few acts of terrorism in the French Revolution was Charlotte Corday’s murder of
Marat on 13 July 1793. What many Russian revolutionaries did not know, or chose to ignore, about the
murder was that the assassin was a Girondin disenchanted with Marat’s justification of terror, not a
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enemies of the government, and calling it ‘terrorism’ distinguishes it from ‘terror’,

while also making clear that the Jacobins and the narodovol’tsy shared the
objective of striking fear in all those who did not die or suffer in the killings
they carried out. The purpose of both terror and terrorism, as the words them-
selves suggest, is not to kill, but to terrorize sufficiently so that those who remain
alive do what the terrorists want.
Russian revolutionaries generally did not distinguish terror from terrorism, and
therefore drew analogies between the Jacobin Terror and Russian revolutionary
terrorism. For many of them the purpose of the analogy was a positive one. To
justify the former was to justify the latter. Vera Figner, herself a narodovolets, once
compared Alexander Mikhailov, one of the leaders of Narodnaia Volia, and for
whom she felt genuine admiration, to Robespierre.⁵³ On another occasion, shortly
after Mikhailov’s arrest in 1880, she expressed regret that ‘the narrow limits of
Russian life do not allow us to deploy our forces on a large scale and to play the
outstanding role in history that Robespierre did in revolutionary France in the
eighteenth century’.⁵⁴ It was true that Figner changed her mind and sought to
distance Narodnaia Volia from the Jacobins after the assassination of Alexander
II, which resulted in the arrest and execution of the leading narodovol’tsy and the
virtual disintegration of the organization as a whole:
[We] never called ourselves Jacobins. At no time among us were there speeches
on the imposition of the will of the minority over the majority, or about
instituting revolutionary socialist and political reforms that were based on
Jacobin theory.⁵⁵

Of course it was entirely possible that Figner still admired the Jacobins for the
personal qualities they revealed while acknowledging that the tactics they used
were conducive to authoritarianism and elitism.
Some narodovol’tsy rendered a mixed verdict. N. I. Kibalchich, whose specialty
in the organization was the preparation of explosives, credited the Convention,
when the Jacobins controlled it, for expropriating nobles’ land, but he criticized it

royalist or counter-revolutionary, and that the moral and political polarity many claimed implicit in the
murder was nonexistent. In Russia many revolutionaries analogized Vera Zasulich’s attempted murder
of the mayor of St Petersburg in 1878 to Corday’s killing Marat even though the mayor and Marat were
at opposite ends of the political spectrum. That the analogy was drawn anyway showed the importance
the French Revolution played in how events in Russia that were relevant to it were conceptualized. Jay
Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography (Stanford CA, 1983), p. 43.

⁵³ V. N. Figner, Zapechatlennyi trud (Moscow, 1932), vol. I, p. 172.

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 194.
⁵⁵ Ibid., pp. 163–4. The letter itself, in its tone and content, was far from conciliatory. It threatened
future acts of violence against the monarchy, and included a demand for amnesty for revolutionaries
convicted of political crimes, and a convocation of representatives of the Russian people ‘to examine the
existing framework of social and governmental life, and to remodel it in accordance with the people’s
wishes’: ‘Letter of the Revolutionary Committee to Alexander III (1881)’, in Readings in Modern European
History, edited by James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard (Boston MA, 1909), vol. II, p. 367.
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for transferring the land to the bourgeoisie, rather than to the masses.⁵⁶ Others
condemned the Jacobins, inside and outside the Convention, entirely. To Lev
Tikhomirov Jacobinism at least in Russia, was ‘befouled by idle chatter’—a
pejorative that nonetheless failed to capture Tikhomirov’s more serious and
considered criticism of the Jacobins in France, who he believed were intent on
transforming the country far more than he considered necessary, and as a result
retained power long after the point at which they should have relinquished it.
In short, the Jacobins did too much and took too long to do it. But the narodo-
vol’tsy, Tikhomirov assured his readers, would be different. They would transfer
immediately whatever power they had acquired by overthrowing the monarchy to
a zemskii sobor, thereby avoiding the ‘a native despotism’ that for Tikhomirov was
the Russian equivalent of Jacobinism. In Tikhomirov’s opinion the narodovol’tsy
were actually the antithesis of the Jacobins, and for that reason their accepting the
appellation or even just not rejecting it would only give credence to false and
pernicious charges of despotism.⁵⁷ Ironically, Tikhomirov himself would be
upbraided by Nicholas Morozov, also a narodovolets, for his ‘Jacobin’ proclivities.⁵⁸
Other Russian revolutionaries of Figner’s generation not only shared her
admiration for the Jacobins as individuals. They also did not have the qualms
she had about their ruling dictatorially and their using terror to ensure that their
dictatorship endured. Sergei Kravchinskii, who in St Petersburg in 1878 stabbed to
death in broad daylight the chief of the police force that hunted down revolution-
aries, said once that he regretted the reluctance of Russian terrorists to recognize
their resemblance, of which he was immensely proud in his own case, to ‘the men
of 1789 and 1793’.⁵⁹ It was obvious to him that the Executive Committee of
Narodnaia Volia resembled the organizations the Jacobins had earlier established;
presumably these included both the Jacobin Clubs and the Committee of Public
Safety. But it was the Jacobins’ exemplary energy and willpower, more than
anything else, that, in Kravchinskii’s opinion, explained their triumphs over
their enemies.⁶⁰ Moreover, Kravchinskii was not the only Russian terrorist to
believe this. Maria Oshanina, who served on the executive committee, stated that
the disintegration of Narodnaia Volia in the late 1880s was especially regrettable
because by that time all of its leaders, however much their numbers had dimin-
ished due to earlier arrests, were effectively Jacobins.⁶¹

⁵⁶ ‘A. Doroshenko’, ‘Politicheskaia revoliutsiia i ekonomicheskii vopros’. Narodnaia volia

(5 February 1881), quoted in Itenberg, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, p. 132.
⁵⁷ ‘Pis’mo Izpolitel’nogo Komiteta “Narodnoi voli” zagranichnym tovarishcham’, in S. M. Volk,
Revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo: 70-x godov xix veka (Moscow/Leningrad, 1965), vol. II, pp. 320–1.
⁵⁸ Olga Liubatovich, ‘Dalekoe i nedavnee: vospominaniia iz zhizni revoliutsionerov 1878–81 gg.’
Byloe, no. 6 (1906): p. 122.
⁵⁹ ‘Otvet S. M. Kravchinskogo na pis’mo ispolnitel’nogo komiteta Narodnoi voli (March 1882)’, in
Volk, Revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo, vol. II, p. 345.
⁶⁰ Itenberg, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, p. 109.
⁶¹ Yarmolinsky, Roots of Revolution, p. 300.
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For all the similarities many narodovol’tsy saw between themselves and the
Jacobins, the Russian revolutionary for whom the resemblance seemed most
obvious—as much to adversaries seeking grounds for condemning him as to
supporters seeking reasons to praise him—was Pëtr Tkachev.⁶² To his critics,
Tkachev’s Jacobinism was informed by a brutality and ruthlessness not seen in
Europe—not even in Russia—since the original Jacobins practised terror nearly a
century earlier. Pavel Axelrod’s enmity did not diminish with the passage of time,
and in his memoirs, which were written nearly a half-century after the events
concerning Tkachev had occurred, he flagellated Tkachev and his supporters
for seeing ‘the elimination of enemies of the revolution . . . as the highest obligation
of any revolutionary organization. There is merit in Alexrod’s denunciation. In
1866, at the age of 22, Tkachev made clear his belief that the only way an
oppressive and powerful regime could be toppled was by revolutionaries practis-
ing conspiracy and then overthrowing it in an urban insurrection bearing all the
hallmarks of a coup d’état.⁶³ By 1869 he had decided that the French Revolution
was the most relevant and obvious example of this, and made clear his belief that
Russians who shared his hatred of the monarchy should imitate the Jacobins and
create conspiratorial circles in which power and authority were concentrated in an
elite of professional revolutionaries. But only if this elite had no compunctions
about using force and violence would it have any chance of success. Here, too,
the precedent of the French Revolution and the Jacobins was instructive:
‘In France the destruction of the monarchy required the application of terror by
the bourgeoisie [because] as a general rule, no radical social reforms have come
about without blood-letting and the use of force.’⁶⁴ Appealing to the larger body
politic, Tkachev believed, would be counterproductive—which was why he
excluded Babeuf from the litany of French revolutionaries he admired: while
practising conspiracy, Babeuf nonetheless tried to publicize the activities of his
co-conspirators for the purpose of gaining popular support, which to Tkachev was
a waste of time. Preferable in that respect were Jacobins like Robespierre, whose
asceticism and selflessness found their highest expression in conspiracy.⁶⁵ For
Tkachev the revolutionary tactics he chose were as much a reflection of his
temperament and personality as of his goals, and if these tactics were appropriate
to the external circumstances that pertained at any particular time, success was
not only possible, but highly likely. Revolutionaries should adopt tactics consistent

⁶² Tkachev’s most recent biographer in the West makes clear in the subtitle of her book that
she considers him to have been a Jacobin: Deborah Hardy, Petr Tkachev, the Critic as Jacobin (Seattle
WA, 1977).
⁶³ P. N. Tkachev, ‘Retsenziia no knigu A. Rokhau, “Istoriia Frantsii ot nizverzheniia Napoleona I do
vosstanovleniia imperii (1866)” ’, Axelrod, Perezhitoe i peredmmannoe, p. 197; in P. N. Tkachev,
Izbrannye sochineniia na sotsial’no-politicheskie temy, edited by B. F. Kozmin (Moscow, 1932–6),
vol. V, pp. 190–6.
⁶⁴ P. N. Tkachev, ‘Zhenskii vopros’, ibid., vol. I, p. 428.
⁶⁵ Hardy, Petr Tkachev, p. 265, 274.
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with their personalities, and the clear implication in virtually all of Tkachev’s
many references to the French Revolution was that by marrying these two
variables the Jacobins greatly facilitated the task of taking power. For that reason,
Tkachev could admire Robespierre and the other members of the Committee of
Public Safety while, as a socialist, considering their programmatic objectives
insufficiently radical to meet the needs of the masses. In short, Tkachev and his
followers should adopt the Jacobins’ tactics, but in the pursuit of goals well beyond
the Jacobins’ objectives.
Because Russian peasants, in Tkachev’s opinion, were hopelessly conservative,
and incapable of taking positive action to improve their lives, the professional
revolutionaries he considered necessary to take power in Russia would have
to hold onto it afterwards, probably for several generations. In Tkachev’s case,
there was reason to believe that this ‘conspiracy in power’, like the one that ruled
the Soviet Union until its implosion in 1991, would never relinquish power
voluntarily.⁶⁶ But at least in his own mind, Tkachev’s conspiratorial politics had
an expiration date, however vague he may have been about the conditions that
would have to exist for it to end. Moreover, as a scenario of revolution applied to
Russia in the late nineteenth century, Tkachev’s penchant for conspiracy con-
formed to the empirical realities—not just the peasants’ inability, for the foresee-
able future, to make a revolution on their own, but also the government’s
prohibition of politics of any kind in Russia, thereby necessitating underground
parties organized hierarchically with conspiracy as their modus operandi. For
both of these reasons, any party that was attentive to the peasants’ needs could
come to power only by means of a coup d’état. In Tkachev’s scenario the peasants
would be the beneficiaries but not the instrument of their own emancipation—a
scenario Lenin and the Bolsheviks would adhere to in 1917, their only alteration
being the substitution of the proletariat for the peasantry.⁶⁷
Notwithstanding this scenario’s similarity to what the Bolsheviks would actu-
ally do several decades later, Tkachev’s claim and that of others in the revolution-
ary movement in the late nineteenth century that it closely replicated the French
Revolution was clearly incorrect. For one thing, revolutionaries like Tkachev
believed the Jacobins represented a definable and recognizable class, or subclass,
of the French population: they were either bourgeois or petit-bourgeois or a
precursor of sorts of the proletariat. But it seems more accurate to define the
Jacobins on political grounds, and thus to consider the clubs they established
vehicles for bringing together like-minded men (and some women) who sought
for France more or less the same thing irrespective of their economic class or

⁶⁶ ‘A conspiracy in power’ is precisely how Martin Malia characterized the Soviet system in The
Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York, 1994), p. 115.
⁶⁷ Hardy’s evaluation of Tkachev’s views on these issues, in Petr Tkachev, is similar to those
expressed here. See especially pp. 186–203, 258–77, and 309–14.
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social category.⁶⁸ For what it says about politics in France, the term ‘Jacobin’ has
genuine utility; as a means of distinguishing social classes in France, it confuses
more than it clarifies. This, at least, is what happened in Russia. But Russian
revolutionaries misunderstood what Jacobinism was and how the Jacobins func-
tioned prior to their taking power in an even more fundamental way. The
conspiracy the Jacobins practised existed only after they took power in France.
Before then their meetings were usually ‘above ground’, their organization, such as
it was, surprisingly decentralized, and most Jacobins did not feel themselves
bound by any particular notion of ‘party discipline’.⁶⁹ The first Jacobin Clubs
were established in 1789 and 1790 so that delegates to the Estates General, and to
the National Assembly that succeeded it could mingle openly and exchange ideas
and opinions.⁷⁰ And once the original club had inspired the creation of others, no
single club, either in Paris or anywhere else in the country, dictated tactics and
strategy to all the others. The mere fact that by the time the Jacobins lost power
there were thousands of clubs dispersed all over France meant that, in the absence
of modern means of transportation and communication, the strict centralization
of authority Tkachev believed existed both among the Jacobins and in how they
ruled France did not exist and in fact was impossible.⁷¹
To be sure, there were similarities between the terror the Jacobins practised and
the terrorism of Narodnaia Volia. Both tactics were adopted reluctantly, thereby
demonstrating that terror in France and terrorism in Russia were more a product
of circumstance than reflective of some preexisting psychological deficiency.⁷² In
other words, the psychosis and paranoia that are often thought to be conducive to
terror and terrorism were more the consequence of these tactics than the reason
for them. Vera Zasulich, who won notoriety and acclaim in Europe as well as in
Russia for shooting at (but not killing) the governor of St Petersburg in 1878,
noted perceptively some years later that, as a weapon of political struggle, terror-
ism was too divisive, too exhausting, and too convenient an excuse for govern-
ment repression to be effective in actually bringing the work of government to a
standstill. Even worse, in her opinion, was that it would remain an alluring
alternative to the tedious and difficult, but in the long run more consequential

⁶⁸ Isser Woloch, Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement under the Directory (Princeton NJ,
1970), pp. 11–14.
⁶⁹ Crane Brinton, The Jacobins: An Essay in the New History (New York, 1930), pp. 10–45; Palmer,
Age of Democratic Revolution, vol. II: p. 30; Michael L. Kennedy, ‘The Best and the Worst of Times: The
Jacobin Clubs from October 1791 to June 2, 1793’, Journal of Modern History 56, no. 4 (1984):
pp. 635–36, p. 663.
⁷⁰ Doyle, History of the French Revolution, p. 142.
⁷¹ Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 (Cambridge, 2013), p. 265.
⁷² After denying that the Jacobins were ‘born conspirators’, Patrice Higonnet goes so far as to claim,
in the next sentence, that they were ‘confirmed parliamentary democrats, however confusedly they
expressed that feeling’: Patrice Higonnet, Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revo-
lution (Cambridge MA, 1998), p. 330.
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work of generating revolutionary consciousness among the peasants. Finally, there

was also the fact that, practised long enough, terrorism would become a psycho-
logical obsession.⁷³
But the terror the Jacobins practised was so different from the terrorism of
Russian revolutionaries as to render any analogy between them a cause for
confusion. The Jacobins, of course, inflicted terror with the full force of the state
mobilized on behalf of this objective, and justified it on the grounds, however
dubious by the time the Committee of Public Safety was created, that they
represented the people of France. For the Jacobins, the principle of popular
sovereignty was one they accepted and believed themselves to personify even
when they violated it. By contrast the Russian terrorists viewed terrorism as a
tactic of last resort, rather than as something intrinsic to Russian national history
and culture, after propaganda and agitation among the peasants had produced
such paltry results; some peasants even turned in revolutionaries in their midst to
the tsarist police.⁷⁴ In addition, the Jacobins, unlike the Russian terrorists, were
not socialists, and their nationalism had no equivalent, after Pavel Pestel, in the
Russian revolutionary movement. Finally, one must bear in mind before imputing
similarities between the Jacobins and the Russian terrorists that the Jacobins’
objectives were considerably more ambitious, inasmuch as they considered the
revolution they came to lead in 1793 nothing less than the first step in the
liberation of all people, a process fully legitimized by the vision driving it of a
General Will like Rousseau’s determining how everyone should live once all the
enemies of the Jacobins had been vanquished.⁷⁵
However, Tkachev was not entirely wrong in believing that ‘the history of
France provide[d] us with extremely edifying lessons’.⁷⁶ Taking his own advice,
he examined French history after the French Revolution and found in it a much
more edifying analogue than Robespierre and the Jacobins, whom he wrongly
imagined acted conspiratorially before taking power to achieve objectives he
wrongly thought were consistent with his own peasant socialism. This new
analogue was Louis-August Blanqui, who shared Tkachev’s penchant for conspir-
acy while suffering for it far more than Tkachev ever did, spending practically his
entire adult life in prison. As it happened, Tkachev learned of Blanqui and his

⁷³ Vera Zasulich, ‘Kar’era nigilista’, Sotsial-demokrat, no. 4 (1892), in Vera Zasulich, Sbornik statei
(St Petersburg, 1907), vol. II, pp. 111–47.
⁷⁴ The only success Russian revolutionaries enjoyed in that respect was in 1876 in the Chigirin
District near Kiev, when they forged a manifesto ostensibly signed by the tsar calling on peasants to
seize nobles’ lands. Some peasants followed the manifesto’s instruction, but the hoax was finally
revealed and peasant agitation ceased. Bergman, Vera Zasulich, pp. 24–5.
⁷⁵ Stanley Hoffmann stresses Rousseau’s paternity in this respect in A Note on ‘The French
Revolution and the Language of Violence’, Daedalus: Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences 116, no. 2 (Spring 1987): pp. 152–3, as did the Soviet historian, A. Z. Manfred, in
‘O prirode iakobinskoi vlasti’, Voprosy istorii, no. 5 (1969): p. 100.
⁷⁶ Tkachev, ‘Retsenziia no knigu A. Rokhau’, p. 194.
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followers from Gaspar Mikhail Turskii, a wealthy Pole who supported Russian
revolutionaries financially while occasionally participating in their activities.⁷⁷
Although the two men apparently never met, Tkachev nonetheless was among
those who eulogized the venerable French revolutionary at his funeral in 1881,
calling him ‘our inspiration and our guide in the great art of conspiracy’.⁷⁸ To an
extent, Tkachev’s admiration was misplaced. The Blanquists, far more than
Blanqui himself, preferred conspiracy to mass action. Not only did Blanqui’s serial
prison terms obviously preclude political activities of any kind, but on the rare
occasions when he had the opportunity to participate in politics, as he did in the
Revolution of 1830, Blanqui opted not for conspiracy but to fight on barricades
Parisians had erected to defend themselves against government troops. And in
1848, after delivering a fiery speech to Parisian radicals, he marched with them to
the National Assembly for the purpose of overthrowing it; only in 1861 was he
arrested for conspiracy per se. Ironically it was the Blanquists, not Blanqui
himself, who practised the conspiratorial politics with which the latter’s name is
still inextricably linked.⁷⁹
Tkachev’s affinity for the larger phenomenon of Blanquism went well beyond
tactics. His objectives and those of Blanqui and the Blanquists were remarkably
similar: they all rejected modernity in favour of a pre-industrial, pre-capitalist
society, based in Tkachev’s case on the peasant commune, the ostensible socialism
of which was very different from that of the socialist parties emerging in Western
Europe in the late nineteenth century. In fact, one can easily imagine the Russian
refusing the invitation extended to Blanqui in 1880 by Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-
in-law, to assist in drawing up a programme for the recently established French
Workers’ Party—an invitation the French revolutionary, by now exhausted and
near death from years of incarceration, refused.⁸⁰ But there was more to Blanqui’s
refusal than that. While a clear precursor of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in his
preference for conspiracies because the masses lacked the revolutionary con-
sciousness to make a revolution on their own, Blanqui’s politics were actually
(paraphrasing Patrick Hutton) ‘a politics of remembrance’, galvanized by a desire
not to accelerate the course of history forward, as the Bolsheviks hoped to do, but
to reverse it for the purpose of recreating in France the original vision of the
French Revolution of a nation of small property owners oblivious to the tempta-
tions, and the dangers, of industrial capitalism.⁸¹

* * *

⁷⁷ Hardy, Petr Tkachev, pp. 249–50.

⁷⁸ Quoted in Michael Karpovich, ‘A Forerunner of Lenin: P. N. Tkachev’, Review of Politics 6, no. 3
(July 1944): p. 341.
⁷⁹ Patrick H. Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: The Blanquists in French Politics,
1864–1893 (Berkeley CA, 1981), pp. 18, 20, 21.
⁸⁰ Ibid., p. 10. ⁸¹ Ibid., p. 11.
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The Russian revolutionary movement left behind a varied aggregation of opinions

on the French Revolution. The only aspect of the revolution on which there was
unanimity was, however, an important one, namely that France and eventually all
of humanity were better off for it having happened. Everyone agreed that the
ancien régime of the Bourbons was intolerable. It was brutal and oppressive,
capricious and irrational in governance, and utterly antediluvian in the way
political power was transferred by dynastic succession. Nothing about it was
morally redeeming, and the sooner it was disposed of, the better France and the
rest of Europe would be.
Beyond this foundational belief, the opinions of Russian revolutionaries varied
considerably—just as they did among conservatives opposed to the French Revo-
lution and among liberals, for whom it was always, at best, a mixed blessing. While
there was a general consensus on the left in Russia that the revolutionary govern-
ments prior to the Jacobins had much to commend them even though they did not
remedy all the injustices for which the Bourbons were responsible, this consensus
broke down over the meaning and moral value of the Jacobin dictatorship. That it
did so is not surprising. The Jacobins did many things, all of them consequential
and all of them subject to varying interpretations even among those who agreed
that the revolution before the Jacobins continued it—or betrayed it, as their critics
contended—was predominantly or entirely a good thing. The Jacobins were
simultaneously administrators of the most populous country in Europe who
mobilized much of its manpower and resources to fight its enemies abroad;
practical politicians who had to protect their sinecures in a new political envir-
onment lacking established rules of procedure; and finally ideologues possessed of
a vision encompassing nothing less than the transformation of France and the rest
of Europe, and eventually of humanity itself.
But none of the Russian revolutionaries who saw in the French Revolution a
source of legitimacy, inspiration, or guidance in how a revolution in Russia should
be carried out, found in it a philosophy of history that ensured its inevitability.
Indeed, the individuals who, in their multifarious ideologies, made the French
Revolution never equated what was desirable with what was inevitable. The
revolution occurred, it did what it did, but things could easily have turned out
differently; one could even imagine circumstances in which it would never have
happened at all, or at a time so far in the future as to be virtually unrecognizable.
Applied to Russia, which in the nineteenth century seemed condemned to
monarchy and autocracy in perpetuity, any scenario of revolution, and of history
itself, that lacked the component of inevitability seemed little more than a counsel
of despair. If the revolution in France had never happened, or if the beneficial
changes it brought about had actually been deleterious, then revolutionaries in
Russia, once they recognized how formidable was the autocracy’s commitment to
preserving the status quo, might have eschewed politics entirely and taken up a
different profession. Some, in fact, did precisely that. (The narodovol’tsy and
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perhaps Bakunin, in his belief that a peasant conflagration was just a match or two
short of ignition, were the proverbial exceptions that proved the rule.) But help
was on the way. Russian revolutionaries in the late nineteenth century were the
recipients of a deus ex machina, in the form of an ideology that considered not just
revolution, but history itself, to be governed by laws the universality and infalli-
bility of which essentially enabled its adherents to believe that what they wanted
was destined to occur irrespective of how unlikely that might seem at any
particular time. The ideology, of course, was Marxism. By rendering the French
Revolution inevitable, Marxism seemed to make a Russian Revolution inevitable
as well. In fact, Russian revolutionaries might even tweak it sufficiently so that
they would not only make a revolution, but also enjoy its benefits, in the form of
socialism or something close to it, within their lifetime. If the arguments, impres-
sions, and interpretations that the Russian revolutionary movement collectively
offered about the French Revolution provided the context in which the Bolsheviks
approached it, the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the prism
through which they viewed it.
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3
The Marxist Inheritance of the French
Revolution

For Marx, the French Revolution was the Great French Revolution. The adjective
he appended to it was meant to signify that it was more than what Marxist
ideology, taken literally, considered it—the means by which the bourgeoisie
gained the political power it was entitled to by its rapidly growing prosperity, in
contrast to the aristocracy, which previously dominated the bourgeoisie and the
classes below the bourgeoisie through the political instrument of the monarchy.
The French Revolution, in other words, adjusted the political balance of power in
France to align it with new and different economic realities. But the French
Revolution was more than that. It did not merely ratify politically the economic
dominance of the bourgeoisie, thus enabling the emergence in France of industrial
capitalism. It was also, and far more importantly, an avatar of modernity itself, a
seminal event in history when man first rationalized his environment through the
application of reason, thereby creating the preconditions for the socialism and
communism that would follow it. Of course one wonders how Marx could be so
sure his analysis of the past and his predictions of the future were correct. The
reason—though Marx never stated this explicitly—is that he had inherited the
rationalism the French Revolution had itself inherited from the Enlightenment;
the result was that in some sense the revolution gave Marx the means for analysing
it. But whether Marx’s rationalism came from the Enlightenment directly or was
mediated through the French Revolution was irrelevant. What mattered was that
the analysis Marx produced of the revolution—with the emendations and clarifi-
cations Engels provided—was always intentionally grounded in evidence and
defensible by reason.
But Marx was also driven by impulses alien to his ostensibly omnipresent
rationality to look to France, and in particular to Paris, as the epicentre of the
first great political transformation in modern history. Marx might not have shared
completely in the confluence of reason and emotion implicit in Engels’ estimation
of the French capital as ‘the head and the heart of the world’.¹ But he was well
aware that Paris was where, beginning in 1789, large numbers of people, in Martin
Malia’s felicitous phrase, ‘violated the immemorially inviolable’, and in doing so

¹ Quoted in Wilson, To the Finland Station, p. 203.

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began the process, made possible by the endless transmutations of the Marxist
dialectic, of bringing a qualitatively different kind of human existence not only to
France, but to Europe and, in due course, to the rest of the world.² For all of his
claims to rationality, for all the pretensions implicit in his calling his doctrine
‘scientific socialism’ rather than Marxism, Marx was attracted to, and profoundly
impressed by, the heroic, the grandiose, and the valiant—by what human beings
could accomplish through the application of will, determination, and courage.
History in general, and the French Revolution in particular, were propelled not
just by impersonal economic forces, but by the best of what humanity was capable
of, albeit within the limits these forces imposed. From the storming of the Bastille
to the military successes its armies achieved against the major powers of Europe,
the French Revolution was defined, as Marx perceived it, as much by the virtues of
the individuals who carried it out as by the particular constellation of economic
forces that pertained in France when the revolution began.
In short, Marx apotheosized the French Revolution for the same reason
Edmund Burke loathed it—because it was the result of human agency that caused
an entire country—or at least a significant percentage of its inhabitants—to reject
the accumulated experiences, traditions, and patterns of life that had existed for
centuries. Although industrial capitalism emerged in England long before it did in
France, the English Revolution and the Glorious Revolution of the seventeenth
century that followed it forty years later could hardly hold a candle to the French
Revolution in their dramatic potential. It was for this reason, more than the
scholarship he produced demonstrating that everything about it was predeter-
mined and the result of impersonal economic forces, that caused Marx to pro-
claim the French Revolution the first revolution in history to look forward to the
distant future, rather than backward to an idealized and semi-mythical past. Early
in his life the French Revolution captured Marx’s imagination, and despite the
criticisms his investigation of its actual history produced—of which there were
many—he never doubted its centrality in the modern history of humanity. It was
not for nothing that Marx usually ended his letters to Engels with the French word
salut—an obvious short-form for the Jacobin greeting ‘Salut et Fraternité’.³
In the 1840s Marx intended to write a history of the Convention.⁴ In 1845,
enlarging the project to a history of the revolution as a whole, he even promised

² Malia, History’s Locomotives, p. 196.

³ Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York, 2013), p. 535. Of the
approximately 400 books in Marx’s library, some 200 concerned France and fifty were histories of
the French Revolution and the Revolution of 1830. Maximilien Rubel, ‘The French Revolution and the
Education of the Young Marx’, Diogenes (Winter 1989): p. 23. In explaining Marx’s affinity for France
and the French Revolution, one should also bear in mind that his father, on at least one occasion, sang
La Marseillaise, the French revolutionary anthem, and favoured retention of Napoleonic law in the
Rhineland, where, in the town of Trier, Marx had been born. Sperber, Karl Marx, pp. 27–28, 34.
⁴ Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class, p. 4.
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a publisher in Brussels to deliver a manuscript shortly.⁵ By that time, two years

after arriving in Paris, where he hoped to produce a newspaper congenial to the
large community of German radical émigrés already living there, he had studied
French history intensively. Apparently Guizot’s history of the revolution, in which
the urban middle class played the dominant role, especially impressed him.⁶ But
more pressing projects took precedence. In the end, Marx never wrote a single
article, much less a book, on the revolution per se. The reason he failed to do so
may be because, in contrast to the 1848 Revolutions and the Paris Commune, both
of which Marx lived through and believed might be followed soon by a more
successful revolution if he could explain their failure convincingly, the French
Revolution ended before Marx had even been born, and could thus be analysed
without the immediacy that pervades The Class Struggles in France (on the 1848
Revolution) and The Civil War in France (on the Paris Commune). Nevertheless,
Marx wrote enough about the revolution for his readers to infer his opinions of it.
Indeed, it seems not at all an exaggeration to say, as many historians have argued
irrespective of their political and ideological predilections, that the French Revo-
lution played a significant role, in the words of one Soviet historian, ‘in formu-
lating the theory of scientific communism’.⁷ François Furet, who was the antithesis
of Soviet historians politically, argued essentially the same thing.⁸
Marx’s first allusion to the French Revolution was in 1842, in an article on
censorship in Prussia in which he condemned, without explanation, ‘the laws of
terrorism Robespierre proclaimed and enforced’.⁹ These apparently so incensed
him that he said it was even worse than Peter the Great ordering the Cossacks to
shave their beards.¹⁰ Whether Marx meant by this that the revolution as a whole
was deficient was not clear, although in another article written in the same year he
located in the National Assembly, which of course preceded the Jacobin dictator-
ship, the principal virtue of the revolution, which he said consisted of ‘the
liberation of the new spirit from old forms’.¹¹ In 1843 Engels was equally com-
plimentary, stating simply that the French Revolution marked ‘the beginning of
democracy in Europe’ and that Babeuf ’s communism, which Engels implied was
the prevailing ideology of the revolution as a whole, was worthy of the working
class’s consideration and respect.¹²

⁵ Rubel, ‘The French Revolution’, p. 25.

⁶ François Furet, Marx and the French Revolution (Chicago IL, 1988), p. 34.
⁷ Dzhedzhula, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia burzhuaznaia revoliutsiia, p. 10.
⁸ Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, passim.
⁹ Karl Marx, ‘Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction’, in Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York, 1975), vol. I, p. 119.
¹⁰ Ibid., p. 120. That Marx, who was a notorious Russophobe, made a comparison in which
something Russian was the less repugnant underscored the extent to which, at this point in his life,
he found the Jacobin Terror objectionable.
¹¹ Karl Marx, ‘The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law’, ibid., p. 205.
¹² Quoted in Manfred, Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, p. 379.
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The next time Marx mentioned the French Revolution, also in 1843, was in a
letter to Arnold Ruge.¹³ The revolution, he wrote, ‘restored man to his estate’, but
he neglected to explain what he meant by this.¹⁴ All one can reasonably infer is
that he considered revolution a positive phenomenon in properly adjusting man’s
relationship to his economic and social environment. But in his essay on ‘The
Jewish Question’, written in 1844, Marx elaborated on this cryptic comment,
arguing that the French Revolution entailed a partial liberation of the individual
from private, egoistic concerns, thereby enabling him to become a real citizen,
which to Marx meant that he was now a genuine member of his community. The
political freedom the revolution promised was not an end in itself, but a means to
a kind of universal liberation, which only a revolution could make possible
because conditions in France had not advanced sufficiently to allow it.¹⁵ It is not
clear whether Marx meant that these circumstances were peculiar to France in
the late eighteenth century or instead were the result of external forces that were
European or possibly even global in scope. What is clear in the essay is that the
beneficial changes Marx believed the revolution would produce were incomplete.
True, the revolution enabled the emergence of a ‘civil society’ independent of
politics. But the French people, albeit to a much less extent than before the
revolution, remained egoistic.¹⁶ (The role of the Jews in all of this—which explains
the essay’s title—was to serve as the archetypical egoists whose obsession with self-
aggrandizement at the expense of the larger society made them the most obvious
and odious personification of capitalism.) Even the Declaration of the Rights of
Man, which Marx rightly considered the paradigmatic document of the French
Revolution, came in for criticism. But instead of condemning it (and the revolu-
tion itself) for subordinating the individual’s welfare to that of the nation, Marx
argued that its harmful effect consisted precisely in perpetuating the individual’s
isolation, which robbed him of his humanity.¹⁷ As he emphasized in other writings
from the 1840s, the French Revolution conferred liberty on only a small segment
of the population, so that, for everyone to enjoy its benefits, there had to be
additional changes not just in the material circumstances in which the vast majority
of the French people lived, but also in their internal psychological state, which Marx
believed reflected ‘alienation’ just as destructive of the individual personality as
material impoverishment and economic exploitation.¹⁸
But compared to Germany, the ancestral home of both Marx and Engels,
France was the avatar of history’s progress. Having already experienced one

¹³ ‘Letter, Marx to Arnold Ruge (May 1843)’, in Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, pp. 103–4.
¹⁴ Ibid., p. 104; Karl Marx, ‘Letters from the “Franco-German Yearbooks” ’, in Karl Marx, Early
Writings (New York, 1975), p. 201.
¹⁵ Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, ibid., pp. 227–33. ¹⁶ Ibid., p. 229.
¹⁷ Ibid., p. 230.
¹⁸ Karl Marx, ‘Critical Notes on the Article “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian” ’,
in Marx, Early Writings, p. 418.
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revolution, it might soon experience another, more radical one, probably before a
revolution like the first one in France occurred in Germany. Marx’s contempt for
his homeland was real, and deeply felt. In his aforementioned letter to Ruge, Marx
wrote that the German states embodied ‘the philistine world’ in its most complete
incarnation, causing it ‘to lag behind the French Revolution’.¹⁹ And in his intro-
duction to his critique of Hegel’s philosophy, written in 1843 and published in
1844, Marx went even further, acknowledging that conditions in the German
states were presently much like those in France in 1789—but then rejecting the
plausible inference that they were on the verge of a revolution because the German
bourgeoisie was an imperfect facsimile of its French equivalent, and therefore
constitutionally incapable of initiating a revolution resembling that which had
begun in France a half-century earlier.²⁰ This Franco-German dichotomy Marx
first posited in the early 1840s would widen after the failure of revolutions in both
France and the German states in 1848, and contribute significantly to his evolving
assessment of the revolutionary potential of both the French and the Germans for
the remainder of his life. A reflection more of Marx’s scepticism about the ability
of the German bourgeoisie to make a bourgeois revolution than of his perhaps
excessive confidence in the ability of the French proletariat to make a proletarian
revolution, the antithesis Marx claimed to see between the two peoples seems
inexplicable in terms of Marxist ideology, and for that reason was perhaps a
reflection of impulses more visceral than rational in his psyche.
In the 1840s Marx laid out the basic tenets of Marxist ideology, incorporating
into the ideological edifice he was constructing the ideas he considered its building
blocks. This brought the French Revolution into sharper focus, so that Marx
gained a better sense of both its achievements and its failures. In The Holy Family,
published in 1845 and co-authored with Engels, Marx stressed the assumption
implicit in the philosophical materialism he had determined was the foundational
principle of all human existence: that ideas are basically a reflection of the material
circumstances in which people live and that, standing alone, ‘[they] cannot carry
out anything at all’.²¹ The French Revolution was still the political phenomenon
Marx had suggested it was in earlier references, but now he unequivocally
considered it the result of economic and social factors, rather than of ideas. The
latter, he now seemed to be saying, drove history forward only to the extent that

¹⁹ ‘Marx to Ruge’, in Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, p. 104.

²⁰ Karl Marx, Introduction to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in
Marx, Early Writings, pp. 245, 254–6.
²¹ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno
Bauer and Company, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. IV, p. 119. For convenience sake and
because Marx dominated Engels personally and intellectually, only Marx will be considered the author
in the analysis that follows, and in all subsequent instances in which an article or book to which both
men contributed is discussed. The advantage Engels enjoyed over Marx, in terms of expanding their
readership, was that the former reduced to simplicity the complexity and opaqueness of the latter’s
often convoluted prose.
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they were consistent with the economic relationships that existed at any particular
time. Ideas that in some way strengthened classes that were already economically
dominant—such as the aristocracy under feudalism or factory owners under
capitalism—were themselves influential; conversely, if the existing order was one
in which the dominant class was declining, the most powerful ideas were those
that served the interests of the class that was destined to destroy it, such as the
bourgeoisie prior to the overthrow of the aristocracy or, at a later stage of history,
the proletariat prior to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
As it happened, Marx and Engels wrote The Holy Family as a rebuttal to the
views Bruno Bauer had expressed earlier, in which Bauer cited the French
Revolution to prove the autonomy and centrality of ideas in causing significant
and lasting changes in the lives of ordinary people. The French Revolution, in
Bauer’s opinion, failed to achieve all of its objectives because the French people
did not fully share the ideas of its leaders.²² Marx disagreed. By essentially seeking
to recreate what they understood to be the morality and the institutions of
antiquity, the French revolutionaries who failed to retain power, namely the
Jacobins, did so because they acted in ways that the prevailing economic condi-
tions would not permit. The result, which Marx considered inevitable, was the
reaction that began on 9 Thermidor.
Marx’s conclusion was consistent with what he had written previously. But it
also suggested something radically new in Marx’s thinking, namely that the
French Revolution, while still a bourgeois revolution, was one in which the
bourgeoisie, after starting the revolution in 1789, betrayed it four years later,
when it falsely concluded that its interests actually coincided with the class it
had originally defeated, namely the landed nobility (by which Marx meant the
aristocracy). In short, the bourgeoisie began the French Revolution but was unable
to finish it. As a result, in 1793, the Jacobins took power from the bourgeoisie and
tried to continue what the bourgeoisie had begun. But the Jacobins, after essen-
tially finishing the revolution, tried to extend it beyond the limits history had
imposed on it, and for that reason lost power in 1794, little more than a year after
acquiring it. In purely personal terms, the Jacobins were far superior to the
bourgeoisie as a whole, and to distinguish them from it Marx often called them
‘petit-bourgeois’, which in his particular lexicon suggested particular personal
qualities he admired, such as courage and ruthlessness, as well as impersonal
factors such as occupation and income.
As a result, the Jacobins, in Marx’s taxonomy of the classes involved in the
French Revolution, comprised a segment of the bourgeoisie but differed from it
simultaneously. In fact, it was the Jacobins’ differences with the bourgeoisie that
enabled them, for a brief period in the winter of 1793–4, to act in ways consistent

²² Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, p. 134.

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with the economic interests of classes and categories of the population below
them. Whether these included a genuine proletariat is not clear from a reading of
The Holy Family. Whatever the case, the Jacobins lost power not long after gaining
it, at which point the French Revolution, according to Marx, came to an end.
Nevertheless, the revolution, considered as a whole, was not a failure. The
Jacobins’ successor in 1794 was not the reactionary class in 1789, namely the
aristocracy, but rather the reactionary class in 1793, namely the bourgeoisie,
whose domination of French politics would continue well into the nineteenth
century. In the French Revolution the bourgeoisie—even though it did not deserve
to do so—triumphed over ‘the pen of Marat, the guillotine of the Terror, and the
sword of Napoleon’, and in 1830 over ‘the crucifix and the blue blood of the
Bourbons’.²³ In short, the Jacobins attempted too much too quickly, and paid
the price for this politically, and in the case of their leadership, with their lives.
According to Marx, the reason the Jacobins overextended themselves was that
they were wrong to think that will and perseverance, by themselves, could
eliminate social pathologies such as poverty and pauperism. What they ignored
were the immovable limits imposed by the economic realities in France in the late
eighteenth century.²⁴ These forces could not prevent the Jacobins from acquiring
power, but they were sufficient to preclude their retaining it. Not even terror could
save them. In an article in November 1847, Marx phrased his objections in the
form of a warning of what would happen if the proletariat—like the Jacobins in
the French Revolution—should somehow take power from the bourgeoisie before
the objective conditions necessary for its doing so existed. In that event:
its victory will be only temporary, only an element in the service of the bourgeois
revolution itself, as in the year 1794, as long as in the course of history, in its
‘movement’, those material conditions have not been created which make neces-
sary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and therefore also the
definitive overthrow of political bourgeois domination.²⁵

In purely personal terms, the Jacobins were hardly likely to inspire confidence in
those who shared their political objectives. In the same article, Marx sneeringly
dismissed them as ‘bloodhounds’ and ‘monsters’.²⁶ But what sealed their fate
politically was the particular configuration of impersonal economic forces they
were powerless to change in any meaningful way.
For all of its world-historical significance as the first bourgeois revolution, the
French Revolution, for Marx, was also a cautionary tale about the perils of trying

²³ Marx and Engels, Holy Family, p. 81.

²⁴ Marx, ‘Critical Notes on the Article’, in Marx, Early Writings, pp. 409–11.
²⁵ Karl Marx, ‘Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality: A Contribution to German Cultural History
Contra Karl Heizen’, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. VI, p. 319. Viewed retrospectively, Marx in
1847 was condemning what Lenin and the Bolsheviks would do exactly seventy years later.
²⁶ Ibid., p. 335.
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to accelerate the course of history.²⁷ But this was not the only lesson Marx drew
from the revolution prior to his witnessing (and, to a limited extent, his partici-
pating in) the revolutions that began in Western Europe in 1848, barely three
months after his derogation of the Jacobins. In these, the earliest years of his life as
a revolutionary actor and analyst, Marx found much to admire in the French
Revolution, even if he felt himself obliged to write about its failures because he
thought his doing so would help future proletarian revolutions to succeed. He
never denied the revolution’s success in ridding France of feudalism, nor did
he ever minimize the significance of this. The year 1789 marked the beginning of a
new stage in history, and given Marx’s low opinion of his fellow Germans, it seems
reasonable to suppose that, when he and Engels wrote the manifesto of the
Communist League—which, once published, would be known as The Communist
Manifesto—he fully expected France to be the site of the next great revolution in
history, in which the bourgeoisie, the victor in the first French revolution despite

²⁷ Marx’s contention that the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution has not gone unchal-
lenged by historians of France. See, for example, Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French
Revolution (Cambridge, 1964); and George V. Taylor, ‘Non-Capitalist Wealth and the Origins of the
French Revolution’, American Historical Review 72 (1967): pp. 469–96. In their view, the groups that
initiated, carried out, and benefitted from the French Revolution had little interest in the kind of
entrepreneurial, industrial capitalism that a genuine bourgeoisie would be apt to pursue. By giving land
to peasants, jobs to the bureaucracy, and the biens nationaux at bargain rates to persons of proprietary
wealth, the revolution retarded rather than accelerated industrialization. Other historians have argued,
contrary to Marxist orthodoxy, that the revolution enabled the bourgeoisie and the nobility to fuse,
creating the order of notables from which the French political elite would be drawn for much of the
nineteenth century. Doyle, History of the French Revolution, p. 405; Colin Lucas, ‘Nobles, Bourgeois,
and the Origins of the French Revolution’, Past and Present, no. 60 (August 1973): pp. 84–126; and
Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989), pp. 116–17, 520. In
the same work (pp. 184–5, 787) Schama even argues that the French Revolution, far from a catalyst of
economic modernization, was actually an impediment to it, while Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, in The
French Nobility of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 84–116, claims that the first real
capitalists in France were nobles who not only dominated certain industries, such as textiles and
mining, but also were prominent in the development of steam technology and joint-stock companies.
Elizabeth Eisenstein, in ‘Who Intervened in 1788? A Commentary on The Coming of the French
Revolution’, American Historical Review 71 (October 1965): pp. 77–103, criticized the Marxist view of
the French Revolution on different grounds, arguing that class lines broke down in the revolution; as a
result, regional differences were more significant that those based on class, and the growth of literacy
enabled coalitions to form that transcended it. In any event, the whole notion of a bourgeoisie is so
elastic and amorphous that Marx’s using the term analytically generated more confusion than clarity.
Still other historians have argued that much of what is considered the legacy of the French Revolution,
such as the centralization and rationalization of government, actually began under the Old Regime and
that these and other changes were the result not of impersonal forces but of policies initiated by the last
Bourbon kings. Doyle, History of the French Revolution, pp. 423–4. Marx’s view of the French
Revolution as ‘bourgeois’ would be reaffirmed, albeit with qualifications for which they would be
strongly criticized by Soviet historians, by Jean Jaurès in the nineteenth century, and by Albert Mathiez,
Georges Lefebvre, and Albert Soboul in the twentieth. Mathiez, for example, was taken to task by
N. M. Lukin, in ‘Al’ber Mat’ez (1874–1932)’, Istorik marksist, vol. 3 (1932): pp. 60–86, for ostensibly
deviating from Marxist orthodoxy even in Mathiez’s essay, Le Bolchevisme et le Jacobinisme (Paris,
1920), in which the French historian praised the Bolsheviks for what he considered their striking
resemblance to the Jacobins. V. G. Revunenkov, in ‘Novoe v izuchenii velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii i
vzgliad V. I. Lenina’, in V. I. Lenin i istoricheskaia nauka, edited by N. A. Zakher and V. V. Makarov
(Moscow, 1969), p. 125, criticized Soboul for claiming that, because the objectives of the sans-culottes
were utopian, they contributed little to the destruction of feudalism.
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its inaction during the Jacobin interregnum, would be the principal loser in the
second one. Industrial capitalism, which Marx believed in 1848 was experiencing
its death throes, in reality was still in its infancy. But Marx could hardly be faulted
for not knowing this, and he welcomed the advent of 1848 convinced that the
proletarian revolutions he believed to be imminent would finish what the French
Revolution had started.

* * *
The conventional wisdom on Marx’s pronouncements on the 1848 Revolution in
France is that it caused him to emphasize the ‘voluntarist’ aspect of his ideology at
the expense of its determinism, causing him to revise upward his opinion of the
French Revolution as a whole, and of the Jacobins and the Terror in particular.
The reason for this is that in a year that initially generated great expectations, only
to destroy them, seemingly completely and for the foreseeable future, his emotions
prevailed over his rational faculties. If, in 1848, Marx’s head told him one thing—
that any proletarian revolution that occurred was bound to fail because capitalism
had not oppressed the proletariat sufficiently for the latter to possess the revolu-
tionary consciousness necessary for a proletarian revolution to succeed—his heart
told him another, namely that seizing power prematurely, as the Jacobins did,
need not have precluded their holding on to it. The fact that the Jacobins were
unable to do so was not inherent in the historical circumstances that pertained in
France in the 1790s. Rather, this was because the Jacobins made mistakes.
In this instance, the conventional wisdom is correct. Marx’s opinion of the
Jacobins improved over the course of the year, as he compared the ongoing
revolution to the earlier one. Increasingly clear to him was the simple fact that
the 1848 Revolution in France followed a course that was practically the exact
opposite of the French Revolution: the 1848 Revolution, over time, became less
radical, while the French Revolution, in its evolution, became more radical. In
addition, the descending trajectory of the former proceeded far more rapidly than
the ascending trajectory of the latter. For this reason, one can trace in Marx’s
writings in 1848 on the revolution unfolding before him expressions of excitement
and anticipation yielding to depression and even occasional despair as the tide
turned against it, first as a result of the events culminating in the June Days, when
(in Marx’s conception of the revolution) the proletariat lost power to the bour-
geoisie, and again in December, when Louis Napoleon was elected president of
France with the support of classes Marx considered retrograde and reactionary.
Remarkably, however, his newfound admiration of the Jacobins remained more or
less constant: his optimism during the first half of 1848 caused him to applaud the
Jacobins for their activism and fearlessness in taking power and dealing severely
with the elements in the population opposing them. In the second half of the year
he still lauded the Jacobins, only now for their (supposedly) conspiratorial tactics
prior to gaining power, and for the degree to which they centralized the government
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and ruled dictatorially afterwards. In short, the Jacobins provided Marx with a
model both for taking power and using it. Indeed, the proletariat’s failure in 1848
was caused precisely by the absence of leaders within its ranks willing and able to
take power—or more precisely to retake power after the crushing defeat it suffered
in the June Days—and to rule the way the Jacobins did a half-century earlier.
What is often forgotten or ignored in all of this is that Marx’s reappraisal of the
Jacobins had started even before the 1848 Revolution began. One suspects that
that was the case because Marx became an actual participant in revolutionary
politics not in 1848, when he established in Cologne a newspaper, the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung (New Rhineland News), for the purpose of inciting a revolu-
tion, but in 1847, when he and Engels agreed to write the manifesto of the
Communist League, which, located for safety’s sake in London, played no role
in any of the revolutions on the European continent that began shortly after its
creation.²⁸ In 1846 Engels had written that Robespierre and the Jacobins actually
represented the proletariat in France, and for that reason were overthrown by the
bourgeoisie.²⁹ And in November 1847, in the same series of articles in which he
criticized the Jacobins for taking power prematurely, Marx also credited them
with completing the process of destroying feudalism in France after the bour-
geoisie shrank from doing so, thereby creating a political vacuum they filled
themselves. In these same articles Marx even justified the terror the Jacobins
employed because by taking power prematurely, they confronted enemies so
numerous and powerful that only the application of force could neutralize them
while the Jacobins finished what the bourgeoisie had begun.³⁰
Marx’s public comments on the Jacobins changed remarkably little over the
course of the year. In an article in Neue Rheinische Zeitung written shortly after the
June Days, he made clear he did not underestimate the seriousness of the defeat the
proletariat had just suffered at the hands of General Cavaignac and the French army,
which he ascribed partly to ‘pedants [rejecting] the old revolutionary tradition of
1793’ as a precedent the proletariat and their leaders should have followed.³¹ In fact,
elsewhere in the same article he broadened his earlier condemnation of the bour-
geoisie, which he now claimed was responsible for Cavaignac’s assault, to include its
earlier incarnations in 1789 and 1830, when, just as in 1848, it ‘retained the class rule,
the slavery of the workers, [and] the bourgeois system’.³² In all three revolutions’
the bourgeoisie—which one would think included the Jacobins—co-opted the
lower classes, and in that respect acted in ways that would have to be considered
reactionary. But in the same month, also in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx again

²⁸ Marx’s and Engels’ activities and peregrinations in these years are described cogently and in detail
in Sperber, Karl Marx, pp. 197–236.
²⁹ Frederick Engels, ‘The Festival of Nations in London’, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. VI, pp. 4–5.
³⁰ Marx, ‘Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality’, ibid., vol. VI, pp. 319, 322–3.
³¹ Karl Marx, ‘The June Revolution’, ibid., vol. VII, p. 147.
³² Marx, ‘The June Revolution’, ibid., vol. VII, p. 147.
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praised the Jacobins, this time to underscore by comparison the timidity of the
Germans in Frankfurt, Prussia, and elsewhere in Germany who were taking steps
Marx considered insufficient to achieve political unification and a successful bour-
geois revolution simultaneously; Marx considered both objectives prerequisites for a
proletarian revolution in all of Germany. The best way to achieve these objectives,
according to Marx, was to repeat the events in France from 1792, when under the
Jacobins the country essentially declared war on the rest of Europe, thereby unifying
it against its external enemies, to 1794, when the highly centralized government the
Jacobins had established the year before ensured the long-term success of the
original revolution and its foremost achievement of ending feudalism.³³ In fact,
Marx expressed the hope that any German republic that was established would be
‘one and indivisible’, which was precisely the slogan the Jacobins had adopted to
defend the republic they had inherited from the Convention in 1793.³⁴ However
dangerous a repetition of the French Revolution might be in France in 1848, in
Germany it was precisely the precedent that should be followed. And among the
lessons of the revolution German radicals should find relevant was that the radic-
alization of policy, the expansion of the revolution geographically, and the central-
ization of political power the Jacobins pursued simultaneously were mutually
reinforcing—until other policies they adopted, most egregiously the suppression
of the Hébertists and other elements to their left politically, weakened them severely
and thereby hastened the Thermidorian reaction.³⁵
Provided it was directed against enemies of the revolution more conservative
than the Jacobins, terror, as a means of ensuring the successful implementation of
policy, was not only morally justified but, in the circumstances that pertained in
France in 1793–4, absolutely essential. Commenting in November 1848 on the
collapse of the revolution in Austria, Marx counselled that ‘there is only one
means by which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody
birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and
that is by revolutionary terror’.³⁶ One month later, Marx praised the Jacobin
Terror, describing it as ‘a plebeian means of eliminating the enemies of the
bourgeoisie, absolutism, feudalism, and philistinism’.³⁷ Significantly, by using
the word ‘plebeian’ to describe it, Marx could distinguish it from the terror the
bourgeoisie had previously employed while acting as the principal agent of the
revolution after it began. But when the bourgeoisie, in 1793, believed, rightly or
wrongly, that it had achieved its objectives, and that advancing the revolution
further was both impossible and inadvisable, power passed to the Jacobins, who, in
their objectives were acting on behalf of the ‘plebeians’, which for Marx and Engels
was an amorphous and elastic social category appropriate in countries like France

³³ Sperber, Karl Marx, pp. 225–6. ³⁴ Ibid., p. 225. ³⁵ Ibid., pp. 225–6.
³⁶ Karl Marx, ‘The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna’, in Marx and Engels, Collected
Works, vol. VII, p. 506.
³⁷ Karl Marx, ‘The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution’, ibid., vol. VIII, p. 161.
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in 1793 where the bourgeoisie has ended feudalism but industrial capitalism has
barely begun.
When Marx first used the term, he stated that he meant by it ‘the proletariat
and the non-bourgeois strata of the middle class’.³⁸ But these could include all
sorts of social categories whose interests, one would think, would rarely coincide,
if ever. Artisans and craftsmen, petty merchants and others who might be
considered members of a petit-bourgeoisie, workers in the first factories, and
even peasants, who by definition had nothing ‘urban’ about them—these all
could be considered ‘plebeian’.³⁹ But according to Marx, despite their obvious
sociological differences, they somehow coalesced to play an active and mostly
positive role in the French Revolution because the bourgeoisie, in 1793, tired of the
obligations imposed on it by history, or simply out of cowardice, yielded political
primacy to the Jacobins, who, acting on behalf of the plebeians, extended the
revolution to its outermost limits, only to exceed them in 1794 and thereby ensure
their own destruction. Indeed, it was because the Jacobins took the revolution
more seriously than anyone else in France that they had to employ the guillotine—
first against reactionary enemies of the revolution, such as the Girondins (and
many Jacobins themselves, most notably Danton) and then against radical ones
like the Hébertists and les enragés who had once supported the Jacobins but had
since come to consider them retrograde and reactionary. In the end, the Jacobins
exaggerated their own power and security and lost both on 9 Thermidor.⁴⁰ But the
Jacobins at least gained power, and thus could finish in France the task of ending
feudalism that the bourgeoisie in Germany, by 1848, had not even begun.⁴¹
Prior to 1848 Marx had written much about the Jacobins, some of which he
repeated in 1848. Prior to 1848, he considered the Jacobins’ losing power inevit-
able; in 1848 he believed it avoidable had the Jacobins made different choices. In
explaining this change, one must bear in mind that, in 1848, his attention was
more on Germany and the German states than on France, so that the principal
comparison he drew throughout the year was not between 1789 and 1848 in

³⁸ Marx, ‘The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution’, ibid., vol. VIII, p. 161.
³⁹ Whether the Jacobins themselves were plebeians or rather members of the petit-bourgeoisie who
acted as the political instrument of the plebeians was a question that especially bedeviled both the
Bolsheviks and Soviet historians, and generated several heated polemics, up to and including the
Gorbachev era. Soviet historians also disagreed, though not as often or with the same degree of
emotion, on who the plebeians actually were and on how they differed—if they differed at all—from
both the Jacobins on the one hand and a genuine proletariat on the other.
⁴⁰ Marx’s emphasis in 1848 on the legitimacy of revolutionary terror, and on the implication that the
Jacobins resorting to it because they possessed the personal qualities necessary to practise it, appealed
profoundly to the Bolsheviks and would be implicit in the panegyrics in which Soviet historians
praised them. A. V. Manfred, for example, quoted with obvious approval Marx’s comment in 1848
that the Jacobins became for him in that year of continental revolution ‘the communists of our day’.
Manfred, Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, p. 388. The constant refrain that the French bourgeoisie
(which included the Girondins) were cowards only accentuated, by contrast, the courage and audacity
of the Jacobins.
⁴¹ Ibid., p. 162.
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France, but between 1789 in France and 1848 in Germany. A typical example was
in an article in July in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, in which he disparaged the
German Revolution of 1848 as a mere ‘parody’ of the French Revolution of
1789.⁴² In essence, Marx was comparing a bourgeois revolution that, within the
limits imposed on it by impersonal historical forces, had more or less succeeded—
even though its success required the intervention of cadres of professional
revolutionaries who did not even represent the class that began the revolution
in the first place—to one that did not. For that reason a second revolution was
required. From the perspective of 1848, the course the French Revolution took
seemed fixed and unchangeable; in Germany the course its (second) revolution
might take was multifarious, though not, to be sure, completely unlimited. It
therefore made sense, in 1848, for Marx to deem the Jacobins’ fall from power
contingent on choices they made, rather than the result of impersonal forces
beyond their control.
In Marx’s exposition of the teleology of the French Revolution—in which the
class that began the revolution was unable to finish it, and for that reason
relinquished power to a coterie of revolutionaries representing very different
categories of the population—much remains unclear. For example, in December
1848, when he could now look back at the events of the year with the benefit of at
least a modicum of hindsight, he wrote the following about the original French
Revolution, obviously in the hope of finding insights relevant to his current
endeavour:
[T]he bourgeoisie was the class that really headed the movement. The proletariat
and the non-bourgeois strata of the middle class had either not yet interests
separate from those of the bourgeoisie or they did not yet constitute independent
classes or class sub-divisions. Therefore, where they opposed the bourgeoisie, as
they did in France in 1793 and 1794, they fought only for the attainment of the
aims of the bourgeoisie, even if not in the matter of the bourgeoisie.⁴³

But while Marx in this passage explained why the Jacobins and their ‘proletarian’
supporters lost power, he left unanswered in his article the question of why—as
opposed to how—they were able to take power in the first place. To answer it, one
had to have more guidance than Marx provided. The most he could muster in that
regard was to advance the argument—mostly by implication rather than openly
and explicitly—that the Girondins, who were the only members of the bourgeoisie
who had any chance of keeping the Jacobins from power, were simply cowards
and thus too irresolute to do what they should have done.

⁴² Karl Marx, ‘The Bill Proposing the Abolition of Feudal Obligations’, in Marx and Engels, Collected
Works, vol. VII, p. 294.
⁴³ Marx, ‘The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution’, ibid., vol. VIII, p. 161. For stylistic reasons I
have altered the translation slightly.
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One is struck, on reading Marx’s comments on the French Revolution while

France was experiencing another revolution a half-century later, by the contrast he
created for his readers between the bourgeoisie in 1848, when it (unfortunately)
succeeded, in the June Days, in wresting control of the revolution from the
proletariat, and the bourgeoisie in 1793, when it (fortunately) relinquished
power to the Jacobins. Could the reason for its action (or lack of it) in the latter
instance have really been just cowardice—which was how Marx usually explained
the passivity of the German bourgeoisie in 1848? Or was the enormity of the task,
given that this was the Great French Revolution, the first genuinely bourgeois
revolution in history, just too much for the bourgeoisie as a class, and that only an
elite of ruthless revolutionaries—like that which Lenin would create in Russia
many years later—could finish the task the bourgeoisie began but could never
end? Or was the French bourgeoisie, or maybe France itself, in some inexplicable
way still not entirely ready for a bourgeois revolution in 1789—in which case the
adjective imputing greatness to the French Revolution that Marx always included
when he mentioned it would be unwarranted? Marx did not say.
Moreover, while in 1848 Marx was clear about what the Jacobins did in the
French Revolution, he never clarified what they were in terms of the class or social
category they belonged to: were they themselves ‘plebeian’ or were they members
of the bourgeoisie who somehow ended up representing a different class entirely?
If the latter, should they be designated as ‘petit-bourgeois’, rather than simply as
bourgeois, because they served to perpetuate, if only for a matter of months, the
interests of classes and categories of the population that were lower than
the bourgeoisie and strongly opposed to it?⁴⁴ Finally, what would be the fate of
the plebeians once the unusual circumstances in which they appeared in France
disappeared? Once again, Marx did not say, and he remained silent on these
questions for the remainder of his life, leaving it to Lenin and the Bolsheviks to
answer them, as it were, on his behalf. But one can speculate that as the product of
a transitional phase in history in which the bourgeoisie has taken power but before
industrial capitalism has developed sufficiently to produce a demographically
dominant proletariat, the plebeians, in the context of Marx’s ideology, would
eventually become members either of the bourgeoisie or of the proletariat.
By the summer of 1849, with his hopes for another revolution seemingly
shattered, Marx left Germany for Paris, and then, two months later, moved to
London, where he and Engels spent the remaining years of their lives. Still, it took
time for Marx’s earlier optimism to disappear completely. In 1850 he and Engels
joined French and German Blanquist émigrés in establishing the Universal League

⁴⁴ Among the Russian Marxists who answered the question Marx evaded was Georgii Plekhanov,
who, while defining the Jacobins as petit-bourgeois and thus a subgroup of the bourgeoisie, claimed
that they nonetheless sought to protect the interests of what was then an embryonic proletariat.
G. V. Plekhanov, ‘Stoletie velikoi revoliutsii (1889)’, in G. V. Plekhanov, Sochineniia, edited by
D. Riazanov, 24 vols (Moscow, 1923–7), vol. IV, pp. 66–7.
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of Revolutionary Communists, which agitated for an immediate revolution transferring

power, at least in Marx’s expectations, to the proletariat.⁴⁵ While Marx now
understood rationally that the proletariat could not possibly overthrow the bour-
geoisie in the foreseeable future, he was simultaneously formulating in his mind a
scenario in which it would. With Engels as co-author, he presented it publicly for
the first time, in March 1850, in his ‘Address to the Central Committee of the
Communist League’, which was distributed to members of the organization both
in London and on the European continent.⁴⁶ One month later, as if in confirm-
ation of his belief in its correctness, he and Engels attended in the British capital a
celebration of Robespierre’s birthday.⁴⁷
In the address, Marx endeavoured to explain why two years earlier the German
Revolution had failed. Perhaps because when he co-wrote the address he was also
writing The Class Struggles in France, a much longer exegesis on what had caused
France’s revolution, also two years earlier, to fail, he barely mentioned the French
Revolution. Understandably more invested emotionally in events in Germany in
1848 than in those in France, Marx put the blame for Germany’s failure squarely
on its ‘liberal bourgeoisie’, singling out for special condemnation its perfidy and
cowardice. To be sure, Marx mentioned the objective conditions that then pre-
vailed, but then continued his ad hominem recriminations.⁴⁸ For any future
German revolution to succeed, both its supporters and its enemies would have
to be different. The segment of the population currently most strongly opposed to a
bourgeois revolution and also most likely to oppose any future one was, paradox-
ically, a segment of the bourgeoisie itself, namely ‘the democratic petit bourgeoisie’,
which Marx had never mentioned or identified as such in any earlier writings, but
now defined as an amalgam of the aforementioned liberal bourgeoisie and other
elements drawn from the petit bourgeoisie.⁴⁹ To prevent these nefarious enemies of
progress from stifling any future revolution, whoever carried it out had to include
among its objectives not just the overthrow of the feudal order that still prevailed in
Germany (but not in France after the French Revolution), but also the destruction
of whatever species of bourgeois or petit bourgeois regime that Marx expected to
succeed it. In this second endeavour—which Marx considered for all intents and
purposes a second revolution—the proletariat would be both its principal agent
and its principal beneficiary. Moreover, this second revolution would follow so
closely upon the first that together they could be considered a single revolution—
a construction remarkably similar to Trotsky’s formulation concerning Russia at

⁴⁵ James Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York, 1980),
p. 283.
⁴⁶ Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, p. 201; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, ‘Address of the
Central Authority to the League’, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. X, pp. 277–87.
⁴⁷ Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, p. 193.
⁴⁸ Marx and Engels, ‘Address of the Central Authority to the League’, pp. 278–9.
⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 279, 287.
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the beginning of the twentieth century and that which Lenin would adopt to
justify the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. In fact, Marx concluded his address
with a stirring call, using the same terminology Trotsky would adopt to elucidate
the correlation of forces and classes he believed would enable a country like
Russia that was just beginning to industrialize to experience a bourgeois revolu-
tion that would morph seamlessly into a proletarian one:
If the German workers are not able to attain power and achieve their own class
interests without completely going through a lengthy revolutionary development,
they can at least know for a certainty this time that the first act of the approaching
revolutionary drama will coincide with the direct victory of their own class in
France and will be very much accelerated by it.
But they themselves must do the utmost to their final victory by making it clear
to themselves what their class interests are, by taking up their position as an
independent party as soon as possible and by not allowing themselves to be
misled for a single moment by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty
bourgeoisie into refraining from the independent organization of the party of the
proletariat. Their battle-cry must be: The Revolution in Permanence.⁵⁰

Especially significant in this scenario Marx envisioned was the role he believed a
future proletarian revolution in France would play in accelerating a bourgeois
revolution in Germany, and thus, indirectly, a proletarian revolution in Germany.
It is, in fact, nothing short of astonishing that, in both Marx’s vision and Trotsky’s, a
bourgeois revolution occurring in one country required a proletarian revolution in
another country (or in Trotsky’s case, in several countries) to succeed. To the extent
that that was the case, neither the bourgeois revolution that came first, nor the
proletarian revolution that would follow it, was self-sufficient. The latter, to succeed,
required the former. But what made what Marx and later Trotsky proposed even
more remarkable in the context of orthodox Marxist ideology was that the two men
envisioned both revolutions, the second just as much as the first, occurring in
countries (Germany for Marx, Russia for Trotsky) where the prerequisites for the
first revolution—not to mention those for the second revolution—were either absent
or just beginning to appear. By the parameters of Marxist ideology, this could never
happen. Revolutions appropriate to economically advanced countries could not
occur, or at least not succeed, in less advanced ones. But the history of European
socialism and communism is filled with instances of hopes and expectations trump-
ing ideologies conceived rationally. This was certainly one of them.
Since his own ideology could not justify what he was advocating in his address,
Marx, once again, looked to the French Revolution for guidance. But since what
he was advocating for Germany was a revolution in which the ultimate benefi-
ciary was the proletariat, rather than the bourgeoisie, which was the principal

⁵⁰ Ibid., pp. 286–7.

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beneficiary of the French Revolution, he had to revise a good deal of what both he
and Engels had previously written about it. In the address to the Communist
League in 1850 on which the two men collaborated, the Jacobins still received
credit for continuing the endeavour the bourgeoisie had begun of destroying
feudalism and the Bourbon monarchy.⁵¹ But once having done that, the Jacobins
stopped. Having completed, or at least having come reasonably close to complet-
ing a bourgeois revolution, the Jacobins could not commence, much less carry to
fruition, a proletarian revolution or even a plebeian one. As a result of his focusing
on this particular aspect of the French Revolution, Marx’s earlier admiration for
the Jacobins for centralizing political power in France diminished, vitiated as it
was by the importance he now placed on the Jacobins’ inability, through no fault
of their own, to use the power they possessed to radicalize the French Revolution
beyond the degree to which they had already radicalized it.
Marx was surely aware when he co-wrote the address that France, in 1793, was
not ready for a proletarian revolution. In fact, in those of his writings after 1848
that did more than merely mention the French Revolution, one sees a recognition
that, for all the changes the revolution brought about both in France and in the
rest of Europe, it was unable to bring history to an end. Only the proletariat, by
means of socializing the means of the production, could do that. The Jacobins, by
contrast, were actually prisoners of the time in which they lived, their choices
limited by the existing configuration of classes. As Marx makes clear in the 1850
Address, the Jacobins were not plebeians, and they certainly were not proletarians.
Rather, they were petit-bourgeois—which explains why they wanted those receiv-
ing large plots of land in the property settlement of the revolution to become a
conservative force politically, supportive of the status quo and impervious to the
continued poverty of those receiving smaller plots of land. One could even infer
from the address that Marx considered the Jacobins personally culpable for the
terror they inflicted, and that the killings he most strongly objected to were those
that took the lives of persons who had suffered most from the Jacobins’ new-found
conservatism.⁵²

⁵¹ Nowhere in the address are the Jacobins cited explicitly. But the authors’ reference to policies
pursued in France in 1793 makes clear that they consider the Jacobins responsible for them. Marx and
Engels, ‘Address of the Central Authority to the League’, p. 285. In notes to a German edition of the
address published in 1885, Engels ‘walked back’ his and Marx’s earlier statements lauding the Jacobins
for centralizing political power by arguing that, while the Convention existed (which is to say, during
the entire period the Jacobins were in power) France was far more decentralized than was generally
imagined. In fact, it bore a strong resemblance to the United States, with its federalism and tradition of
states’ rights. Engels did not use these terms explicitly, but it is clear from the context in which he
mentioned the two countries that the decentralization of power the terms implied was what he had in
mind. Frederick Engels, ‘On the History of the Communist League’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Selected Works (Moscow, 1968), vol. III, pp. 173–90.
⁵² Marx and Engels, ‘Address of the Central Authority to the League’, pp. 284–5. Although Marx
never specifically cited the Jacobins in the address, he was obviously referring to them when praising
‘the petit bourgeois in the French Revolution [who gave] the feudal lands to the peasants as free
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In The Class Struggles in France, Marx’s valedictory to the failed revolution in

that country in 1848, the French Revolution is notable for its virtual absence. The
failure of the 1848 Revolution seemed to tarnish the reputation, and to reduce the
significance, of its supposedly illustrious predecessor. Marx mentioned the earlier
revolution only to demonstrate that even its most enduring achievements could
not prevent its beneficiaries from experiencing degradation and increasing pov-
erty during the half-century that followed it. Far from ensuring the peasants’ well-
being, it actually had the opposite effect: ‘Whereas the Revolution of 1789 began
by shaking the feudal burdens off the peasants’, it was powerless to prevent
prospectively ‘the 1848 Revolution announcing itself with a new tax on the rural
population, in order not to endanger capital and to keep its state machine going’.⁵³
The best thing the French could do, now that the 1848 Revolution had failed so
ignominiously, was not to look backward to 1789, as so many in 1848 had done
with so little to show for it, but to look forward while there was still a chance the
revolution that just ended might resume.
The way Marx phrased his criticism could even be taken as proof that he now
believed drawing historical analogies of any kind harmed the heroic undertaking
he had assumed of showing humanity how to extricate itself from the ethical
morass that was industrial capitalism and guiding it first to socialism and then to
communism. In fact, that was precisely the point he soon made explicit in his next
major work, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written two years later.
‘The social revolution of the nineteenth century’, he wrote, ‘cannot draw its poetry
from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin . . . before it has stripped
off all superstition in regard to the past.’⁵⁴ To be sure, Marx then proceeded to
invoke a historical analogy in explaining Louis Napoleon’s political dominance of
France, namely by comparing him to his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte. Analogizing
the two Bonapartes came naturally to anyone in France in the mid-nineteenth
century with even only a rudimentary knowledge of its history, and Louis
Napoleon shrewdly used to considerable advantage the implication in the analogy
that the nephew was the equal, or near-equal of his illustrious uncle, who by 1848
had become a symbol of France itself. But after invoking the analogy, Marx
quickly rejected it. Louis Napoleon, he stressed, was not an analogue of Napoleon
Bonaparte. Rather, he was a pathetic parody of the revolutionary emperor and
conqueror he was trying so hard to emulate. For all his success in gaining power in
France, Louis was nothing more than a mediocrity lacking the qualities of
leadership necessary to rule a country successfully. Although his lineage had

property’. Ibid., p. 284. While it is true that peasants received land in the revolution before the Jacobins
took power, Marx considered the haute-bourgeoisie, not the petit-bourgeoisie, responsible for this.

⁵³ Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850 (New York, 1964), p. 49.
⁵⁴ Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, 1968), p. 18.
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enabled him to gain power, it could not prevent his losing it, at which point the
inexorable march of history towards proletarian revolution and socialism would
resume. One must bear in mind that for Marx, the phenomenon that was Louis
Napoleon was not supposed to happen in France in the mid-nineteenth century.
Quite apart from his abysmal lack of gravitas in purely personal terms, Louis came
to power not by representing a particular class, but by transcending all classes, and
as Marx himself reluctantly acknowledged in The Eighteenth Brumaire, using the
state he dominated to keep them quiet.⁵⁵ For that reason Marx had to invent a new
term to describe Louis’s unique form of leadership, and the term he came up with
was ‘Bonapartism’.
Still, Marx was too much the student of history, still wedded to the notion that
early events prefigured later ones, to forswear historical analogies entirely. Even
if the analogy between the two Napoleons was non-existent (except in the
negative sense that the later Napoleon was a pale imitation of the earlier one),
other analogies, if they were drawn carefully and correctly, had the potential to
educate, enlighten, and even, in certain instances, inspire. Marx seemed to
recognize intuitively that to revolutionaries seeking the moral and material
improvement of humanity through the creation of a radically new society,
historical analogies, however strained they might be, could nonetheless be
helpful. One could learn from the past irrespective of how little the future will
resemble it. Historical analogies, in short, could be instructive. Even when
incorrect, revolutionaries could learn from them; false analogies could tell
them what not to do. But that did not exhaust their utility. Historical analogies,
Marx wrote, could simultaneously inspire and legitimize. In short, they could
provide revolutionaries with the raw material needed to construct a credible and
compelling mythology that, by explaining their actions simply and clearly, could
legitimize the revolutionary transformation they intended in the eyes of the
masses whose support they needed:
Just when men seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in
creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of
revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their
service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to
present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this
borrowed language.⁵⁶

⁵⁵ Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 123. To be precise, in the same page Marx claimed that Louis, far
from transcending class, in reality represented ‘small-holding peasants’. Elsewhere in the essay he
identified his supporters in towns and cities as ‘lumpenproletarians’, by whom he meant workers
without the political consciousness he expected of an actual proletariat. Ibid., p. 75.
⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 15. Engels reaffirmed his good opinion of history’s relevance to revolutionaries in less
grandiose language in 1852. ‘A well-contested defeat’, he stated in obvious reference to 1848, ‘is a fact of
as much revolutionary importance as an easily-won victory’. Friedrich Engels, Revolution and Counter-
Revolution in Germany in 1848 (London, 1896), p. 96.
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Not surprisingly, Marx went on, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, to draw analogies of
his own. Resurrecting the teleologies he had previously invoked in explaining
events in 1848, Marx argued, once again, that while in the French Revolution
power passed from moderates to radicals, in 1848 this sequence was reversed. In
that year power passed in France from the proletariat to the bourgeoisie, and
ultimately to someone who was a parody of the bourgeoisie, after the army, led by
General Cavaignac and serving as the instrument of the bourgeoisie, had already
stripped the proletariat of its power.⁵⁷ Also revived was the ethical gloss Marx had
placed on the two teleologies: like history itself, the first one (that which traced
the course of the French Revolution) was progressive and thus beneficial for the
people of France, while the second one (which characterized the 1848 Revolution
in France) was regressive, in the sense of history running backwards, which of
course was harmful to the people of France. What distinguished Marx’s formula-
tion in The Eighteenth Brumaire from that which he had posited in 1848 was that
he was now extending the temporal limits of the two revolutions to include the
Napoleonic era in the case of the French Revolution, and Louis Napoleon’s rise to
power in the case of the revolution in 1848. But by extending the two revolutions’
chronologies, Marx reduced the dissimilarities between them: both Napoleons, he
remarked in The Eighteenth Brumaire, were ‘statists’ of a sort, intent on increasing
the already considerable distance between the individual and the state that already
existed when each one took power. In fact, the original Napoleon ably continued
the work of the French Revolution, and by increasing the power of the state,
brought it to a point of near completion:
The first French Revolution, with its task of breaking up all separate local,
territorial, urban and provincial powers in order to create the civil unity of the
nation, was bound to develop what the absolute monarchy had begun: central-
ization, but at the same time the extent, the attributes and the agents of govern-
ment power. Napoleon perfected this state machinery.⁵⁸

Although Marx did not use the term in The Eighteenth Brumaire, this, in essence,
was what in other writings he called ‘Bonapartism’. In this context the term was
clearly not a synonym for a military dictatorship. Louis Napoleon, unlike his
uncle, was a civilian. Nor, at least in the case of Napoleon Bonaparte, was the term
applied pejoratively. Marx always considered the latter’s legacy morally and
politically ambiguous, which of course was how he considered the bourgeoisie
as a class: progressive in comparison to the aristocracy under feudalism, but
reactionary in comparison to the proletariat under capitalism.⁵⁹

⁵⁷ Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, pp. 42–3. ⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 122.

⁵⁹ The Soviets would use the term as an unalloyed epithet, and after the Stalin era, in contrast to
Marx’s application of the term, mostly military personnel—rather than civilians—were accused of it.
The evolution of Bonapartism and the role it played in the history of the Soviet Union will be described
and analysed in a later chapter devoted entirely to it.
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If one takes at face value what Marx now seemed to be suggesting, namely that
the French Revolution ended not on 9 Thermidor or even on 18 Brumaire, but
with the end of the Napoleonic Era in 1815, then the Jacobins’ role in the
revolution is necessarily diminished. Marx rarely mentioned the Jacobins after
1852, and in the 1860s, as his concerns turned from France to events in Ireland
and the German states, his sense of their uniqueness in the revolution—that they
acted on behalf of a class they did not belong to (the plebeians) to continue a
revolution when the class that began the revolution (the bourgeoisie) refused to do
so—diminished as well. In one of his few references to the Jacobins, in a letter to
Engels in 1865 expressing opposition to Prussia’s recent Anti-Combination Law
prohibiting workers from forming unions, he stated that the Jacobins did little or
nothing that was contrary to the interests and the wishes of the bourgeoisie; he
also singled out Robespierre in this regard for having approved the Loi le Chape-
lier, passed by the National Assembly in 1791, which by forbidding artisans and
craftsmen from forming guilds, effectively prohibited them from staging strikes.⁶⁰
Still, the French Revolution proved a bountiful source of analogies whenever
Marx needed one to make a point or to clinch an argument. The same was true for
Engels. In September 1870 he described the Jacobins cuttingly as ‘little philistines
who wetted their pants [and] practiced terrorism out of fear’.⁶¹ The context in
which Engels offered his pejorative opinion was significant. By the time Engels
was writing, Prussia had soundly defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War,
and the political vacuum created by the collapse of the Second Empire opened a
window of opportunity for the working class in the French capital. Louis Napoleon,
who had taken personal command of French forces, surrendered at Sedan on
2 September, and was deposed as emperor immediately afterwards. The Third
Republic—with Paris still in the hands of the Prussians—was proclaimed on
4 September. But Marx counselled caution. Because the 1848 Revolution had ended
disastrously, the enthusiasm he had mustered when it began was now nowhere in
evidence. In an address to the General Council of the International on 9 September,
he advised French workers ‘not to be swayed by the national souvenirs of 1792’
and commence an insurrection in Paris that could not possibly succeed.⁶² In a
letter to Marx, Engels was even more emphatic in warning Parisians not to take up
arms, much less do anything resembling what the Jacobins had done nearly a
century earlier. Moreover, practising terror would be especially counterproduct-
ive. The only exculpatory argument Engels mustered to temper the severity of his
and Marx’s criticisms of the Jacobins was that the terror they practised was the
result not just of their personal deficiencies, which were admittedly considerable,

⁶⁰ Manfred, Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, p. 380.

⁶¹ Quoted in Bruno Naarden, Socialist Europe and Revolutionary Russia: Perception and Prejudice,
1848–1923 (New York, 2002), p. 69.
⁶² Karl Marx, ‘Second Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Asso-
ciation on the Franco-Prussian War’, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. XXII, p. 269.
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but also of the exigencies arising from having to fight for France’s survival.⁶³ In other
words, the Jacobins could not have done anything other than what they actually did.
* * *
The establishment of the Paris Commune in 1871, followed less than three
months later by its destruction, produced in Marx the same extremes of emotion
he had experienced in 1848. Exhilaration and enthusiasm yielded to disillusion-
ment and even despair. But just a few years later, his pessimism dissipated. The
exploits of Russian revolutionaries caused Marx to believe they would soon
instigate a peasant revolution leading to socialism in Russia without the capitalist
stage of history preceding it. The reason Russia could follow a path sui generis
among the countries of Europe was because the peasants’ commune, or obshchina,
that regulated various aspects of peasant life reflected their instinctive collectivism
and disdain for private property. That many of these revolutionaries would form
organizations resembling the Jacobins in their centralized structure and willing-
ness to practise terrorism for the purpose of inciting a peasant revolution required
Marx and Engels to revise upward their recent denigration of the Jacobins.
Often forgotten in descriptions of this transformation is that it caused Marx to
soften his earlier Russophobia, which had become especially vitriolic after Nicholas
II sent troops to suppress a revolution in Hungary in 1849. Russia’s suppression of
the Polish Revolt in 1863 only confirmed his belief in its irredeemable iniquity. For
years both Marx and Engels had been hostile to Russian revolutionaries. They
considered Herzen frivolous because of his infatuation after 1848 with the same
peasant commune they would extol in the late 1870s and 1880s, and Marx’s hatred
of Bakunin, which reflected the latter’s national identity as well as his anarchism,
is well known. By the late 1860s Marx’s hatred of all things Russian had become so
deep and unforgiving, so central a component of his personality and politics, that
he recognized the irony in the fact that Russian revolutionaries were the first ones
to translate Capital into their native language.⁶⁴ But instead of softening his
animosity, this seemed to harden it. In the same letter in which he confessed his
amazement at what these Russian revolutionaries were doing, he castigated
Russian nobles working for the government as ‘scoundrels’.⁶⁵
One result of Marx’s Russophobia after 1848 was a new-found interest in the
original Napoleon; while not defeating Russia in 1812, he should not be con-
demned too harshly for attacking it. Moreover, Napoleon’s grandeur as the
overseer of Europe for nearly a decade only confirmed his and Engels’ opinion
of his nephew as ‘the stupid Napoleon’.⁶⁶ To be sure, Marx and Engels continued
to consider Bonaparte the ‘gravedigger’ of the French Revolution, who after

⁶³ ‘Letter, Engels to Marx (4 September 1870)’, ibid., vol. XLIV, p. 63.

⁶⁴ ‘Letter, Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann (12 October 1868)’, ibid., vol. XLIII, p. 130.
⁶⁵ ‘Letter, Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann (12 October 1868)’, ibid., vol. XLIII, p. 131.
⁶⁶ ‘Letter, Engels to Marx (3 December 1851)’, ibid., vol. XXXVIII, p. 504.
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completing it by establishing the Code Napoleon and making other reforms in the
organization and administration of the state, betrayed it by concentrating so much
power in his own hands that the historical forces simultaneously driving the
bourgeoisie to practise industrial capitalism, and the emerging proletariat to
oppose it, were temporarily weakened.⁶⁷ When Marx, in a letter to Lassalle in
1859, described Louis Napoleon’s regime as a form of Bonapartism, he could
surely have applied the same sobriquet to Napoleon Bonaparte’s.⁶⁸
But what is especially notable about Marx’s and Engels’ comments on the
original Napoleon is that so many of them concerned his inadequacies as a
military strategist. In explaining his ultimate demise at Waterloo, Engels stressed
Bonaparte’s ignorance of the potentialities of naval power.⁶⁹ But given his and
Marx’s Russophobia, one cannot help but conjecture that what concerned them
most were the mistakes Bonaparte had made commanding forces on land,
particularly in 1812, when he sent the Grand Armée into to Russia to force
Alexander I to comply with his Continental System, which the tsar was violating
by exporting timber and grain to Great Britain. The failure of Napoleon’s
Russian campaign must have gnawed at Marx and Engels. Had it been success-
ful, Russia could not have played the outsized role it assumed later in the century
as the Gendarme of Europe, suppressing radical revolutions and supporting
reactionary regimes.
But none of this prevented Marx and Engels, after the debacle in Paris in 1871,
which was followed by the final collapse of the International in 1876, from
welcoming the emergence in Russia towards the end of the decade of revolution-
ary organizations they could easily convince themselves were on the verge of
overthrowing the Russian autocracy, which they hated nearly as much as Russian
revolutionaries did. Despite their Russophobia, Marx and Engels were surely
gratified in 1869, when The Communist Manifesto was translated into Russian,
and again in 1872, when Nikolai Danielson’s translation of the first volume of
Capital marked the first time it appeared in a language other than German and
English.⁷⁰ Indeed, their interest in the country they had previously vilified
increased in the 1870s to the point where in 1879 Marx, even more effusively
than Engels, praised the first dissertation in Russia on the French Revolution,
N. I. Kareev’s, on the role of the peasantry.⁷¹

⁶⁷ ‘Letter, Marx to François Lafargue (12 November 1866)’, ibid., vol. XLII, p. 334.
⁶⁸ ‘Letter, Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle (4 February 1859)’, ibid., vol. XL, pp. 380–3.
⁶⁹ ‘Letter, Engels to Marx (17 November 1856)’, ibid., vol. XL, p. 84.
⁷⁰ Sperber, Karl Marx, p. 532. Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and
Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia ((New York, 1966), p. 384, names Bakunin as the
translator of the Manifesto. Woodford McClellan, in Revolutionary Exiles: The Russians in the First
International and the Paris Commune (Totowa, NJ, 1979), p. 41, argues that Bakunin and Sergei
Nechaev shared the task, with the latter doing most of the work.
⁷¹ Manfred, Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, pp. 157–8.
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But it was the creation of Narodnaia Volia in 1879, even more than that of its
parent organization, Zemlia i Volia in 1876, that opened Marx’s and Engels’ eyes
to what seemed to them the very real possibility of a revolution in Russia
destroying the autocracy and replacing it with a more humane way of life
organized around the peasant commune and informed by its ethical purity.⁷²
The impunity with which the terrorists in charge of the organization murdered
government officials was a testament to the inefficiency of the government’s
efforts to apprehend them. However, these murders failed to bring down the
government, and the narodovol’tsy determined that only regicide—the assassin-
ation of Tsar Alexander II—would do so. They put their minds to this objective
with singular determination and ingenuity. One member detonated a bomb in the
Winter Palace; others dug a tunnel under a St Petersburg street for the purpose of
blowing up the Imperial Carriage as it passed above. In both instances the tsar
escaped with his life. In the former he was too far away from the explosion; in the
latter his carriage did not appear at the expected time.⁷³ Nonetheless, it seemed
likely the terrorists would eventually succeed, and in doing so inspire the peasants
to rise up in yet another of the anarchic but profoundly powerful revolts that had
occurred periodically in Russia for several centuries.
The effect of all this on the two now elderly revolutionaries in London was
electric. Marx, in a letter to a Russian revolutionary newspaper in 1877, expressed
his conviction, which he said was the result of learning the Russian language and
studying its economic development, that ‘if Russia continues along the road she
has followed since 1861, she will forego the finest opportunity history has ever
placed before a nation, and will undergo all of the fateful misfortunes of capitalist
development’.⁷⁴ In 1880, in a letter to F. A. Sorge, he attacked Chernyi Peredel, an
organization of Russian revolutionaries opposed to Narodnaia Volia because it
considered bombings and assassinations unlikely to radicalize the peasants absent
mass propaganda; ironically, a number of the chernoperedel’tsy, whom Marx
castigated for their ‘tedious doctrinairism’ and their unwillingness to return to
Russia from abroad and fight alongside the terrorists against the autocracy, later
became Marxists.⁷⁵ Responding in 1881 to a request from one of the chernoper-
edel’tsy, Vera Zasulich, for clarification of his views on the peasant commune,
Marx wrote that the general laws of economic development need not apply to

⁷² The name of the organization, which in English means ‘The People’s Will’, was deliberately
misleading. At no time during its existence did it include more than 500 members. Its executive
committee never numbered more than thirty. Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism (Boston, 1987),
p. 94; Adam B. Ulam, In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia
(New York, 1977), p. 327.
⁷³ Ulam, In the Name of the People, pp. 340–1, 351.
⁷⁴ ‘Marks v redaktsiiu ‘Otechestvennykh Zapisok (November 1877)’, K. Marx and F. Engels,
Izbrannye pis’ma (Moscow, 1947), p. 314.
⁷⁵ ‘K. Marks k F. A. Sorge (5 November 1880)’, ibid., pp. 338–40.
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Russia, and that institutions peculiar to Russian society like the commune could
lead it in a direction different from that of every other nation.⁷⁶
As it happened, the terrorists succeeded in killing Alexander II. But despite the
absence of any subsequent peasant revolution, Marx was undeterred. In 1882, in
an introduction to a new Russian edition of the Manifesto, he and Engels posed
the question of whether the peasant commune could serve as the basis for
socialism in Russia, thereby making unnecessary industrial capitalism and the
oppression of the proletariat they had previously considered prerequisites for
socialism. They then answered their own question as follows:
If the Russian revolution is a signal for proletarian revolution in the West, so that
the two can supplement each other, then modern Russian communal ownership
can serve as a point of departure for communist development.⁷⁷

In their answer Marx and Engels effectively contradicted much of the edifice of the
ideology Marx in particular had spent countless hours carefully constructing for
nearly the entirety of their adult lives. Remarkably, there is evidence that Marx was
cognizant of this. He made a point of asking Zasulich not to make public his
earlier response to her question about the commune, with the result that it was
known only to a few until it was published in the Soviet Union in 1924.⁷⁸ Also
noteworthy about his response, and about everything he wrote, either singly or
with Engels, on the possibility of the peasant commune serving as the basis for
socialism in Russia is that it was precisely that, a possibility but not a certainty.
Marx, in other words, was giving himself grounds for exoneration should his
prediction prove incorrect.
No such concerns inhibited Engels. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, he
repeatedly lauded the Russian terrorists for their audacity, and expressed his
certainty that their exploits would soon trigger a peasant revolution. Cognizant
of the absence of revolutions everywhere in Western Europe after the destruc-
tion of the Paris Commune, the aged revolutionary understandably latched onto a
peasant revolution in Russia as a deus ex machina that would revive his spirits and
lend meaning to his life, and to Marx’s, as their deaths seemed increasingly
imminent. To analogize Russia to France in 1789 was a temptation Engels could
not forego. In 1880, writing to the narodovolets, German Lopatin, he proclaimed
that ‘Russia is the France of this century’ and therefore ‘on the verge of a new

⁷⁶ ‘Pis’mo K. Marksa k Vere Ivanovne Zasulich (8 March 1881)’, in Lev Deich, ed., Gruppa
‘Osvobozhdenie Truda’: Iz arkhivov G. V. Plekhanova, V. I. Zasulich i L. G. Deicha (Moscow/Leningrad,
1923–8), vol. II, pp. 223–4.
⁷⁷ Quoted in Solomon M. Schwarz, ‘Populism and Early Russian Marxism on Ways of Historical
Development in Russia’, Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, edited by Ernest
J. Simmons (Cambridge MA, 1955), p. 51.
⁷⁸ Bergman, Vera Zasulich, p. 76.
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social transformation’.⁷⁹ And in 1885, in a letter to Marx’s onetime interlocutor,

Vera Zasulich, Engels wrote the following:
What I know or believe about the situation in Russia impels me to the opinion
that the Russians are approaching their 1789. The revolution must break out
there in a given time; it may break out there any day. . . . This is one of the
exceptional cases where it is possible for a handful a people to make a revolution,
i.e. with one small push to cause a whole system, which . . . is in more than labile
equilibrium, to come crashing down, and thus by one action, in itself insignifi-
cant, to release uncontrollable explosive forces. . . . When 1789 has once been
launched, 1793 will not be long in following.⁸⁰

One would think that in analogizing Russia to France in 1789, Engels would single
out either the Parisian lower classes or the Jacobins or both as exemplars of the
values their Russian counterparts should hold dear. But in his letter to Zasulich
Engels cited instead the Blanquists, of whom both he and Marx had been critical,
but whose ‘fantasy of overcoming an entire society through the action of a small
conspiracy’ he evidently thought had some salience in the circumstances then
prevailing in Russia.⁸¹ One wonders if Engels substituted the Blanquists for the
Jacobins as the relevant analogue because he recognized the preference of the
Russian terrorists for the strategy the Blanquists had pioneered in France, after
rejecting the more tedious and time-consuming strategy of inculcating revolu-
tionary consciousness among the masses, of taking power in an insurrection
resembling a classic coup d’état. Engels was so smitten by this particular strategy
that he thought it might also work in Western Europe, bringing socialists there the
success that had long eluded them. Both he and Marx may also, in the last years of
their lives, have come to admire Blanqui and his followers for their courage and
stubborn adherence to principle during the years they spent in prison and had no
influence on politics in France. Never exercising power, they never tainted their
reputations, as the Jacobins did by killing thousands of innocents in addition to
the much smaller number of Frenchmen who actually threatened them politically.
In the last years of his life, Engels was no more able to make up his mind
about the Jacobins than he was in earlier phases of his career as a revolutionary
actor and theorist; the same, of course, had been true of Marx. In a letter in 1889
to the Austrian socialist Victor Adler, Engels justified the Jacobins’ guillotining
the Hébertists—which neither he nor Marx had ever done before.⁸² But even then,
he felt compelled to condemn the Jacobins for intensifying the terror they

⁷⁹ Quoted in ‘G. A. Lopatin—M. N. Oshaninoi’, Russkie sovremenniki o K. Markse i F. Engel’se

(Moscow, 1969), p. 201.
⁸⁰ ‘Letter, Engels to Vera Zasulich (23 April 1885)’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected
Correspondence 1846–1895 (Westport CT, 1942), pp. 437–8.
⁸¹ Ibid.
⁸² ‘Letter, Engels to Victor Adler (4 December 1889)’, in Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence,
p. 457.
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began ‘to a pitch of insanity’, which left them defenceless against the counter-
revolutionaries in the Directory who succeeded them.⁸³
* * *
Considering their work in its totality, it is clear that Marx and Engels left Russian
revolutionaries a diverse menu to choose from when it behooved them to invoke
the French Revolution. The options these revolutionaries could select—concerning
the tactics they should use, the organizations they should create, and the object-
ives they should emphasize—can best be understood by assigning them to one of
two camps, each the opposite of the other. Taken together, they demonstrate the
ambivalence with which Marx and Engels viewed the revolution, which future
revolutionaries better situated than they were in Victorian England might finally
resolve. One of these camps was characterized by a rigid determinism that viewed
history as subject to impersonal laws largely impervious to alteration. There was
certainly a time for revolution, but there were also circumstances when revolu-
tionaries should do nothing at all. Attempting a revolution before the precondi-
tions for it existed was a recipe for failure. The other camp reflected a belief in the
primacy of human agency. While not denying the existence of impersonal histor-
ical laws, like the dialectic, that determined the ultimate course of human events, it
considered these laws sufficiently malleable to allow their acceleration, so that
premature revolutions might nonetheless succeed. One might even draw from this
the conclusion that a revolution that succeeded could not, by definition, be
considered premature. At different times in his life, Marx inhabited one or other
of these camps, stressing a form of ‘voluntarism’ in 1848 when it seemed that a
premature revolution might nonetheless succeed, only to retreat to a kind of
quietism and watchful waiting on history after it failed. For Marx, this oscillation
from one camp to the other was not just the result of a rational choice, of his
revising upward or downward the prospects of a revolution’s success after a
dispassionate re-evaluation of the tactical and strategic possibilities that pertained
at any particular time. It also reflected Marx’s personality and temperament.
Remarkably, Marx seemed to encompass within himself the traits appropriate
to both of these dichotomous positions concerning when exactly revolutionaries
should attempt a revolution. Among Russian revolutionaries, this kind of ambiva-
lence was rare, in large part because they tended to radicalize, and to defend as the
reflection of an absolute moral principle, virtually every political choice they
made; for many this characterized their actions in non-political circumstances
as well. Whether this particular trait or characteristic generated a certain kind of
personality or was a reflection of it is impossible to answer. But what one can
assert with a reasonable degree of confidence is that this moral and political
absolutism made for an atmosphere within the Russian revolutionary movement

⁸³ Ibid. p. 458.
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conducive to conflict and strenuous disagreement rather than to compromise and

reconciliation. In this regard, one must also bear in mind that prior to 1917 the
Russian revolutionary movement was a failure—which had the effect of generat-
ing fratricidal recriminations over what went wrong, which only further reduced
what little chance existed of success. In such an atmosphere, political opinions
and moral judgements that were already polarized because there was no way to
evaluate their validity empirically became even more extreme, in the case of
politics, and even more absolute, in the case of personal morality.
As a result, what revolutionaries of the late nineteenth century wrote and said
about the French Revolution—and about practically everything else as well—was a
substitute for the actions they were as yet unable to undertake in pursuance of
their own objectives in Russia. Indeed, the French Revolution assumed special
significance because its success as a bourgeois revolution contrasted so sharply
with the dismal prospects in Russia for a proletarian revolution—or really for any
kind of a revolution. As a result, questions about whether one’s politics were
Jacobin or Girondin spoke directly to whether one could be relied on to make the
right kind of revolution rather than the wrong kind of revolution, or no revolu-
tion at all. After 1903, when Lenin split the nascent Russian Social Democratic
Workers’ Party (RSDLP) and for the first time applied the word ‘Bolshevik’ to his
supporters, with its connotations of strength in numbers, ferocious debates
commenced within the ranks of this new party over whether Bolshevism was a
contemporary embodiment or expression of Jacobinism, a complete negation
of it, or something in between.
For that reason, it is to the Bolsheviks and their views on the French Revolution
to which we now turn.
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4
Lenin
The Russian Robespierre

Consideration of how the Bolsheviks viewed the French Revolution begins with
Lenin. Before 1917 the French Revolution was of inestimable value in helping him
formulate a plan for taking power in Russia. This was also true, after 1917, in
establishing the Soviet state. Both of these endeavours required Lenin to exceed
the limits of Marxist ideology, and fashion policies consistent with the realities he
faced in a country that had barely begun to industrialize, much less develop a
proletariat sufficiently large and politically conscious to carry out a proletarian
revolution. Lenin was by far the most flexible Bolshevik ideologically, and his
willingness to extract from the French Revolution insights directly relevant to the
organization and tactics of a revolutionary party amply demonstrates this. In
addition, the French Revolution provided a vocabulary of politics Lenin was able
to utilize as a polemical weapon in the internecine rhetorical wars Russian
socialists waged among themselves prior to the October Revolution; these were
especially vitriolic and ad hominem because, with so many of them in prison,
Siberian exile, or in emigration in Western Europe, these socialists were powerless
to affect the course of events in their own country. And because they could not test
their ideas empirically, those they conjured often had an abstract, almost other-
worldly quality, causing them, at times, to seem more real than the realities to
which they were meant to apply.
Lenin was not the first Russian socialist to canvass the French Revolution for
concepts and terminology that might prove useful. In fact, it was mostly in
response to others invoking the revolution to attack him and to undermine his
authority as the leader of the Bolsheviks that he first looked to it for assistance in
defending himself. To be sure, his opinion of Paris, at least, was always a positive
one. In a letter to his mother in 1895, shortly after arriving for the first time in the
City of Light, he described it as having ‘broad, light streets, many boulevards, and
lots of greenery’.¹ As a child he had studied French along with German, Latin, and
Greek, and as an adolescent read histories of the revolution; in the library in his
quarters in the Kremlin years later could be counted eighty-seven books on French

¹ ‘Letter, V. I. Lenin to M. A. Ulianova (8 June 1895)’, in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow,

1977), vol. XXXVII, p. 74.
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history, many of which concerned the French Revolution.² While living in London
in the early 1900s, he and Lev Deich, whose politics he would soon condemn as
muddleheaded and insufficiently Marxist, in lighter moments playfully referred to
one another by the Russian word for citizen, grazhdanin, because the French
equivalent, citoyen, was the preferred salutation during the French Revolution.³
More significant, in terms of Lenin’s growing proximity to the French Revolu-
tion, were contacts he established in the early 1890s, during his conversion to
Marxism from the populism he had earlier embraced, largely out of filial loyalty to
his older brother Alexander, a narodovolets who was executed in 1889 for par-
ticipating in an unsuccessful attempt to kill the tsar. In 1891 he conversed at
length with the Tkachevite, M. I. Iaseneva, in which they discussed, inter alia, the
seizure of power in Russia by a revolutionary elite.⁴ Between 1887 and 1893 he
also befriended narodovol’tsy and one-time supporters of both Zaichnevskii and
Nechaev.⁵ It is quite likely that at least some of these revolutionaries impressed
upon the young Lenin the virtues of the personal qualities the original Jacobins
embodied, along with their ostensible emphasis on conspiracy and the centraliza-
tion of political power.⁶ But for all of the evidence indicating Lenin’s early
receptivity to the lessons older revolutionaries had drawn from the French
Revolution, one must also bear in mind his cautionary admonition in 1899 that
France and Russia were very different. In his words, ‘we should never consign
Russia’s distinctiveness to oblivion’.⁷
In ideological terms, Lenin’s first comments on the French Revolution were
predictable. In 1895 he described it as a revolution of the bourgeoisie that ended in
1793. He also stated that Babeuf had no chance of taking power under the Directory
because the revolution could never embrace, much less impose on an unwilling
populace, his more radical objectives.⁸ In 1897 he explicitly rejected the conspira-
torial tactics practised by both by the Blanquists in France and the narodovol’tsy in

² George Jackson, ‘The Influence of the French Revolution on Lenin’s Conception of the Russian
Revolution’, in The French Revolution of 1789 and its Impact, edited by G. M. Schwab and John
R. Jeanneney (Westport CT, 1995), p. 275; Biblioteka V. I. Lenina v Kremle (Moscow, 1961), pp. 242–5.
³ B. I. Gorev, Iz partiinogo proshlogo: vospominaniia 1895–1905 (Leningrad, 1924), p. 59.
⁴ J. L. H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (London, 1963), p. 34.
⁵ Richard Pipes, ‘The Origins of Bolshevism: The Intellectual Evolution of Young Lenin’, in
Revolutionary Russia: A Symposium, edited by Richard Pipes (New York, 1969), pp. 36, 42. Pipes
calls these associations ‘Jacobin’.
⁶ It is true, as Robert Mayer asserts in ‘Lenin and the Jacobin Identity in Russia’, Studies in Eastern
European Thought, 51 (1999): p. 141, that there is no evidence proving that Lenin was influenced by
‘Russian Jacobins’ such as Tkachev and his followers. But Lenin’s contacts with these individuals is
surely proof that he may have been influenced by them. While Lenin’s ‘Jacobinism’, in the sense of his
favouring conspiracy and the strict centralization of power in the parties and organizations he was
involved in, would not yet manifest itself until the 1900s, there is good reason to believe such ideas were
germinating in his mind in the 1890s.
⁷ V. I. Lenin, ‘Proekt programmy nashei partii (1899)’, in V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii
[hereafter rendered as PSS], 5th edn, 55 vols (Moscow, 1958–65), vol. V, p. 220.
⁸ V. I. Lenin, ‘Conspectus of the Book, The Holy Family by Marx and Engels’, in V. I. Lenin,
Collected Works (Moscow, 1977), vol. XXXVIII, pp. 23–4.
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Russia. Both failed because they lacked popular support.⁹ But for the next four years,
while commenting occasionally on the role of the proletariat in the 1848 Revolution
(he deemed it considerable but insufficient to prevent the revolution’s failure) and
the French peasantry under Louis Napoleon (it was, predictably, conservative) Lenin
wrote nothing and said nothing about the French Revolution itself.¹⁰ Finally, in 1901,
he did, but the reason was not to offer an idea or to propose an explanation that had
occurred to him spontaneously, but in response to an article Plekhanov had written
recently, with which he disagreed especially strongly because he believed it was
directed partly at him.
To understand Lenin’s rebuttal, one must know something of Plekhanov’s
views on the French Revolution. It was obvious the latter had thought deeply
about it, and considered it relevant to Russia despite a full century having passed
since its conclusion. The same was true, albeit to a lesser extent, for Pavel Axelrod,
who, with Zasulich and Alexander Potresov, had joined with Plekhanov in 1883 to
form the first Marxist organization in Russia, the Gruppa Osvobozhednie Truda
(Group for the Emancipation of Labour). Lenin and Iulii Martov, both of them a
full generation younger, joined the group in the 1890s. In relation to his col-
leagues, Plekhanov was always primus inter pares, and for that reason his opinions
on the French Revolution—and on most other matters—the other members
usually found persuasive. At the very least, his views were always accorded serious
consideration. Complete agreement, however, proved difficult because Plekhanov’s
views on the French Revolution, and on the Jacobins in particular, changed
considerably with the passage of time. At times he attacked the Jacobins. At others
he defended them. There were even occasions when he attacked them and
defended them simultaneously. Obviously these changes were not inconsequen-
tial. What Plekhanov thought at any particular time about the French Revolution
played a significant role in determining what he thought about the Russian
Revolution.
At times Plekhanov gravitated towards an extreme form of what he and other
Marxist revolutionaries—not only Russian ones—called ‘Jacobinism’, by which
was meant a political party organized as a conspiracy, with political authority
concentrated in a ‘centre’ of professional revolutionaries ready to take power when
opportunities arose irrespective of the Marxist axiom that the objective conditions
that pertained at any particular time imposed limits on what was possible polit-
ically. At other times, however, Plekhanov—like Marx before him—argued the
opposite: that a socialist party should always seek mass support, but because
Russia was an autocracy in which politics of any kind was forbidden, this would

⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Zadachi russkikh sotsial-demokratov’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. II. p. 459.

¹⁰ V. I. Lenin, ‘Protest rossiiskikh sotsial demokratov (1899)’, PSS, vol. IV, p. 169; Lenin, ‘Proekt
programmy’, p. 231.
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be very difficult. In addition, the party should welcome differences of opinion, and
ensure that while authority was exercised, as it were, from the top down, it should
also be informed by the opinions directed from the bottom up. Finally, and
perhaps most critically, Plekhanov argued that Russian socialists should not take
power prematurely, as he believed the Jacobins had; if they did so, like the Jacobins
they would lose power shortly afterwards. After years of oscillating between these
two positions—which he and other Russian Marxists habitually termed ‘Jacobin’
and ‘anti-Jacobin’ respectively—Plekhanov finally resolved his ambivalence in the
aftermath of the 1905 Revolution. For the remainder of his life he never deviated
from the opinion that under no circumstances should Russian socialists emulate
the Jacobins, and that any socialist party that did so was not really socialist and
therefore destined to fail. The circumstances under which the Bolsheviks came to
power in 1917 seemed to him tangible confirmation of his conclusion.
But Plekhanov’s earlier ambivalence on the whole matter of Jacobinism was
characteristic of Russian Marxism as a whole. In explaining this, one might
suggest that it reflected the same conflict evident in Marx between the heart and
the mind: between wanting desperately, on the one hand, that a proletarian
revolution occurred soon enough to enjoy the benefits it would confer—and
recognizing on the other hand, in what one imagines were more contemplative
moments, that, if Marxism meant anything at all, revolutionaries in Russia who
espoused it would be dead long before any such revolution could occur. When
Russian Marxism was in its infancy, Russia had not yet experienced a bourgeois
revolution, and the industrial capitalism the triumphant bourgeoisie would
legitimize could not be avoided or truncated temporally if the proletarian
revolution that followed it was to succeed. In short, there were many Russian
Marxists, Plekhanov among them, who at times thought the requirements of
Marxist ideology could be safely ignored, while on other occasions recognizing
that the limits Marxism imposed on what was politically feasible should be
adhered to both in the interest of ideological consistency and as a matter of
simple prudence and collective self-protection. In short, Russia, in 1900, was
hardly ready for a proletarian revolution, a bourgeois revolution, or really any
revolution at all.
Plekhanov personified these dichotomous positions perfectly. His activist
impulses, when they were triggered for one reason or another, would cause him
to praise the Jacobins lavishly. But on other occasions, when for whatever reason
he was calmer, he would condemn them for their excessive activism and volun-
tarism, for their unfortunate penchant for getting ahead of themselves ideologic-
ally and politically. At times, he even appended to strong criticisms of the Jacobins
an acknowledgement that on an emotional level he knew what it was like to have
been one. Scattered throughout Plekhanov’s voluminous writings are examples of
this. In 1885 he wrote that while admiring the Jacobins for their personal qualities,
he also equated their ‘theory of government’ with ‘a revolutionary dictatorship of
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the minority’.¹¹ To be sure, the Blanquists, for all of their courage and heroism,
were even worse. Absent mass support, their conspiratorial methods, applied in
Russia, would not yield anything beneficial to the Russian proletariat.¹² But worst
of all, in Plekhanov’s estimation, was how ‘the traditions of French Jacobinism’
had been transmuted by Tkachev (and narodovol’tsy such as Lev Tikhomirov) into
a strategy for taking power that, in contrast to that which the original Jacobins had
pursued successfully, would lead in Russia to disaster.¹³ The problem, as Plekha-
nov defined it, was that France in 1789 bore little relation to Russia in the late
nineteenth century; the latter was far more backward because a much larger
percentage of its population consisted of peasants. Moreover, instead of acknow-
ledging this, and fastening on the proletariat as the proper instrument for the
achievement of the social justice they claimed to favour, Russian populists and
terrorists like the two he singled out for opprobrium had shown recently an
exceedingly destructive aversion to political activity of any kind. For that, Plekha-
nov concluded, the Jacobins deserved at least some of the blame. Indeed, by the
time Plekhanov was writing his essay, Russia, in his opinion, was so different from
France when the Jacobins controlled it that infantile and shamefully ignorant
Russian revolutionaries, by ripping the Jacobins’ methods out of their original
historical context and misapplying them in ways unimaginable when the Jacobins
were alive, were diminishing the Russian revolutionary movement to the point of
oblivion.¹⁴ So corrupted by this misuse of history were the likes of Tkachev and
Tikhomirov that Plekhanov considered them contemptible both as revolutionaries
and as human beings.
In 1888, Plekhanov praised and criticized the Jacobins simultaneously, this time
self-referentially, in a letter to Axelrod in which he admitted sheepishly to being
something of a Jacobin himself. But since he preferred that that not continue, he
told his fellow Marxist that ‘it is necessary that you restrain me’.¹⁵ One year later,
he expressed his ambivalence in the form of a coherent argument in an essay
commemorating the centenary of the French Revolution. He began the essay by
acknowledging that while the Jacobin dictatorship was politically necessary and
the terror it inflicted morally just, simply repeating in Russia the Jacobin phrase of
the French Revolution would be a terrible mistake. The Jacobins, he took pains to
emphasize, were hardly exemplary revolutionaries. The tactics they adopted were
repugnant, and what to Plekhanov was just as bad, counterproductive of their
political and ideological objectives. But he also stressed that, for all of their faults,
the Jacobins were neither reactionaries nor counter-revolutionaries. In fact, the

¹¹ G. V. Plekhanov, Nashi raznoglasiia, in Plekhanov, Sochineniia, vol. II, pp. 294, 330–1.
¹² Ibid., p. 331. ¹³ Ibid., p. 158. ¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 329–31.
¹⁵ ‘Letter Plekhanov to Axelrod (May 1888)’, Perepiska G. V. Plekhanova i P. B. Aksel’roda, edited by
B. I. Nikolaevskii, P. A. Berlin, and V. S. Voitinskii (Moscow, 1925), vol. I, p. 44. In February 1900 he
admitted more or less the same thing, this time describing his Jacobinism as something to which ‘I was
beginning to incline’. ‘Letter, Plekhanov to Axelrod (24 February 1900)’, ibid., p. 118.
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differences between the Jacobins and their principal rivals, the Girondins, were
not reducible to a simple dichotomy of good versus evil. The Girondins, for all
their failings, desired freedom and republicanism for France just as much as the
Jacobins did, while the Jacobins, for all their professions of moral virtue, estab-
lished a regime based on force and coercion that led inexorably to despotism.
Nevertheless, the Jacobins did what they did not out of any inherent propensity
for evil. Under the circumstances, any government run by rational people would
probably have done the same. Terror was the only means of defeating the very real
foreign enemies the Jacobins faced, and they should not be criticized on moral
grounds for employing it.¹⁶
One might think, after reading the first half of the article, that Plekhanov was
calling on Russian socialists to emulate the Jacobins only selectively, adopting all
that was virtuous in their personal character, while eschewing all that was coun-
terproductive. But that was not his intention. Following his qualified embrace of
Jacobinism as a guide to revolutionary action generically, Plekhanov admonished
his readers that Russia in 1889 was vastly different from France a century earlier,
and that the Russian proletariat bore obligations that by virtue of its temporal
location in the Marxist scenario of history were very different from those that
history had imposed on the Jacobins.¹⁷ The working class, he wrote confusingly,
must condemn ‘the bourgeois spirit of the Great French Revolution’, while
remaining faithful to the revolutionary spirit he was certain would carry the
proletariat well beyond the French Revolution.¹⁸
The same equivocation was evident in Plekhanov’s other early writings on the
French Revolution. In one essay, he claimed that Robespierre and Saint-Just failed
as revolutionaries because they tried to accelerate the course of history beyond
what was then feasible according to the inviolable tenets of Marxist ideology.¹⁹ But
he also wrote, a few years after that, that in fighting despotism in Russia—by
which Plekhanov clearly meant the regime of Tsar Nicholas II—‘dynamite is not a
bad weapon, but the guillotine is even better’.²⁰ To achieve maximum publicity, a
facsimile of the French original should be set up in Kazan Square, in the heart of St
Petersburg; to achieve maximum effect its victims should include not just the tsar
but also his retainers. In sum, ‘every Social Democrat ha[s] to be a terrorist like
Robespierre’.²¹ In more reflective philosophical writings, however, such as his
rumination on the role of the individual in history written in 1898, Plekhanov was
able to detach himself emotionally from the French Revolution to the point where

¹⁶ Plekhanov, ‘Stoletie velikoi revoliutsii (1889)’, Sochineniia, vol. IV, pp. 55–61.
¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 62–7. Pavel Axelrod stuck even more closely and consistently to the Marxist script,
stating often, as he did in 1901, that Russia presently was not like France in 1789.
¹⁸ Ibid., p. 65.
¹⁹ G. V. Plekhanov, ‘N. G. Chernyshevskii’, in Plekhanov, Sochineniia, vol. V, p. 57.
²⁰ Quoted in V. Rumii, ‘Plekhanov i terror’, Pod znamenem Marksizma, no. 6–7 (June–July 1923):
p. 24.
²¹ Quoted in ibid., p. 32.
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he could use it in illustrating his conclusion, which was a synthesis of sorts of the
two aspects of his political persona, that individuals can affect the timing of events,
but not their outcome.²²
But the synthesis Plekhanov had finally arrived at in 1898 did not last long.
Lenin’s emergence as a political figure of some significance in the small and
incestuous world of Russian socialism forced the Father of Russian Marxism
to choose one of the two dichotomous tendencies—the Jacobin and the anti-
Jacobin—he seemed to have successfully synthesized. From 1898 to 1903, Plekha-
nov surrendered to his own Jacobin impulses, and in 1903 supported Lenin’s
throughout the Second Congress of the RSDLP. Several months later, however,
Plekhanov reversed himself, and began excoriating his younger colleague with the
same rhetorical abandon with which he had previously defended him. Lenin,
whose penchant for venomous rhetoric was unmatched among Russian socialists,
responded in kind.
What prompted Lenin to formulate his own views on the French Revolution
was Plekhanov’s article in 1901 in Iskra, the newspaper established the year before
of which both men, with four others, were the editors. Plekhanov argued that the
conflict in the revolution between the Mountain (by which Plekhanov meant the
Jacobins) and the Girondins was analogous to the current division in European
and Russian socialism between socialists such as himself, who were faithful to
Marxism and thereby furthering the interests of the working class, and socialists in
Russia and Europe who in his opinion were betraying Marxism in one way or in
multiple ways. Among the latter were the so-called Economists, who believed
that addressing the economic needs of workers took precedence over indoctrin-
ating them ideologically, and also the followers of Eduard Bernstein in Germany,
who believed socialists could take power peacefully and democratically and
should revise their tactics accordingly. Their common betrayal, while substan-
tively different, of what Plekhanov believed to be orthodox Marxist ideology was
so obvious that he considered it reason enough to exclude them from the ranks of
true socialists.²³

²² Plekhanov also argued that if Robespierre had been hit on the head by a brick and died, or if
Napoleon had been deposed before he completed his plan to dominate Europe, other persons would
have emerged to replace them, with the result that while not everything the two men desired would be
achieved, much of what they desired would have been achieved, though not nearly as quickly. The same
would be true for their demise. Even if both men had retained power longer—Robespierre after 1794,
Bonaparte after 1815—eventually each of them would have lost it. G. V. Plekhanov, ‘K voprosu roli
lichnosti v istorii (1898)’, in G. V. Plekhanov, Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1956),
vol. II, pp. 317–26.
²³ G. V. Plekhanov, ‘Na poroge dvatsatago veka’, Iskra, no. 2 (February 1901): p. 1. In a note
Lenin appended to a new edition of What is to be Done? in 1907, in which he criticized the Mensheviks
for their excessive zeal to drawing analogies between ‘Jacobinism’ and ‘Russian Social Democracy’, he
cited Plekhanov’s article as a useful corrective, implying that Plekhanov, unlike the Mensheviks, drew
analogies only when they were historically accurate. The one Plekhanov drew in the article appealed to
Lenin because it judiciously distinguished genuine revolutionaries (like himself ) from ‘the opportun-
ists’ (by whom he meant the Mensheviks and others occupying ‘the right-wing of Social Democracy’).
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In a speech delivered several months after Plekhanov’s article appeared, Lenin

did not disagree. What made his speech distinctive, in comparison to his earlier
writings, was his invocation of the French Revolution to illustrate and corroborate
his own arguments. He began by claiming that the socialists who published
the newspaper Rabochee delo—by whom he meant socialists sympathetic to the
heresies Plekhanov had attacked—were the equivalent of the Girondins, while
the editors of Iskra—who included Plekhanov and Lenin—were comparable to
the Montagnards (by whom Lenin, like Plekhanov, meant the Jacobins). But Lenin
now included among the Marxist heretics Plekhanov had earlier attacked the
supporters of Alexandre Millerand in France, who in 1899 became the first
European socialist to accept a ministerial portfolio in a socialist government. In
fact, Lenin seemed as interested in denouncing the ideological crimes of Mill-
erand, Eduard Bernstein, and the Economists as he was in analogizing their
transgressions to those of which the Girondins, in the French Revolution, were
guilty.²⁴ Lenin returned to the Jacobin–Girondin dichotomy in April 1902, this
time in the course of criticizing Plekhanov for not making clear the sharp
distinction Lenin claimed to exist between the ‘small producers’ in Russia and a
genuine proletariat: while both were exploited, the degree and manner of their
exploitation were different. Indeed, the same was true for the revolutionaries who
claimed to represent them politically. Those representing small producers, who in
comparison to the proletariat were a retrograde class, were themselves not really
socialists—and thus analogous to the Girondins. Those representing the proletar-
iat, which in comparison to other classes was always the most progressive one,
were of course Lenin and his followers, who by analogy were comparable to the
Montagnards; increasing the iniquity of these ersatz socialists, Lenin continued,
was that, like the original Girondins, they not only represented a retrograde class,
but also claimed falsely to represent a progressive class. In short, Lenin’s adver-
saries were both wrong and disingenuous.²⁵
To Lenin it was essential that the distinction between genuine socialists and
false ones remained clear. Only if that were the case could the latter be prevented
from corrupting the proletariat; if in some unfortunate turn of events, they were
able to do so, their entire revolutionary endeavour would collapse. The proletariat
would never learn to make a revolution which required them to follow professional
revolutionaries like Lenin, who knew that the ‘trade union consciousness’ workers
possessed would leave them no better off than if they had no consciousness of

V. I. Lenin, What is to be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement, in V. I. Lenin, Selected Works
(New York, n.d.), vol. II, p. 34.

²⁴ V. I. Lenin, ‘Rech’ sentiabria 4: Ob”edinitel’nyi s”ezd zagranichnykh organizatsii RSDRP 21–2

sentiabria (4–5 octiabria) 1901 g.’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. V, pp. 271–6.
²⁵ V. I. Lenin, ‘Otzyv o vtorom proekte programmy Plekhanova’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. VI, pp. 237–8.
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the world around them whatsoever. Strikes and unions—in which workers with
trade-union consciousness invested their hope for a better life—could never help
them. Only a political revolution eliminating the capitalism that was the ultimate
cause of their exploitation could do that. But Lenin could not instill among Russian
workers the revolutionary consciousness they needed to understand this as long as
‘neo-Girondins’ in Russia and Western Europe could still delude them with coun-
terproductive, non-Marxist notions about evolving into socialism peacefully and
democratically.
For this reason it was essential that these modern-day Girondins be unmasked.
By claiming to be socialists when they clearly were not, Millerand and Bernstein
threatened the entire socialist movement far more than political figures who had
never been socialist and had never claimed falsely that they were. Lenin’s writings
early in the twentieth century fairly brim with denunciations of contemporary
socialists who, in his jaundiced opinion, betrayed it. So intent on defaming
his political enemies that he ignored simple logic in doing so—Millerand and
Bernstein could not have betrayed socialism if they themselves had never been
socialists—Lenin found in the Jacobin–Girondin polarity the perfect analogy to
illustrate the depths and the historical provenance of his enemies’ depravity. To
act in the tradition the Girondins began was to reveal a degree of apostasy that
Lenin might have inveighed against with such vehemence not in spite his own
ideological heresies, which he would express publicly in 1902 in What is to be
Done?, but rather because of them. Lenin’s own betrayal of Marxism would be
obscured by focusing on the far greater betrayal of his enemies. This, at any rate,
was the strategy Lenin adopted.
And so Lenin, in 1900, began analogizing various Russian and European
socialists he disliked and feared—not just Millerand and Bernstein and the Russian
economists—to the Girondins. He did so, quite clearly, to underscore their men-
dacity while simultaneously shielding his own, rather than to suggest any larger
analogy between the French Revolution and the revolution he anticipated in
Russia. But charges after the split occurred in the RSDLP that he was a putative
Robespierre, waiting in the wings until he could drown Russian socialism in a sea of
blood, forced him to immerse himself much further than he ever had before in the
events in France after 1789, and then to use them rhetorically in defending himself.

* * *
The Second Congress of the RSDLP crystallized and confirmed for many Russian
socialists the suspicion they had harboured since Lenin first involved himself in
revolutionary politics that he was, in the vocabulary of the French Revolution, a
Jacobin: that he shared the Jacobins’ supposed penchant for conspiracy and
secrecy, their intolerance of dissent and disagreement, and their limitless lust for
power. At times, Lenin’s conduct at the congress seemed to suggest—as was the
case for the Jacobins—that the very purity of his objectives imposed no ethical
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limits on the means he might use to achieve them. Not even violence or coercion
or mass terror should be excluded a priori.²⁶ As it happened, the purpose of the
congress—which reconvened in London after the Belgian government, under
pressure from the Russian government, was about to arrest its participants, who
had originally gathered in Brussels—was to create a unified socialist party; groups
sending representatives were as diverse in their objectives and ethnic identity as
the economist-minded newspaper Rabochee delo, the Jewish Bund, and Latvian
and Polish socialists. But the result was the opposite: the socialist party that
emerged did not include the Bundists, among others, and it was immediately
riven by bitter disagreements impervious to compromise.
Lenin and Plekhanov bore much of the responsibility for this. Lenin, as one of
the six editors of Iskra, which everyone agreed would be the new party’s public
face, had succeeded in packing the congress with supporters who shared his
preference for hard-nosed tactics; no less important was the agreement of all the
editors that the gradualism Bernstein was advocating in Germany posed a grave
danger to the whole endeavour of overthrowing the monarchy in a bourgeois
revolution and then, at some point in the future, overthrowing the bourgeoisie in a
proletarian revolution. At first, Lenin failed to convince the delegates to approve a
definition of party membership slightly more ‘Jacobin’—in the sense of limiting
membership to ‘participants’ in the party’s business—than Iulii Martov’s defin-
ition, which would ensure a somewhat larger party, and one less easily controlled
from the centre, by providing membership to ‘supporters’ of the party. But after
Jewish Bundists and two delegates representing Rabochee delo left the congress for
reasons of their own, Lenin found himself with a working majority that approved
his proposal to reduce membership on the newly created Central Organ, which
would run the party, from six to three. Since it was assumed that the six-person
editorial board of Iskra would constitute this central organ, its reduction by half
required the same of the editorial board. The result was that Plekhanov, Martov,
and Lenin were designated to run both institutions. With Plekhanov in one of his
‘Jacobin’ phases, when his views were generally in alignment with Lenin’s, the
latter did not need Martov’s support to secure a majority in either of them. To all
intents and purposes, Lenin was now, if not the leader of the RSDLP, then
certainly primus inter pares. Fully cognizant of his new status, Lenin dubbed his
followers at the congress ‘Bolsheviks’, or people of the majority, to distinguish
them from his detractors, whom he shrewdly dubbed ‘Mensheviks’, or people in
the minority. Foolishly, those so derogated accepted the descriptive, and to their
detriment both descriptives proved to be permanent.

²⁶ It is true that in 1902 in What is to be Done?, Lenin had translated the authoritarianism others
sensed in his temperament into a conception of how a revolutionary party should be organized that
stressed the necessity of hierarchy and strict obedience once its policies had been determined. But the
negative reaction among many Russian socialists paled in comparison to what it would be to Lenin’s
actions at the Second Congress one year later.
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While powerless to stop Lenin from splitting the party, his numerous antag-
onists wasted little time in denouncing him for doing so. In their diatribes,
allusions to the French Revolution were common. The Economist Vladimir
Akimov declared that the authoritarianism Lenin (and Plekhanov) had revealed
at the congress smacked of Jacobinism, and that, if unchecked, could lead to the
application of terror. In contrast to Lenin, who considered the Jacobins and
the Blanquists polar opposites, by claiming that both of these terms were descrip-
tive of Lenin Akimov made clear that, as far as he was concerned, there was little
difference between them; both the Jacobins and the Blanquists were either openly
or surreptitiously authoritarian.²⁷ But to Akimov, this was hardly cause for
despondency. His derogation of Lenin was a warning, not a prediction. Russian
socialism was strong enough to ensure Lenin’s eventual demise, after which he
would be as powerless as Blanqui and the Blanquists had been through much of
the nineteenth century. For Akimov, French history demonstrated how a revolu-
tionary movement could turn bad, but it also showed that it could remain strong
as long as unscrupulous individuals intent on betraying it did not take power (as
was true of the Blanquists), or if they did, be forced to relinquish it (which was true
of the Jacobins and would the case for Lenin).²⁸
Akimov was a minor figure in Russian socialism. Far more influential was Iulii
Martov, whose criticisms of Lenin following the congress were taken especially
seriously because of the longstanding friendship between the two men, which was
now severely tested, and in fact would never be repaired.²⁹ Martov had been
interested in the French Revolution and in the revolutions in France that followed
it even before his conversion to Marxism. As a youth he read Herzen and Victor
Hugo, and in his memoirs mentioned his infatuation with Mirabeau, the Giron-
dins, Danton, and Robespierre; he also found the speeches of Desmoulins, Hébert,
and Babeuf inspirational.³⁰ As a university student in St Petersburg, he mostly
ignored debates over whether Russia had to experience industrial capitalism
before advancing to socialism. To establish one’s credentials as a revolutionary,
it was enough simply to commit oneself to socialism, and to recognize that only
through ‘a Jacobin revolution’ could socialism be achieved. This, at any rate, was

²⁷ V. P. Makhnovets [V. Akimov], K voprosu o rabotakh II-go s”ezda (Geneva, 1904), pp. 41–2;
V. P. Makhnovets’, Ocherk razvitiia sotsialdemokratii (St Petersburg, 1905), p. 141.
²⁸ Makhnovets, K voprosu o rabotakh, p. 42.
²⁹ When Martov was mortally ill in the early 1920s, Lenin, perhaps recalling their friendship in the
1890s, ordered for him the finest medical treatment despite his strenuous criticism—which included
charges of Jacobinism—of Lenin’s new regime. The Soviet government, moreover, only subjected
Martov to house arrest, rather than imprisonment, or worse. But Lenin’s agreeing to Martov’s
subsequent request to leave the Soviet Union permanently was hardly motivated by fond memories.
Rather, Lenin calculated that whatever influence Martov still exerted would be minimal if he were
abroad. Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (London and New
York, 1967), pp. 207–8.
³⁰ Ibid., pp. 6–7; Iu. O. Martov, Zapiski sotsial-demokrata (Berlin, 1922), p. 48.
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how he explained his political maturation in his memoirs.³¹ What Martov evidently
meant by a Jacobin revolution was a coup d’état by professional revolutionaries
following an orchestrated campaign of terrorism designed to reduce the capacity of
the government to defend itself.
By 1900 Martov had changed his mind. He now rejected as a recipe for
authoritarianism and dictatorship the Jacobinism he had previously praised.
And by 1904, he was condemning Lenin as its most obvious personification in
Russian Social Democracy. While in November 1903, in a letter to Axelrod
describing Lenin’s losing control of Iskra, Martov had referred to Plekhanov’s
calling Lenin ‘Robespierre’ without either endorsing or rejecting this appellation,
in 1904 he made clear that his opinion was now identical to Plekhanov’s. Everyone
in the newly created RSDLP who believed it functioned best in a state of siege, with
political authority strictly centralized, Martov attacked bitterly as Robesp’erchiki
(‘adherents of Robespierre’); that his actual target was Lenin was unmistakable.³²
In a letter to Axelrod in October 1905 expressing concern about a seizure of power
in St Petersburg, where the government had been rendered virtually powerless by
the general strike that had paralysed the city, Martov stated flatly that the worst
possible outcome for Russia would be a Jacobin dictatorship.³³
Yet another socialist who invoked the French Revolution to condemn Lenin for
his authoritarianism was Leon Trotsky. It took time for Trotsky, as it did for
Martov, to acknowledge this, and then to attack Lenin publicly. At the Second
Congress, in defending the Iskra editorial board against Akimov’s accusation,
repeated by Alexander Martynov, that its actions resembled those of the Jacobins,
Trotsky, in effect, turned their accusation into praise by expressing his approval of
the Jacobinism Akimov and Martynov had condemned.³⁴ And to Akimov’s
description of the proletarian dictatorship he feared Lenin wanted to establish
as ‘an act of Jacobinism’, Trotsky responded that Russian socialists had nothing to
worry about.³⁵ A proletarian dictatorship, he wrote, would not be the consequence
of any ‘conspiratorial seizure of power’, but rather ‘the political rule of the
organised working class, which will then constitute the majority of the nation’.³⁶
But once Trotsky considered seriously the implications of Lenin’s actions at
the congress, he denounced them. In a summary of the proceedings he prepared
for the organization from Siberia he had represented at the congress, Trotsky

³¹ Martov, Zapiski, pp. 94, 98.

³² ‘Pis’mo Iu. Martova k P. B. Aksel’rodu (4 November 1903)’, Pis’ma P. B. Aksel’roda i Iu.
O. Martova, 1901–1916, edited by F. Dan, B. Nikolaevskii, and L. Tsederbaum-Dan (The Hague,
1967), p. 97; Iu. O. Martov, Bor’ba s ‘osadnym’ polozheniem’ v Rossiiskoi sotsial’demokratovskoi
rabochei partii: otvet na pis’mo n. Lenina (Geneva, 1904), p. 10.
³³ ‘Pis’mo Iu. O. Martova k P. B. Aksel’rodu’, Pis’ma P. B. Aksel’roda i Iu. O. Martov, p. 146.
³⁴ Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky. 1879–1921 (New York, 1954), p. 76.
³⁵ Quoted in Jonathan Frankel, ed., Vladimir Akimov on the Dilemma of Russian Marxism
1895–1903 (Cambridge, 1969), p. 94.
³⁶ Ibid.
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castigated Lenin as ‘a Robespierre [who] transformed the modest [Party] Council

into an all-powerful Committee of Public Safety’.³⁷ Just like the leader of the
Jacobins, Lenin was leading his followers, and the newly established party as a
whole, to disaster. By so thoroughly centralizing political authority, Lenin was
making divisions within it more likely. Even worse, the authoritarian tempera-
ment Lenin shared with Robespierre explained why each of them was capable of
using violence to achieve his objectives. Robespierre, of course, had already done
so, while Lenin’s killings were still hypothetical. But that did not diminish the
danger Lenin’s centralism posed to the party, which in Trotsky’s opinion could
easily degenerate into an actual dictatorship should the party lead the proletariat
in a successful revolution and then take power itself, rather than relinquish
leadership to the proletariat. This of course could not be permitted under any
circumstances.
But this particular scenario could not occur for quite some time, and in any
event Trotsky’s references to Robespierre and the Jacobins were intended to
illustrate that Lenin’s centralism was dangerous, rather than that it actually
replicated that of the Jacobins. Unlike Lenin in 1903, the Jacobins controlled a
country and exercised real power. At some point in the future, Lenin might be in
the same position and do the terrible things the Jacobins had done. Then again, he
might not. For that reason Trotsky carefully refrained from asserting any analogy
or similarity between the French and the Russian situations, while claiming
simultaneously that Lenin resembled Robespierre only in caricature. Paraphrasing
Marx’s famous remark about Louis Napoleon, Trotsky concluded that Lenin
differed from Robespierre roughly ‘as a vulgar farce differs from a historical
tragedy’.³⁸
In 1904, Trotsky composed a pamphlet entitled, in English translation, Our
Political Tasks, in which he responded to Lenin’s recent comments praising the
Jacobins and Jacobinism by fleshing out his earlier explanation why French
Jacobinism and Russian Social Democracy were mutually exclusive. These two

³⁷ L. Trotsky, Vtoroi s”ezd RSDRP (Otchet Simbirskii delegatsii) (Geneva, 1903), p. 29.
³⁸ Ibid., p. 33. Trotsky, who prior to the summer of 1917 ostentatiously refused to become a
Bolshevik—or to join any other organization or party within the larger rubric of Russian socialism—
understandably had good reason to pretend, after finally becoming a Bolshevik, that his differences
with Lenin were minimal, and in any case had been misunderstood and exaggerated. In his
biographical sketch written three months after Lenin’s death in 1924 which Trotsky intended as a
general introduction to a full-scale biography of the Soviet leader, which he never completed,
Trotsky repeated Plekhanov’s condemnation of Lenin—that he possessed ‘the stuff of which
Robespierres are made’—but offered none of his own. Leon Trotsky, Lenin: Notes for a Biographer
(New York, 1971), pp. 8–9, 69. In 1927, in an article entitled ‘Thermidor’ explaining its relationship
to the French Revolution itself, Trotsky chose to deal with the matter of his differences with Lenin
more directly, now acknowledging that the latter had been right all along in claiming ‘continuity’
between the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks. The article is reprinted in Leon Trotsky, The Challenge of
the Left Opposition [hereafter rendered as CLO followed by the year or years] 1926–27 (New York,
1980), p. 263.
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historical phenomena, he maintained, were, in fact, so radically different that any

useful comparison between them was impossible. In Trotsky’s words:
Jacobinism is not a supra-social ‘revolutionary’ category but a historical product.
Jacobinism is the highest moment reached by the tension of revolutionary energy
during the period of the self-emancipation of bourgeois society. It is the max-
imum radicalism which can be produced by bourgeois society—not by the
development of its internal contradictions but by the suppression and stifling
of these: in theory, by appealing to the rights of the abstract man and the abstract
citizen, in practice, with the help of the guillotine.³⁹

Trotsky went on to explain in more detail why the Jacobins had failed. Because
they proclaimed the universality of their political principles, the Jacobins, through
their rhetoric—which masked their indebtedness to the particular class from
which they originated and to which they still belonged—energized nearly every-
one who opposed them, with the result that they were forced to rule by terror,
which turned out to be the most proximate reason for their subsequent demise.
Of course the Jacobins were not the only actors in the French Revolution who
failed. So, too, did the Abbé de Sieyès, whose conviction, which resembled Lenin’s,
that power in any political institution should ‘come from above’ caused him to
lose power in 1799 to Napoleon.⁴⁰ But none of this, in what it might portend
for Russian Social Democracy, should be worrisome. Because Russian socialists
would likely keep their goals in consonance with what was politically possible, the
application of terror would be unnecessary:
[The Jacobins] were utopians; we aspire to express objective tendencies. They
were idealists from foot to head; we are materialists from head to foot. They were
rationalists; we are dialecticians. They believed in the saving force of a supra-class
truth before which everyone should kneel. We believe only in the class force
of the revolutionary proletariat. . . . Their method was to guillotine the slightest
deviations; ours is to overcome differences ideologically and politically. They cut
off heads; we enlighten them with class consciousness.⁴¹

To be sure, Trotsky freely acknowledged in his pamphlet that the Jacobins and
Russian socialists were similar. Both fought resolutely against the heresies of
reformism and opportunism. And while Russian socialists would never inflict
indiscriminate terror on an entire population, as the Jacobins had done, Trotsky
could not promise that Lenin would not follow the Jacobins’ example. Robespierre’s
aphorism that there are only two kinds of citizens in a body politics, virtuous

³⁹ L. Trotsky, Nashi politicheskie zadachi (Geneva, 1904); L. D. Trotsky o partii v 1904 g. (Moscow/
Leningrad, 1928), p. 183.
⁴⁰ Trotsky did not cite Napoleon’s coup as the specific cause for the failure for which he held Sieyès’
centralism responsible, but this is almost certainly what he had in mind.
⁴¹ Ibid., p. 184.
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ones and evil ones, was ‘engraved on the heart of “Maximilien Lenin” ’, whose
temperamental affinity for the tactics the Jacobins had employed could only lead
the RSDLP to disaster.⁴² But the two phenomena themselves, Jacobinism and
Russian Social Democracy, because they emerged at different times in history,
were fundamentally and irreconcilably different. To claim otherwise was not
only false but a perversion of language. In fact, if Jacobinism should come to
pervade Russian Social Democracy in its entirety, a different term would be
needed to describe it.
It was certainly possible, according to Trotsky, that individuals plausibly
claiming to be socialists and orthodox Marxists could manifest personal qual-
ities consistent with those of the original Jacobins. Lenin, of course, was the
perfect example of such a person, and it was obviously with Lenin in mind that
Trotsky spoke passionately, though also only hypothetically, about the party
organization substituting itself for the party, the Central Committee substituting
itself for the organization, and finally a dictator, presumably Lenin, substituting
himself for the Central Committee.⁴³ But Trotsky’s celebrated strictures on the
dangers of centralism (or Jacobinism) were intended more as warnings than as
predictions. Because they were Marxists, Russian Social Democrats were not like
the Jacobins, as a result of which ‘[their] attitude towards elemental social forces,
and therefore towards the future, is one of revolutionary confidence’.⁴⁴ At most,
Jacobinism would remain a political tendency in Russian socialism, but one that
had little chance of perverting or preventing a proletarian revolution. As on so
many other occasions throughout his career, Trotsky’s powerful intellect and
historical consciousness enabled him, in 1903 and 1904, to sense danger in the
course the Bolsheviks were following, only to dismiss the danger as illusory out
of an unshakable optimism about the objective laws of history—and an equally
unshakeable confidence in the veracity and persuasive power of his own views.
Having raised the disturbing precedent of the Jacobins, Trotsky ended up
rejecting it.
The next time Trotsky addressed the whole issue of Jacobinism was in 1906, not
long after the 1905 Revolution had ended in failure. For Trotsky, however, the
revolution was not without its benefits. As chairman of the St Petersburg Soviet of
Workers’ Deputies, Trotsky had the opportunity to demonstrate his oratorical
ability. What is more, the revolution prompted Trotsky to conjure a scenario of
revolutions so close to one another temporally as to constitute a single, continuous
revolution. In the sequence of events Marx and Engels had proposed and that their
followers, with few exceptions, considered inescapable, the bourgeois revolution
that ended feudalism would produce an ersatz democracy, controlled by the
bourgeoisie, that would delude the proletariat (and the lower strata of the peasantry)

⁴² Ibid. p. 190. ⁴³ Ibid., p. 127. ⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 187.

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into believing that the bourgeoisie was attentive to their interests and committed to
their material and spiritual improvement. Moreover, it would take decades, even
centuries perhaps, for the proletariat, as its economic condition worsened, to realize
that this democracy was just a ruse intended to perpetuate the economic supremacy
of the bourgeoisie. Finally, it would do so, and at that point the bourgeoisie’s
destruction in a proletarian revolution would be imminent.
Because Marx and Engels considered history impervious to anything that might
cause it to deviate from its predetermined path, it followed logically that history
could not be rushed. But Trotsky, in 1905, was a revolutionary in a hurry, and the
speed at which he wanted history to proceed got the better of his Marxist
determinism. What he did, in stating the course he believed history could follow
in Russia, was to merge the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions into one
continuous revolution, in which the proletariat would take from the bourgeoisie
the political power it had just wrested from the aristocracy, and together the
proletariat and the most progressive elements of the peasantry—led, of course, by
professional revolutionaries like Trotsky himself—would establish socialism in
Russia. The only caveat Trotsky included in his extraordinarily optimistic—and
ideologically heterodox—scenario was that there be simultaneous proletarian
revolutions in Western Europe enabling the proletariat there to assist its Russian
equivalent should its assistance be necessary. In this way, the entire period in
Russia’s history during which the bourgeoisie held power would be compressed
into a matter of weeks, days, or even hours. In fact, Trotsky even allowed, if only
by implication, for the possibility that the bourgeoisie, by conferring on the
proletariat and the peasantry the responsibility of carrying out the bourgeois
revolution, would never exercise power at all. In other words, the proletariat
and the peasantry, instead of participating alongside the bourgeoisie in the
bourgeois revolution, would carry out the revolution without it.
It seemed to follow from Trotsky’s scenario that analogies with the French
Revolution were entirely invalid. In Itogii i perspektivy (Results and Prospects),
written in 1906, he made clear that this was precisely what he wanted his followers
to believe. ‘History’, he said, ‘does not repeat itself. However much the Russian
Revolution can be compared with the Great French Revolution, the former can
never be transformed into a repetition of the latter.’⁴⁵ Indeed, the differences
between the French Revolution, as all Marxists considered it, and Trotsky’s theory
of Permanent Revolution—as it came to be known—were obvious. While in the
French Revolution, it was the bourgeoisie that ended feudalism, in Trotsky’s vision
of the future Russian Revolution the proletariat and the peasantry would either
join with the bourgeoisie in ending feudalism, or achieve the same objective on
their own. And while in the French Revolution the Jacobins’ attempt to radicalize

⁴⁵ L. Trotsky, Itogi i perspektivy (Moscow, 1919), p. 25.

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it ended in failure, in the Russian Revolution, in Trotsky’s prognostication, the

proletariat’s attempt to radicalize it would succeed.
What this implies about the possibility of Jacobinism in the Russian Revolution
is rather subtle. To the extent that the Jacobins in France were unable to remain in
power after wresting it from the bourgeoisie, Russian socialists would be well
advised not to imitate them. But to the extent that the Jacobins succeeded in taking
power from the bourgeoisie, and then attempted to make the French Revolution
something more than what it was, Russian socialists, while avoiding the Jacobins’
mistakes, should nevertheless honor their noble intentions, apply to their own
situation the insights the Jacobins had gained from their experience, and find
psychological sustenance in the epic saga of their rise and fall. That the Jacobins’
failure, no less than their success, was inevitable hardly detracted from the
precedent of heroism and martyrdom they left behind. The legerdemain with
which Trotsky, in 1906, defended the Jacobins against accusations that he, among
others, had expressed just a few years earlier, is clear in the following passage from
Results and Prospects:
Jacobinism is now a term of reproach on the lips of all liberal wiseacres.
Bourgeois hatred of revolution, its hatred of the masses and of the force and
grandeur of the history that is made in the streets, is concentrated in one cry of
indignation and fear—Jacobinism! We, the world army of Communism, long ago
made our historical reckoning with Jacobinism. . . . We subjected its theories to
criticism, we exposed its historical limitations, we unmasked its social contra-
dictions, its utopianism, and its phraseology, and we broke with its traditions,
which for decades had been regarded as the sacred heritage of the revolution.
But we come to the defence of Jacobinism against the attacks, the slander, and
the mindless vituperation of anemic, phlegmatic liberalism. The bourgeoisie has
shamefully betrayed all the traditions of its historical youth, and its current
lackeys dishonour the graves of its ancestors and scoff at the ashes of their
ideals. . . . However radically the proletariat may have broken in practice with
the revolutionary traditions of the bourgeoisie, it nevertheless preserves them as a
heritage of great passion, heroism, and initiative, and in its heart beats sympa-
thetically with the speeches and the acts of the Jacobin Convention.⁴⁶

Without saying so explicitly, Trotsky has now qualified significantly his earlier
strictures both on emulating the Jacobins and on drawing analogies with the
French Revolution. Perhaps a Russian Robespierre—irrespective of whether
Lenin would assume that particular role—would be a good thing for Russian
Social Democracy.
Other Russian socialists, however, had no second thoughts about Lenin’s
authoritarianism and the harm it might inflict on Russian Social Democracy.

⁴⁶ Ibid., pp. 26–7.

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Some, like Vera Zasulich, condemned what they saw as Lenin’s dictatorial
proclivities without referring to the Jacobins or the French Revolution.⁴⁷ Con-
versely, socialists who were not Russian sometimes cited the revolution in doing
so. The most prominent was Rosa Luxemburg, who, in the course of her career,
which ended prematurely with her assassination in Germany in 1919, involved
herself in varying degrees in German, Polish, and Russian socialism. Although
she did not attend the Second Congress, she knew enough about Lenin from his
writings to recognize that they were entirely consistent with what she had
learned from others about his actions at the Congress. A year later, she sum-
marized her objections in an article published both in Neue Zeit, the official
organ of the German Social Democratic Party, and in Iskra, on the editorial
board of which Lenin was still a member, though regularly outvoted now because
of Plekhanov’s recent repudiation of the hard line he had followed at the
congress in favour of a softer one.⁴⁸ In the article, Luxemburg argued that any
parties and organizations Social Democrats created should be different from
those of the Jacobins and the Blanquists. This was because the Jacobins and, to
an even greater extent, the Blanquists separated themselves politically from the
classes and categories of the population they claimed to represent; the result, in
the case of the Jacobins, was a revolutionary elite that claimed to rule in ways
that helped the people while actually harming them. The Blanquists, of course,
never gained power, but the implication of what Luxemburg wrote about them
was that, if they had taken power, they, too, would soon have ignored the
interests of whichever segment of the population supported them.
In Luxemburg’s opinion, Lenin was no different. Both his personality and his
actions bespoke a genuine authoritarianism, and one can consider her more
extensive, more impassioned, and ultimately more prophetic denunciation in
1918 of the Soviet state of a piece with what she had written in 1904.⁴⁹ Luxemburg
and Pavel Axelrod were the first socialists to sense Lenin’s authoritarianism, the
first to recognize that he might never honour the promises he made to transfer
political authority to the workers once they had acquired the political conscious-
ness sufficient to carry out a socialist revolution. But one must be careful in stating
precisely what it was about Lenin that Luxemburg, both in 1904 and in 1918, was
rejecting. It was not a centralized party per se. Nor was it the notion of the party as

⁴⁷ She did, however, compare Lenin to Louis XIV, analogizing the latter’s identification of himself
with the state (‘L’état c’est moi’) with what she considered the former’s proprietary designs on the newly
created RSDLP. Vera Zasulich, ‘Organizatsiia, partiia, dvizhenie’, Iskra, no. 70 (25 July 1904): pp. 4–6.
See also Vera Zasulich, ‘K istorii vtorogo s”ezda (5 November 1904)’, Katorga i ssylka, no. 7–8 (1926):
pp. 128–30.
⁴⁸ R. Luxemburg, ‘Organizatsionnye voprosy russkoi sotsial demokratii’, Iskra, no. 69 (10 July 1904):
pp. 2–7. The essay has been published in English translation as ‘Leninism vs. Marxism’, in Rosa
Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor MI, 1972), pp. 81–108.
⁴⁹ Luxemburg, Russian Revolution, pp. 25–80.
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the ‘vanguard’ of the proletariat. When the RSDLP was established, Luxemburg,
no less than Lenin, recognized that the workers lacked political consciousness and
were thus susceptible to the two deviations from Marxism orthodoxy, Economism
and Bernstein’s evolutionary socialism, that Lenin and Plekhanov had denounced.
However, Lenin’s deviation from Marxist orthodoxy, as Luxemburg saw it, was
entirely different, and in terms of the future of the party, even more dangerous:
instead of perpetuating the unequal relationship between the workers and the
professional revolutionaries until it could be reversed once the former had gained
from the latter the knowledge of Marxist ideology they needed to make a success-
ful revolution, the future Soviet leader was acting in ways that might soon sever
this relationship entirely. As a result, the revolution Luxemburg believed in 1904
would occur in the distant future would not be a revolution at all. Instead, it would
be what it was in 1917, namely a coup d’état masquerading as an urban insurrec-
tion, claiming falsely not just to represent the proletariat, but actually, in some
fashion, to embody it.
Although it took some time, in Plekhanov’s case, for Lenin’s behaviour at the
Second Congress to have a similar effect, once he reversed his opinion, he attacked
Lenin loudly and repeatedly. In the immediate aftermath of the Second Congress,
Lenin still had no reason to doubt Plekhanov’s loyalty, or his continued belief
in the efficacy of the Jacobinism many of his colleagues had already condemned.
In an article in Iskra in September 1903, Plekhanov argued that the Terror in
the French Revolution, which he now construed to include the storming of the
Bastille in 1789, had mass support.⁵⁰ Terror on behalf of the masses, he argued,
was often inspirational, and thus could reinvigorate a revolution showing signs of
slowing down. For that reason, Russian revolutionaries would be wise to study
carefully the terror the plebeians of Paris employed in 1789, because by doing so
they would be better able ‘to storm our own, our all-Russian Bastille’.⁵¹ But two
months later, he came to question the Jacobinism he had previously praised—
which in turn caused his good opinion of Lenin to disappear. Whether Plekha-
nov’s less favourable opinion of the Jacobins caused the change in how he viewed
Lenin, or whether his less favourable opinion of Lenin caused the change in how
he viewed the Jacobins, is unclear. But the result was undeniable. When Lenin
lost control of Iskra in November 1903, Plekhanov analogized his defeat to
Robespierre’s, and not even the implication in his analogy that losing control of
a newspaper was somehow comparable to arrest and execution seemed to bother
him or to cause him to question the analogy after proposing it.⁵² In reality,
Plekhanov’s oscillations in the matter of the Jacobins continued. In 1906 he
argued that ‘Jacobins without popular support are pitiable’, and that Russian

⁵⁰ G. V. Plekhanov, ‘Belyi terror’, in Plekhanov, Sochineniia, vol. XII, pp. 449–50.

⁵¹ Ibid., p. 450. ⁵² Mayer, ‘Lenin and the Jacobin Identity’, p. 143.
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socialists would do better preparing the latter for a popular revolution.⁵³ But he
also saw no need to revise his earlier view, in his article on the centenary of the
French Revolution, that only the Jacobins could have saved it from destruction in
1793, prior to the article’s reissue, also in 1906, in St Petersburg.⁵⁴
Implicit in Plekhanov’s argument was that the Jacobins were not only revolu-
tionaries but also French patriots espousing a kind of revolutionary nationalism
similar to that which would cause him, in 1914, to favour Russia’s participation in
the First World War. In fact, in November 1917, barely a month after the October
Revolution, in a letter his wife wrote that one of his biographers claims to reflect
accurately Plekhanov’s views when she wrote it, Lenin was condemned for
allowing Russia ‘to be torn to pieces’ by foreign enemies, unlike the Jacobins in
the Convention, who to their credit had prevented the same thing from happening
to France.⁵⁵ But after 1906 other issues, such as how socialists should respond to
the outbreak of war in 1914, assumed greater significance, and Plekhanov’s
comments on the Jacobins and the French Revolution diminished accordingly.
Plekhanov’s apostasy in the fall of 1903 infuriated Lenin. But it was actually
Pavel Axelrod who prompted the Bolshevik leader finally to address the accus-
ation of authoritarianism publicly. In 1904, in an article in Iskra that because of its
length appeared serially in two issues of the newspaper, Axelrod, without men-
tioning Robespierre or the Jacobins, described Lenin pejoratively in terms many
Russian socialists would understand.⁵⁶ Axelrod stated his objections to Lenin
clearly and emphatically. If allowed to accumulate even greater power than he
already had, Lenin would destroy everything that made socialism virtuous. And
the reason for this was that Lenin made a ‘fetish’ of his centralism.⁵⁷ According to
Axelrod, centralizing political authority within the party was not necessarily a bad
thing. In 1905, when Russia was actually experiencing a revolution, he advocated
the creation of ‘central clubs’ modelled on the Jacobins’ that would ‘rally the
proletariat and form a strong revolutionary atmosphere’.⁵⁸ But until a revolution
occurred, Russian socialists had to recognize and accept the harsh reality that with

⁵³ G. V. Plekhanov, ‘Pis’ma o taktike i bestaktnosti (June 1906)’, in Plekhanov, Sochineniia, vol. XV,
p. 110.
⁵⁴ G. V. Plekhanov, Stoletie velikoi revoliutsii (St Petersburg, 1906).
⁵⁵ Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism (Stanford CA, 1963), p. 358.
⁵⁶ P. B. Axelrod, ‘Ob”edinenie rossiiskoi sotsialdemokratii i eia zadachi’, Iskra, no. 55 (15 December
1903): pp. 1–4 and no. 57 (15 January 1904): pp. 2–4. In 1921 Axelrod repeated these arguments, and
acknowledged that they were identical to those he first made in 1903 and 1904. In 1921, however, he
dressed them explicitly in the language of the French Revolution, arguing that ‘the Jacobinism of the
Bolsheviks [was] a tragic parody of its original’. ‘Tov. P. B. Aksel’rod o bol’shevisme i bor’be s nim!’
Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 6 (20 April 1921): pp. 3–7, and no. 7 (4 May 1921): pp. 4–5. Two years
earlier he had added to his original indictment that Lenin split the RSDLP in 1903 not over anything
substantive but only to accumulate power, the additional derogation that this was the result of Lenin’s
‘Bonapartism’. After the October Revolution he also termed the new Bolshevik regime as a whole to be
‘tsarist-Bonapartist’. Naarden, Socialist Europe and Revolutionary Russia, p. 302.
⁵⁷ Axelrod, ‘Ob”edinenie rossiiskoi sotsialdemokratii i eia zadachi’ (1904), p. 4.
⁵⁸ P. B. Axelrod, Narodnaia duma i rabochii s”ezd (Geneva, 1905), p. 8.
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their leaders almost entirely in emigration and their influence in Russia practically
nil, a measure of centralism in how party cells inside Russia were organized was
still essential. But in this sense there could be too much of a good thing—and it
was Lenin, more than anyone else in the party, who could ensure that that would
happen. His authoritarian temperament, combined with an iron will and an
intolerance of opposing points of view, was a real and present danger to all that
was best in socialism. In fact, should a party led by Lenin take power in Russia, it
would quickly degenerate into a ruthless and brutal dictatorship.⁵⁹
Barely four months after his denunciation of Lenin in Iskra, Axelrod amplified
his earlier criticisms in another article, also in Iskra, which he felt compelled to
write after receiving a letter from Karl Kautsky in which the German socialist
showed what Axelrod considered a woeful lack of understanding of what dis-
tinguished Mensheviks from Bolsheviks.⁶⁰ In the article Axelrod remarked that
Lenin’s emphasis on discipline and centralism reminded him of Blanquism and
Jacobinism.⁶¹ But not even the authoritarianism these terms implied could fully
capture the danger Lenin posed to the moral fibre of Russian Social Democracy;
the only analogy Axelrod could conjure was that the Bolshevik leader, both in his
views and in his temperament, resembled ‘the bureaucratic-autocratic system of
the (tsarist) Ministry of the Interior’.⁶² Although the emphasis in the article was
obviously on Lenin’s dictatorial proclivities, there is also evident the rudiments
of the argument that not everything that happened in the French Revolution
was salubrious, and that the Jacobins’ penchant for repression and hostility to
any free expression of opinion were as abhorrent as the worst excrescences of
tsarist autocracy.
By the time Axelrod had written this, Lenin had preemptively unleashed his
rhetorical fusillades in an essay entitled, in English translation, One Step Forward,
Two Steps Back (The Crisis in our Party), which was published as a book in Geneva
in May 1904.⁶³ It was more a polemic than a calm and carefully considered
exegesis. Its intent was to defame rather than to illuminate. But it nonetheless

⁵⁹ In 1925 the Menshevik P. A. Garvi credited Axelrod with identifying and calling attention to what
Garvi called Lenin’s ‘Bonapartist habits’, and praised the striking similarities Alexrod had seen between
Lenin’s conception of a socialist party and the Jacobin clubs, with their conspiratorial methods and
centralized organization. P. A. Garvi, ‘P. B. Aksel’rod i Men’shevizm’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no.
109–10 (1925): pp. 11–12. Garvi’s low opinion of both Napoleon and the Jacobins, however, did not
vitiate his longstanding admiration for the original French Revolution. While living in Paris in
emigration after the October Revolution he made a point of visiting the site of the Bastille on Bastille
Day because the holiday was ‘an echo of a heroic past and a living, breathing expression of freedom’.
P. A. Garvi, Vospominaniia Sotsialdemokrata: stat’i o zhizni i deiatel’nosti (New York, 1946), p. 400.
⁶⁰ P. Axelrod, ‘K voprosu ob istochnike i znachenii nashikh organizatsionnykh rasnoglasii’, Iskra,
no. 68 (25 June 1904): p. 2.
⁶¹ Ibid.
⁶² Ibid. For the sequence of events that prompted Axelrod to write the article, see Ascher, Pavel
Axelrod, pp. 210–11.
⁶³ V. I. Lenin, Shag vpered, dva shaga nazad (Krizis v nashei partii), in Lenin, PSS, vol. VIII,
pp. 185–414.
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contained a serious argument. Since the publication of What is to be Done?, Lenin

had maintained in his mind a vision of how a revolutionary party in Russia should
be organized and administered in order to survive under a repressive autocracy.
At this point in life, the future founder of the Soviet state did not think much
beyond the party’s survival. The tsarist autocracy was too strong, and the Russian
proletariat too weak and politically illiterate for him to conceive of scenarios
in which the RSDLP might somehow seize power in an urban insurrection.
But Lenin was certain that only revolutionaries possessing certain personal qual-
ities could create the revolutionary party he desired. These revolutionaries, like
Rakhmetov in Chernyshevskii’s novel, had to be tough, totally committed to
the cause, and ruthless enough to exclude from it anyone showing the slightest
sentimentality. To Lenin, not only Axelrod, but also Martov, Akimov, and Zasu-
lich were the embodiment of all the qualities Russian revolutionaries should
eschew. These individuals in particular were the antithesis of the revolutionary
he imagined himself to be, and their specific recommendations on tactics and
ideology could not be anything other than ill-conceived and counterproductive.
Because of their personal traits, they were destined to fail.
In One Step Forward, Lenin did not have to invoke the French Revolution to
make his argument. But he did so anyway. Alluding to it made his arguments
more persuasive—or so Lenin believed—and also to heighten the embarrassment
he wanted their targets to experience. The way he did this was by employing a
rhetorical sleight of hand that he would use no less effectively in the future. Instead
of denying the charge that he was a Jacobin and the Russian Robespierre, he
welcomed it, thereby turning what was intended as an epithet and a pejorative into
a virtue. Dredging up the debate at the Second Congress on the importance of how
best to ensure that the party they were creating would remain a proletarian one,
Lenin drew a sharp distinction between himself and those who opposed him, and
drove home the moral and political dichotomy he was suggesting in the form of a
series of questions:
Who defends the proletarian trend in our movement? Who insists that the
worker is not afraid of organization, that the proletarian has no sympathy for
anarchy, that he values any incentive to organize? Who warns us against
the bourgeois intelligentsia, which is permeated thoroughly with opportunism?
The Jacobins of Social Democracy. And who tries to smuggle radical intellectuals
into the party? Who is concerned about professors, high-school students, free-
lancers, and radical youth? The Girondin Axelrod together with the Girondin
Lieber.⁶⁴

After excoriating Axelrod for adopting ‘the hackneyed Bernsteinian refrain about
Jacobinism and Blanquism’, which only confirmed his own ‘opportunism’, Lenin

⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 370. Mikhail Lieber was of course another Menshevik.

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proclaimed—in the most revealing and politically consequential statement of his

on the French Revolution prior to the October Revolution—that Jacobinism was
not a deviation from Social Democracy but its best expression and its highest
embodiment: ‘A Jacobin who wholly identifies with the organization of the
proletariat—a proletariat that is conscious of its class interests—is a revolutionary
Social Democrat.’⁶⁵ Lenin then analogized to the Girondins a mentality he saw far
too often among the Social Democrats whose words and writings he was finding
increasingly abhorrent’. Excoriating the ‘phrase-mongering’ typical of these Rus-
sian Girondins, who rejected the centralized party he considered essential to its
eventual success, Lenin castigated the tactics they preferred to his as little more
than ‘autonomism, aristocratic and overly-intellectualised anarchism, and tailism’
dressed up as Marxism and Social Democracy.⁶⁶ In fact, the fear these Russian
Girondins had of actually establishing a proletarian dictatorship was the most
obvious expression of the cold but undeniable fact that they were not really
revolutionaries at all.
Invoking the Jacobins was surely, for Lenin, a matter of sober calculation.
Adopting the terminology his opponents had directed against him while reversing
the moral value they placed on it showed the degree to which, by 1904, he had
become a cunning, resourceful, and ruthless politician. In addition, because
Russian socialists had effectively divorced the whole notion of Jacobinism from
its actual origins in the French Revolution, the term was sufficiently amorphous,
and its boundaries sufficiently elastic, so that it could include or exclude practic-
ally anything; in the early 1900s in Russia, it could be used, and was used, to
justify, or to condemn, virtually any political party Russian socialists created.
Indeed, the very uncertainty about what the term actually meant enabled Lenin
to obscure the distinction between the class the Jacobins belonged to (the bour-
geoisie or some subset of the bourgeoisie) and the social classes and categories the
Jacobins had represented politically (mainly impoverished peasants and an urban
‘proto-proletariat’). This conception of the Jacobins was particularly felicitous in
substantiating Lenin’s sense of himself as Marx’s successor because it applied
equally well to Marx and Lenin. Both men belonged to the bourgeoisie but claimed
to know what the proletariat and other oppressed classes wanted and needed—
even though in doing so they were reversing Marx’s axiom, without which
Marxism is no longer Marxism, that being determined consciousness.
But calling himself a Jacobin—which is exactly what he did in his article
without doing so explicitly—was more than a manifestation of tactical acumen
and a subtle way of squaring an ideological circle. There was, in addition, a
personal element to Lenin’s identification with the Jacobins. In his mind they
were, clearly and undeniably, the figures of the French Revolution who most

⁶⁵ Ibid., p. 370. ⁶⁶ Ibid., pp. 385, 394.

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resembled him. To say that when Lenin looked at Robespierre and Saint-Just he
saw himself is more than a rhetorical flourish. By focusing his praise on their
personal qualities rather than on what they actually accomplished, Lenin was
extricating the Jacobins from the milieu in which they lived, and indeed from
history itself. In the way Lenin understood the term, ‘Jacobinism’ was part of a
universal revolutionary lexicon suggesting certain qualities of firmness, determin-
ation, and will that were as desirable in Russia in the twentieth century as they
were in France at the end of the eighteenth.
It is certainly true that Lenin first concerned himself with the French Revolu-
tion only reluctantly, when opponents invoking it to condemn him forced him to
do the same in response. But once immersed in the revolution, he found in the
Jacobins a kindred spirit. While never, in his own mind, a Jacobin per se, Lenin
seems to have cultivated in himself the very qualities he found admirable in the
Jacobins. Being called a Jacobin, in other words, was for Lenin a compliment,
however much his opponents would have recoiled in horror—and probably
avoided references to the Jacobins entirely in their diatribes against him—had
they realized how much Lenin welcomed the analogy. In purely ideological terms,
Lenin actually had more in common with Babeuf, a genuine communist, than
with the Jacobins, whom Lenin always remembered, albeit reluctantly and with
genuine regret, were not themselves proletarian and never intended a proletarian
revolution. In addition, Babeuf ’s penchant for conspiracy was more in keeping
with Lenin’s conception of how a socialist party should be organized than were the
Jacobin Clubs, which even before the Jacobins took power were decentralized and
had no need to adopt conspiratorial tactics. But Babeuf and his followers, in
contrast to the Jacobins, never took power, and the reason for this, at least as far
as Lenin was concerned, was not just because capitalism in France had not existed
long enough for communism to replace it. Lenin never expressed any particular
admiration for the personal qualities the Babouvists possessed other than a foolish
courage, not dissimilar from that of the narodovol’tsy decades later, that made
their martyrdom especially poignant because it was so politically useless. The
Jacobins, however, were different. In Robespierre and Saint-Just Lenin found
actual figures in history to complement Rakhmetov, who of course existed only
in Chernyshevskii’s imagination, and in Lenin’s, and Lenin admired all three of
them for choosing, as he did, a profession consistent with their personality.
Indeed, by virtue of living in an age when a proletariat actually existed, Lenin
could utilize the character traits he shared with the Jacobins in changing history to
an extent of which the Jacobins, by living in an earlier stage of history, were
incapable.⁶⁷

⁶⁷ In this context one is reminded of Plekhanov’s comment to Lenin that he is ‘baked of the same
dough as Robespierre’, and of Lenin’s reply, after agreeing with Plekhanov’s description, that ‘a Jacobin
joined with the working class is the only true revolutionary’. Quoted in Simon Liberman, Building
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The Mensheviks, unsurprisingly, were not convinced of any of this. If anything,

Lenin’s identification with Jacobinism only deepened their suspicions that any
party he ran would be an authoritarian one, and thus contrary to all that was best
in socialism and Marxism. Of all their responses to One Step Forward, Alexander
Martynov’s, published in January 1905 and titled Two Dictators, was the one
Lenin disliked the most.⁶⁸ Martynov was a fairly decent polemicist, and his
rhetorical attacks clearly irritated the future founder of the Soviet state. Lenin
would seldom miss an opportunity over the next few years to respond in kind, and
while Axelrod may have been the most perspicacious of the Mensheviks in
intuiting the kind of regime Lenin intended, Martynov wielded his pen as a rapier
more adeptly. Indeed, his allusions to the French Revolution were one of the
reasons for his rhetorical success.
According to Martynov, nothing good could come from any party Lenin led,
any revolution he ordered, or any regime in which he exercised power. Martynov
rejected emphatically the positive gloss Lenin placed on the Jacobins and Jaco-
binism. Lenin, in his opinion, was a Russian Jacobin, and as such favoured
conspiratorial tactics that could bring about a revolution in Russia only ‘by
means of an aristocratic coup d’état’.⁶⁹ Social Democracy and Jacobinism were
incompatible, he argued, because the latter entailed ‘the hegemony of an organ-
ization of professional revolutionaries over all opposition movements’.⁷⁰ Even
worse, it carried with it tacit permission for Russian socialists to seize power
prematurely. But Russia was not ready for socialism in 1905, and when it would
be, Jacobin tactics would not be needed because the working class would be large
enough and politically conscious enough to stage a revolution on its own, with
only minimal assistance from professional revolutionaries. In effect, Martynov
argued, Lenin was trying to fuse Marxism and Jacobinism into an ideological and
tactical hybrid in which the latter was a means of achieving the objectives of the
former. But while the Jacobins replaced the bourgeoisie in 1793 and then extended
the revolution beyond what the bourgeoisie intended, the fact that they lost power
soon afterwards showed that ‘neither the God that was Jean Jacques Rousseau,
nor the heroic forces of the Mountain, could defy the laws of historical necessity’.⁷¹
In fact, in Martynov’s rendition of the French Revolution, the petit-bourgeois
dictatorship the Jacobinism established caused the Girondins, in reaction, to
embrace federalism and eventually a form of royalism, while the Jacobins came

Lenin’s Russia (Chicago IL, 1945), p. 16. According to Nikolai Valentinov, who was a supporter of
Lenin when Plekhanov made his remark but eventually rejected Bolshevism and became a Menshevik,
Plekhanov thought less of the Jacobins after Lenin made clear he thought highly of them. Nikolai
Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin (New York, 1968), p. 128.

⁶⁸ Alexander Martynov, Dve diktatury (Geneva, 1905). ⁶⁹ Ibid., p. 10.

⁷⁰ Ibid., p. 11. ⁷¹ Ibid., p. 35.
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to practise imperialism abroad and inflict mass terror at home. As ‘revolutionary

ideologues of the petit-bourgeoisie’, the Jacobins were bound at some point to turn
on the sans-culottes, whose support the Jacobins had wrongly taken as evidence
that their dictatorship transcended class, and thus was destined to endure.⁷² But
even with the sans-culottes terrorized into a passive neutrality, the Jacobins could
not rule by coercion alone. In the end, ‘their most exalted argument was the
guillotine’, and it was clearly not enough to save them.⁷³ In Martynov’s analysis of
the French Revolution, 9 Thermidor became inevitable at the very moment when
the Jacobins, a year earlier, had seized power prematurely.
But instead of learning from the French Revolution, Lenin, in Martynov’s jaundiced
opinion, was bent on repeating its mistakes, most egregiously the Jacobins’ miscalcu-
lation of their chances of retaining power after seizing it. Lenin, in fact, was no diff-
erent from the Jacobins, and therefore the same ‘adventurism’ that was the Jacobins’
principal legacy would lead any party Lenin headed to ruination. In other words,
Martynov, in his essay, was questioning not only the wisdom of Lenin’s tactical choices
and temperamental tendencies, but his credentials as a socialist and revolutionary.
Lenin’s loathing of Martynov and of the Mensheviks who shared his views was
understandable.⁷⁴ Not even the outbreak of revolution in Russia in January 1905,
which one would think would lessen the antagonisms that had developed among
Russian socialists as a consequence of their isolation and political impotence,
diminished his hostility. Instead, it increased. The very real possibility, at least in
Lenin’s mind, that events in Russia would culminate in the downfall of the
monarchy, and then somehow precipitate a workers’ revolution, only underscored
the costs of adopting policies he believed might have doomed this revolution
before it even began. On 8 February, Lenin called for Russian socialists to shelve
their internecine rhetorical warfare and instead work to instill in the masses
awareness that ‘attacking the autocracy is a burning necessity’.⁷⁵ Doing so, he
stated, ‘is the constant common duty of Social Democrats always and every-
where’.⁷⁶ But Lenin, at this point in his article, could no longer restrain himself.
He filled the rest of his article with his customary invective. Martynov and
the other ‘incorrigible Girondins of socialism’ were nothing more than ‘tailists’,
whose acquiescence in their own cowardice and weakness, conducive to tactically
retrograde prescriptions, Martynov dressed up in the clothing of a supposedly
respectable philosophy.⁷⁷

⁷² Ibid., p. 52. ⁷³ Ibid., p. 53.

⁷⁴ Soviet historians, not surprisingly, shared Lenin’s low opinion of Martynov. B. G. Veber, for
example, denigrated him as the leader of ‘the Social Democratic “Gironde” ’—a failing Veber ascribed
to Martynov’s reading Aulard, Michelet, and Jaurès on the French Revolution instead of Marx and
Engels. B. G. Veber, ‘V. I Lenin i istoricheskoe nasledie iakobintsev’, Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik: stat’i i
materialy po istorii Frantsii 1970 (Moscow, 1972), pp. 23, 24.
⁷⁵ V. I. Lenin, ‘Dolzhy li my organizovat’revoliutsiiu’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. IX, p. 269.
⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 269. ⁷⁷ Ibid., p. 271.
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Two weeks later Lenin resumed his rhetorical assault in not one but two articles
that appeared on the same day in the same venue. In one of these, he wrote that
Social Democrats who claimed to be ardent revolutionaries were only pretending.
Like Madame Roland in 1793, when she wrote that France had no men, only
dwarfs, and for that reason knew that the revolution could advance no further,
these ersatz revolutionaries in Russia ‘should retire and leave the field clear for
younger forces who make up in enthusiasm what they lack in experience’.⁷⁸ Lenin
reserved his attack on Martynov for the other article, which began by stating
condescendingly that by now it was unnecessary to condemn him: he had
been unmasked as a Russian Girondin in the liberal newspaper, Osvobozhdenie,
which by deeming Two Dictators consistent with socialism, only confirmed its
fraudulence.⁷⁹ Reading Lenin’s attack, one expects him at various points to
banish Martynov and his ilk from the ranks of Russian Social Democracy. Lenin
even asked rhetorically whether the Girondins—who here and elsewhere in
Lenin’s writings were obviously stand-ins for the Martynovites—were ‘traitors
to the cause of the Great French Revolution’.⁸⁰ But in a rare moment of magna-
nimity he then conceded that Martynov and his acolytes had never betrayed the
cause of socialism. But to the extent that they were ‘inconsistent, indecisive, and
opportunist champions of the cause’, they were identical to the Girondins, whom
he condemned in the article for more or less the same transgressions and in
similar language.⁸¹ In fact, it was the Girondins’ inconsistency and opportunism
that caused the Jacobins to oppose them. In contrast to the Girondins, the
Jacobins ‘upheld the interests of the advanced class of the eighteenth century as
consistently as the revolutionary Social-Democrats—by whom Lenin of course
meant the Bolsheviks—upheld the interests of the advanced class of the twenti-
eth’.⁸² In both articles—in one implicitly, in the other explicitly—Lenin dichot-
omized the Girondins and the Jacobins morally and politically, with the result
that at the end of each article it seems that the French and the Russians have
merged in his mind: while ‘the most honourable Girondin Martynov’ and his new
Iskrist allies might not be traitors by intention, the fact that they were supported
by actual traitors was good reason to question their bona fides as socialists
and revolutionaries.⁸³
Not even the anarchy prevalent in Russia in the spring and early summer of
1905—which made easier an urban insurrection by Leninist cadres of professional
revolutionaries—could distract the Bolshevik leader from his self-imposed task of
splitting Russian socialism by anathematizing everyone who disagreed with him;

⁷⁸ V. I. Lenin, ‘Novye zadachi i novye sily (23 February 1905)’, ibid., p. 306.
⁷⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Osvobozhdentsy, neoiskrovtsy, monarkhisty, i zhirondisty (23 February 1905)’, ibid.,
pp. 307–8.
⁸⁰ Ibid., p. 308. ⁸¹ Ibid., p. 308. ⁸² Ibid., p. 308.
⁸³ Among the ‘traitors’ Lenin was referring to were Pëtr Struve, the editor of Osvobozhdenie, who
had been a Marxist and Social Democrat before becoming a liberal, and his liberal supporters.
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whether they were Mensheviks, Bundists, or Martynovites did not matter. After
the revolution ended in December in failure, Lenin would do the same thing in
response both to the ‘God-Builders’ within the RSDLP, who tried to synthesize
Marxism and religion, and to other, equally errant Bolsheviks seeking to recon-
cile Marxism and an abstruse theory of knowledge called ‘empiriocriticsm’.⁸⁴ This
kind of ‘splitting’, which for Lenin was as much a psychological necessity as a
political one, seemed to solidify his identification with the Jacobins, who certainly
did some splitting of their own, destroying sequentially those they claimed had
betrayed the revolution—first the Girondins, then Danton and the Dantonists,
and finally Hébert and the Hébertists. But Lenin’s identification with the Jacobins
was not mindless. Nor was his admiration boundless or driven entirely by his own
emotions. He was well aware that the splitting they engaged in narrowed their
political base sufficiently to make them vulnerable to the conspiracy that brought
them down and destroyed them physically as well as politically. In that respect, the
last thing Lenin wanted was for the French Revolution to repeat itself in Russia.
All of this found expression in July 1905, when it seemed increasingly likely that
the anarchy that had been unleashed in Russia in January, in the aftermath of
‘Bloody Sunday’, when tsarist troops killed unarmed demonstrators in Palace
Square in St Petersburg, would lead to the collapse of the monarchy itself. In a
pamphlet entitled Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,
Lenin attacked his enemies with rhetoric no less vituperative than that he had used
before—and with the same terminology he had previously borrowed from the
French Revolution.⁸⁵ Five months earlier Lenin had excoriated ‘the opportunists
of the new Iskra . . . for crying hysterically about a sinister “Jacobin plan” ’.⁸⁶ The
plan the new Iskra editors had in mind was of course Lenin’s, and one suspects
that that was what prompted him to respond with a degree of vehemence unusual
even for him. It may also have increased the likelihood of his drawing upon the
French Revolution for empirical support. In any event, Lenin went further in Two
Tactics than he ever had before in defending his belief that only a party that
centralized authority and practised conspiracy could survive the harsh repression
of the tsars while simultaneously instilling political consciousness in the vast
majority of the Russian proletariat that still lacked it. The way he did so was
by proclaiming, yet again, that the Jacobinism for which his enemies attacked
him was a virtue, and for that reason he was effectively a Jacobin himself. And to
the charge that Jacobinism was proof not just of some personal and political
deficiency or defect that disqualified anyone possessing it from participation in
the glorious enterprise of building socialism and communism, Lenin proclaimed

⁸⁴ Ulam, The Bolsheviks, pp. 270–6.

⁸⁵ V. I. Lenin, Dve taktiki sotsialdemokratii v demokraticheskoi revoliutsii, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XI,
pp. 1–131.
⁸⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘Dve taktiki (1 February 1905)’, ibid., p. 259.
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simply that ‘the Bolsheviks are the Jacobins of contemporary Social Democracy’.⁸⁷
In keeping with the tactics the Jacobins adopted after defeating the Girondins and
consigning them to political oblivion, he and the other Bolsheviks were now
‘attempting by their slogans to raise the revolutionary and the republican petit-
bourgeoisie, and particularly the peasantry, to the level of the consistent democ-
ratism of the proletariat, which retains its complete individuality as a class’.⁸⁸ At
this point in his polemic, Lenin suddenly adopted a different tone entirely,
imploring his readers not to read too much into the kind words he had for the
Jacobins, even with his personal identification with them taken fully into account.
None of what he wrote about them was meant to suggest
that we intend to imitate the Jacobins of 1793, to adopt their views, programmes,
slogans, and methods of action. Nothing of the kind. Our programme is not an
old one, it is a new one—the minimum programme of the Russian Social-
Democratic Workers Party. We have a new slogan: the revolutionary-democratic
dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.⁸⁹

* * *
With these words, Lenin made clear that, as far as the French Revolution was
concerned, its utility in the future would be different from what it had been before
the anarchy triggered by the outbreak of revolution in 1905 caused him to
contemplate the possibility of the proletariat and the peasantry making a revolu-
tion after the bourgeoisie had refused to do so. This revolution, he insisted, would
be a bourgeois revolution programmatically. Foremost among its objectives would
be the elimination of the monarchy, followed by measures ending feudalism
and the domination of the nobles in the countryside. One might think that once
these objectives had been accomplished, Lenin would order the Bolsheviks and
the classes they led politically to desist, stand down, and wait for capitalism to
progress—or more precisely to degenerate—sufficiently for the proletariat, now in
charge of the party Lenin had helped to create many years earlier, to take power
and then began the task of establishing socialism. But that would not be the case.
In the twelve years separating the two revolutions in Russia in the early twentieth
century, even bigger things begin to germinate in Lenin’s mind, namely a scenario
of revolution—remarkably similar to Trotsky’s—in which the Russian proletariat
and the most impoverished elements of the peasantry, after making a bourgeois
revolution (because the bourgeoisie was either unable or unwilling to do so
itself ), would then make a proletarian revolution even though that would clearly
exceed what was possible politically in light of economic realities—specifically
Russia’s relative backwardness as a country just beginning to industrialize—that

⁸⁷ Lenin, Dve taktiki sotsialdemokratii, Lenin, PSS, vol. XI, p. 47.

⁸⁸ Ibid. ⁸⁹ Ibid., p. 48.
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would not change in any fundamental way for decades or even for centuries. But
Lenin, nearly as much as Trotsky, was also a revolutionary in a hurry. Perhaps
unconsciously, he wanted to experience a proletarian revolution and to enjoy its
salubrious results within his own lifetime.
To be sure, it took some time for Lenin to formulate this scenario in his mind,
and he would not infer from it a concrete strategy until he was actually executing it
in 1917. In that year, after years of isolation, immobility, and failure, Lenin found
himself improvising madly and making day-to-day decisions on the basis of his
political instincts—which in 1917 proved to be impeccable—rather than on the
basis of a plan conceived calmly and deliberately prior to its implementation. But
until then, Russian socialists confined to Western Europe could do little more than
daydream about victories in the future that seemed, with every year that passed,
increasingly unlikely. But Lenin, while certainly prone to idle rumination—before
the October Revolution much of his political thought amply qualified as such—
was able also to ponder the limits of what was politically and ideologically
possible, which was certainly a more fruitful use of his time and energy than
pointless contemplation of how Marxism and religion, or Marxism and obscure
philosophies such as ‘Machism’, might be reconciled and find expression in a new,
synthetic ideology.⁹⁰ These heresies Lenin denounced, quite correctly, as incom-
patible with Marxist ideology. After the 1905 Revolution ended with the mon-
archy still in power, and Russian socialism once again consigned to the extreme
periphery of Russian politics, its members consumed by the feuding and recrim-
inations failure invariably generates, Lenin almost never lost his self-confidence
and his belief that at some point in the future—of course he preferred it would be
sooner rather than later—his peregrinations in the political wilderness just as
much as his Marxist ideology would be vindicated.
In the meantime, Lenin and, to a lesser extent, the other Bolsheviks, continued
their exploration of the French Revolution in terms of its relevance and utility to
Russian revolutionaries living well over a century after it ended. Before 1906 the
revolution provided insights into a how a revolutionary party in Russia should be
organized. From 1906 to 1917, however, Lenin mined it for a different kind of ore.
In these years he focused on the relationship of the Jacobins to French society. In
particular he was concerned with ascertaining if this relationship constrained the
Jacobins or made them more flexible in the tactical and programmatic decisions
they had to make during the brief time they wielded power. Whether the Jacobins
did what they did because of the class they belonged to, or in response to the class
or classes they represented politically, might seem a question too arcane even for
Russian socialists whiling away their time idly chatting in cafes in Geneva,
Munich, Paris, and London—to consider. But that proved not to be the case.

⁹⁰ Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History (New York, 1964),
pp. 496–517.
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And as far as Lenin was concerned, this particular question concerned him
precisely because he recognized its relevance and importance for any socialist—
or really for anyone seeking power and expecting to exercise it.
In the whole matter of what Jacobinism consisted of, and whether it was
something the Bolsheviks should inculcate among themselves, Lenin was a relative
latecomer; he addressed the issue only after others had begun using it to demean
him and to derogate his credentials as a revolutionary. But on the issue of the
coalition the Jacobins headed while in power, Lenin was the first Bolshevik to
address it, and the only Bolshevik to do so repeatedly and voluntarily between
1906 and 1917.
For that reason, his views on the matter require serious consideration.
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5
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks on the
Jacobins and the Girondins

The revolution in Russia in 1905 caused many Russians, not all of them revolutionaries,
to consider it analogous to the French Revolution. On this there was, of course, no
unanimity. Some Russians accepted the analogy; others rejected it. But proponents
of each of these dichotomous positions believed that drawing the analogy was a
useful endeavour, if for no other reason than to confirm the clarity and veracity of
opinions already conceived. Naturally one wonders whether any of those who
drew the analogy did so because of what revolutionaries like Lenin had previously
written about it, indeed, whether these revolutionaries had any role in simply
acquainting Russians with the French Revolution. In both respects the answer is
no: the acquaintance ordinary Russians had with the revolution reflected a
popular culture that had evolved independently of revolutionaries confined in
jail, Siberia, or European emigration—and thereby far removed from the urban
centres of Russian culture, principally Moscow and St Petersburg. Russian revo-
lutionaries tended to create their own insular and self-contained subculture
wherever they were.¹ When separated from Russia geographically, they deliber-
ately remained aloof from the native, national culture, be it French, German, or
English, that surrounded them; that it was French, German, or English made no
difference. In that way, Russian revolutionaries were cut off from two cultures,
not just one.
For this reason the fact that both Russian revolutionaries and ordinary people
in Russia found the French Revolution relevant in 1905—or, for that matter, at
any other time in Russia’s history—does not imply any causal relationship one
way or the other. Nor does it mean that any proprietary claim revolutionaries
made on the revolution was more valid than those whose politics were more
conventional. In fact, the French Revolution was such a multicoloured tapestry of
events, personalities, political parties, coalitions, and cliques that observers in

¹ Miller, Russian Revolutionary Emigres, pp. 3–10. Moreover, many biographers of individual
Bolsheviks, such as Lenin and Stalin, make a point of showing how uninterested they were in their
surroundings either in exile domestically or as émigrés in Western Europe. Trotsky seems to have been
exceptional in that regard. Marc Raeff, in Russia Abroad, pp. 3–15, shows that the same dynamic
characterized the emigration after the October Revolution, which of course included non-
revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, and many who were apolitical.
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Russia and elsewhere could make use of it in much the way one eats in a
cafeteria—by seeing what every item looks like, and then selecting some, but not
others, in accordance with one’s particular preferences. In the case of the cafeteria
customer, these could be based on taste, aesthetic appreciation, or medical neces-
sity; in the case of Russians during the 1905 Revolution, politics and ideology were
usually decisive.
By 1900 Russians were learning about the French Revolution in many ways.
The orations of many of its principal figures were well-known to many of the
educated elite; some were considered models of rhetorical eloquence.² Nikolai
Bukharin recalled that at the age of seventeen he was greatly impressed by a
lecture on the revolution delivered by the well-known historian M. N. Pokrovskii,
in which he extolled the virtues of ‘proletarian Jacobinism’.³ The word burzhuaziia’
had entered the Russian language around the turn of the century, and by 1905 the
works of the major French historians of the revolution had been published in
Russian translation.⁴ Of these historians the most read were Thiers, Aulard, Sorel,
Taine, and Jaurès.⁵ How precisely these historians affected the course of events in
Russia is difficult to determine. But there is no doubt that in educating Russians
about the revolution, so that those who admired it could consider it, in 1905, a
noble precedent of the revolution they themselves were experiencing, these his-
torians played a significant role. A typical comment about the 1905 Revolution,
even after it failed, was that by finally ‘freeing people from the chains of unbear-
able slavery’, it made ‘the image of the great French emancipatory struggle
especially dear and near to us’.⁶ Sentiments such as these were expressed fre-
quently in 1905, and another of the reasons for their prevalence was the publica-
tion and performance of a cycle of plays by Romain Rolland, entitled Théâtre de la
Révolution, that glorified the French Revolution in ways that made its uplifting
message of universal freedom accessible to people disinclined to read books.⁷
In Russia the most obvious symbol of the French Revolution was its iconic
anthem, the Marseillaise. Though singing it was a crime, many were acquainted
with it from its inclusion in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which was written in
1880 and first performed, at the government’s request, at the Moscow Arts and
Industry Exhibition in 1882.⁸ For some, the anthem symbolized allegiance to one’s

² M. Vinaver, Nedavnee: vospominaniia i kharakteristiki, 1907 (Paris, 1926), p. 165.

³ N. Bukharin, ‘Professor s pikoi’, Pravda, no. 249 (4081), (25 October 1928): p. 3; Stephen F. Cohen,
Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York, 1973), p. 9.
⁴ Keep, ‘Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd’, p. 25. ⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Quoted in P. Zaborov, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v russkoi pechati 1905–1907 gg. (Bib-
liograficheskii materialy)’, Revue des Études Slaves, 61 (1989): p. 144.
⁷ G. I. Il’ina, ‘Obraz evropeiskikh revoliutsii i russkaia kul’tura’, in Anatomiia revoliutsii 1917 goda v
Rossii: massy, partii, vlast’, edited by V. Iu. Cherniaev (St Petersburg, 1994), p. 384.
⁸ Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (New York, 2014), p. 159;
Anthony Holden, Tchaikovsky: A Biography (New York, 1995), pp. 203–4. The strains of the
Marseillaise one hears in the first half or so of the overture are meant to symbolize Napoleon’s
incursion into Russia.
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own country; for others it implied rejection. In 1905 it was sometimes sung
spontaneously. In October of that year, when striking workers in the railway
industry sparked a general strike in St Petersburg that brought the Russian capital
to a standstill, ordinary people supportive of the strike demonstrated their sym-
pathies by singing it.⁹ And even after the revolution had ended in defeat, the
anthem remained a symbol of hope and defiance. In April 1906, in the provincial
city of Saratov, a crowd of ten thousand at the railway station sang the anthem as
the delegates who would represent them in the First Duma left for St Petersburg.¹⁰
On May Day 1906, meetings of workers in the Russian capital and elsewhere did
the same thing to mark the end of their deliberations. One month later, inebriated
Cossacks preparing a demonstration of their own—its objectives no doubt more
and more obscured as the consumption of alcohol increased—sang the anthem as
a way of showing solidarity with everyone who shared their vaguely libertarian
ethos. But perhaps the most poignant renditions of the anthem occurred when
hopes for a better future seemed unwarranted. When the First Duma was pro-
rogued by the tsar in 1906, not long after its convocation, the fact that what he did
was perfectly legal did not preclude the anthem being sung at demonstrations
protesting the tsar’s decision.¹¹
Another symbol of the French Revolution that had real salience for Russians in
1905 was the red flag, the first use of which in a political context was by the
Jacobins in 1792; in the nineteenth century it symbolized socialism not only in
Western Europe but also in Russia.¹² Although many of the Russians who carried
red flags in 1905 were unaware of their provenance, the fact that the Russian word
for red (krasnyi) was the root of the words prekrasnyi, which means ‘splendid’ or
‘fine’, and krasivyi, which means ‘beautiful’ or ‘handsome’, may have been another
reason they became a means of expressing one’s politics symbolically.¹³ Many of
the demonstrators in St Petersburg in 1905 who sang the Marseillaise also
unfurled red flags as a way of symbolizing their defiance visually as well as
aurally.¹⁴ That this occurred as frequently as it did suggests that the crowds
observing such events found these particular symbols of the French Revolution
inspirational.
In 1905 the revolution provided guidance as well as inspiration. A. I. Gukovskii,
a well-known jurist and professor, proclaimed while the outcome of the revolution
in Russia was still uncertain that the country needed another ‘Declaration of the

⁹ ‘Biulleten’ no. 12 moskovskogo komiteta RSDRP o sobytiiakh v Moskve 17–19 Oktiabria’, in

Listovki moskovskikh Bol’shevikov v period pervoi russkoi revoliutsii (Moscow, 1955), p. 319.
¹⁰ Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored (Stanford CA, 1992), p. 54.
¹¹ Ibid., pp. 133, 158, 209.
¹² Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley
CA, 1998), p. 13.
¹³ Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and
Symbols of 1917 (New Haven CT, 1999), p. 32.
¹⁴ ‘Biulleten’ no. 12 moskovskogo komiteta RSDRP o sobytiiakh v Moskve 17–19 Oktiabria’, p. 319.
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Rights of Man’. Its purpose, he believed, was not to supersede the French original
but to complement it by including provisos relevant to Russia of which revolu-
tionaries more than a century earlier could not possibly have been aware.¹⁵ But
one did not have to be a white-collar professional like Gukovskii to find in the
French Revolution insights relevant to the ongoing revolution in Russia. In
October 1905, as the revolution was approaching its apogee, a student organiza-
tion in St Petersburg called on the RSDLP’s newly formed committee in the
Russian capital to acknowledge that the revolution Russia was experiencing was
a bourgeois revolution like that which had occurred in France. By including in
their statement their regret that the revolution in the German states in 1848 had
failed so miserably, they made clear their belief that to learn what they should do,
Russians should look to France rather than to Germany.¹⁶

* * *
Lenin was not in Russia when the 1905 Revolution began. But word of it seemed to
stimulate the ‘voluntarist’ element of his temperament and political personality.
As early as the third week in February he proclaimed confidently that the
oppression workers had had to endure for many years made them eager to lash
out at those responsible for their predicament. Indeed, all that was needed to
trigger an actual revolution was for revolutionaries cognizant of Marxist ideology
to convince the workers that the government was ultimately responsible for all the
evils from which they suffered, and should therefore be overthrown immediately.
Lenin phrased his hopes and expectations as follows:
Never has revolutionary Russia had such a multitude of people as it has now. Never
has a revolutionary class been as fortunate in the relationships that exist among
temporary allies, self-avowed friends, and unconscious supporters as the Russian
proletariat is today. These are masses of people; all we need to do is get rid of tailist
ideas and concepts, give free rein to initiative and enterprise, to ‘plans’ and
‘undertakings’, and then we will show ourselves to be worthy representatives of
the great revolutionary class. Then the proletariat of Russia will carry out the great
Russian revolution in its entirety as heroically as it has begun it.¹⁷

In Lenin’s opinion, Russia in 1905 was like France in 1793. In both countries there
were persons susceptible to calls for revolution and also, no less important,
professional revolutionaries eager to issue them. In France the Jacobins—and
only the Jacobins—were capable of mobilizing mass discontent; in Russia the
same was true for the Bolsheviks. But before they could act, they had to eliminate

¹⁵ Viktor Chernov, Pered burei: vospominaniia (New York, n.d.), pp. 263–4.
¹⁶ ‘Listovki ob”edinennoi studencheskoi organizatsii pri Petersburgskom Komitete RSDRP s prizy-
vami k vooruzhdennomu vosstaniiu’, Listovki Peterburgskikh Bol’shevikov 1902–1917 (Moscow,
1939–57), vol. I, p. 263.
¹⁷ Lenin, ‘Novye zadachi i novye sily’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. IX, p. 306.
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from the RSDLP the detritus of all the retrograde and ersatz ideologies—
Menshevism, Economism, and evolutionary socialism—that if put into practice
on a national scale would preclude a genuine revolution rather than facilitate it.
That was why, two weeks earlier, he had condemned as ‘incorrigible Girondins of
socialism’, the editors of Iskra, who by that time seemed to him the personification
of everything he found distasteful in revolutionaries lacking the courage to make a
revolution and the tactical flexibility to ensure its success.¹⁸
But while Lenin in 1905 condemned the Girondins and praised the Jacobins
just as fervently as he had on previous occasions when the prospects for revolution
in Russia seemed nil, the circumstances that now pertained were radically differ-
ent. When revolution in Russia seemed inconceivable, arguments about the
French Revolution broke out partly because Russian socialists had good reason
to believe that the cause to which they were dedicating their lives might prove
illusory. The possibility that a revolution of any kind in Russia would not occur
within their lifetime seemed very real, and for that reason the invective with which
the participants in these arguments phrased their opinions was very sharp. In 1905
the same thing was true, but this time it was a reflection of the belief that, with the
outbreak of revolution in Russia, Russian socialists might actually succeed; the
only disagreement, albeit one of critical significance, was whether the bourgeois
revolution that erupted in January should be followed shortly by a proletarian one.
While for those remaining faithful to Marxist orthodoxy decades, even centuries,
had to pass before conditions were finally conducive to this second revolution, the
fact that the first revolution was occurring was undeniable. In the spring and
summer of 1905 it was success, not failure, that kept the conversation among
Russian socialists over tactics and ideology just as vituperative and ad hominem as
it had been before. At the end of March Lenin attacked unnamed socialists whose
‘schoolboy’s understanding of history’ caused them to imagine history ‘as some-
thing in the shape of a straight line moving slowly but steadily upwards’.¹⁹ For more
than a century or so, ‘as was the case in France from 1789 to 1905’, this view of
history was correct.²⁰ But only ‘a virtuoso of philistinism’, Lenin concluded, ‘would
consider this relevant to a plan of action in [the current] revolutionary epoch’.²¹
For this reason Lenin’s references to the French Revolution after the 1905
Revolution began concerned matters of tactics and strategy rather than with
determining which of its participants were similar to the Bolsheviks, and which
were not. At the Third Congress of the RSDLP in April 1905, Lenin quoted Marx
approvingly on the admissibility of terror in the context of a progressive revolu-
tion like the French. Even if the Bolsheviks somehow took over St Petersburg and

¹⁸ Lenin, ‘Dolzhny li my organizovat’revoliutsiiu’, ibid., p. 271.

¹⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Revoliutsionnaia demokraticheskaia diktatura proletariata i krest’ianstva (30 March
1905)’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. X, p. 26.
²⁰ Ibid. ²¹ Ibid.
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guillotined Nicholas II, he noted, there would still be Vendées—by which Lenin
meant counter-revolutionary elements in Russia—that would have to be dealt
with severely.²² Jacobin terror, he stated, was simply the way ‘plebeians settled
accounts with counterrevolution and absolutism’, and for that reason the Bol-
sheviks would do well to follow the Jacobins’ example, leaving ‘Girondin methods’
to Iskra.²³ At the beginning of May, Lenin amplified his praise for the Jacobins,
defending them as ‘the most consistent of all bourgeois democrats’, while claiming
that charging genuine revolutionaries like the Bolsheviks with Jacobinism was just
a means ‘hopeless reactionaries and philistines’ had adopted to defame them.²⁴
But their efforts, he remained certain, would come to naught.
Lenin’s description of the Jacobins as ‘bourgeois’ was significant. Because by the
spring of 1905 he was considering the possibility of the bourgeois revolution that
had begun in January evolving organically into a proletarian revolution, it would
seem he could no longer consider the French Revolution a useful analogue: fully
three years elapsed in the French Revolution between the original bourgeois
revolution in 1789 and its radicalization in 1792 into what Lenin considered the
first precursor of a proletarian revolution. But what required three years to occur
in France in the late eighteenth century could be virtually complete in Russia in
the early twentieth century in a matter of weeks or, at most, a few months if
Lenin’s powers of prognostication were real.
That said, the Bolshevik leader was unwilling to downgrade the French Revo-
lution as a precedent, much less acknowledge that his self-identification with the
Jacobins had been a mistake. Rather, he seemed unable to make up his mind on
the whole matter. His indecision is evident in what he wrote about the Jacobins
in the summer of 1905. On 16 August, in an article in the newspaper Proletarii,
he stated that Russia had a reached a point where it was nearly analogous to
France on 10 August 1792, when demonstrators led by the Jacobins overthrew the
Legislative Assembly and shortly afterwards proclaimed the Bourbon monarchy
abolished and France a republic.²⁵ But on 23 August he reversed position, stating
in another article, also in Proletarii, that Russia had not yet attained the point at
which, in the French Revolution, the Bastille was stormed, thereby demonstrating
that the lower classes in Paris were now active participants in the ongoing
revolution. The Russian Bastille, by contrast, had yet to be stormed.²⁶
One might think that this second article, so definitive in the conclusion it
expressed about the French Revolution, showed that Lenin had finally achieved

²² V. I. Lenin, ‘Doklad ob uchastii sotsial-demokratii vo vremennom revoliutsionnom pravitel’stve

(18 April 1905)’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. X, p. 138.
²³ Ibid.
²⁴ V. I. Lenin, ‘Politicheskie sofizmy (5 May 1905)’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. X, p. 203; V. I. Lenin, ‘Sovety
konservativnoi burzhuazii (21 May 1905)’, ibid., p. 226.
²⁵ V. I. Lenin, ‘Edinenie tsariia s narodom i naroda s tsarem’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XI, p. 188.
²⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘V khvoste u monarkhicheskoi burzhuazii ili vo glave revoliutsionnogo proletariata i
krest’ianstva?’, ibid., pp. 205–6.
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some clarity on its relevance to the revolution that was still unfolding in Russia.
But that was not the case. If anything, he was more confused than ever. On
23 August there appeared in Proletarii, in addition to the aforementioned article,
a ‘note’ by Lenin on a recently published book, in which he directly contradicted
what appeared under his own name in the same issue. ‘The parallel between the
Russia of 1905 and the France of Louis XVI’, Lenin wrote in the note, was
‘amazing’.²⁷ In explaining Lenin’s indecision, specifically his unwillingness or
inability to make clear what exactly was the relationship—assuming any
existed—between the two revolutions, one might propose, in Lenin’s defence,
that the 1905 Revolution, when it began, came as a surprise, perhaps even as a
shock, and that the anarchy and the breakdown of political authority that ensued
after Bloody Sunday created opportunities that previously had been nonexistent.
As a result, the proletarian revolution he previously believed would be so far in the
future as to be virtually an abstraction was now, suddenly, a real possibility. All
that remained for Lenin to do in order for the Bolsheviks to participate in the
radicalization of the revolution he now fully expected was to come up with a
slogan descriptive of the scenario he was conjuring that his readers, and possibly
also the Russian workers engaged in actions disruptive of the status quo, could
easily understand. The one he soon decided on—to which he was indebted deeply
to Trotsky—was ‘the democratic-dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’.
Fortunately for Lenin, Trotsky never wavered in his belief that the weakness of
the bourgeoisie in Russia did not preclude a proletarian revolution provided that
the proletariat and peasantry assumed the role Marx had usually thought the
bourgeoisie would play of overthrowing the monarchy and ending feudalism. In
August 1905 he wrote an ‘open letter’ to Pavel Miliukov, the de facto leader of
Russian liberals who had just praised the tsar’s proposal to establish a consultative
duma, which Trotsky of course considered a ruse to regain the allegiance of
moderates weakly supportive of the revolution.²⁸ In the letter Trotsky contrasted
what he considered Miliukov’s cowardice with the courage of the revolutionaries
in France who had established a republic in 1792 not because the king, in a spirit
of paternalistic solicitude, had agreed to it, but because the people of France
demanded it; only through struggle, which in the French Revolution involved
the masses arming themselves and defending their rights through the stringent
application of force and violence, could people gain what was rightfully theirs.²⁹
And even after the revolution in Russia was finally crushed in December, when the
government suppressed an attempted insurrection in Moscow, Trotsky never lost
hope. The government’s survival was always for him a close-run thing. Had the

²⁷ V. I. Lenin, ‘Primechanie k stat’e “Finansy Rossii i revoliutsiia” ’, ibid., p. 214.

²⁸ L. Trotsky, ‘Otkrytoe pis’mo professoru P. N. Miliukovu’, in L. Trotsky, Sochineniia, 23 vols
(Moscow/Leningrad, 1924–7), vol. II, pp. 196–205.
²⁹ Ibid., p. 198.
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correlation of political power in Russia in 1905 shifted even only slightly in favour
of the revolutionaries, their efforts would have achieved the desired results.
For this reason, from the end of the 1905 Revolution to the outbreak of the First
World War in 1914, Trotsky saw no reason to modify the scenario of permanent
revolution he had conjured earlier. Not only was a bourgeois revolution still
possible even without the participation of the bourgeoisie; in addition, this
bourgeois revolution would lead directly to a proletarian revolution that, by its
very audacity, would inspire the proletariat in more advanced countries in Europe,
such as France, Germany, and England, to take power. Once that was done, it
could render whatever assistance the new proletarian regime in Russia required to
survive. As far as Trotsky was concerned, the mental universe he inhabited he
filled with visions of humanity everywhere redeeming itself through the elimin-
ation of private property and the establishment of socialism and communism. But
these visions—one might fairly consider them, under the circumstances, to be
hallucinations—became more real to him than the harsh realities Russian social-
ists were understandably afraid to confront from 1906 to 1914, when it seemed
possible that Russia might evolve peacefully into a constitutional monarchy that
satisfied the material needs of the lower classes. Images of courageous workers and
urban artisans storming the Bastille had an intoxicating effect even on revolu-
tionaries like Trotsky who wrongly prided themselves on their rationalism and
dispassionate comprehension of the impersonal laws of history.
Trotsky’s optimism is obvious even in the book he intended as a post-mortem
on the 1905 Revolution.³⁰ His task in the book, as he saw it, was not just to explain
the circumstances requiring the proletariat and peasantry to replace the bourgeois
in a bourgeoisie revolution. It was also to explain why the proletariat and
peasantry would succeed in this endeavour. In fulfilling this second obligation,
he revisited the French Revolution, asking rhetorically if St Petersburg or Moscow
at the present time was analogous to Paris in 1789; the cities were obviously stand-
ins for Russia and France respectively. His answer was that they were not: Russia
presently lacked even ‘a trace of that sturdy middle class which . . . hand in hand
with a young, as yet unformed proletariat, stormed the Bastilles of feudalism’.³¹
This would seem to suggest that a bourgeoisie revolution, and a fortiori a
proletarian revolution, could not occur for decades, perhaps even centuries. But
the French Revolution, when it began, was more or less localised ‘within the walls
of Paris’.³² In a pre-industrial age, considerable time had to pass before an urban
insurrection in the capital or in the largest city in a country could become a
genuinely national revolution. In Russia, however, circumstances were different.
Capitalism and modern technology, most notably railroads and the telegraph,

³⁰ The book, when it appeared in 1907, was entitled Nasha revoliutsiia. It acquired the title 1905, by
which it is known today, in 1922, when it was published in the Soviet Union.
³¹ Leon Trotsky, 1905 (New York, 1971), p. 41. ³² Ibid., p. 103.
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ensured that news of any insurrection in St Petersburg would spread quickly, and
because both the proletariat and the peasantry by the beginning of the twentieth
century were sufficiently aggrieved by the oppression they experienced to possess
the requisite political consciousness, they would be inspired by events in the
Russian capital to replicate them everywhere.
What Trotsky did in 1905 was to turn France’s revolution, which Marx and
orthodox Marxists considered a success, into a failure, while virtually guaranteeing
that the revolution in Russia he anticipated would succeed. France’s revolution,
because it occurred when industrial capitalism was just emerging, could not
exceed the limits history had placed on it. While successful in purging France of
feudalism and the Bourbons (if only until their restoration in 1815), the French
Revolution could not transcend itself. It could not morph seamlessly from a
bourgeois revolution to a proletarian or proto-proletarian revolution, and the
Hébertists and the Babouvists who tried to achieve this had failed miserably, and
in many cases paid for their failure with their lives. By contrast, because it was a
consequence of industrial capitalism rather than the impetus to it, as was the
French Revolution in Marx’s interpretation of its history, any future revolution in
Russia had an excellent chance of success. In mathematical terms, Trotsky’s
scenario boiled down to a simple equation: industrial capitalism plus a recalcitrant
bourgeoisie equals a bourgeois revolution that becomes a proletarian revolution.
Trotsky essentially conceded in 1905 that, as a general rule, for revolutions to be
radicalized, the individuals who begin the revolution have to be replaced before
this radicalization—which, for all intents and purposes, can also be called a second
revolution—can occur. This was how the French Revolution had progressed: the
class that made the original revolution in 1789 had to be replaced in 1792 by a
different class—or more precisely a coalition of urban craftsmen and merchants
who collectively comprised the sans-culottes—before it could start making pol-
icies, in 1793, of which the bourgeoisie was incapable. But Russia, compared to
other countries that had experienced a bourgeois revolution, was sui generis. In
Russia the replacement of one coterie or class of revolutionary actors by another
was not a necessary prerequisite for a revolution there to be radicalized. Nor was it
a necessary prerequisite for that second, more radicalized revolution to succeed.
Trotsky summarized the difference between the circumstances that pertained in
France in 1789 and those existing presently in Russia in the following way:
In the French Revolution the conditions for the hegemony of a capitalist bour-
geoisie were prepared by the terrorist dictatorship of the victorious sans-culottes.
This happened at a time when the main mass of the urban population was
composed of a petty bourgeoisie of craftsmen and shopkeepers. This mass was
led by the Jacobins.
In Russia today the main mass of the urban population is composed of the
industrial proletariat. Is this analogy enough to suggest that a potential historical
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situation in which the victory of a ‘bourgeois’ revolution is rendered possible only

by the proletariat gaining revolutionary power? Or does the revolution therefore
stop being a bourgeois one. Yes and no. . . . If the proletariat is overthrown by a
coalition of bourgeois classes, including the peasantry, whom the proletariat itself
has liberated, then the revolution will retain its limited bourgeois character. But if
the proletariat succeeds in using all means to achieve its own political hegemony
and thereby breaks out of the national confines of the Russian revolution, then
that revolution could become the prologue to a world socialist revolution.³³

In 1905 Trotsky made clear that, for revolutionaries like himself, the French
Revolution had become more an anachronism than an analogue. The Russian
revolution he anticipated and expected would be radically different, and invoking
the earlier revolution for insights into the course the later one would take would be
a waste of time. But throughout the book, Trotsky always showed the French
Revolution genuine respect. It was a milestone in human history no less trans-
formative because Russia would likely go well beyond its foundational teleology.
But when it came to particular figures in the revolution of whose actions he
disapproved, Trotsky, a few years later, could not restrain himself. In 1908 he
directed at Lafayette and Anacharsis Cloots the derisive and opprobrious rhetoric
he usually reserved not for counter-revolutionaries and reactionaries permanently
hostile to historical progress, but for pseudo-revolutionaries who either skilfully
masked their fundamentally malevolent intentions behind a smokescreen of
progressive rhetoric, as Lafayette did, or showed incredible naiveté, of which
Cloots was undeniably guilty, in promoting policies that were completely unreal-
istic and unattainable.³⁴ But why Trotsky chose these two, very dissimilar person-
ages in the French Revolution to excoriate is not clear. He could just as easily have
denounced Mirabeau instead of Lafayette, and the Girondins instead of Cloots. All
the two men had in common, as far as Trotsky was concerned, was that they both
belonged to classes that obviated any possibility of their understanding socialism.
Lafayette was a typical aristocrat, who betrayed the revolution when he realized it
would harm his own class. Cloots, by contrast, was a revolutionary dreamer
labouring under the illusion that a bourgeois revolution like the French could
emancipate humanity as a whole.³⁵ Trotsky disagreed. Only a socialist revolution
led by the proletariat could do that.
Trotsky was not the only Russian socialist intoxicated by the 1905 Revolution to
the point where Marxist assumptions about what kind of revolution it was were
forgotten. Pavel Axelrod, whose strictures on the dangers of Jacobin dictatorship
predated his recognition that Lenin aspired to something akin to it, nevertheless

³³ Ibid., pp. 240–1.

³⁴ L. Trotsky, ‘Nashe otchestvo vo vremeni (12 April 1908)’, in Trotsky, Sochineniia, vol. XX, p. 267.
³⁵ In his jeremiad, Trotsky mocked Cloots for supposedly considering himself the embodiment of all
of humanity. Ibid.
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wrote in 1905 that ‘a central club’ should be created ‘to rally the local proletariat
and to form a strong revolutionary atmosphere modelled on the Jacobin clubs in
France’.³⁶ But most of the Mensheviks resisted the temptation to which Axelrod
succumbed. Even as the revolution approached its climax in October, Martov
remained convinced that any facsimile of the Jacobins controlling it was a recipe
for disaster; not even the benefits a bourgeois revolution would normally confer
could come about in Russia, and with a proletarian revolution precluded by
Russia’s backwardness, the country would find itself in a cul-de-sac from which
its extrication would be exceedingly difficult.³⁷ As for Plekhanov, the lesson he
drew from 1905 was that it failed because Russia was not ready for it. Despite
achieving the highest industrial growth rates in history in the 1890s, the country
still lacked the essential prerequisites of a bourgeois revolution. For that reason he
considered Lenin’s and Trotsky’s seductive notion of combining the two revolu-
tions into one the most odious form of ideological apostasy. To underscore his
disgust, in both 1905 and1906 he analogized what they intended to the elitism of
Narodnaia Volia, which in turn reminded him of everything he disliked about the
Jacobins. The narodovol’tsy, in his scathing derogation of them, were just ‘our
homegrown Jacobins’.³⁸ Any revolution led by Lenin—who by this time was
for Plekhanov no more a Marxist than the Russian terrorists he had excoriated
well over a quarter-century earlier—would lead inevitably to a reaction strongly
resembling Thermidor. To be sure, this would not be an unmitigated disaster.
In fact, in Russia it would be a significant improvement over a stagnant form
of feudalism that only grudgingly allowed the emergence of bourgeois class
relations. But any Leninist insurrection would delay their appearance unneces-
sarily, and would constitute for the proletariat a dead end yielding no discernible
advantage.³⁹
Lenin and Trotsky were well aware of Plekhanov’s scepticism about their
ruminations on accelerating the course of history. It must therefore have come
as a pleasant surprise for them that their scenarios, which differed only in the
greater role Trotsky’s assigned to the proletariat in countries more advanced than
Russia, were considered well within the realm of possibility by Karl Kautsky, one
of the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party, which before its supposed
betrayal of socialism in 1914, when it supported Germany’s decision to go to war,
both Lenin and Trotsky held in the highest esteem. In a pamphlet prompted by
several of Plekhanov’s in 1906 and 1907 advising against an armed uprising in
Russia, Kautsky agreed with Plekhanov’s contention that the Russian bourgeoisie

³⁶ P. B. Axelrod, Narodnaia duma i rabochii s”ezd (Geneva, 1905), p. 8.

³⁷ ‘Pis’mo Iu. O. Martova k P. B. Aksel’rodu’, pp. 145–7.
³⁸ Veber, ‘Lenin i istoricheskoe nasledie iakobintsev’, p. 22.
³⁹ G. V. Plekhanov, ‘K agrarnomu voprosu v Rossii (March 1906)’, in Plekhanov, Sochineniia,
vol. XV, pp. 28–9.
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was too weak to make a bourgeois revolution on its own.⁴⁰ After its creation in
1906, the sorry record of Russia’s liberal party in addressing and solving Russia’s
problems was proof of the lassitude and lack of political will of the urban middle
class.⁴¹ To the extent that that was true, the French Revolution, which when it
began was a purely bourgeois revolution, was not an example Russian socialists
should emulate. But Kautsky did not believe this to be a cause for despair.
According to the German socialist, the Russian proletariat, while not strong
enough to make a bourgeois revolution by itself, could do so if advanced elements
of the Russian peasantry assisted it. In that way, the Russian monarchy and the
feudalism it perpetuated could be destroyed. To be sure, in recommending this
course of action Kautsky did not jettison every aspect of the Marxism he pro-
fessed. Although the coalition Lenin envisioned of the proletariat and the peas-
antry might succeed in making a bourgeois revolution, Kautsky did not think it
strong enough, at least not for the foreseeable future, to radicalize the revolution to
the point where the preconditions for socialism existed. The most likely result, in
his view, would be:
an entirely original process, occurring on the boundary between bourgeois and
socialist society, facilitating the liquidation of the first, then preparing the
conditions for the establishment of the second, and in any case giving powerful
impetus to the progressive development of the countries where capitalist civil-
ization existed.⁴²
Even though Kautsky’s endorsement of the scenario Lenin was considering was
hardly a full-throated one, his article, which Lenin translated into Russian and
for the publication of which produced a laudatory introduction, was certainly,
from Lenin’s perspective, a welcome development. Although his description of
Kautsky’s article as ‘the most brilliant confirmation’ of the Bolsheviks’ tactics was
unabashed hyperbole, Lenin was pleased to receive support from any quarter, and
the fact that it came from one of the leading lights of German socialism was
especially welcome.⁴³

⁴⁰ K. Kautsky, Dvizhushchie sily i perspektivy russkoi revoliutsii (Moscow/Leningrad, 1926),

pp. 15–17.
⁴¹ Ibid., pp. 22–6. ⁴² Ibid., p. 29.
⁴³ Ibid., p. 6. Of course when he wrote these words Lenin had no way of knowing that in 1914
Kautsky would change his mind, and exclude the peasants from any revolutionary coalition based on
the proletariat. Nor, more significantly, could Lenin know in 1907 that in 1914 he would denounce
Kautsky for his pro-war position—which caused Lenin thereafter to disparage him invariably as ‘the
Renegade Kautsky’. Nor could he possibly know in 1907 that in 1920 he and Trotsky would train on
the German socialist a withering barrage of insults for the heresy of openly opposing the new Soviet
state. Kautsky of course was not the only socialist in Europe who became a patriot in August 1914. Jules
Guesde of France, for example, stated at the time that his own country ‘will have no more ardent
defenders than socialists’. Robert Tombs, France 1814–1914 (New York and London, 1996), p. 320. But
Alexandre Millerand’s decision to join a bourgeois government in France in 1899 disgusted Lenin and
lowered his opinion of French socialism generally to such an extent—his writings in the years that
followed are filled with denunciations of Millerand himself and of the party he belonged to—that one
suspects he was less surprised and angered by Guesde’s heresy in 1914 than by Kautsky’s.
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To be sure, it took some time, in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution, for Lenin
to conceptualize the scenario conjured by Trotsky in 1906 and reaffirmed by
Kautsky in 1907. The confusion in Lenin’s writings while the revolution was still
in progress was resolved after it failed—but not before his experiencing genuine
despondency. In an article he wrote for Novaia zhizn’ (New Times) that appeared
in two installments in the late fall of 1905, Lenin maintained that Russian
capitalism was now more developed than it was in France in 1789. But he then
conceded that the oppression it made necessary was not yet sufficient for a
proletarian revolution to occur.⁴⁴ The Russian proletariat, he admitted, presently
sought a ‘cleansing’ of capitalism rather than its overthrow.⁴⁵ By May 1906,
however, his mood had brightened. In a report on the so-called Unity Congress
of the RSDLP, Lenin invoked the French Revolution yet again, in this instance
citing the weakness of the backward and ‘semi-feudal’ countries surrounding
France when the revolution began.⁴⁶ In fact, with every year they got weaker,
which enabled the revolution to survive their efforts, through the application of
military force, to restore the ancien régime. At this point in Lenin’s argument, any
comparison with the revolution would seem to reinforce the pessimism that
pervaded the aforementioned article in Novaia zhizn’. The capitalist countries of
Western Europe were undeniably stronger in 1906 than the feudal states and
principalities bordering France in 1789. But their strength, paradoxically, was
actually, according to Lenin, a sign of weakness: the more advanced a capitalist
country was, the more radical and potentially subversive was the proletariat it
oppressed. In Lenin’s phraseology, the proletariat at the beginning of the twentieth
century was ‘a social force capable of becoming the reserve of the revolution’.⁴⁷
Left unsaid in Lenin’s argument was the assumption that the proletariat
in Germany, France, or Great Britain, on taking power, would be willing and
able to assist the proletariat in Russia, a thousand miles to the east, in whatever
revolution—in his report Lenin did not indicate whether it would be bourgeois or
socialist—it might choose to undertake. One month later, in an article ridiculing the
proposal that Russian socialists should collaborate with the Kadets because they
were equally committed to overthrowing the monarchy in a bourgeois revolution,
Lenin forthrightly excluded the bourgeoisie from participation in this endeavour.
Even more daringly, he claimed that this exclusion should be enforced before the
proletariat and the peasantry, after replacing the bourgeoisie at the forefront of
those clamouring for a bourgeois revolution, were strong enough to ensure that any
revolution the two classes began would succeed. In this instance, as in many others

⁴⁴ V. I. Lenin, ‘Sotsialisticheskaia partiia i bespartiinaia revoliutsionnost’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XII,

p. 134.
⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 135.
⁴⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘Doklad ob Ob”edinitel’nom s”ezde RSDRP (Pis’mo k Peterburgskim rabochim)’, in
Lenin, PSS, vol. XIII, p. 17.
⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 18.
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in Lenin’s career, his enormous self-confidence, now fully restored, enabled him to
banish any doubts he might still have had about the imminence and viability of a
proletarian revolution in Russia. That Lenin included in his article the following
reference to the French Revolution shows the role it played in enabling him to claim
to know what the future would bring:
Our Russian opportunists [by whom Lenin meant Social Democrats seeking an
alliance with the Kadets] are like all opportunists: they demean the teachings of
revolutionary Marxism and the role of the proletariat as the vanguard. They
labour under the illusion that the liberal bourgeoisie must inevitably be the ‘boss’
in any bourgeois revolution. They fail totally to understand the historical role
played, for example, by the Convention in the great French Revolution as the
dictatorship of the lower strata of society, specifically of the proletariat and the
petit-bourgeoisie. They fail totally to understand the idea of the dictatorship of
the proletariat and peasantry as the only possible social bulwark of a fully
victorious bourgeois revolution in Russia.⁴⁸

Underlying Lenin’s reference to the French Revolution was the assumption in

Marxist ideology that knowing the past enabled one to predict the future.
As the notion of the proletariat allying with the peasantry was germinating in
Lenin’s mind, he had to respond to attacks from Plekhanov and other socialists for
whom the schemata of revolution inherited from Marx and Engels since their
deaths had acquired the patina of holy writ. This was especially the case now that
several of them, notably Lenin and Bernstein, were exploring different ways of
achieving the same objective, thereby making them vulnerable to the charge,
however unfair, that by substituting their own tactics for Marx’s, they were
somehow repudiating Marx’s objectives, which were socialism and communism.
In several articles that were written in 1906, Lenin took up the cudgel he had
earlier wielded against critics claiming that, in exceeding the limits of what was
tactically permissible, he was really a Blanquist—a term which in the circles Lenin
inhabited could only be a pejorative. Blanquists were generally believed to have
been conspirators without even a smidgen of popular support; for that reason
their efforts to create socialism were doomed to fail. Lenin was very sensitive to the
charge of Blanquism in part because the charge was accurate. In May 1906 he
wrote the following about the tactical heresy with which he was charged:
Blanquism is a theory that rejects class struggle. Blanquism expects that mankind
will be emancipated from wage slavery, not by proletarian class struggle, but by
means of a conspiracy hatched of a small minority of intellectuals. . . . By using
the ruse of ‘Blanquism’, the bourgeoisie wants to belittle, discredit, and slander
the people’s struggle for power. . . . The right-wing Social Democrats use the word

⁴⁸ V. I. Lenin, ‘Kto za soiuzy s kadetami’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XIII, pp. 244–5.
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‘Blanquism’ merely as a rhetorical device in their polemics—while the bourgeoisie

meanwhile converts the word into a weapon against the proletariat.⁴⁹

Like many others within the self-contained little universe of Russian socialists
prior to the October Revolution, the debate over Lenin’s Blanquism continued
until 1917, when arcane disputes like this one finally yielded to matters of practical
significance. One reason for this was that, in reality, there was little else to do.
Plekhanov and the Menshevik Iurii Larin both claimed that this particular devi-
ation from Marxist orthodoxy called into question Lenin’s commitment to social-
ism itself—to which Lenin replied in Proletarii that by levelling the charge,
Plekhanov, at least, was merely ‘venting his spleen’.⁵⁰ Perhaps surprisingly, in
light of what she had written about Lenin in 1904 and would write in 1918, after
the new Bolshevik government in Petrograd convinced her, by its actions, that it
was a ruthless dictatorship and would never relinquish power voluntarily, Rosa
Luxemburg came to Lenin’s defence. In an article written in Polish that was
published in June 1906, she exonerated the leader of the Bolsheviks of the
ideological crime of which Plekhanov, Larin, and others had judged him guilty:
If today the Bolshevik comrades speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat, they
have never given it the old Blanquist meaning, nor have they ever fallen into
the mistake of Narodnaia Volia, which dreamt of ‘taking power for itself ’. On the
contrary, they have affirmed that the present revolution will succeed when the
proletariat—all the revolutionary class—takes possession of the state machine.
The proletariat, as the most revolutionary element, will perhaps assume the role
of liquidator of the old regime by ‘taking power for itself ’ in order to defeat
counter-revolution and prevent the revolution being led astray by a bourgeoisie
that is reactionary in its very nature. No revolution can succeed other than by the
dictatorship of one class, and all the signs are that the proletariat can become this
liquidator at the present time.⁵¹

The debate over Lenin’s ostensible Blanquism continued with the same intensity
until 1912, when Lenin declared the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP an independ-
ent entity, thereby obviating the necessity of responding to every Menshevik
attack or insinuation. In 1907 he responded to Plekhanov’s charge that he and
his supporters were Blanquists by noting that Marx in 1871 had refused to
condemn the Blanquists and Proudhonists supporting the Paris Commune
because its survival was more important than the ideological deviations of

⁴⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘V itogam s”ezda’, ibid., pp. 76–7.

⁵⁰ V. I. Lenin, ‘Predislovie k russkomu perevodu broshiury V. Libknekhta “Nikakikh kompromissov,
nikakikh izbiratel’nykh soglashenii” (December 1906)’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XIV, p. 220. To be precise,
Larin accused not just Lenin, but the Bolsheviks as a whole, of ‘anarcho-blanquism’. V. I. Lenin, ‘Krizis
Men’shevizma (7 December 1906)’, ibid., p. 154.
⁵¹ Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Blankizm i Socjałdemokracia’, Czerwony Sztandar, no. 86 (June 1906), https://
www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/06/blanquism.html.
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which they were both guilty.⁵² But in 1911 Lenin was the attacker, in this instance
accusing Martov, and by implication the Mensheviks collectively, of precisely that
which they had ascribed to him several years earlier. When Lenin was writing, he
was disturbed by what was called, in the pejorative, ‘liquidationism’. By this was
meant the notion, which Lenin abhorred, that much, if not all, of the conspira-
torial apparatus with which Russian socialists had protected their party against the
tsarist police could be eliminated because repression in Russia by now had
diminished significantly. But to Lenin—if one considers his public statements a
reflection of what he actually believed—the Mensheviks (especially Martov) were
advocating this course of action because their objectives and those of the Kadets
(the Russian liberals) made a separate and distinct socialist party, operating
underground beneath the increasingly hospitable environs of parliamentary pol-
itics, unnecessary and even a handicap. To the Mensheviks, its liquidation would
make a bourgeois revolution, led by the Kadets with the Mensheviks in a subor-
dinate position, much easier. Lenin, of course, strongly disagreed. In fact, he
turned the charge of Blanquism against the Mensheviks, who he said deserved
the appellation because they now considered a revolutionary party unnecessary.⁵³
That they did so for a reason no true Blanquist could ever accept was of course a
caveat Lenin omitted from his polemic.
It should be borne in mind that Lenin, while sui generis in his tactical impro-
visations to compensate for Russia’s unreadiness for a socialist revolution, did not
fight Martynov and the Mensheviks alone. He had allies. One was Anatolii
Lunacharskii, the future Commissar of Education in the Soviet Union. Lunachars-
kii was well-positioned to assist Lenin. As one of the editors of Vpered—
M. S. Ol’minskii and V. V. Vorovskii were the others—from December 1904 to
May 1905, he had easy access to a forum from which to disseminate his views.
That the journal was published openly in Geneva made them accessible to
the exile community not just in Switzerland but in all of Western Europe. For
many years, Lunacharskii remained mute as the debate over Jacobinism became
more and more acrimonious. But the polemics it produced intensified in 1904,
and in January 1905, barely more than a week before the outbreak of revolution,
Lunacharskii finally addressed the larger issue it concealed, namely whether
the bourgeoisie could be trusted to bring any revolution in Russia to fruition
and, in that event, whether a more advanced, proletarian revolution might closely
follow it. The arguments he mustered, like Lenin’s, relied heavily on the French
Revolution for clarification and corroboration.⁵⁴

⁵² V. I. Lenin, ‘Predislovie k russkomu perevodu pisem K. Marksa k Kugel’manu’, in Lenin, PSS,

vol. XIV, p. 376.
⁵³ V. I. Lenin, ‘O sotsial’noi structure vlasti, perspektivakh i likvidatorstve’, ibid., vol. XX, p. 201.
⁵⁴ A. Lunacharskii, ‘Ocherki po istorii revoliutsionnoi bor’by evropeiskogo proletariata’, Vpered,
no. 2 (1 January 1905): pp. 2–3.
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In Lunacharskii’s opinion, the Russian proletariat, in 1905, could draw both

inspiration and guidance from the events in France beginning in 1789. The French
proletariat—by which Lunacharskii always meant the sans-culottes in Paris—was
too immature politically to act on its own after the revolution began; understand-
ably it saw the bourgeoisie as an ally whose strength was reason enough to support
it. Moreover, until feudalism was destroyed, the interests of the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat in France coincided. But the mistake the French proletariat made
was in thinking that the bourgeoisie’s solicitude for its welfare was genuine, rather
than the result of political calculation. As it happened, once feudalism ended, the
bourgeoisie turned on the proletariat and neutered it politically. But the Russian
proletariat, in Lunacharskii’s effusively optimistic estimation, was not susceptible
to such naiveté. Because its political consciousness greatly exceeded that of even
the most radical of the sans-culottes in the French Revolution, it would not only
not align with the bourgeoisie, the upper echelons of which would almost certainly
not participate in any bourgeoisie revolution, but it would also repudiate elements
of the petit-bourgeoisie that might want to assist it after the bourgeois revolution
had succeeded. The Russian proletariat, in other words, was now strong enough to
make a socialist revolution by itself.
Lenin edited at least one of the essays Lunacharskii wrote and published in
Vpered in 1905; he may even have tried to accelerate their publication.⁵⁵ Obviously
he recognized how closely Lunacharskii’s vision of the socialist revolution emer-
ging organically from the bourgeois revolution, with the proletariat as the driving
force in both of them, resembled his own. But Lunacharskii, while describing his
prediction of events in Russia dispassionately, seemed to be more invested emo-
tionally in the French Revolution than Lenin was. For Lunacharskii, the revolution
was not the asseveration of a cold rationality traceable to the Enlightenment, but
of emotions that were grounded in a visceral demand for justice. For Lunacharskii,
the most iconic event of the revolution was the storming of the Bastille, which he
described in language even more florid than that to which he was normally
inclined. In his description, revolutionaries ‘raising their banners for all the
oppressed . . . possessed intangible advantages that made the fortress, which
seemed impregnable, an easy target, for in the end, as a symbol of the status
quo, it was weak in an ethical sense: the ancien régime it represented had lost its
legitimacy and stood for little more than its own perpetuation and the continued
oppression of the lower classes.⁵⁶ In fact the French Revolution, in Lunacharskii’s
estimation, was as much a culturally transformative event as it was the political
prerequisite of industrial capitalism. In his mind, the revolution improved the

⁵⁵ ‘Spisok izdanii redaktirovannykh V. I. Leninom’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XI, p. 437; V. I. Lenin i
A. V. Lunacharskii. Perepiska, doklady, dokumenty—Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow, 1971),
vol. LXXX, pp. 527–33.
⁵⁶ A. Lunacharskii, ‘Ocherki po istorii revoliutsionnoi bor’by evropeiskogo proletariata’, Vpered,
no. 9 (23 February 1905)’: pp. 2–3.
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moral calibre of nearly all of its participants, and in doing so prepared the stage, so
to speak, for the next act in the ongoing Marxist revolutionary drama. Lunacharskii’s
comments on the French Revolution, considered in their totality, were reason
enough for his selection, after the October Revolution, to head the Commissariat
of Education. More than most Russian socialists, excepting only Trotsky and
Lenin, Lunacharskii was sensitive to the propagandistic possibilities in revolutions
and revolutionary mythologies, and it was hardly a coincidence that after the
October Revolution much of the pageantry Lunacharsjkii mobilized to legitimize
it included innumerable references—in music, theatre, literature, and the visual
arts—to its French analogue and antecedent.
A very different ally in Lenin’s rhetorical wars was the young Joseph Stalin. It is
not known if Lenin was aware of Stalin’s writings in the months when he was
battling his enemies within the ranks of Russian socialism and beyond them. Nor
can one be sure that the reverse was true prior to Lenin elevating the Georgian to
the central committee of the newly proclaimed Bolshevik party in 1912. But the
resemblance between what the two men wrote during the 1905 Revolution and in
its immediate aftermath is striking. Indeed, this similarity pervaded what each
believed about the French Revolution.
Stalin, while an autodidact, was not the ignoramus many of his future rivals—
and future allies—considered him. A voracious reader at an early age, by adult-
hood he had familiarized himself with many of the classics in European and
Georgian literature.⁵⁷ One of the many books he read while a student in the
theological seminary he attended before becoming a revolutionary was Victor
Hugo’s last novel, Ninety-Three, which brought to life the disparate personalities
of that critical year in a way few works of history, no matter how well-written,
could match.⁵⁸ The result was that when Stalin first wrote about the French
Revolution, he knew a great deal about it, certainly far more than one would
expect from someone growing up in a milieu so far removed, culturally no less
than geographically, from Western Europe.⁵⁹ Although he wrote nothing about
the debate within the RSDLP over the Jacobins, the outbreak of revolution in 1905
prompted Stalin to put his more general thoughts about the French Revolution
on paper.
In August 1905 Stalin drew an analogy between the two revolutions, the French
and ongoing one in Russia, but only for the purpose of rejecting it.⁶⁰ The French

⁵⁷ Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (New York, 2014), pp. 32, 36.
⁵⁸ Ian Grey, Stalin: Man of History (Garden City NY, 1979), p. 21; Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as
Revolutionary 1879–1929 (New York, 1974), p. 86.
⁵⁹ Stalin also read about the French Revolution when he was exiled to Siberia several times before the
October Revolution. According to one of his biographers, he found especially impressive Robespierre’s
decisiveness in dealing with enemies of the revolution. Dmitrii Volkogonov, Stalin, Triumph and
Tragedy (New York, 1996), p. 279.
⁶⁰ J. V. Stalin, ‘Vremennoe revoliutsionnoe pravitel’stvo i sotsial-demokratiia’, in J. V. Stalin, Sochi-
neniia, 13 vols (Moscow, 1946–51), vol. I, pp. 149–51.
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Revolution, he wrote, was a bourgeois revolution, while the Russian one, at least in
its leadership, was proletarian. In the short, declarative sentences that would
characterize his prose for the rest of his life, Stalin starkly dichotomized the two
revolutions:
In France the bourgeoisie was at the head of the revolution; in Russia it is the
proletariat. There, the bourgeoisie determined the fate of the revolution; in
Russia the proletariat will do so. And is it not clear that with such a realignment
of the leading revolutionary forces the results for the respective classes cannot be
identical? If, in France, the bourgeoisie, being at the head of the revolution,
reaped its rewards, must it also reap them in Russia, notwithstanding the fact that
the proletariat here stands at the head of the revolution? Yes, say our Mensheviks;
what happened there, in France, must also happen here, in Russia. These
gentlemen, like undertakers, take the measure of something long dead—but
then apply its lessons to the living.⁶¹

Because the Mensheviks were ‘capable of learning historical facts only by rote’,
Stalin continued, they could not possibly comprehend the difference between the
conditions in France in 1789 and those in Russia in 1905.⁶²
In two statements he made in 1906 and 1907 respectively, Stalin explained
further why he considered the two revolutions dichotomous.⁶³ In the course of
reiterating Lenin’s scenario of the proletariat in Russia leading a bourgeois
revolution and then going well beyond it to a socialist revolution, Stalin made
clear that the failure of the 1905 Revolution was not cause for discouragement,
because the proletariat still had a political party, the RSDLP, representing it. The
party had already instilled in the proletariat the cognizance of its own objectives
that it needed to act politically, so that when the time came to advance its own
interests, rather than those of another, retrograde class—in this instance the
bourgeoisie—it would do so. Moreover, in the proletariat’s independence, the
contrast to what the French proletariat had done in the French Revolution would
be unmistakable. In that particular instance, the workers did the difficult and
dangerous work of confronting the revolution’s enemies, while the bourgeoisie
took power and reaped its rewards. But in Russia the proletariat would not be
content with ‘dragging the tail’ of the bourgeoisie, and for that reason ‘our
revolution [will have] an advantage over the Great French Revolution in that it
will culminate with the people gaining total sovereignty’.⁶⁴ In fact, the proletariat,
as Stalin described it, would likely resist all efforts by the bourgeoisie, and by
treacherous pseudo-socialists only pretending to have its interests at heart, to

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 150. ⁶² Ibid., p. 155.

⁶³ J. V. Stalin, ‘Sovremennyi moment i ob”edinitel’nyi s”ezd rabochei partii (1906)’, in Stalin,
Sochineniia, vol. 1, pp. 254–8; J. V. Stalin, ‘Londonskii s”ezd rossiiskoi sotsial-demokraticheskoi
rabochei partii (Zapiski delegata) (20 June and 10 July 1907)’, ibid., vol. II, pp. 60–2.
⁶⁴ Stalin, ‘Sovremennyi moment’, in Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 1, pp. 255–6.
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sabotage it in its ongoing effort to improve its material condition. In short, because
the bourgeoisie was so inherently perfidious and malevolent, the proletariat
should never allow itself ‘to pull its chestnuts out of the fire’—by which Stalin
meant that the proletariat should never act as a surrogate of the bourgeoisie, or of
any other class; more broadly, he meant that one should always act, and only act,
in the service of one’s own interests, not those of anyone else.⁶⁵ In this respect,
Stalin identified Martynov as the worst offender among the Mensheviks in their
efforts to prevent the Russian proletariat from acting on the basis of its own
interests and to serve those of the bourgeoisie instead. Like Lenin, Stalin, more-
over, personalized political disagreements—in the 1930s he would do so to the
point where they were ipso facto evidence of treason—and for that reason his
criticisms of political opponents, in this case Martynov, were no less caustic and
ad hominem than Lenin’s.
In 1907 Stalin also wrote a preface, in some ways similar to Lenin’s of the same
year, to Kautsky’s aforementioned pamphlet, in which he expressed agreement
with the latter’s scenario of the proletariat and peasantry replacing the bourgeoisie
in a bourgeois revolution. Once again, Stalin implied that what distinguished the
French Revolution from any bourgeois revolution that might occur in Russia was
more significant than any similarities between them. The principal difference,
according to Stalin, was that in the French Revolution, which both he and Kautsky
considered a bourgeois revolution, the ‘liberal bourgeoisie’ played the dominant
role, partly because this was the role Marx intended for it, but also because the
proletariat was too weak to do anything but provide incidental or mostly ineffec-
tual assistance.⁶⁶ But in Russia in 1907, circumstances were different. The liberal
bourgeoisie was no longer revolutionary; indeed, the Kadets, who served as its
political instrument in Russia, now ‘seek protection under the wing of reaction’
even before a bourgeois revolution has occurred.⁶⁷ But the proletariat, according
to Stalin, was ready for action, and it was only a matter of time before it would rise
up against the existing order and destroy it.
If only by implication, Stalin adopted Lenin’s whole scenario of revolution in
the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution, and in doing so utilized the example—or
more precisely the counter-example—of the French Revolution in distinguishing
what he believed would happen in Russia from what unfortunately happened in

⁶⁵ Ibid., p. 256. This was the same phrase Stalin used in his speech to the Eighteenth Party Congress
in March 1939 to indicate subtly to Hitler that he would likely not sign any agreement with Great
Britain and France directed at Nazi Germany. Hitler rightly interpreted Stalin’s comment as indicating
a readiness to explore the possibility of a rapprochement between the two dictatorships, which was
achieved with the signing of a non-aggression pact in August 1939, thereby enabling Nazi Germany
to invade Poland ten days later, convinced that not only the Soviet Union, but also the Western
Democracies would not attack it.
⁶⁶ J. V. Stalin, ‘Predislovie k gruzinskomu izdaniiu broshiury K. Kautskogo “Dvizhushchie sily i
perspektivy russkoi revoliutsii” ’, in Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. II, p. 4.
⁶⁷ Ibid.
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the past when the proletariat foolishly aligned itself with the bourgeoisie in the
entirely mistaken belief that the latter was its ally. Henceforth Stalin would not
deviate from this particular aspect of Leninist orthodoxy, and would expound it
with the same single-minded obstinacy with which he expressed political opinions
generally. Like Lenin, Stalin much preferred a sledgehammer to a stiletto in
eviscerating his political opponents rhetorically.
To be sure, there were differences, some of them subtle, between what Lenin
and Stalin each wrote about the French Revolution. While Stalin agreed with
Lenin that Jacobinism was a virtue that anyone engaged in making a full-scale
revolution would do well to adopt, he disagreed with him on Blanquism. In
contrast to Lenin, for whom the term was always one of opprobrium and its
application to him a grave injustice, Stalin, like Lenin after being accused of
Jacobinism, welcomed the charge, thereby turning an expletive into a compliment.
At least in what he wrote publicly about it, Blanquism was just a short-form for the
scenario he envisioned of professional revolutionaries like himself and Lenin one
day leading the masses in creating the more equitable society the proletariat
deserved. According to Stalin, Bolshevism and Blanquism were synonymous:
they both prescribed ‘the introduction of consciousness and organization into
[any] sporadic insurrection that has broken out spontaneously’.⁶⁸ To Stalin it
seemed not to matter that the Bolsheviks—like the Blanquists—had few followers.
The important point was that they would acquire them in the future—but well
before the proletarian revolution both Stalin and the other Bolsheviks predicted.
Although there exists no empirical evidence to prove it conclusively, it seems
reasonable to suggest that Stalin thought the Blanquists wise not to disavow the
conspiratorial tactics they practised not just because they lacked mass support, but
also because he thought such tactics absolutely essential once the Bolsheviks took
power. In other words, the hegemony professional revolutionaries exercised over
the workers that Russian socialists without exception considered a regrettable, but
temporary, necessity—Lenin always claimed that he shared in this consensus, but
many who knew him did not believe him when he said it—Stalin considered this
imbalance of power a virtue and believed it should continue at least until socialism
existed, and possibly even under communism itself—even though the whole
notion of communism would be rendered meaningless as a result.
Another difference between the two men in how they viewed the two revolu-
tions, the French and the Russian, was that Stalin was more ready than Lenin to
distinguish them both morally and ideologically. In Lenin’s explication of the
French Revolution, he always considered it morally equivalent—though not
ideologically equivalent—to any proletarian revolution that might occur in the
future. Both were inherently progressive, and one could hardly blame the French

⁶⁸ J. V. Stalin, ‘Marks i Engel’s o vosstanii (13 July 1906)’, in Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. II, p. 243.
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in 1789 for not making a revolution more radical than what the existing objective
conditions in France permitted. Undoubtedly Lenin, at a visceral level, admired
revolutionaries like Babeuf and the Hébertists for wanting to go further. But his
cold rationalism prevented his admiration from overpowering his judgement. Even
the language Lenin normally used in describing and explaining the French Revo-
lution only rarely descended into the ad hominem recriminations he regularly
directed at contemporaries who for one reason or another displeased him. In the
final analysis, the French Revolution was revealed to Lenin through the application
of reason. But with Stalin, the revolution suffered from a failing that for Stalin
originated more in his own psyche than out of any rational application of Marxist
ideology. In practically everything Stalin wrote and said about the French Revolu-
tion there was implicit a genuine preference, more inchoate and unformed than
carefully arrived at, for Russian revolutions because they would occur in Russia.
The same was true, in reverse, for the French Revolution. Stalin wrote about it
coldly, even dismissively, not just because it was a bourgeois revolution, but also
because it occurred it France, rather than in Russia. The Russian nationalism that
lurked beneath the surface of Soviet Communism that Stalin shared and employed
adroitly in mobilizing the Soviet population against the Nazis decades later is
evident, albeit in embryo, in his early writings on the French Revolution.

* * *
In making sense of Lenin’s references to the French Revolution from 1905 to 1914,
one must bear in mind that the revolution served during those years as a
comforting counterpart to the powerlessness and isolation that, while not created
by the failure of the 1905 Revolution, was certainly aggravated by it. Indeed, it
seems that the French Revolution created for Lenin practically a parallel universe,
in which moral virtue, at least in the beginning, was triumphant, power was
exercised effectively, and any defeats that occurred were avenged in the future.
That was certainly true in November 1907, when Lenin praised the National
Assembly for emancipating the peasantry in France in ‘one night in the summer
of 1789’.⁶⁹ What made his paean to the assembly unusual, in addition to his
praising an institution he had previously denigrated for its hostility to the lower
classes, was that he now considered it the antithesis, morally and politically, of the
Third Duma in Russia, the delegates to which had recently been elected in
accordance with laws giving disproportional weight to the votes of nobles and
affluent townspeople. By conjuring the National Assembly in his mind, he could
create for himself a reality that, however idealized it might have been in com-
parison to actual events in Russia, remained a source of comfort and reassurance.

⁶⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Prigotovlenie “otvratitel’noi orgii” ’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XVI, p. 152.

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The same dynamic helps to explain comments Lenin made at the Fifth Congress
of the RSDLP, held in London in the spring of 1907, and immediately following it.
Responding to a liberal who had characterized as unfortunate ‘the road taken [in
France] by the revolution of 1789–1793’, Lenin, once again, effectively rehabili-
tated the first phase of the French Revolution, thereby contradicting previous
iterations of its evolution, according to which the haute-bourgeoisie kept the
radicals on a tight leash until the Jacobins came to power and radicalized the
revolution beyond anything the bourgeoisie intended.⁷⁰ The Jacobin Terror, he
wrote in February 1908, in response to the recent assassination of the King of
Portugal, was ‘genuine’, ‘popular’, and ‘truly regenerative’, in contrast to the terror
exemplified by the assassination, which he was certain would have no effect.⁷¹ Two
months later, Lenin decided that the events of the French Revolution, because they
included peasant uprisings, were grounds for upgrading the 1905 Revolution to
something that nearly succeeded; in fact these peasant uprisings showed that in
any future revolution in Russia, the proletariat would guide the peasantry in a
second revolution after both had replaced the bourgeoisie in the first one.⁷² In
1911 Lenin once again spun the Janus-like sides of the French bourgeoisie; this
time the side facing forward depicted the bourgeoisie, in 1789, as a genuinely
progressive force, not making ‘sour faces’ when its ‘younger brother’—the lower
classes—spoke with conviction and eloquence about a future superior to anything
that existed at the time.⁷³ But by the end of the year, the opposite side of the
revolution, when the French bourgeoisie turned reactionary, appeared in yet
another of Lenin’s articles both advocating and predicting an alliance of the
proletariat and the peasantry. Contrary to what he said was Martov’s good
opinion of it, the French bourgeoisie was cowardly and reactionary to the core.
It carried out a bourgeois revolution only under pressure from the proletariat from
1789 to 1793, at which time it retired from politics, only to re-emerge in 1848 to
betray the proletariat again. But fortunately the proletariat and the classes and
categories of the population that supported it completed the bourgeois revolution
the bourgeoisie began, thereby establishing the political system in France that
exists today.⁷⁴ In fact, by 1913, Lenin was applying the lessons of the French
Revolution to the whole issue of minority nationalism in the Russian Empire. In a
letter to the Georgian Bolshevik, Stepan Shaumian, he contrasted the democratic
centralism the Jacobins favoured to the federalism preferred by the Girondins. But
after expressing agreement with the Jacobins, as he had done countless times
before, in this instance Lenin went beyond his customary Jacobin–Girondin

⁷⁰ V. I. Lenin, ‘Rech’ ob otnoshenii k burzhuaznym partiiam (12 May 1907)’, ibid., vol. XV, p. 336.
⁷¹ V. I. Lenin, ‘O proisshestvii s Korolem Portugal’skim’, ibid., vol. XVI, p. 441.
⁷² V. I. Lenin, ‘K otsenke russkoi revoliutsii’, ibid., vol. XVII, pp. 46–7.
⁷³ V. I. Lenin, ‘O starykh, no vechno novykh istinakh (11 June 1911)’, ibid., vol. XX, p. 281.
⁷⁴ V. I. Lenin, ‘Printsipal’nye voprosy izbiratel’noi kompanii (December 1911 and January 1912)’,
ibid., vol. XXI, pp. 83–4.
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dichotomy and declared the relevance to Russia of what he called ‘autonomy’, by

which he seemed to mean something in between the centralism the Jacobins
favoured, and the federalism the Girondins preferred.⁷⁵
What was significant about Lenin’s preference for a compromise between a
centralized polity and a federative one was not just that he considered it an
amalgam of what the Jacobins and the Girondins had each preferred. Even
more important was that it predated by several years what he recommended for
what remained of the Russian Empire after the Bolsheviks had taken power in
1917, namely a middle course between two extreme positions that would give the
national minorities the illusion they enjoyed autonomy while actually binding
them to the Centre in perpetuity. Independence could be promised in the Soviet
Constitution of 1922 because Lenin believed conditions in the Soviet Union would
be so wonderful that no Soviet citizen in his right mind would want to leave it.
The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 created new realities
Lenin had to comprehend and comment on if his views were not to sink into
irrelevance. Once again he called upon the French Revolution for assistance. In
this instance, however, he situated the revolution historically within the larger
rubric of the tradition of revolutions in France, which he defined temporally as
encompassing the eighty-two years between the outbreak of the French Revolu-
tion in 1789 and the emergence and suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871.⁷⁶
What distinguished this period both from what preceded it and what followed it
was the triumph and continued dominance of the bourgeoisie first in France and
then, somewhat later, elsewhere in Western Europe, and finally in Central
Europe. In some countries, including France, its victory was rapid and fairly
easy, while in others, such as Germany, it was difficult and took some time. But
in every instance it achieved ‘the breakdown of the obsolete feudal-absolutist
institutions’.⁷⁷
The Marxist dialectic, however, drove history beyond what the bourgeoisie
desired. Beneath the surface of its seemingly incontestable victory over feudalism
were buried the seeds of its eventual demise. In Europe its decline began in
1871. In every year that followed, the bourgeoisie could not help but transform
itself from its ‘original progressive character towards reactionary and even

⁷⁵ V. I. Lenin, ‘Letter to S. G. Shaumian (6 December 1913)’, Lenin, Collected Works, vol. XIX, p. 500.
⁷⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘Pod chuzhim flagom (no earlier than February 1915)’, ibid., vol. XXVI, p. 143. Lenin,
to be sure, never wrote or spoke explicitly about a French revolutionary tradition or explained the
reason for his particular choice of dates. But those he chose (1789 and 1871) make clear that he believed
such a tradition existed and that it defined a discrete period within the larger capitalist phase of history
Marx had earlier claimed to discern. Between the outbreak of the First World War and the February
Revolution in Russia, Lenin wrote often about what made 1789–1871 distinctive not only in the history
of France but also in the history of Europe. See, as examples, ‘Sotsializm i voina (otnoshenie RSDRP k
voine) (July–August 1915)’, ibid., vol. XXVI, pp. 312–13 (co-authored with Zinoviev); ‘Opportunizm i
krakh II Internatsionala,(end of 1915)’, ibid., vol. XXVII, pp. 100–1, 116–17; and ‘O karikature na
marksizma (August–October 1916)’, Lenin, PSS, vol. XXX, pp. 80–1, among others.
⁷⁷ Lenin, ‘Pod chuzhim flagom’, ibid., vol. XXVI, p. 143.
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ultra-reactionary finance capital’.⁷⁸ In an adumbration of what he would argue

at greater length in his 1916 exegesis on imperialism, Lenin claimed that this
period of bourgeois decay reached its apogee in 1914, when the internal
contradictions of capitalism had weakened the class sufficiently so that not
even imperialism—which provided capitalists with markets to compensate for
the inability of impoverished workers to purchase all of the industrial goods the
capitalists produced—could prevent its collapse.
What Lenin concluded from all of this was that it made no sense for the Russian
proletariat to participate in Russia’s defence against its more advanced capitalist
enemy, namely Germany. In fact, Lenin explicitly rejected the argument of Martov
and several Mensheviks—who had agreed with him in 1914 that Russian socialists
should not support Russia’s involvement in the war—that should ‘the autocratic
and feudal militarised imperialism’ that caused the war be ‘swept away’ and
replaced by ‘bourgeois-democratic revolutions and republic’, the proletariat
should then support the countries where such a transfer of power within the
bourgeoisie had occurred.⁷⁹ To Lenin such a course of action would be foolish.
A different faction of the bourgeoisie might come to power, one less inclined to the
bourgeois democracy Martov preferred to any bourgeois dictatorship, but the
nature and objectives of the war would remain the same. The only circumstance
under which Russian socialists should support the war, according to Lenin, would
be if the proletariat somehow came to power in the course of it. But of course
once the proletariat came to power in one of the countries waging war, it was
highly likely—at this point Lenin was still reluctant to consider it inevitable—
that all the combatants would soon stop fighting because the proletariat—which
in the classic formulation of the Second International ‘had no country’—would
come to power nearly everywhere in Europe and render the original causes of
the war an anachronism. In Lenin’s tripartite division of modern history since
1789, the wars fought between 1871 and 1914 were imperialist wars, but now
that imperialism, at least in Europe, could no longer save capitalism from
destruction, the First World War was losing its raison d’être. To clarify his
argument and to make it more convincing, Lenin yet again invoked the example
of the French Revolution:
[I]n 1793 the foremost class in the bourgeois revolution in France fought against
European pre-revolutionary monarchies, whereas the Russia of 1915 is fighting
not the more backward countries, but the more advanced ones, which are on the
eve of a socialist revolution. For that reason, in the war of 1914–15 only a
proletariat that is carrying out a victorious socialist revolution can play the part
of the Jacobins of 1793. Consequently, in the present war, the Russian proletariat

⁷⁸ Lenin, ‘Pod chuzhim flagom’, ibid., vol. XXVI, p. 143.

⁷⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Prikrytie sotsial-shovinistskoi politiki internatsionalistskimi frazami (21 December
1915)’, ibid., vol. XXVII, p. 90.
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could ‘defend the fatherland’, and consider ‘the character of the war changed
fundamentally’, if, and only if, the revolution installed the party of the proletariat
in power, and allowed only that party to direct the full force of a revolutionary
upheaval and the machinery of the state towards an instant and direct conclusion
of an alliance with the socialist proletariat of Germany and Europe.⁸⁰

What is especially noteworthy about Lenin’s whole scenario is that while he still
considered a proletarian revolution in Russia by no means inevitable, or even
likely, he seemed certain that, were such a revolution to occur in the context of
proletarian revolutions in more economically advanced countries in Europe—it
mattered not that it be Germany, which was fighting Russia, or Great Britain and
France, which were its allies—the new proletarian regime in Russia would con-
sider it essential to end the war as quickly as possible. In contrast to the French
Revolution, which for all of its virtues could never eliminate opposition from
‘feudal’ elements opposed to it both at home and abroad, the countries fighting in
the First World War would find the issues that caused them to go to war irrelevant
once they jettisoned their bourgeois leadership and replaced it with proletarian
regimes intent on establishing socialism and communism. Whereas wars fought
between 1789 and 1871, and between 1871 and 1914, were incapable of changing
the underlying economic rivalries and inequalities that caused them to erupt in the
first place, the First World War, from Lenin’s perspective, always had the potential
to transform the existing constellation of forces in Europe, and to usher in an
entirely new epoch in its history.
For Lenin this required a diminution in the relevance and importance of the
French Revolution. In an article composed in the late summer and early autumn
of 1916, he lumped France with Germany and England under the rubric of
advanced capitalist countries that were once in the forefront of humanity, espe-
cially in 1789–1871, in forming national states, but which were now just the
detritus of an era that was irretrievably lost.⁸¹ In fact, these three countries had
morphed into their antithesis: ‘liberated nations have become oppressor nations,
nations of imperialist rapine, nations approaching the eve of capitalism’s col-
lapse’.⁸² In December 1916, barely a few weeks before the strikes and demonstra-
tions that resulted in the collapse of the monarchy in Russia, Lenin reiterated his
earlier tripartite division of Europe’s modern history: 1789–1871, 1871–1914,
1914 to whenever proletarian revolutions erupt in Russia and Western Europe.
This time, however, it came with the corollary that whatever moral capital France
had acquired from its original revolution and the wars it fought to defend it it
managed to squander later on, not only by suppressing revolutions in 1848 and in

⁸⁰ Ibid., vol. XXVII, p. 90.

⁸¹ V. I. Lenin, ‘O karikature na Marksizma i ob “imperialisticheskom ekonomizme” ’, ibid., vol. XXX,
p. 88.
⁸² Ibid., vol. XXX, p. 88.
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1871 but also by participating in the First World War from its inception.⁸³ In
Lenin’s mind, the dichotomy between the virtuous France of 1789 and the
iniquitous France of 1914 was obvious:
It is not true that France is waging this war in 1914–1917 for freedom, national
independence, democracy, and so on. She is fighting to retain her colonies, and
for England to retain hers, colonies to which Germany would have had a much
greater right—of course from the standpoint of bourgeois law. . . . Consequently
this war is being waged not by democratic and revolutionary France, not by the
France of 1792 or of 1848, nor by the France of the Commune. It is being waged
by bourgeois France, reactionary France, that ally and friend of tsarism, ‘the
universal userer’, who is defending his booty, his ‘sacred right’ to colonies, his
‘freedom’ to exploit the entire world with the help of the millions loaned to
weaker or poorer nations.⁸⁴

In earlier writings, going back even before the establishment of the RSDLP and the
emergence of Bolshevism, Lenin had excoriated contemporary French socialists
such as Millerand, Guesde, and Jaurès mercilessly as traitors to socialism. But only
during the First World War did he make clear the depths of the moral abyss into
which France had fallen in the nineteenth century. What made these ersatz
socialists especially abhorrent, as far as Lenin was concerned, was that in betraying
socialism they were also betraying the French Revolution, and indeed the entire
tradition of revolution in France that ended with the suppression of the Paris
Commune in 1871.
In sum, the outbreak of a European war in 1914 enlarged the French Revolution
for Lenin to the point where it was no longer a revolution notable only in its own
right, for what it had accomplished (and did not accomplish) in France beginning
in 1789. What it now became—and what it would remain for him for the
remainder of his life—was the first manifestation of a longer and larger revolu-
tionary tradition in France, the full implications of which were truly European.
What this seemed to suggest to Lenin, however obliquely, about what might
happen in Russia specifically was that a revolution there, like the French original,
would transform events elsewhere in Europe—only this time, unlike the bourgeois
revolutions the French Revolution had inspired outside France that eventually

⁸³ V. I. Lenin, ‘Otkrytoe pis’mo Borisu Suvarinu’, ibid., vol. XXX, pp. 262–3. In the same article,
Lenin seemed to waver on whether what happened in France in 1792 constituted a more radical phase
of the original French Revolution or instead was a separate revolution entirely. He also variously dated
this distinction, while sometimes defining it differently, to 1792 and 1793.
⁸⁴ Ibid., vol. XXX, pp. 263–4. Lenin resurrected the analogy in the paragraphs that follow this one,
where he stated that the class in France that was prepared to make a revolution in 1780 was just as
insignificant politically and numerically as the proletariat was in Russia in 1900. But he then went on to
write about the proletariat as already having ‘led the masses’—which suggests that he was referring to
the 1905 Revolution. Ibid., vol. XXX, pp. 266–7. Because the letter was not published until January
1918, it is possible, though unlikely, that Lenin wrote this section of his letter after the Bolsheviks, in
October 1917, had already seized power.
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collapsed, the proletarian revolutions a Russian revolution would inspire outside

Russia would endure, and even be able to offer the revolutionaries in Russia now
in power valuable, indeed indispensable assistance. Where the French Revolution
had failed, namely in universalizing itself in such a way as to assure its own
survival, the Russian Revolution Lenin anticipated would succeed.
But from none of this, while it was germinating in Lenin’s mind prior to 1917,
should one infer that when the monarchy collapsed in Russia in that year, and
thereby opened up possibilities Lenin previously had not considered either likely
or imminent, the French Revolution lost its salience. Rather, its value and utility
changed. From providing a model of organization and tactics relevant to a party
and a movement with little chance in the immediate future of influencing events,
it now offered a menu of strategies that might prove useful should taking power
become a real possibility. And once this seemingly improbable undertaking
was achieved, the French Revolution provided a useful template for what the
Bolsheviks should do to remain in power, albeit one more negative than positive in
its helping the Bolsheviks distinguish strategies they should avoid from those they
should pursue. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the French Revolution was not
completed by Napoleon after 1799, as many Western historians have argued, but
rather stopped in 1794 with the demise of the Jacobins and the onset of Thermi-
dor, in which a number of the achievements of the original revolution were
reversed, albeit temporarily.⁸⁵ For that reason, the Bolsheviks could take power
in 1917 and consolidate it successfully in the years that followed with the
Jacobins—and the Terror the Jacobins inflicted on the people of France—once
again uppermost in their minds. It concerned the Bolsheviks greatly after 1917
whether the Jacobins calibrated the amount of terror they inflicted or simply killed
people indiscriminately—or did both of these things sequentially, as a rational
pre-emptive strike against real and potential enemies degenerated into something
larger that was indefensible both morally and politically. After 1917 the Bolsheviks
were no longer exiles and émigrés for whom revolution and the construction of a
new government and society was an intellectual exercise. They were now the

⁸⁵ See, for example, Crane Brinton, A Decade of Revolution 1789–1799 (New York, 1934), and
Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights
of Man to Robespierre (Princeton NJ, 2014), especially pp. 12–13. One of the few Western historians to
share Lenin’s opinion on when the French Revolution ended is Simon Schama, who in Citizens ends his
narrative with Robespierre’s arrest and execution, and claims that ‘violence’ was the common factor
that distinguished the French Revolution and drove it forward (pp. 847, 859). Of course Schama
reverses the moral gloss Lenin placed on the French Revolution, condemning what Lenin and most of
the other Bolsheviks applauded. One of the few Soviet historians who rejected Lenin’s claim that the
revolution ended in 1794—thereby agreeing with many Western historians who were neither Marxists
nor sympathetic to the Soviet Union—was V. G. Revunenkov, in Ocherki po istorii Velikoi frantsuzskoi
revoliutsii. Iakobinskaia respublika i ee krushenie (Leningrad, 1983), whose apostasy was noted calmly
during the Gorbachev era, when opinions contrary to the preexisting Soviet orthodoxy were readily
expressed, for example, by L. A. Pimenova, ‘O sovetskoi istoriografii Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii
(1979–1986 gg.)’, Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik (1989), p. 123.
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custodians of a country that their ideology compelled them to transform into a

political entity different in every way from all those that had preceded it in
history—while simultaneously inciting revolutions rooted in that very same ideol-
ogy in other parts of Europe, and indeed in other parts of the world.
But in order to understand what the Bolsheviks actually did in this respect, and
how the French Revolution affected the choices they made and the decisions they
reached, one must know something of the role the revolution played in shaping
the culture of Russia itself both in 1917 and thereafter. The French Revolution was
no less a factor in the calculations of the Bolsheviks’ opponents than it was in
those of the Bolsheviks themselves, and it is to these wider manifestations of the
influence of the French Revolution to which we now turn.
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6
1917—Russian Jacobins Come to Power

By 1917 the French Revolution had become part of the collective memory of
educated Russians. As a result, its images and symbols would be invoked both to
comprehend the events of that tumultuous year and to pass moral judgement on
them. Russians of all political persuasions—though especially those at the opposite
ends of the political spectrum—found in the books and articles that were written
about the revolution ample corroboration of their own opinions and beliefs. For
every work that condemned the revolution, such as Anatole France’s The Gods are
Athirst, which after its translation into Russian in 1912 served for supporters of
the monarchy as an object lesson in the horrors that would ensure upon its
overthrow, there were others, such as Alphonse Aulard’s, that praised the French
Revolution, or certain aspects of it, effusively.¹ Histories of the revolution pub-
lished in 1917 often were bound deliberately in red, to indicate that they had
something to do with socialism, or at least with revolution.² Politicians intent on
applying to their own careers any lessons the revolution might provide were
prominent among those who purchased them. In addition, imperfect reproduc-
tions of paintings by Jacques-Louis David, the acknowledged iconographer of the
French Revolution, appeared on the covers of Russian newspapers and journals,
and it was not uncommon to see plastered on their first page Danton’s celebrated
injunction on the need for ‘audacity’ in order for a revolution to succeed.³
Histories of the French Revolution sold well in the spring and summer of 1917.⁴
Those by Michelet and Louis Blanc were especially popular.⁵

¹ Shlapentokh, French Revolution and the Russian Anti-Democratic Tradition, pp. 93, 133. In 1917
Aulard reciprocated the interest shown in his work in Russia by writing a public letter urging the
Provisional Government not to renounce its obligations to France and to remain a combatant in the
First World War. La Révolution française et la Révolution russe: letter aux citoyens de la libre Russie
(Paris, 1917), in La Révolution française 70 (1917): pp. 193–204. Aulard’s original, very favourable view
of the Russian Revolution was shared by many Frenchmen. In February 1917, the Society for the Study
of the French Revolution in Paris sent a telegram to the Duma analogizing it to the Convention. In
April the League of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen held a meeting in Paris, the only one it
convened during the First World War, to honour the Russian Revolution. A. A. Aulard, ‘Dve revoliutsii
(1789–1917)’, Volia Rossii, no. 20 (1923): p. 14.
² Philip M. Price, My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution (London, 1921), p. 16.
³ Il’ina, ‘Obraz evropeiskikh revoliutsii i russkaia kul’tura’, pp. 385–6. In the original French,
Danton’s exhortation, in full, is as follows: ‘De l’audaçe, encore l’audaçe, toujours de l’audaçe’.
⁴ Pitirim Sorokin, Leaves from a Russian Diary—and Thirty Years After (Boston MA, 1950), p. 39.
⁵ Il’ina, ‘Obraz evropeiskikh revoliutsii i russkaia kul’tura’, p. 386.
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In 1917 opinions on the revolution varied widely. Some who believed it had
predictive value thought Russians should replicate its principles not only in
politics but in everyday life.⁶ One foreigner visiting Siberia wrote of his amazement
on witnessing a child invoking the revolution in explaining her vow to dedicate her
life, as a physician, not only to the physical improvement of the Russian people,
but also to their moral improvement.⁷ According to another eyewitness to the
events of the year, many Russians sympathetic to the revolution even imitated in
their speech and mannerisms how they imagined the sans-culottes spoke and
behaved.⁸ No doubt many of those who did so were among the much larger
number of Russians who referred to one another in 1917 as grazhdanin and
grazhdanka, the masculine and feminine equivalent in Russian of citoyen and
citoyenne respectively, which during the French Revolution were used by its
supporters in conversation to demonstrate their rejection of elitism and privilege.⁹
On some of the signs advertising the ‘freedom icons’ the Provisional Government
distributed to generate political support were written, in Russian translation, the
iconic triad of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité.¹⁰ According to one
Russian historian of the revolution’s effects on Russia, Tamara Kondratieva, in
1917 it was hard to find a Russian revolutionary without Robespierre, Danton, or
the Vendée on his mind.¹¹ In Krasnoe Koleso (The Red Wheel), his summa on the
collapse of the monarchy and the advent of the Bolshevik dictatorship, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, who loathed the Soviet Union for rejecting Russian Orthodoxy in
favour of the secularism and rationalism of Marxism–Leninism, said much the
same thing, but enlarged the applicability of Kondratieva’s comment to encompass
the entire population of Petrograd: ‘soaring parallels to the Great French Revolu-
tion hung in the Petrograd air [and] were on everyone’s lips’.¹² Even Russian
officers serving on the Western Front in France were said to have learned much
from Lazare Carnot and Napoleon, both of whom enhanced the effectiveness
of the French army sufficiently for it to secure numerous victories and to delay
to 1815 the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.¹³ Also in 1917, many
political figures, in their oratory, tried to emulate the extravagant rhetoric of

⁶ N. I. Kareev, Prozhitoe i perezhitoe (Leningrad, 1990), p. 292.

⁷ Ernest Poole, The Village: Russian Impressions (New York, 1918), pp. 146–48.
⁸ Sorokin, Leaves from a Russian Diary, p. 39.
⁹ Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, p. 31.
¹⁰ E. P. Stebling, From Czar to Bolshevik (London, 1918), p. 50–51. Richard Stites correctly notes
that, for all the visual imagery intended to underscore analogies, or even identities, between the French
Revolution and the revolutions in Russia in 1917, there was no equivalent in the latter, or in the early
years of the Bolshevik regime, to Jacques-Louis David, whom Stites, in Revolutionary Dreams, p. 84,
aptly terms ‘the pageant-master of the French Revolution’.
¹¹ Quoted in Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik
Revolution (Ithaca NY, 2004), p. 6.
¹² Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Krasnoe koleso (Paris, 1988), knot III, p. 475.
¹³ Shlapentokh, Counter-Revolution in Revolution, p. 56.
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Camille Desmoulins.¹⁴ And to enemies of the Russian Revolution charging in 1917

that there was nothing romantic, unselfish, or self-sacrificial in the French Revo-
lution, and that it was energized only by greed and parochial self-interest, Maxim
Gorky proclaimed that the French Revolution should be judged on its own terms.
But of one thing about the revolution he was certain—that the replication in
Russia of its most iconic events, such as the storming of the Bastille, required
persons possessing the courage and heroism of its principal actors.¹⁵
Russians like Gorky who admired the French Revolution while believing its
Russian successor would do even more to alleviate poverty and material depriv-
ation tried to translate their admiration into action. For some, that meant trying to
prevent the repetition in Russia of the most egregious excesses of the revolution,
most notably the Jacobin Terror. Leading Mensheviks and Socialist Revolution-
aries promised that no matter what course the revolution in Russia followed,
Nicholas II would not suffer the fate of Louis XVI.¹⁶ But there were others who
thought the legacy of the French Revolution was indivisible and should be applied
to Russia in its entirety. In Siberia, after taking power in several localities, ordinary
citizens deliberately called the governing agencies they established Committees of
Public Safety, on which police powers were swiftly conferred, in one case without
any concern about their practising terror because the democratic procedures that
created them would presumably prevent it.¹⁷ Along these same lines, an anonym-
ous article in Izvestiia in July praised the French and the ongoing revolution in
Russia in equal measure because both, in the opinion of the author, were infused
with the idea of democracy. The Constituent Assembly, once it convened, would
retroactively vindicate the Russian Revolution the way the Estates-General pro-
spectively vindicated the French Revolution in the spring of 1789; in the moral
virtue of the two institutions there was little to distinguish them.¹⁸ Of course not
everyone assumed that everything Russians did in 1917 would exceed, or even
equal the achievements of the French. In July an article in Obozrenie teatrov
(Survey of Theatres) noted plaintively that the ongoing revolution in Russia had
yet to generate poetry comparable to that which appeared in France after the
revolution began there.¹⁹

¹⁴ Iu. A. Limonov, ‘Prazdnestva Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii v 1789–93 gg. i massovye prazdniki
Sovetskoi Rossii v 1917–1920 gg.’, Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik: stat0 i i materialy po istorii Frantsii 1989
(Moscow, 1989), p. 401. That Desmoulins was guillotined—on the same day Danton suffered the
identical fate—proved to be no deterrent in that respect.
¹⁵ Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture and the Bolsheviks (New York,
1968), p. 32.
¹⁶ Kerensky, for example, vowed on 7 March that he would never execute the Provisional Govern-
ment’s enemies, and predicted optimistically that the tsar would soon find safety in England. Meriel
Buchanan, Petrograd: The City of Trouble, 1914–1918 (London, 1918), p. 109.
¹⁷ Doreen Stanford, Siberian Odyssey (New York, 1964), pp. 50, 55.
¹⁸ ‘Nakanune Uchreditel’nago Sobraniia vo Frantsii i v Rossii’, Izvestiia, no. 130 (29 July 1917): p. 2.
¹⁹ Nils Ake Nilsson, ‘Spring 1918. The Arts and the Commissar’, in Nilsson, ed., Art, Society,
Revolution: Russia, 1917–1921 (Stockholm, 1979), p. 12.
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Not surprisingly, many Russians who considered the French Revolution worth
emulating disagreed on precisely what aspects of it they should replicate. Because
its most prominent figures were so outsized and distinctive personally as well as
politically, it was inevitable that Russians should have identified variously with the
Girondins, the Jacobins, and several of the other factional configurations in the
revolution, and even more so with their respective leaders, such as Danton,
Robespierre, Saint-Just, Mirabeau, Brissot, and Madame Roland. At the same
time, Russians less favourably disposed to the revolution considered some or all
of these figures the personification of evil itself.
Support for the revolution in Russia was not monolithic. Very quickly after the
monarchy fell in February a distinct fissure emerged between those who believed
that its agenda was sufficient to achieve their own objectives, and those who, while
admiring the revolution, thought the ongoing revolution in Russia should super-
sede it and make real an ideology—specifically some variant of socialism—to
which nearly all the principal actors in the earlier revolution had been oblivious
or openly hostile. This is evident in the evolution of the Marseillaise in 1917 from a
unitary symbol admired by practically everyone in Russia into something more
complex, with multiple meanings that varied depending on one’s particular
political convictions.
When the monarchy collapsed in February, the French national anthem became
de facto the national anthem of Russia. An Englishman in Petrograd at the time
commented that ‘the Marseillaise was on every tongue’.²⁰ This was partly because
the anthem was a paean to revolution and patriotism simultaneously. Its lyrics
spoke to revolutionaries, patriots, and patriotic revolutionaries in equal measure.
In Russia in 1917 it was sung to assuage the sentiments of all three of these
subdivisions of the population. This was particularly true of the army. Some of
the soldiers who sang it—often after their oath of allegiance to the Provisional
Government—hoped that the new government might prosecute the ongoing war
more effectively than the monarchy had been able to do. But for others, the
revolutionary message it implied was the motivating factor.²¹ Troops ordered to
Petrograd in March to break up workers’ strikes sometimes sang the anthem as
they disobeyed their orders and fraternized with the strikers instead.²² The same
thing had occurred during a march on the Duma, just prior to its dissolution the
month before, to pressure its deputies not to accept any kind of regency enabling
the monarchy and the Romanov dynasty to continue.²³ Even rioters breaking into
bakeries in search of bread sang the anthem while doing so because they believed it

²⁰ Isaac Frederick Marcosson, The Rebirth of Russia (New York, 1917), p. 51.
²¹ Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, p. 45.
²² R. H. Bruce Lockhart, The Two Revolutions: An Eyewitness Study of Russia, 1917 (Chester Springs
PA, 1967), p. 71.
²³ James L. Houghteling, A Diary of the Russian Revolution (New York, 1918), p. 137.
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conferred a kind of moral legitimacy—though one wonders how they could

articulate the lyrics while cramming bread into their mouths.²⁴ Very quickly
after the fall of the monarchy, it seemed that the anthem was nearly ubiquitous
in Petrograd, sung or performed by bands not merely on political occasions, such
as when a regiment in the Tauride Square in full formation demanded that a band
be found to play it, but also to sacralize mass funerals on the Champs de Mars in
Petrograd—a large open space that by its name alone was redolent of the French
Revolution—of fallen heroes of the Russian Revolution.²⁵ During at least one of
these, Chopin’s Funeral March was played along with the Marseillaise.²⁶
In Petrograd in particular the anthem informed aspects of daily life. High
school students sang it as part of their normal school day.²⁷ By March it was
played at the beginning of most concerts and recitals, largely as a way of affirming
collectively one’s personal identification with both revolutions, the Russian as
much as the French. Failure to honour the new custom sometimes generated vocal
disapproval. When, in April, the orchestra at an opera house in Petrograd on one
occasion did not began its performance with the Marseillaise, as had become
customary in the major cities of Russia, the audience began yelling for it. But its
protests were in vain. The orchestra refused to play it. The same thing occurred
before the second act, and yet again before the third act—but at that point the
orchestra finally relented and did what the audience demanded.²⁸
By the time the Bolsheviks seized power in October, the anthem had become so
much a part of the common culture in Russia that it was no longer just a call to
oppressed people casting off the chains that metaphorically enslaved them, and
finally enjoying the blessings of liberty. Nor was it merely a means of expressing
patriotism and one’s willingness to fight for one’s country, as the French had done
in the 1790s. For many, singing it was now a ritual sanctifying the comity that
ensued when everyday disputes ended happily. Shortly after the October insur-
rection, John Reed, the proletarian bard of the Bolsheviks, whose account of their
seizure of power Lenin praised lavishly, visited the Police Prefect in Petrograd for
the purpose of finding an apartment. The individual holding the position agreed

²⁴ Irina Skariatina, A World Can End: A Diary of the Russian Revolution (New York, 1931), p. 96.
²⁵ Nikolai Nikolaevich Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917: A Personal Record (New York,
1955), vol. I, pp. 218–19. The original Champs de Mars in Paris was where, in 1790, crowds celebrated
the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille; in 1794, also on the Champs de Mars, Robespierre,
on behalf of the Jacobins and the Committee of Public Safety, inaugurated the Cult of the Supreme
Being, the deistic alternative to the Christian God he believed would bind the French nation as it
ascended to higher and higher plateaus of moral virtue and social justice. To symbolize the upward
trajectory of the French Revolution, Jacques-Louis David oversaw the construction on the field of a
small mountain, from which Robespierre, like Moses at Mount Sinai, dramatically descended at a
critical moment in the proceedings. Schama, Citizens, pp. 834–6; Martin Warnke, Political Landscape:
The Art History of Nature (London, 1994), p. 98.
²⁶ Edward T. Heald, Witness to Revolution: Letters from Russia 1916–1919 (Kent OH, 1972), p. 77.
²⁷ Arthur Ransome, Russia in 1919 (New York, 1919), p. 187.
²⁸ Heald, Witness to Revolution, pp. 89–90.
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to help, but advised that before the two men got down to business, they should
sing the French national anthem.²⁹
Over the course of this extraordinarily consequential year in Russia’s history, the
Marseillaise, depending upon the needs of those for whom it was sung or played
instrumentally, acquired multiple meanings. By the end of the year there were no
less than four separate versions, the original and three new ones, each intended for
a different social class or category, specifically peasants, soldiers, and workers. One
suspects that the version most suitable for workers was favoured by the Bolsheviks
after Lenin’s April Theses conferred on them the task of carrying out their own,
more radical revolution that would supersede the ongoing bourgeois revolution.³⁰
The new versions had their own lyrics, rhythm, and melodic variations, and none
bore more than a vague resemblance to the original, which was played, when it was
played at all, mostly by orchestras.³¹ The ‘Workers’ Marseillaise’—as the version
for workers was dubbed—was actually the creation of the pre-revolutionary popu-
list, Pëtr Lavrov, who in 1875 had substituted lyrics, rendered in Russian, that
transformed the anthem into a direct exhortation to class warfare:
To the parasites, to the dogs, to the rich!
Yes and to the evil vampire-tsar!
Kill and destroy them, the villainous swine!
Light up the dawn of a new and better life!³²

It is difficult to know, absent direct evidence, which version was played on

ceremonial and symbolic occasions, such as Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station
in Petrograd in April 1917. Someone in the crowd that had assembled there
started singing the Marseillaise, and all those who knew the words and the melody
joined in. But none of the chroniclers of the event indicated which version was
sung.³³ The same uncertainty was true of the demonstrations outside the Tauride
Palace during the July Days. The military band that apparently was playing the
anthem as military units suppressed the demonstrations might plausibly
have opted for the French original, for one of the variations, or perhaps even for
multiple variants played sequentially, depending on whether the musicians’ senti-
ments were patriotic, which was entirely possible, or driven by loyalty to the
Provisional Government, soon-to-be headed by Alexander Kerensky, that had

²⁹ Albert Rhys Williams, Through the Russian Revolution (New York, 1967), p. 182. Williams’
admiration for the French Revolution was boundless. He considered it the first step in the conquest
of outer space, an endeavour he said would include trips to the moon, the planets, and the sun. Joshua
Kunitz, ‘A Biographical Sketch of Albert Rhys Williams’ in Albert Rhys Williams, Through the Russian
Revolution (New York, 1967), p. cxxii.
³⁰ Unaniants, N. T. ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v sovetskoi muzykal’noi zhizni. 1917–1940
gg.’, in Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik (1989), p. 441; Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian
Revolution 1891–1924 (New York, 1988), p. 357.
³¹ Figes and Kolotnitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, p. 40. ³² Ibid.
³³ For example, E. Stasova, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1969), p. 135.
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ordered the suppression, or for some other, unspecified reason.³⁴ It is also, for
much the same reason, unclear which version the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs)
sang—either a version of the anthem (probably the one for peasants) or the
original—as they walked out of the Second Congress of Soviets in December
1917 in protest over the Bolshevik seizure of power in October.³⁵ Because the
SRs (excluding the so-called Left SRs, who supported the Bolshevik insurrection)
were simultaneously patriotic and politically radical—they supported Russia’s
involvement in the First World War while advocating a form of socialism based
on the peasant commune—they could have opted just as easily for the patriotic
version as for the politically radical one. The same uncertainty exists regarding the
version that was played on 6 January 1918, at the request of some of the supporters
of the Constituent Assembly, which they had presumed would succeed the Provi-
sional Government, to protest the Bolsheviks’ disbanding it after only its first day of
deliberations.³⁶
Many in the Bolshevik rank and file found the Marseillaise inspiring, and on
ceremonial occasions, such as the inauguration of the Third Congress of Soviets in
January 1918, demanded that it be played—which version they wanted for this
particular event is not known.³⁷ It was also played, by request, for the Red Guards
in Moscow, shortly after the October Revolution, to welcome home those of their
colleagues who had participated in the dramatic events in Petrograd.³⁸ But Lenin
and most of the other Bolshevik leaders either disliked the Marseillaise or had
decidedly mixed feelings about it, despite its recently acquiring a version with
lyrics appropriate for the proletariat. To them, the anthem, in France, was
originally a means of legitimizing and engendering popular support for a revolu-
tion that, for all of its virtues, was, at bottom, a bourgeois revolution. In Russia its
symbolism might still be useful depending on the political requirements of any
particular occasion. But it should not be played mindlessly or so frequently that
audiences lost sight of the Bolsheviks’ objectives, which of course were well
beyond the comprehension of most Frenchmen in the late eighteenth century.³⁹
For that reason Lenin much preferred the Internationale, the official anthem of the
Second International, despite the great betrayal of which he considered most of its
leaders guilty in August 1914; he even requested that it be sung upon his arrival in

³⁴ Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917
Uprising (Bloomington IN, 1991), p. 199.
³⁵ Oliver Radkey, The Sickle under the Hammer: The Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the Early
Months of Soviet Rule (New York, 1963), p. 243.
³⁶ Figes and Kolotnitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, pp. 66–7.
³⁷ Ia. M. Sverdlov, ‘Vystuplenie pri otkrytii s”ezda (10 January 1918)’, in Ia. M. Sverdlov, Izbrannye
proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1959), vol. II, p. 99.
³⁸ John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New York, 1960), p. 325.
³⁹ The Mensheviks never really warmed to the Marseillaise for the same reason, though of course
without sharing Lenin’s enthusiasm for an imminent proletarian revolution in Russia. V. L. L’vov-
Rogachevskii, ed., ‘Predislovie’, Sotsialisty o tekushchem momente: materialy velikoi revoliutsii 1917 g.
(Moscow, 1917), p. 2.
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Petrograd in April 1917, after the crowd of admirers gathered at the Finland
Station to welcome him had finished singing the Marseillaise.⁴⁰ In fact, beginning
a few years after the October Revolution the two anthems were at times rendered
sequentially.⁴¹ The Marseillaise was usually played or sung first, and the Inter-
nationale second, so as to symbolize the October Revolution superseding the
French Revolution. But this arrangement proved politically and ideologically
confusing to many audiences—this, at any rate, was what the Soviet leadership
concluded in the early 1920s, and the Internationale replaced the Marseillaise as
the de facto anthem of the Soviet Union—only to be replaced itself by a more
intrinsically Russian one, with lyrics supportive of the Soviet Union’s struggle
against Nazi Germany, in 1944.
* * *
Given their ideology, the Bolsheviks’ ambivalence about the Marseillaise is under-
standable. Others, situated elsewhere on the political spectrum in Russia in 1917,
were not similarly constrained in their enthusiasm. The Russian liberals and non-
Bolshevik socialists who established the Provisional Government positively rev-
elled in the French Revolution, channelling the interest the revolution had already
evoked in ways they thought would be politically helpful. In this respect there was,
in 1917, a felicitous convergence of the spontaneous and the coldly preconceived.
This was particularly true of the celebrations and commemorations of the fallen
heroes of the February Revolution the Provisional Government had previously
determined should be held on the Champ de Mars in Petrograd. Because it had
never been elected democratically, the Provisional Government believed it lacked
the legitimacy to rule Russia permanently. For that reason it never shared the
transformational objectives of the Jacobins, and the public gatherings it sponsored
never approached in size or solemnity the fêtes the Jacobins staged to launch the
so-called Cult of the Supreme Being in 1794.
Nonetheless, the gatherings on the Champ de Mars made clear the legitimizing
function the French Revolution served for the Russian Revolution. In the words of
two historians who have written extensively on how the Provisional Government
tried to legitimize itself through language and visual symbolism, the field served in
the months between the February and the October Revolutions as ‘the main public
space of commemoration’ in Petrograd, possibly even in the country as a whole.⁴²
But there were other sites in the city the Provisional Government hoped to utilize
for the same purpose. That they were all outdoors reflected the conviction of
Kerensky and the other ministers that class distinctions would be less obvious

⁴⁰ Stasova, Vospominaniia, p. 135.

⁴¹ This is what happened at the Third Congress of Soviets. Figes and Kolotnitskii, Interpreting the
Russian Revolution, p. 67.
⁴² Ibid., p. 31.
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than they would be in indoor facilities originally constructed under the monarchy
and frequented primarily by the upper classes.⁴³ In August the government made
plans for a mass celebration—part carnival, part spectacle—in the so-called
Summer Garden in the Russian capital. The site, to which on Sundays residents
of the city often repaired for relaxation, would be transformed to resemble Paris,
so that the most consequential and inspiring events of the French Revolution
could be re-enacted properly; the reason for doing so was to demonstrate concern
for Russian POWs in Germany and Austria. There is no evidence, in fact, that this
particular festival, obviously intended to replicate, on a much smaller scale, the
elaborate fêtes of the French Revolution, ever occurred.⁴⁴ But its purpose was
understandable nonetheless, namely to generate political support for the Provi-
sional Government, in this particular instance by suggesting symbolically that the
government stood on the same moral high ground once occupied by the heroes
who had carried out the French Revolution. Like the even more monumental
spectacles the Bolsheviks would subsequently sponsor, those the Provisional
Government was responsible for in 1917 were intended, in Richard Wortman’s
apt expression, which he applied to tsarist celebrations that had similar objectives,
as ‘presentations of power’.⁴⁵
The same was true for yet another public event that, had it actually occurred,
would have symbolized for large numbers of Russians the triumph of moral virtue
over evil, and of the powerless over the powerful, that many saw as the essence of
the February Revolution in 1917. This was the destruction of the Lithuanian
Castle in Petrograd, where political prisoners under the tsars had been incarcer-
ated. The Provisional Government hoped the event would be cause for celebra-
tion, and did nothing to vitiate the obvious parallel between the castle and the
Bastille in Paris; the destruction of the former could obviously be viewed as
analogous to the storming of the latter.⁴⁶ But again the intended event never
went beyond the planning stage, and devotees of this particular analogy could
console themselves by analogizing the Bastille to the Schlusselburg Fortress in
Petrograd, which in 1917 acquired the sobriquet ‘the Russian Bastille’, and to the
Peter-Paul Fortress, also in Petrograd, which became known as ‘the Petrograd
Bastille’.⁴⁷ Both structures had housed political prisoners for decades prior to the
February Revolution, and for Russian revolutionaries had long served as symbols
of tsarist repression.
It was thus virtually inevitable, given a public already marinated in the myth-
ology of the French Revolution, that in 1917 prisons in particular would evoke

⁴³ James Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkeley CA, 1993), p. 51.
⁴⁴ Ibid., pp. 23, 154.
⁴⁵ Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the
Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton NJ, 2006), p. 13 and passim.
⁴⁶ Anatolii Strigalev, ‘Sviaz’ vremen’. Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 4 (1978): p. 1.
⁴⁷ Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 67; Sorokin, Leaves from a Russian Diary, p. 118.
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comparisons with the Bastille, and cause the Provisional Government to consider
their destruction as latter-day re-enactments of the events in Paris on 14 July 1789.
But one must bear in mind the distinction between the original festivals of the
French Revolution and the way they were replicated in Russia. As Mona Ozouf has
pointed out perceptively, the fêtes and festivals of the French Revolution were
intended to rearrange time and space, and in that way sacralize values considered
inherently virtuous—the family, the nation, and a deity like the Divine Providence
as conceptualized by the philosophes of the Enlightenment.⁴⁸ These, in turn, would
provide the moral underpinnings of a new, largely secular society, its government
and economy organized on the basis of reason. While the rhetoric of the revolu-
tion implied that it was merely the initial step in the emancipation of humanity,
the first of perhaps an endless progression of uprisings that would spread to all the
continents of the world, many of its supporters considered its accomplishments
neither insufficient nor excessive. Rather, they were exactly what they should be,
and the revolutions that followed would ideally have the same objectives.
Russian socialists, irrespective of whether they were Bolshevik, Menshevik,
anarcho-syndicalist, or Socialist Revolutionary, disagreed. For them, the French
Revolution marked just the beginning of a long journey humanity was engaged in
that would lead eventually to a utopia in which private property, which was
considered the principal source of oppression and injustice, had not merely
been redistributed equitably, as the revolutionaries in France intended, but abol-
ished entirely. For that reason, the celebrations of the February Revolution in
Russia in 1917, and those that followed after the Bolsheviks took power in October
1917, were generated by a different dynamic, one based on the assumption that
history was both linear and progressive, and that since socialism—and for the
Bolsheviks, communism—had not yet been achieved, a good deal of history would
have to pass before it emerged; exactly how much was the issue that most clearly
separated the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks. For that reason, the principal
actors in the Russian Revolution of 1917 chose to sacralize what they were
doing not by rearranging space and time as if the end of history had already
come about, as Ozouf shows was true of the French Revolution, but by demon-
strating that space and time were both evolving in a linear fashion towards a future
utopia. Since February much had been accomplished in that regard, but a great
deal more remained to be done.
To be sure, the symbolism and mythology of the French Revolution were often
mobilized in Russia in 1917 for less exalted purposes; in some instances these were
nakedly political. This was certainly true for Alexander Kerensky, who, while
affecting aspects of the revolution in his policies, rhetoric, and even personal
appearance, for purely political reasons wanted the flexibility to repudiate it or to

⁴⁸ Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge MA, 1988), pp. 126–96.
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proclaim it irrelevant should he believe this to be in his own interest. There was
nothing uniquely untoward or objectionable in this. Politicians often adopt sym-
bols and perpetuate myths in their pursuit of power. In Kerensky’s case, his
inclusions and exclusions reflected his tendency to dichotomize the French Revo-
lution, approving most aspects of it prior to the Jacobins gaining power, but
rejecting most everything that ensued. The only exception was his calling ‘the
Directory’ the secret group he organized in August with Mikhail Tereshchenko and
Nikolai Nekrasov in a last-ditch effort to save the Provisional Government.⁴⁹ But
that still left much from which he could pick and choose as circumstances
warranted. In May, he proclaimed grandly that ‘it is our fate to repeat the tale of
the great French Revolution’.⁵⁰ Shortly afterwards he explained that this required
Russia to strive for universal peace while maintaining its faith ‘in the well-being
and the grandeur of the [Russian] people’.⁵¹ In June, he stated emphatically that
‘the watchwords’ of the Provisional Government were liberté, égalité, and frater-
nité.⁵² With that in mind, he recommended that the Provisional Government
formally call those it sent to oversee the Russian army ‘commissars’, which was
the same term used in the French Revolution for those performing the identical
role.⁵³ Finally, it bears mention that Kerensky argued for a military offensive in the
summer of 1917 because he believed Russia should capitalize on a strategic
opportunity similar to that which France enjoyed in 1792, when it essentially
declared war on the rest of the Europe, and despite severe deficiencies in its
economy, managed to defeat the Old Regimes of Europe and thereafter annex
territory in western Germany, parts of Italy, and what would soon become Bel-
gium. What Kerensky ignored, however, was that while French peasants went to
war in 1792 to protect land they had already taken or received in the revolution,
and therefore fought willingly to defend it, their Russian counterparts deserted
from the Russian army in 1917 to take land they considered rightly theirs.⁵⁴ But
that did not prevent the prime minister, in keeping with his sense of himself as a
leader of a country at war, from adopting military dress—knee-high boots,
officer’s breeches, and a khaki jacket—while inspecting troops and sometimes
inspiring them with flights of grandiloquent rhetoric about the patriotic mission
it was theirs to undertake.⁵⁵ That his right arm was often in a sling—the real
reason for which may have been bursitis or the result of excessive hand-shak-
ing—contributed to the impression he clearly wanted to cultivate that he himself

⁴⁹ Viktor Chernov, Rozhdenie revoliutsionnoi Rossii (Paris, 1934), p. 403.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 402.
⁵¹ Quoted in Pavel N. Miliukov, The Russian Revolution (Gulf Breeze TX, 1978), vol. I, p. 97.
⁵² Quoted in Shlapentokh, Counter-Revolution in Revolution, p. 41.
⁵³ Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky, The Grinding Mill: Reminiscences of War and Revolution (New York,
1935), p. 211.
⁵⁴ Lewis Namier, Avenues of History (London, 1952), pp. 6–7.
⁵⁵ Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 411.
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was a victim of the foreign enemies intent on harming Russia by ending its
revolution and restoring its ancien régime.⁵⁶
Many in Petrograd and elsewhere in Russia had cause to compare Kerensky,
first as Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government and then as its prime
minister, to several of the major figures of the French Revolution. Mirabeau was
one, Saint-Just, less approvingly by the French Ambassador, was another.
Napoleon Bonaparte, though not, strictly speaking, a figure of the revolution
because his career extended well beyond its expiration, was yet another.⁵⁷ There
is considerable debate over whether Kerensky welcomed or rejected comparisons
with the French général and imperator.⁵⁸ But of all the comparisons that came to
mind when the prime minister was concerned, he might have liked most of all
Viktor Chernov’s analogizing him to Lazare Carnot, who was largely responsible
for organizing and training the army of the First French Republic, which fought so
capably against the its enemies.⁵⁹ That the army scored significant victories under
the Directory as well as under the Jacobins might have been the reason Kerensky,
while claiming to reject the Directory’s serial manipulations of existing electoral
laws, nevertheless used the word itself as a short-form for one of the coalitions he
formed as prime minister of the Provisional Government.⁶⁰
To be sure, Kerensky usually maintained the distinction he drew between the
first phase of the French Revolution, which he praised, often lavishly, and the
second phase, beginning in 1792, which he frequently, and often vehemently,
deplored. Almost immediately after the fall of the monarchy and the establish-
ment of the Provisional Government, he was warning Russians of the dangers

⁵⁶ Ibid.; Louise Erwin Heenan, Russian Democracy’s Fatal Blunder: The Summer Offensive of 1917
(New York, 1987), p. 103. One should avoid the facile conclusion that Kerensky dressed as he did in
imitation of Napoleon, much less that he intended a dictatorship like that which the latter established in
France. The most plausible explanation, in light of Kerensky’s belief that the military offensive he
ordered would not only save the revolution but ensure its expansion, is the one offered here, namely
that his attire would cause soldiers to believe he was a soldier himself, and therefore fight harder and
more effectively. Partly because Kerensky’s ‘Bonapartism’ in 1917 was, in fact, a misperception by
others rather than something to which he truly aspired, the way the term was applied to him will be
considered in a later chapter, after Marx’s paternity for the term in the aftermath of the Revolution of
1848 has been established.
⁵⁷ Figes and Kolotnitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, p. 30; Richard Abraham, Alexander
Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution (London, 1987), p. 151.
⁵⁸ Orlando Figes, in A People’s Tragedy, p. 411, states that Kerensky kept a bust of Napoleon on
his desk in Petrograd. But even if Kerensky not only admired the French Emperor but also sought to
replicate his achievements, one has to wonder how he could have considered their replication possible
in Russia after the Russian army’s defeat and virtual disintegration in the early autumn of 1917. If
Kerensky actually harboured ‘Bonapartist’ aspirations, the likelihood of his achieving them was nil. In
that respect, his predicament was different from Trotsky’s, who was first accused of Bonapartism not
long after the Bolsheviks’ victory in the Civil War in 1921, for which Trotsky, who had commanded the
Red Army during the war, could legitimately claim partial credit. Stephen Kotkin, in Stalin, p. 185,
claims that Kerensky’s role model was actually Mirabeau.
⁵⁹ Chernov, Rozhdenie revoliutsionnoi Rossii, p. 402. ⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 403.
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of mindlessly re-enacting events and episodes in the French Revolution he

considered immoral and inhumane. Foremost among them was the execution of
Louis XVI; to inflict the same punishment on Nicholas II, he argued in an address
to the Moscow Soviet on 7 March, would be even more harmful than simply
incarcerating him. Only those wanting ‘to re-enact the drama of the French
Revolution’, he said, would endorse something so profoundly immoral.⁶¹ To
indicate that the whole issue of terror had a moral dimension above and beyond
its practical ramifications, Kerensky, after a brief flirtation with Marat, during
which he aspired to be the French Jacobin’s equivalent, stated flatly that he would
never ‘make the guillotine part of the arsenal of the machinery of our state’ and
that he would never be ‘the Marat of the Russian Revolution’.⁶² While never
identifying with the Girondins at any point in 1917, on at least one occasion he
expressed contempt for those who considered him ‘the Russian Robespierre’.⁶³
According to Louise Bryant, whose reportage from Russia was highly sympa-
thetic to the Bolsheviks after they took power in October 1917, Kerensky always
saw the French Revolution as primarily a political revolution, in sharp contrast to
the February Revolution, which in its aspirations and agenda for reform he
considered predominantly an economic revolution.⁶⁴ What this meant in practical
terms for the prime minister was that he was acutely aware of the French
Revolution in dealing with the very real threats he faced, primarily, but not
exclusively, from the Bolsheviks. While fears of a military coup like Napoleon’s
caused Kerensky to exaggerate the threat he believed General Kornilov’s army
posed to his own fortunes and those of the Provisional Government in the late
summer of 1917, there is little doubt that the whole issue of how he should
respond to Lenin’s public threats to destroy his government plagued the prime
minister virtually from Lenin’s return from exile in April. On 17 June, at a session
of the First Congress of Soviets in Petrograd, he responded to Lenin’s claim that
the ongoing revolution in Russia needed to continue, rather than to stop, because
‘in times of revolution it is impossible to remain in one place’.⁶⁵ According to
Kerensky, the French Revolution showed how seductive repressive measures can
be to governments created in the aftermath of a successful revolution that are
nonetheless confronted by implacable enemies who will not be satisfied until the
revolutions that brought these governments to power are reversed, whether as a

⁶¹ Alexander Kerensky, Russia and History’s Turning Point (New York, 1965), p. 238.
⁶² Quoted in M. S. Frenkin, Russkaia armiia i revoliutsiia 1917–1918 (Munich, 1978), p. 265; and in
Buchanan, Petrograd: The City of Trouble, p. 102. On Kerensky’s brief identification with Marat, see
F. I. Rodichev, Vospominaniia i ocherki o russkom liberalizme (Newtownville MA, 1983), p. 126.
⁶³ Chernov, Rozhdenie revoliutsionnoi Rossii, p. 503; Jacques Sadoul, Notes sur la Révolution
Bolchevique, Octobre 1917 (Paris, 1920), p. 47.
⁶⁴ Louise Bryant, Six Red Months in Russia (New York, 1970), p. 120.
⁶⁵ Lockhart, The Two Revolutions, p. 90.
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result of foreign conquest or by the application of terror domestically. He

explained the predicament Russia faced in the following way:
The problem of the Russian Socialist parties and of Russian democracy is to
prevent such an end as there was in France—to hold onto the revolutionary
conquests already made, to see to it that our comrades who have been released
from prison do not return there; that Comrade Lenin, who has been abroad, may
have the opportunity to speak here again, and not be obliged to flee back to
Switzerland.⁶⁶

Then, addressing Lenin directly, Kerensky warned him that should his party take
power with the assistance of ‘reactionaries’, the result would be ‘a dictatorship like
the Jacobins’, that did not flinch at the prospect of inflicting mass terror.⁶⁷
Kerensky had many detractors in the SR Party, to which he belonged.
A considerable minority, the so-called Left SRs, supported the Bolshevik regime
after the October Revolution, only to turn on it when, at Lenin’s urging, it signed a
humiliating treaty with Germany that offended the Left SRs’ patriotic sensibilities.
But whatever their internal differences, the SRs, like most other socialists in
Russia, were genuinely ‘hypnotised’ by the French Revolution both in 1917 and
thereafter.⁶⁸ According to the Belgian socialist, Hendrik de Man, this was because
they were ‘obsessed by the idea that the Russian Revolution, in all its phases, had
to replicate the Great French Revolution. . . . Some wanted to be Girondins, others
Jacobins; still others dreamed of an 18 Brumaire.’⁶⁹ According to the foremost
historian of the SRs, this was to a large degree the result of their predilection for
French culture, which caused them, even before the events of 1917 invested
analogies with the French Revolution with special significance, to view the revo-
lution favourably.⁷⁰
The SRs manifested their good opinion in several ways, some of which, in
practical terms, were incompatible. The aspects of the revolution the SRs variously
considered applicable foreshadowed the split in the party after the Bolsheviks
seized power in Petrograd—from which the party never recovered and may
have contributed to the fateful decision of the party’s leader, Viktor Chernov,
not to resist forcibly the Bolsheviks’ refusal, in January 1918, to allow the Con-
stituent Assembly, in which the SRs enjoyed a plurality, to reconvene. Mark
Natanson, who as a Left SR supported the Bolsheviks, hoped that the government
they created would be modelled on the Convention.⁷¹ Maria Spiridonova, like
Natanson, a strong, even fanatical advocate of violence directed at anyone opposed
to her objectives, in 1917 expressed agreement with others in the party advocating
mass killings like those of the Jacobins; the Kadets, whom she considered hardly

⁶⁶ Ibid. ⁶⁷ Ibid. ⁶⁸ Chernov, Rozhdenie revoliutsionnoi Rossii, p. 401.

⁶⁹ Ibid. ⁷⁰ Radkey, Sickle under the Hammer, p. 479. ⁷¹ Trotsky, Lenin, p. 112.
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better than the Black Hundreds, should be prominent among the victims.⁷² Yet
another SR, Evgeniia Ratner, evoked the ‘honest bourgeoisie’ of the French Revo-
lution in advancing the argument that under no circumstances should Russia
repudiate her alliance with Great Britain and France, while Pitirim Sorokin
commented in his memoirs that one member of the Petrograd Soviet in the spring
of 1917 reminded him of Robespierre because, in apparent imitation, a red rose
was affixed to his jacket.⁷³ In Tambov in 1921 during the peasant uprising that
required considerable force to suppress it, Sorokin imagined himself at the epi-
centre of ‘a Russian Vendée’.⁷⁴
Under Chernov’s leadership, the SRs did not allow their personal and ideo-
logical distaste for the Bolsheviks, whom they often analogized to the Jacobins, to
vitiate their admiration of the French Revolution itself. Not long after the October
Revolution, the party requested that the new Bolshevik government issue a degree
formally designating every person in Russia, irrespective of class or political
predilection, ‘a citizen of the Russian Republic’ because the terminology
was redolent of the French Revolution.⁷⁵ For Chernov himself, the revolution
provided a rich menu of choices in making sense of the kaleidoscopic cauldron of
events that simultaneously intrigued and bewildered Russian revolutionaries in
1917 because the collapse of the monarchy that produced it had been so rapid.
Mikhail Rodzianko, the chairman of the now-defunct State Duma and one of the
architects of the February Revolution, seemed to the SR leader ‘a living Russian
parody of Mirabeau’ in his efforts to save the monarchy.⁷⁶ Unalterably convinced
that the innate benevolence of the peasantry somehow guaranteed their eventual
emancipation and salvation, Chernov took pains in his history of the Russian
Revolution—which he considered a failure because it culminated in Bolshevism—
to ascertain what had enabled the French Revolution, by contrast, to achieve
objectives that were morally virtuous. The principal reason, he concluded, was
that it was, at once, anti-monarchical, anti-feudal, pro-peasant, and, in Babeuf ’s
Conspiracy of Equals, proto-proletarian. The French Revolution, in other words,
was the result of a tacit alliance of distinct constituencies with incompatible
objectives that were nonetheless capable of working together because they all
loathed the Bourbons and the ancien régime. To Chernov, the Russian who did
more than anyone else to prevent the formation of a similar coalition, in this case of

⁷² Shlapentokh, ‘Images of the French Revolution in the February and Bolshevik Revolutions’,
pp. 38–9. The Black Hundreds were extreme supporters of tsarist autocracy who even murdered
Kadet delegates serving alongside their own delegates in the duma, or legislature, Nicholas reluctantly
agreed to in October 1905. The first one convened in May 1906.
⁷³ Radkey, Sickle under the Hammer, p. 478; Sorokin, Leaves from a Russian Diary, p. 35.
⁷⁴ Sorokin, Leaves from a Russian Diary, p. 256.
⁷⁵ John L. Keep, The Debate on Soviet Power: Minutes of the All-Russian Central Executive Com-
mittee of Soviets: Second Convocation, October 1917–January 1918 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 107–8. Perhaps
in the interest of brevity, the Bolsheviks opted instead for ‘comrade’.
⁷⁶ Chernov, Rozhdenie revoliutsionnoi Rossii, p. 403.
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everyone in Russia seeking socialism, was Vladimir Lenin. ‘Cold, Spartan, and
severe’ in his manner, Lenin, in Chernov’s estimation, eschewed even the most
minimal forms of cooperation in favour of a dictatorship that, while not, strictly
speaking, based on any precedent in the French Revolution, nevertheless resembled
Robespierre’s, presumably because in personal terms the two men were so similar.⁷⁷
Far preferable to Lenin’s dictatorship would have been a government headed by
someone like Danton, whose failure to defeat his principal rival may have reminded
Chernov and the other SRs who admired the great orator of the French Revolution
of their own inability to prevent a Bolshevik dictatorship.⁷⁸
No less obsessed with the French Revolution were many Mensheviks, for whom
it provided a convenient means of sharpening arguments that might otherwise
have been expressed less effectively or not at all. This was especially true for
Nikolai Sukhanov, who, in his eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution,
revealed the degree to which the French Revolution informed his recollections
of the events he witnessed. One example was his calling a worker in the Tauride
Palace a sans-culotte because the blue blouse he was wearing reminded him of how
he thought the Parisian lower classes dressed in the late eighteenth century.
Similarly, the cap on the worker’s head may have reminded Sukhanov of the
Phrygian caps and bonnets worn during the French Revolution to express support
for it.⁷⁹ Another example was Sukhanov’s disdain for Nicholas Chkheidze and
Matvei Skobolev, fellow Mensheviks he considered irresolute and indecisive, and
for that reason reminded him of the delegates to the Convention in the French
Revolution who, by sitting in the ‘swamp’ between the Jacobins and the Girondins,
ostensibly demonstrated their political independence. To Sukhanov this smacked
of a particularly dysfunctional form of cowardice—a refusal to make the hard
decisions often required of revolutionaries if their objectives are to be achieved.⁸⁰
In June 1917, at a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, Sukhanov called Irakli Tsereteli
‘Danton’ in the context of condemning him after the Georgian had proposed
disarming the Bolsheviks.⁸¹ Unlike Chernov, Sukhanov considered Robespierre’s
celebrated rival, rather than Robespierre himself, the most obvious embodiment
in the French Revolution of the qualities conducive to political dictatorships,
and one suspects that in the heat of the moment—Sukhanov’s description of
the incident makes clear it occurred when emotions were running high—an
example from the French Revolution came to mind because it was so frequently
on Sukhanov’s mind throughout the year. The same dynamic might explain
Plekhanov’s comparing himself to Danton after Trotsky, at the First Congress of
Soviets in June, had publicly mocked Plekhanov’s continued support of Russia’s
involvement in the First World War.⁸² In his response, the older Marxist praised

⁷⁷ Ibid., p. 404. ⁷⁸ Ibid., p. 404. ⁷⁹ Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, vol. I, p. 450.

⁸⁰ Ibid., p. 245.
⁸¹ Keep, ‘Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd’, p. 30.
⁸² Deutscher, Prophet Armed, p. 267.
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the army the Jacobins had raised to fight their enemies in Europe, and expressed
the hope that their Russian equivalent would drink from ‘the [same] sap of
revolution’, and defend Russia as capably as the French revolutionary armies
had defended France.⁸³
But the French Revolution served a more serious and substantive purpose for the
Mensheviks. Curiously, it comforted them and concerned them simultaneously.
Mensheviks like Martov and Plekhanov, who had long ago repudiated his infatu-
ation with the Jacobins, could plausibly find in the revolution confirmation of their
conviction that exceeding the limits of the February Revolution in Russia would
only embolden reactionaries and increase the likelihood of a military dictatorship.
Like practically everyone else on the non-Bolshevik Left in 1917, they thought the
principal danger to the February Revolution came from the Right, in the form of a
military dictatorship, rather than from the Bolsheviks, who they thought would
either fail to take power or be unable to hold onto it in the unlikely event that they
succeeded. For that reason, the Mensheviks really had little to worry about from the
Bolsheviks. Instead they should devote their efforts to preventing a military dicta-
torship, which their knowledge of French history told them might be personified in
a facsimile of the original Bonaparte. But Plekhanov and Martov were also well
aware of Lenin’s authoritarian inclinations and the degree to which it mirrored the
Jacobins’; that the latter held power long enough to practise terror could hardly
have reassured them that the same thing would not happen in Russia. In 1917
Plekhanov took pains to make known his belief, which he claimed was also Marx’s,
that revolutions in any one country required time between them to be successful.
Moreover, the leaders of revolutions who by some quirk of history took power
prematurely would have no choice but to practise terror, and while doing so invoke
the Jacobins—or some other historical precedent—in seeking legitimacy for a
policy even less acceptable in the twentieth century in Russia than it was in the
eighteenth century in France.⁸⁴ But this was precisely what Plekhanov believed the
Bolsheviks would do should they take power.
For Plekhanov, the Jacobins were eighteenth-century Bolsheviks just as much
as the Bolsheviks were twentieth-century Jacobins; the only difference between
them—which for Plekhanov was a considerable one—was their objective: indus-
trial capitalism in the case of the Jacobins, ersatz socialism in the case of the
Bolsheviks. In their temperament, and indeed in their whole revolutionary per-
sona, however, the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks were remarkably similar and even,
in some ways, identical. As for Martov, he considered the Jacobin dictatorship and
any regime the Bolsheviks might establish potentially analogous because the latter
could conceal its authoritarianism by claiming that the proletariat, as a class,
supported it. In fact, the Jacobins had perpetrated a similar canard concerning
their relationship with the lower classes in France. But even after the Bolsheviks

⁸³ Quoted in ibid. ⁸⁴ Baron, Plekhanov, p. 358.

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seized power in October, Martov was convinced the analogy with the Jacobins was
valid, and for that reason that the Bolshevik state would be no more stable than
the Jacobins’, and soon suffer its fate.⁸⁵ Other Mensheviks, however, were not
so sanguine. Ivan Kubikov, who shared Martov’s disdain for Lenin and the
Bolsheviks, expressed in Rabochaia mysl’ (The Worker’s Thought), his foreboding
that while the Bolsheviks piously condemned capital punishment, they nonethe-
less ‘preached the guillotine’, and undoubtedly would resort to it should they come
to power.⁸⁶ But unlike Martov, Kubikov did not sugarcoat his prediction with
soothing words about how vulnerable any Bolshevik regime that came to power
undemocratically would be.
Russian liberals, like the Mensheviks, believed a Bolshevik coup d’état would be
a catastrophe for Russia. However, their belief was driven by a concern for
individual rights and how these might be violated, or even prohibited in perpetu-
ity, under a Bolshevik dictatorship, rather than from any concern that such a
dictatorship would preclude the economic equity and fairness the Mensheviks
believed would exist under socialism. But however much Russian liberals feared
the concentration of power in the state that socialism necessarily required, they
feared a military dictatorship even more. For that reason, comparisons with the
French Revolution—in contrast to warnings of Bonapartism—were few; many
liberals, in fact, considered such comparisons misleading and profoundly unhelp-
ful. An example was an unsigned and untitled editorial in the liberal newspaper
Rech’, on 11 March, possibly authored by Miliukov, that denied entirely any
analogy between the French Revolution and the ongoing revolution in Russia.⁸⁷
The idée fixe many liberals applied to virtually all political issues in 1917 was that
the French Revolution was threatened far more by its enemies on the Right than
by those on the Left. Miliukov, for example, seemed not to mind when a speech of
his was interrupted by the Marseillaise.⁸⁸ He may even have considered the
juxtaposition complimentary of both. But he also reproached Kerensky for invok-
ing the revolution in speeches the latter made to soldiers, whose support for
Russia’s continued involvement in the First World War Miliukov believed essen-
tial if the Provisional Government was to endure until a democratically elected
legislature could replace it. By invoking the French Revolution without enumer-
ating, or even merely acknowledging its less salubrious aspects, Kerensky, in

⁸⁵ Iu. O. Martov, Mirovoi bol’shevizm (Berlin, 1923), p. 40.

⁸⁶ Shlapentokh, Counter-Revolution in Revolution, p. 81.
⁸⁷ Shlapentokh, French Revolution and the Russian Anti-Democratic Tradition, p. 224. This did not
mean that Russian liberals had lost their longstanding admiration for French culture, language, and
customs. Shortly after the collapse of the monarchy in February 1917, Georgii L’vov, the first (and
largely ineffectual) prime minister in the Provisional Government, had his personal calling card
replicated in French. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 357–8. Militating against Miliukov’s authorship
of the editorial is that 11 March was the day he resigned as foreign minister in the Provisional
Government, and for that reason may have been too busy to write it.
⁸⁸ A. Tarasov-Rodionov, February 1917: A Chronicle of the Russian Revolution (Westport CT, 1931),
p. 111.
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Miliukov’s jaundiced opinion, was effectively dispensing ‘a fairy tale’.⁸⁹ Although

Miliukov failed to indicate precisely what it was he thought Kerensky was ignor-
ing, one can be reasonably sure that, as a liberal, Miliukov had in mind the Jacobin
Terror, which, in addition to costing lives, robbed the French people of their
inalienable rights.
* * *
In 1917 the Bolsheviks were busy. Organizing themselves into a viable political
force in a country from which most of them had been absent for many years was a
formidable task, exceeded only by that of actually taking power in an urban
insurrection that only Lenin and a few others believed could succeed. For that
reason they no longer had the leisure to ruminate endlessly on analogies with
earlier revolutions. But Lenin and Trotsky in particular were aware of how their
rivals on the left invoked the French Revolution in 1917 not just to explain events
in Russia in 1917, but also to attack the Bolsheviks. However wrenching their
break with European socialism in 1914, Lenin and Trotsky still felt the need to
respond to attacks from its leading lights in Western Europe, which in their mind
called their credentials as revolutionaries into question.
Lenin was unsurpassed among the Bolsheviks in defaming anyone who criticized
them for any ostensible deviation from orthodox Marxism; only Trotsky (who
became a Bolshevik in the summer of 1917) came close to matching his abilities in
that regard. In 1917, however, Lenin took umbrage even more quickly than in earlier
years despite the enormous responsibilities he assumed and had to carry out in that
tumultuous year. As he groped for justifications for seizing power in a country that
by Marxist standards would not be ready for socialism for years, or even decades,
lambasting his rivals for their supposed mistakes became a means of confirming
his own ideological rectitude, a way of convincing himself, perhaps even more than
others, that what he was attempting would succeed, and thereby validate retro-
actively the deviations from Marxist orthodoxy he believed to be necessary politic-
ally. In this endeavour the French Revolution played a significant role.
Upon his arrival in Petrograd in April, Lenin quickly confronted the political
dilemma he faced: whether taking power in what would be in all but name a coup
d’état could be compatible ideologically and in practical terms with the establish-
ment of a proletarian state that guaranteed the Russian people freedom. The
problem was that the means he chose for achieving such a state, instead of
increasing the amount of freedom in Russia, would almost certainly diminish it.
Seizures of power by a small minority of professional revolutionaries by definition
could not be anything other than authoritarian, and governments created in an
authoritarian fashion were likely to function in an authoritarian fashion.

⁸⁹ P. N. Miliukov, History of Russia: Reforms, Reaction, Revolutions (1855–1922) (New York, 1969),
vol. III, p. 343.
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But Lenin possessed enormous self-confidence, and with the assistance of

comparisons with the French Revolution easily conjured a scenario he was certain
would not result in a dictatorial regime. In April 1917, responding in print to
accusations of Blanquism, Lenin condemned, yet again, any insurrection or
seizure of power by a small minority that lacked mass support, and proclaimed
that that, in fact, was the furthest thing from his mind. The regime he envisioned
would not be based on force or coercion, but rather derive legitimacy from the
support of the soviets, the councils of peasants, workers, and soldiers that had
emerged following the collapse of the monarchy independently of any political
party or faction.⁹⁰ For Lenin, coups d’état should be judged by the degree to which
they were supported tacitly by the people. Coups that lacked such support were
‘Blanquist’, and thus to be avoided, while those that enjoyed it were perfectly
legitimate because the political system that would follow would automatically vest
popular sovereignty in the masses. For proof, Lenin cited Engels on the French
Revolution, specifically his comments on the seizure of power by the Jacobins
in 1793, which ensured that for some time thereafter six years ‘France . . . was
governed by locally elected bodies without any supervision from above’.⁹¹ These
bodies, in Lenin’s description, ‘did not “fall apart” or “disintegrate” ’. On the
contrary, ‘[they] gained strength and became organised democratically’.⁹² Any
government the Bolsheviks established would be accountable to the soviets, and
thus be politically and ideologically legitimate. To claim otherwise was to claim,
in effect, that the Bolsheviks were Blanquists, and to do that was to smear the
Bolsheviks unconscionably.⁹³
What Lenin contemptuously dismissed as Blanquism was not the only devi-
ation from Marxist orthodoxy he believed his enemies would invoke in attacking
him. ‘Anarchism’ was no less an ideological epithet, and this was the case not only
because Plekhanov had included it among the charges he levelled against the
Bolsheviks in the spring of 1917. Lenin always maintained that socialism and
anarchism were incompatible, indeed that they were polar opposites. For that
reason, his tactical and ideological peregrinations over the course of the year can
be explained as an effort to chart a course for the Bolsheviks that avoided the
Scylla of Blanquism on the one hand, and the Charybdis of anarchism on the
other—with the Jacobins sometimes viewed as having completed a comparable
journey successfully, but at other times seen as having failed to do so because their
manic obsession with physically destroying their enemies to their left made
possible a partial restoration, on 9 Thermidor, of their enemies to their right.

⁹⁰ V. I. Lenin, ‘K chemu vedut kontrrerevoliutsionnye shagi Vremennogo Pravitel’stva’, in Lenin,

PSS, vol. XXXI, p. 464.
⁹¹ Ibid., vol. XXXI, p. 464. ⁹² Ibid., vol. XXXI, p. 464.
⁹³ V. I. Lenin, ‘Pis’ma o taktike (April 1917)’, ibid., vol. XXXI, p. 138. Lenin was particularly
perturbed when the ascription of Blanquism (and also anarchism) to the Bolsheviks. Ibid.,
vol. XXXI, p. 138.
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One can trace Lenin’s vacillations on the Jacobins virtually from month to
month, even, at times, from week to week. In the article in April extolling the
Jacobins for seizing power with popular support, he nonetheless said nothing
about the terror that followed it, perhaps because mentioning it would suggest
that the democracy Lenin claimed the Jacobins practised was in fact fraudulent—
that the Jacobins ruled not as a result of their somehow being vested with a kind of
sovereignty originating in the French people as a whole, but rather by force and
coercion. At the end of May, in an article in Pravda subtitled ‘Jacobinism without
the People’, Lenin repeated his earlier claim that the Jacobins enjoyed popular
support. But this time he stated explicitly his approval of the Jacobin Terror by
citing this support as one reason they were acting ethically as well as efficaciously
in exterminating the forces inside France that opposed them. The other reason, of
course, was that these forces were genuinely retrograde and reactionary; objectively
speaking, there was no particular reason why they should not be eliminated.⁹⁴
There were, Lenin acknowledged, true Jacobins and false Jacobins, virtuous Jaco-
bins and iniquitous ones. The former were the actual Jacobins of the French
Revolution, the latter were enemies of the Jacobins pretending to be real Jacobins;
in Russia their ranks, not surprisingly, included many of Lenin’s own enemies.
Among them were Plekhanov and Miliukov, whose notion of what Jacobinism
required in practical terms excluded precisely the firmness of purpose and the
willingness to take decisive action, even to the point of practising terror, that Lenin
believed were what made the original Jacobins in France so admirable.⁹⁵ As long as
the Jacobins represented a majority of Frenchmen, or at least a majority of those
who were politically progressive, any tactic they deemed necessary was morally
justified. Lenin articulated his argument in the following fashion:
The historical greatness of the actual Jacobins, the Jacobins of 1793, stems from
the fact that they were ‘Jacobins with the people’, with the revolutionary majority
of the people, with the revolutionary advanced classes of their time.

The ‘Jacobins without the people’ are ridiculous and pitiful. They merely pose as
Jacobins, but are afraid to declare clearly, openly, and for all to hear that the
exploiters, the oppressors of the people, the servants of monarchy in all countries,
and the defenders of the landowners in all countries are enemies of the people.⁹⁶
None of what Lenin wrote about the Jacobins should be construed to mean that
he considered the Bolsheviks identical to the Jacobins or that the circumstances
that pertained in 1917 resembled those in France in the 1790s. For one thing, the
wars France and Russia fought were different. In a lecture delivered in May, Lenin
rejected what he said were ‘attempts, especially on the part of the capitalist press,

⁹⁴ V. I. Lenin, ‘Perekhod kontrrevoliutsii v nastuplenie (Iakobintsy bez naroda)’, ibid., vol. XXXII,
p. 216.
⁹⁵ Ibid., vol. XXXII, p. 217. ⁹⁶ Ibid., vol. XXXII, pp. 216–17.
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whether monarchist or republican, to read into the present war a historical

meaning it does not possess’.⁹⁷ The current war, he argued, involved countries
that were exclusively capitalist, and was therefore indefensible. The wars of the
French Revolution, by contrast, were fought between countries with different
political and economic systems, and since the Jacobins ruled the most progressive
of them, any military operations they engaged in were morally justifiable; whether
these were defensive, in the sense of protecting France and the revolution from
destruction at the hands of external enemies, or intended to spread the revolution
to other parts of Europe, was irrelevant.⁹⁸ In June, in articles in Pravda, Lenin
added to his earlier indictment of the current war the implication that the
Jacobins, if they somehow could be brought back to life, would be able to
distinguish their own wars, which Lenin again claimed were morally virtuous,
from the current war, which he was certain they would condemn.⁹⁹
In effect, Lenin was now not just embracing, but enlarging the boundaries of an
equivalence he had previously rejected. In this new installment of his peripatetic
ruminations on the French Revolution, not just the Bolsheviks, but ‘the workers
and the semi-proletarians’ in Russia in 1917 were like the Jacobins. But Lenin
quickly amended what he said so that these two entities, separated by over a
thousand miles and a century of history, were not just similar to one another, but
as close to being identical as was humanly possible given the obvious differences in
the external circumstances in which they each existed.¹⁰⁰ What this, in turn,
seemed to suggest was that Lenin, in the summer of 1917, had come to consider
the Bolshevik party a universal revolutionary party that embodied all that was best
in both Jacobinism and Bolshevism and knew exactly what to do in every
conceivable situation. In tactics, organization, and temperament, the Bolsheviks
were truly latter-day Jacobins. Together they personified a veritable Platonic ideal
of Revolutionary Virtue that existed outside the limits Marxism imposed on what
people could achieve by virtue of the temporal and geographical particularities
that surrounded them.
But perhaps because what he was implying was so audacious and so contrary to
Marxist ideology, Lenin felt constrained to caution that on many issues the
Bolsheviks and the Jacobins differed significantly. In the same article in Pravda,
Lenin acknowledged that, on the issue of terror, the Bolsheviks would never resort
to it because their enemies, in contrast to those of the Jacobins, who were implac-
able in their opposition to the French Revolution, could be easily neutralized by

⁹⁷ V. I. Lenin, ‘Voina i revoliutsiia’, ibid., vol. XXXII, p. 81.

⁹⁸ Ibid., vol. XXXII, pp. 77–81.
⁹⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘O vragakh naroda’, ibid., vol. XXXII, pp. 306–7; V. I. Lenin, ‘Vneshnaia politika
russkoi revoliutsii’, ibid., vol. XXXII, pp. 335–7.
¹⁰⁰ Lenin, ‘O vragakh naroda’, ibid., vol. XXXII, pp. 307. That Lenin inserted quotation marks
around the word Jacobin when he described workers and others as ‘the Jacobins of the twentieth
century’ merely qualifies this equivalence, rather than vitiating it entirely. Ibid.
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simply arresting them. ‘The “Jacobins” of the twentieth century would not guillo-
tine the capitalists’, Lenin promised, and then added the clarification that following
the good example of the Jacobins did not require copying them mindlessly; there
were matters in which the Bolsheviks should take pains to avoid what the Jacobins
did, not because the latter were intrinsically immoral or lacked the personal
qualities Lenin considered essential to the success of any revolutionary enterprise,
but because France in the eighteenth century was significantly different from Russia
over a century later.¹⁰¹
Phrased in this fashion, Lenin’s strictures on drawing analogies with the French
Revolution had the virtue of ideological and tactical flexibility. Policies the
Jacobins pursued that he deemed inimical to the Bolsheviks could be rejected
without undermining the larger similarities—indeed at times the exact identity—
he claimed to see between the French and the Russian Revolutions. At a meeting
of the Kronstadt Soviet in June—when he was otherwise disavowing any intention
of destroying his enemies physically should he have the power to do so—Lenin
evoked ‘a government of the proletariat which had its historical parallel in 1792
in France’ as the kind of regime Mensheviks like Tsereteli—who was present and
to whom Lenin was directing his comment—claimed to favour but were too
cowardly to establish.¹⁰² The obvious implication of Lenin’s accusation was that,
unlike the Mensheviks, he and the other Bolsheviks possessed the necessary
intestinal fortitude to create a regime like the Jacobins’ once the Provisional
Government, which most of the Mensheviks still supported, had been overthrown.
Unlike the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, according to Lenin, possessed the audacity
Danton had said was essential to the success of any revolutionary undertaking;
shorn of the terror the Jacobins had no choice but to inflict on their enemies,
the regime they established should be considered a precedent not just by the
Bolsheviks, but by all revolutionary parties committed to achieving socialism and
communism.
Mined selectively on the basis of its relevance to Russia, the legacy the Jacobins
left behind, according to Lenin, offered not just inspiration and legitimacy, but a
record of accomplishment reflective of the strength of character the Jacobins
possessed. In terms of the policies they pursued, the Jacobins, according to
Lenin, were the proverbial mixed bag. Some things they did should be avoided;
other things they did should be copied. But the personal qualities they manifested
were always beyond reproach. Very much the product of ‘feudalism’ in what they
did, the Jacobins transcended their times in what they were, and for that reason
were the closest embodiment Lenin could conjure—excepting fictional characters
such as Chernyshevskii’s Rakhmetov—of a Universal Revolutionary Type, capable
of performing any task for which history selected him.

¹⁰¹ Lenin, ‘O vragakh naroda’, ibid., vol. XXXII, p. 307.

¹⁰² Quoted in Price, Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution, p. 45.
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The centrality of the French Revolution in Lenin’s thinking in 1917 is perhaps

most apparent in his lengthy essay, State and Revolution, which he wrote in
Finland in August and September after the failure during the July Days to
overthrow the Provisional Government. Very briefly, Lenin had the leisure to
contemplate what a Bolshevik state would look like should circumstances change
and increase the chances of any future insurrection succeeding. In the second
chapter Lenin, quoting Engels, made clear that while the French Revolution was in
many ways sui generis, the lessons it taught transcended the historical circum-
stances in which it occurred:
France . . . is the country where, more than anywhere else, historical class strug-
gles have been always fought through to a decisive conclusion, and therefore also
where the changing political forms within which the struggle developed, and in
which their results were summed up, were stamped in sharpest outline. The
centre of feudalism in the Middle Ages, the model country (since the Renais-
sance) of a rigidly unified monarchy, in the great revolution France shattered
feudalism and established the unadulterated rule of the bourgeoisie in a more
classical form than [in] any other European land. And here also the struggle of
the rising proletariat against the ruling bourgeoisie appeared in an acute form
such as was unknown elsewhere.¹⁰³

For this reason the Bolsheviks could find in the French Revolution a solution to
the problem Lenin believed would be paramount should the Bolsheviks seize
power, namely whether a regime that is centralized politically can allow the people
it rules a meaningful measure of personal freedom. In retrospect it is easy to see
that the Bolsheviks, once in power, could not help but centralize political authority
to such an extent that the regime they established would be, for all intents and
purposes, a dictatorship. Having come to power—as the elections to the Constitu-
ent Assembly would demonstrate conclusively—with the support of no more than
roughly a quarter of the population, the Bolsheviks perhaps could hardly have
been expected to do otherwise. Revolutionaries rarely relinquish power or stop
seeking it just because their popular support has diminished or was never suffi-
cient to begin with. But when Lenin was writing in the summer of 1917, no one
knew what the elections to the assembly would demonstrate, and he could still
argue plausibly that personal freedom and the centralization of political power
were not inherently incompatible.
The principal argument Lenin mustered on behalf of this proposition, which he
seemed to recognize as counterintuitive and thus requiring empirical corrobor-
ation, was that the republic that was established during the French Revolution had
achieved the seemingly unachievable, namely a genuine equilibrium in which
personal freedom and centralized political power co-existed. In fact, the freedom

¹⁰³ V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution (New York, 1969), p. 28.

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the French people enjoyed under the republic was actually greater than what
would have been allowed in a political system in which power had devolved onto
regional or local institutions. As if to emphasize how much this contradicted what
an orthodox Marxist would have expected of a bourgeois revolution, which of
course required a subsequent proletarian revolution to provide people the per-
sonal freedom a bourgeois revolution could only promise, Lenin cited Engels
approvingly in State and Revolution to underscore his conviction that the French
Revolution was an achievement unequalled in history; only under socialism and
communism, one was meant to surmise, would it finally be surpassed.¹⁰⁴
The implications of this for the Bolsheviks were encouraging. Once in control
of the government, they could centralize it to whatever extent they considered
necessary to defend it, while simultaneously receiving support from classes under-
standably grateful for the freedom they now enjoyed. As long as this equilibrium
continued, the Bolsheviks could do the other things Lenin recommended in State
and Revolution, such as substituting a people’s militia for a regular army, and
removing from the police the task it had performed under the tsars of suppressing
political opposition. Evidently the benefits of life under socialism rendered criti-
cism and political opposition unnecessary, and if it nonetheless persisted it was
simply an expression of ingratitude.
In Lenin’s phraseology, the French Revolution had shown that ‘the greatest
amount of local, provincial, and other freedom known in history was granted
by a centralised republic, not a federal republic’.¹⁰⁵ Armed with this knowledge,
Lenin proceeded, in early autumn, to the more prosaic, but no less pressing
task of actually making a revolution now that circumstances in Russia sug-
gested it might succeed. In September 1917, Lenin grasped the political reality
that the Provisional Government had lost practically all of its political legit-
imacy. Its decision to continue Russia’s involvement in the First World War,
while understandable given the need to prevent Germany’s domination of the
European continent, had caused it to lose what little support it still enjoyed
among the peasantry. Moreover, Kerensky’s obsessive fear of a military dictator-
ship caused him in August, in a moment of supreme weakness, to allow the
Bolsheviks, who had been in hiding since the July Days, to re-emerge, and in
Petrograd to form armed regiments, the notorious Red Guards, ostensibly to
defend the Provisional Government against its enemies; in reality they would
carry out the October Revolution.
Once again, France’s history proved useful. While in the autumn of 1917 Lenin
mentioned the Jacobins only rarely, he now thought it necessary to dredge up the
Blanquists, who in Lenin’s hierarchy of revolutionary virtue, were at the bottom
and were thus the Jacobins’ antithesis. In an article for Rabochii put’ in early

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., p. 28. ¹⁰⁵ Ibid., p. 62.

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September, he castigated the Blanquists for their lack of pragmatism and tactical
flexibility.¹⁰⁶ In a letter to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, written in
the middle of the same month, Lenin phrased his objections in the form of a
syllogism: the Blanquists favoured insurrection even in the absence of popular
support; the Bolsheviks were not Blanquists; therefore any insurrection the
Bolsheviks attempted would have popular support.¹⁰⁷ And at the end of the
month, in another article in Rabochii Put’, Lenin minimized the threat recalcitrant
peasants might pose to a Bolshevik insurrection by citing the Vendée as a counter-
example. The closest equivalent in Russia to the French peasants, whose guerilla
warfare and anarchic violence required four years of counter-insurgency to
quell, were not the peasantry but rather the Cossacks, who inhabited regions of
the country distant from Petrograd and Moscow.¹⁰⁸ From the countryside the
Bolsheviks, for that reason, had nothing to fear. The French Revolution, once
again, inspired confidence in Lenin, though in this instance it was because circum-
stances in France and Russia during their respective revolutions were different
rather than similar.
Finally, as October arrived and the fear that the other Bolsheviks would not
authorize an insurrection even as the chances of its succeeding were increasing,
Lenin fell back on the Dantonesque imperative (‘De l’audaçe, encore l’audaçe,
toujours de l’audaçe’) in impressing upon his colleagues the need for immediate
action.¹⁰⁹ In his opinion there now existed a genuine window of opportunity that,
if not utilized, might soon disappear. But other Bolsheviks disagreed, and hours of
arguments and plaintive pleas were required to convince a majority to support a
resolution calling for a revolution—though without setting a specific date for its
commencement. However, rumours that the Provisional Government—or what
remained of it—was about to arrest them caused the Bolsheviks to act, with the
result that by 2 November, the Bolsheviks found themselves, while not the masters
of Russia, nonetheless in command of its three largest cities (Moscow, Petrograd,
and Kiev) and of the territory that was enclosed by them. In his Decree on Peace,
the contents of which Lenin revealed’ in his speech on 26 October to the Congress
of Soviets, whose ratification of the still ongoing insurrection enhanced its legit-
imacy, the new leader of Russia included ‘a series of revolutions of world-historical
significance carried out by the French proletariat’ among the noble precursors of

¹⁰⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘O kompromissakh’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXIV, p. 133.

¹⁰⁷ V. I. Lenin, ‘Marksizm i vosstanie (Pis’mo k tsentral’nomu komitete RSDRP[b])’, ibid.,
pp. 242–3.
¹⁰⁸ V. I. Lenin, ‘Russkaia revoliutsiia i grazhdanskaia voina. Pugaiut grazhdanskoi voinoi’, ibid.,
pp. 219–20.
¹⁰⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Sovet postoronnego (August 1917)’, ibid., p. 383. Despite his instinctual disdain for
history’s losers, Lenin admired Danton profoundly. Soviet historians, however, viewed him less
favourably. For example, in Danton (Moscow, 1965), p. 235, Ts. Fridland airily dismissed the great
orator of the French Revolution as, an ‘opportunist to the marrow of his bones’, who also ‘distrusted
and feared the masses’.
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what the Bolsheviks, on behalf of workers and peasants everywhere, were in the
process of achieving in Russia.¹¹⁰ Although he did not name these revolutions
individually, the fact that he referred to them in concert shows that he now
considered the French Revolution part of a larger revolutionary tradition that
included the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and the Paris Commune in 1871. And
by describing all of them as ‘proletarian’, Lenin was effectively blurring the
distinction Marx and Engels had maintained for most of their lives between
bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. Although Lenin never indicated why he
did this, one can speculate that, by instigating a revolution he said was proletarian
only eight months after a revolution he always considered bourgeois had begun,
he needed some way of synthesizing all of the revolutions in France and Russia
into two revolutionary traditions, a French and a Russian, and then combining
them into a larger, transcendent, and seemingly universal revolutionary tradition,
unbounded by time and space. In his mind, there now existed not only a French
Revolutionary Tradition, but also a Russian Revolutionary Tradition, which
included the 1905 Revolution, the February Revolution, and now the October
Revolution, which was both a continuation and climax of its two illustrious
predecessors. For Lenin, ideological distinctions were fine in the abstract, and
his belief in their reality was genuine. But tactical modifications in the service of
Marxist ideology were no less legitimate, and if these modifications required
changing French revolutions from bourgeois revolutions to proletarian or proto-
proletarian ones, then that was a historical fiction Lenin could easily live with.
Trotsky’s interest in the French Revolution was even greater than Lenin’s. His
personal identification with several of its luminaries, irrespective of his early
condemnations of Robespierre and Jacobinism, reflected his outsized self-image
as a historical actor of the first order whose mission in life, which he accepted
eagerly, was imposed on him by the requirements of the Marxist dialectic. In 1917
Trotsky, in his own estimation, was in exactly the right place at the right time.
Destined to personify the revolutionary vanguard that would put Russia and
eventually the world on a path to universal justice, Trotsky could not help but
consider himself the latter-day personification of all that was heroic and histor-
ically consequential in the French Revolution.
Many of Trotsky’s contemporaries agreed, though not all of them thought that
analogies with the French Revolution flattered him. Viktor Chernov claimed in
his memoirs that Trotsky’s ‘greatest ambition [was to be] the Russian Marat’.¹¹¹
So did Louise Bryant.¹¹² Others variously compared him to Danton, Carnot,
Saint-Just, and of course Robespierre.¹¹³ Indeed, Trotsky’s vow in 1917 that ‘the

¹¹⁰ V. I. Lenin, ‘Doklad o mire’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXV, p. 16.

¹¹¹ Shlapentokh, French Revolution and the Russian Anti-Democratic Tradition, p. 254.
¹¹² Bryant, Six Red Months in Russia, p. 67.
¹¹³ Shlapentokh, French Revolution and the Russian Anti-Democratic Tradition, p. 254.
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quadrangle of the guillotine’ would separate the Bolsheviks from their political
rivals only confirmed their fears that Trotsky would not shrink from meting out
the ultimate punishment, and would likely justify it on the grounds cited by
Bertrand Barère, a Jacobin who served on the Committee of Public Safety, that
‘only the dead never come back’.¹¹⁴ By this time Trotsky had reversed completely his
earlier position on the Jacobins, viewing them now as the personification of
revolutionary virtue; the Girondins, by comparison, were ‘pitiful’ and ‘ludicrous’.¹¹⁵
Implicit in Trotsky’s identification with the Jacobins was the notion that the
Bolsheviks in Russia were completing, or at least continuing, a process embedded
in history that was leading humanity to a better future that the French Revolution
had anticipated over a century earlier. The reader will recall that in 1906, in Results
and Prospects, Trotsky had written that ‘history does not repeat itself ’, and that
‘however much one may compare the Russian revolution with the Great French
Revolution, the former can never be transformed into a repetition of the latter’.¹¹⁶
But he also would write, in 1929, that ‘rejecting historical analogies would mean
rejecting the use of historical experience in general’.¹¹⁷ It is hard to take the first of
these two statements seriously. Trotsky always considered historical analogies
useful even when he raised them for the purpose of rejecting them. In particular,
Trotsky always claimed a genuine affinity between the two revolutions; and that
was especially true after the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917, when, as one
of the architects of the new regime, he looked to the French Revolution for
guidance. Not even the proletarian revolutions in Western Europe Trotsky
believed would follow a Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia would make the
prosaic, but nonetheless essential task of formulating specific policies any easier.
The French Revolution, while not a panacea, would render assistance.
However much the French Revolution intrigued them, only a few of the
Bolsheviks, other than Lenin and Trotsky, had the inclination (or the time) in
1917 to write about it for purposes other than the purely polemical. One who did
was Lev Kamenev. Understandably shocked by Lenin’s April Theses, which flatly
rejected Marxist orthodoxy on the impropriety of making a proletarian revolution
prematurely, Kamenev invoked the French Revolution to substantiate his view that
any revolution the Bolsheviks attempted should be a mass revolution; since the
proletariat in Russia still lacked the political consciousness to support a revolution
in numbers sufficient to ensure its success, to call for one, as Lenin did, was

¹¹⁴ Quoted in ibid., p. 237; quoted in Otto J. Scott, Robespierre: The Voice of Virtue (New Brunswick
NJ and London, 2011), p. 254.
¹¹⁵ Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution: The Overthrow of Tzarism and the Triumph of the Soviets,
abridged edition (New York, 1959), p. 250.
¹¹⁶ Trotsky, Itogi i perspektivy, p. 25.
¹¹⁷ Leon Trotsky, ‘Questions for the Leninbund’ in George Breitman et al., eds, Leon Trotsky:
Collected Writings (1929–1940), 14 vols (1929) [hereafter rendered as LTCW and followed by the
year or years of the writings that are included in the volume] (New York, 1975), p. 314. Isaac Deutscher,
in The Prophet Unarmed Trotsky: 1921–1929 (London, 1963), p. 315, describes Trotsky accurately as
having an imagination that was ‘overfed with history’.
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politically suicidal.¹¹⁸ Another Bolshevik, Grigorii Zinoviev, limited his references

to the revolution to the observation that war and revolution were mutually
reinforcing, and that ‘1793’ was a prime example of this. However, Zinoviev also
cautioned that there were circumstances in which this maxim did not apply, such
as those that pertained in France in 1917, when ‘social chauvinists’—the expletive
the Bolsheviks applied to European socialists who in 1914 had supported their own
country’s involvement in the First World War—supported war while opposing
revolution. In the essay in which he expressed this opinion, Zinoviev offered the
contrary example of the German proletariat, which he believed would shortly
follow the example of the Jacobins and make a revolution in wartime, even though
Zinoviev believed that the German proletariat, on taking power, would withdraw
their country from war rather than have it fight it more effectively, as the
Jacobins had done against their own foreign enemies.¹¹⁹
As for Nikolai Bukharin, one sees in his single reference to the French Revo-
lution the idea that would animate his policy prescriptions immediately after the
October Revolution, when the requirements of international communism, in his
view, took precedence over those of the nascent Soviet state. The most obvious
example of this was his vehement opposition to Russia withdrawing from the First
World War in March 1918 because he believed this would enable Germany to win
the war and thereby make proletarian revolutions in Europe impossible. In an
article in the spring of 1917, Bukharin praised the French Revolution for igniting
what he called ‘the torch of revolution’ on virtually the entire European continent.¹²⁰
But if, in 1789, the bourgeoisie was a progressive force, by the late nineteenth
century it had become ‘the citadel of reaction’, so that by 1917 it was ‘standing at
its grave’, nearly powerless to prevent the proletariat from ending its dominance
once and for all.¹²¹ To be sure, there was nothing in Bukharin’s teleology to which
a Marxist could object. The Russian Revolution, led by the proletariat, would
continue the inexorable march of progress to which the French Revolution, driven
forward by the bourgeoisie, had long ago contributed, and thereby fulfilled its
historical obligation. But Bukharin’s obvious preference for viewing this quasi-
apostolic succession of revolutions in a purely European context, seemingly with
only minimal concern for the fate of Russia, surely followed logically from the
opinion he would hold until the 1920s that events in Russia were significant
mostly for the effect they had on Western and Central Europe.

¹¹⁸ Cited in Lenin, ‘Pis’ma o taktike’, PSS, vol. XXXI, pp. 139, 143–4; John Keep, Contemporary
History in the Soviet Mirror (New York, 1964), 204. Bolsheviks like Kamenev were not the only ones
confounded by the April Theses. Plekhanov wrote a short essay in 1917 attacking them that bore the
title, in English translation, On the Delirium of Lenin, or Why Delirium is Sometimes Interesting.
¹¹⁹ G. Zinoviev, Vtoroi international i problema voiny ot nazyvaemsia my ot nasledstva? (Petrograd,
1917) p. 9.
¹²⁰ N. Bukharin, ‘The Russian Revolution and its Significance’, The Class Struggle, no. 1 (1917),
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1917/rev.htm.
¹²¹ Ibid.
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Very different from Bukharin’s were the statements referencing the French
Revolution that Stalin expressed in 1917. Whereas Bukharin esteemed it for its
internationalism and universalist aspirations, Stalin saw it as an expression, in
Erik Van Ree’s words, of a primitive form of ‘revolutionary patriotism’.¹²² In
March, Stalin stated unambiguously that the wars the Jacobins fought against their
enemies in Europe in the 1790s were morally and politically legitimate.¹²³ But in
Russia in 1917, the war the country was fighting was an imperialist war, in which
neither side enjoyed a monopoly of virtue. In fact, they were both engaged in
hostilities for the most dubious of motives, namely ‘the seizure of foreign, chiefly
agrarian territories’ the possession of which would increase their own capitalists’
profits.¹²⁴ The First World War, in other words, was the result of the machinations
of the bourgeoisie. But the inference Stalin wanted his readers to draw from all of
this, one suspects, was that should Russia fall into the hands of the proletariat, any
war it waged in its own defence would be no less legitimate than the wars the
Jacobins had fought in defence of their own revolution.
Also in March, Stalin attacked the Provisional Government because, in contrast
to the governments that emerged in prior revolutions in France—Stalin failed to
specify which revolutions and governments he had in mind—Russia’s arose ‘not
on the barricades, but near them’, and was therefore ‘being dragged along by the
revolution with its tail between its legs’.¹²⁵ Finally, in two articles in Rabochii put’
in early September, Stalin called the coalition Kerensky had recently cobbled
together a Directory not just because with five members it resembled the institu-
tion of the French Revolution, but also, and more importantly, because he
considered it the instrument of the Kadets, who, like most of the Directors, were
bourgeois.¹²⁶ At the end of the second of these two articles, Stalin opined that ‘it
[was] the duty of the advanced workers [in Russia] to tear the mask from these
non-Kadet governments and expose their real Kadet nature to the masses’.¹²⁷ Even
though the Directory did not disavow the territorial gains the Jacobins had made
in the wars they waged against their enemies, Stalin considered the institution
ideologically and politically retrograde, relative to the Jacobin regime that pre-
ceded it, and for that reason chose to consider it lacking any virtues whatsoever.
Of all the governments of the French Revolution, the one that most clearly
practised a revolutionary patriotism akin to that which Stalin argued for in
1917, until Lenin returned to Russia and promptly contradicted him in that
regard, was that of the Jacobins.

* * *

¹²² Erik Van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth Century Revolutionary
Patriotism (London, 2002), pp. 230–54.
¹²³ J. V. Stalin, ‘O voine’, in Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. III, pp. 4–5. ¹²⁴ Ibid., p. 5.
¹²⁵ J. V. Stalin, ‘Ob usloviiakh pobedy russkoi revoliutsii’, in Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. III, p. 14.
¹²⁶ J. V. Stalin, ‘Krizis i direktoriia’, ibid., p. 269; J. V. Stalin, ‘O razryve s kadetami’, ibid., p. 278.
¹²⁷ Stalin, ‘O razryve o kadetami’, ibid., p. 278.
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Not long before his death, Lenin admitted that in 1917 he had found useful
Napoleon’s celebrated injunction ‘On s’engage et puis . . . on voit’, which captures
the degree to which Lenin’s tactical decisions from the April Theses to the October
Revolution were reactions to unexpected events over which he had no real control.
It also implied that these decisions were partly or entirely improvised. But Lenin’s
admission should not obscure the fact that there was something in history that
offered the guidance the Bolsheviks needed, and that the French Revolution
provided it. In particular it was the example of the Jacobins that strengthened
his belief that the Bolsheviks could seize power as the so-called vanguard of a class,
the proletariat, that despite Russia’s impressive industrial growth beginning in the
1890s, constituted only a small percentage of the country’s still mostly agrarian
population. Although the Jacobins ruled France for only a matter of months, the
analogy the Bolsheviks drew with them was flexible enough so that it would
exclude this potentially discouraging piece of information. The result was that
the Bolsheviks could reference the analogy whenever necessary, while continuing
to believe that the only temporal limit on any government they established was
that inherent in the establishment of socialism and the abolition of classes. With
the proletariat, once socialism was established, the only class in Russia, there
would be, in actuality, no classes in Russia, and for that reason whatever remained
of the Bolshevik regime that had been established in 1917 would soon disappear.
Whereas the end of the Jacobins’ regime signified failure, that of the Bolsheviks
would signify success.
Still, it was easy to underestimate the Bolsheviks in 1917, just as it was easy to
underestimate the Jacobins in 1792. One suspects that Lenin was well aware of
this, and knew how advantageous that perception could be in making a revolution
with far less than a majority of the Russian people supporting it, and when the
ideology to which he remained genuinely committed practically cried out to him
that doing so would be a catastrophic mistake. But one must bear in mind how
easily Lenin could conclude from what he knew—or thought he knew—about the
Jacobins that such considerations, while worth considering, should not deter him
from acting as his political instincts dictated. In fact, it was Lenin’s (mostly
inaccurate) vision of the Jacobin Clubs as a prototype for the revolutionary
party he first described in 1902 in What is to be Done?, with its intimations of
conspiracies and the strict centralization of authority, that enabled him in 1917 to
carry out a successful coup d’état. In October 1917 Lenin truly believed that the
Bolsheviks were doing what the Jacobins had done in France, and that that was
what enabled both sets of revolutionaries to succeed. In light of what it led to, it is
hard to imagine an analogy more powerful in its effect on the course of history
than that which Lenin conjured in 1917 between the French Revolution and the
October Revolution.
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7
Mythologizing the New Soviet Regime

One might think that after the Bolsheviks took power they would be less inclined
to look to the French Revolution, and to history generally, for guidance, inspir-
ation, and legitimacy. That they were on the verge of building socialism and
thereby creating the preconditions for communism, when history ended and
social justice prevailed universally, would seem to fill these needs sufficiently so
that historical analogies of any kind would no longer be necessary.
But that was not the case. The French Revolution remained relevant. Until the
end of the Civil War in 1921, when the Bolsheviks finally consolidated the
power they had acquired in 1917, the whole issue of the efficacy and morality of
terror caused them to cite, yet again, the Jacobins in responding to charges that
the application of terror for any purpose was immoral, and thus destructive of the
patina of legitimacy the Bolsheviks enjoyed by having carried out a successful
revolution. Moreover, it was during the era of the New Economic Policy (NEP),
which mostly coincided with the struggle for power that accelerated after Lenin’s
death in 1924 and finally ended in 1929 with Stalin triumphant, that the Bolsheviks
for the first time had to react to charges—from abroad, from other Russians, and
even from critics within their own party—that their revolution was going seriously
wrong and that momentum was building inside the Soviet Union for either a
reaction that would delay the construction of socialism and communism, or an
actual counter-revolution that would bring the Bolshevik regime and the entire
revolutionary enterprise to which it was committed to an end. In the debate that
ensued, the French Revolution played a significant role, as it had before.
In this instance, however, it was Thermidor, by which was meant the phase
of the revolution from 1794 to 1799, rather than the earlier Jacobin one, that
assumed special significance. It is no exaggeration to say that, beginning in the
1920s, mere mention of the word evoked fear and foreboding, even of panic,
among the Bolsheviks because of what it implied about their taking power before
the objective preconditions for their doing so existed; these emotions were also
what made any intimation of a Soviet Thermidor analogous to the French as
useful for polemical purposes in intra-party politics as it was for its interpretive
and predictive implications. In short, the fate of the October Revolution seemed to
depend on whether the Soviet Union had succumbed or would soon succumb to
Thermidorian reaction or counter-revolution; it mattered greatly, in terms of the
chances of reversing any descent into Thermidor, whether it marked merely a
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reactionary phase that the workings of the dialectic would easily rectify, or a
reversion to an earlier stage in history that would set back its progress towards
socialism and communism significantly. In contrast to 1917, when the Bolsheviks
evoked the Jacobins voluntarily, because they considered them, in purely personal
terms, the very model of revolutionary rectitude, when they pondered the unwel-
come possibilities of a Soviet Thermidor in the 1920s, they were responding
reluctantly to enemies of theirs who had retrieved from the French Revolution
the images of a phase in its history that could be wielded against the Bolsheviks as
a weapon. That the Bolsheviks in 1921 had instituted a new economic policy that,
in its partial allowance of capitalism and market relations resembled an old one,
made the charge that they had betrayed their own objectives more plausible. And
the fact that some of their critics thought a Soviet Thermidor a good thing, to be
welcomed instead of condemned, only underscored the danger it posed to the
entire undertaking to which the Bolsheviks had devoted their lives.

* * *
In the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution it was the Jacobins’ terror,
rather than any consideration of Thermidor, that monopolized the Bolsheviks’ time
and attention. By this time the slightest intimation that the Bolsheviks were about
to replicate the killings for which the Jacobins had been responsible in the French
Revolution was enough for Lenin or an appropriate surrogate to take up the whole
issue, sometimes to distinguish any terror the Bolsheviks might inflict from that of
the Jacobins, sometimes to claim, as justification, that the two forms of terror would
be very similar, and sometimes to claim that terror, for practical reasons, if not for
ethical ones, was not then, and would never be, under consideration. Even before
the October Revolution, Lenin’s ambivalence and indecision were palpable. In an
article in Pravda four months earlier, he declared boldly that the workers in Russia
were ‘the Jacobins of the twentieth century’, but then seemed to qualify the
identification by stating that while guillotining enemies of the revolution was a
perfectly good example to follow, that did not mean it was a policy the workers—
and by implication the Bolsheviks—should copy.¹ Moreover, one cannot ascertain
from the article whether Lenin’s aversion to terror was based on moral principle or
on the exigencies of politics.² On 1 November, at a meeting of the Central
Committee, less than a week after the Bolsheviks had seized power, Lenin plain-
tively bemoaned his inability, as the head of the new government, to do more than

¹ V. I. Lenin, ‘O vragakh naroda’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXII, pp. 306–7.

² Even within the Cheka, the police force established on 20 December, support for terror was far
from unanimous; some officials (if what they said was not disingenuous) even opposed its application.
In the winter of 1917–18, one of its functionaries, Iakov Peters, when asked about the veracity of
rumours of a reign of terror, which the questioner analogized to the guillotine, responded that ‘it has
been over a hundred years since the French Revolution, and I would like to think the world [has]
moved [on] since then’. Bessie Beatty, The Red Heart of Russia (New York, 1918), p. 307.
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take food away from persons doing the same to others. Far better would be simply
sending the miscreants to the guillotine.³ But, as was the case earlier in the year, he
did not indicate what prevented him from doing so. In a speech on 4 November to a
session of the Petrograd Soviet, the new Soviet leader, after amplifying his objec-
tions to terror, made clear these were more practical than ethical:
We are accused of resorting to terror. But we have not done so—unlike the
French revolutionaries, who guillotined unarmed men—and I hope we will not
do so in the future, because we have strength on our side.⁴

On 1 December, Lenin argued that the enemies of the revolution were engaging in
opposition for the purpose of actually overthrowing the new regime.⁵ The Kadets,
he said, were in the forefront of these efforts, and strong measures were necessary
to stop them. But the remedy was not terror. Instead, Lenin prescribed imprison-
ment, and to support his preference he cited the Jacobins, who in similar circum-
stances had simply ‘declared bourgeois parties outside the law’.⁶
However, at a meeting of the Sovnarkom (the acronym of the Council of
People’s Commissars, which Lenin headed) five days later, Lenin informed its
other members that ‘we cannot fail in finding our own Fouquier-Tinville’, who
during the Jacobin terror had prosecuted many of its victims.⁷ By invoking
Fouquier-Tinville, whom Lenin’s secretary, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich once called
‘one of the unsurpassable fighters for the French Revolution’, the Soviet leader was
insisting, in effect, that the Bolsheviks had no choice but to destroy their real or
potential enemies physically, and that to do so properly ‘a staunch proletarian
Jacobin’ like Fouquier-Tinville was needed.⁸ Fortunately for the Bolsheviks, there
was already such an individual among them, Felix Dzerzhinskii, the first head of
the Soviet political police, who after his premature death in 1926 would be
remembered fondly as ‘Iron Felix’ for showing no mercy towards those whose
executions he ordered.⁹

³ ‘The Lost Document (1 November 1917)’, in Leon Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification (New
York, 1972), p. 110.
⁴ V. I. Lenin, ‘Rech’ na zasedanii Petrogradskogo Soveta 4(17) noiabria’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXV,
p. 63.
⁵ Keep, Debate on Soviet Power, p. 175.
⁶ Ibid. Among those who executed policy (and later people as well), N. V. Krylenko believed from
the very beginning of the Bolshevik regime that terror was a legitimate tactic and that ‘the French
Revolution provided an example of how to fight the bourgeoisie’. The Bolsheviks, he said, were ‘its
worthy students’. Quoted in V. Smirnov, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia i sovremennost’, Mirovaia
ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, no. 7 (1989): p. 65.
⁷ Quoted in V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, Na boevykh postakh fevralskoi i oktiabrskoi revoliutsii (Moscow,
1930), p. 197; George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police: The All-Russian Extraordinary
Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, December 1917 to February 1922
(Oxford, 1981), p. 22.
⁸ Bonch-Bruevich, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. III, p. 114; Bonch-Bruevich, Na boevykh, p. 197.
⁹ In Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. III, p. 366, Bonch-Bruevich calls Dzerzhinskii ‘the Fouquier-Tinville
of the Russian proletariat’.
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By 1918 Lenin had not reached the point where he had become, in Maxim
Gorky’s phrase, ‘a thinking guillotine’, a description the Russian writer considered
applicable.¹⁰ But the Soviet leader did not have far to go for the description to fit.
On 6 January, he made clear in Pravda that like all revolutions the French
Revolution had generated implacable enemies; foremost among them were ana-
logues of Chernov and Tsereteli.¹¹ Enemies like these had to be defeated because if
they were not, the Bolsheviks might as well relinquish power and give up the
revolution. Wolves, he said, could never become lambs.¹² At the end of the month,
and also in the beginning of February, Lenin used the same argument to reach the
identical conclusion. But this time, in articles in Pravda, he cited the unsuccessful
revolutions of 1848 and 1871 in France as evidence of what would be the
Bolsheviks’ fate if they did not deal with their enemies with the firmness he
recommended: ‘The whole history of socialism, particularly of French socialism’,
showed how deleterious would be the consequences of the Bolsheviks treating
their enemies leniently.¹³
Not surprisingly, Lenin never relented in his attacks on French socialism, which
he maintained until his death was informed by the cowardly revisionism of its
leaders, who like their Russian counterparts were not really socialists at all. The
apostasy of which, with the exception of Jean Jaurês they were guilty in 1914
became, with the passage of time, even more a cause for rage. But Lenin usually
evaluated the French Revolution calmly; the exception, of course, was shortly after
the Second Congress in 1903, at which he was attacked as a Jacobin and a Russian
Robespierre. This was even the case in the winter of 1918, when Germany
threatened a resumption of military operations unless Russia surrendered and
signed a treaty Lenin rightly feared would be draconian. In an article in Pravda in
the beginning of February he made clear that while some analogies with the
French Revolution were valid, others were misplaced.¹⁴ Among the latter was
that which considered Russian peasants, in their patriotism, like French peasants
in 1792. Lenin, however, disagreed, and in doing so made clear that he believed
anti-war sentiment among the peasants was as strong now, in 1918, as it had been

¹⁰ Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin (Leningrad, 1924), p. 10. There was in Lenin’s mind a
significant difference between shooting specific individuals for some particular misdeed that merely
harmed the regime, and doing so to those who threatened its survival. Execution on the spot was his
preferred remedy for the former; for the latter only mass terror sufficed. Lenin often cited the Jacobins
in justifying each of these remedies. But whereas it took some time for him to warm to mass terror, he
always seemed receptive to the more individualized ad hoc punishment he instructed Trotsky to inflict
in September 1918 on insubordinate or unsuccessful Red Army officers. In his instruction in this
particular instance, he specifically cited ‘the precedent on the French Revolution’. V. I. Lenin, Neiz-
vestnye dokumenty: 1891–1922 (Moscow, 1999), p. 250.
¹¹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Liudi so togo sveta’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXV, p. 230.
¹² Ibid.
¹³ V. I. Lenin, ‘Doklad o deiatel’nosti soveta narodnykh komissarov 11(24) ianvaria’, in Lenin, PSS,
vol. XXXV, p. 266.
¹⁴ V. I. Lenin, ‘O revoliutsionnoi fraze’, ibid., pp. 345–6.
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in 1917. For that reason, a humiliating peace with Germany was the least harmful
of the choices Russia could make: ‘Any reminiscing over 1792 [when French
peasants willingly went to war to protect the land the Revolution had given them]
amounts to mere revolutionary phrase-mongering’, and those in Russia inside and
outside the party who ‘repeat such slogans, words, and war cries are afraid to
analyse objective reality’.¹⁵
But two weeks later, Lenin analogized Russia’s current relationship to Germany
to that of Prussia to France when the latter, under Napoleon, was militarily and
politically stronger. Just as the balance of power between France and Prussia
would eventually change in favour of Prussia, so too, he said, would it change to
the benefit of Russia in the case of its relationship to Germany.¹⁶ And at the end of
the month, he returned to the French Revolution to support his earlier argument
that capitulating to the Germans, while humiliating and a tangible setback, should
not be cause for despondency:
The Frenchmen of 1793 would never have said that their gains—the republic and
democracy—were becoming purely formal and that they would have to accept
the possibility of losing the republic. They were not filled with despair, but with
faith in victory. To call for a revolutionary war, and at the same time to talk in an
official resolution of ‘accepting the possibility of losing Soviet power’ [as oppon-
ents of his within the party he believed to have done] is to expose oneself
completely.¹⁷

After the Bolsheviks, on 3 March, signed a treaty with the Germans at the Polish
town of Brest-Litovsk, which many Bolsheviks considered an unconscionable
betrayal of their very identity as Marxist revolutionaries, Lenin was more frantic
than ever in drumming up support. In an article in Pravda in the middle of March
he argued at considerable length that peace with Germany was a regrettable
necessity until the German proletariat rose up and destroyed the existing bour-
geois government. Among the arguments he mustered was that, in much the way
the agreement Alexander I signed with Napoleon at Tilsit in 1809 gave Russia time
to prepare for the French attack the tsar considered inevitable, the Treaty of Brest-
Litovsk enabled the Bolshevik regime to survive until the German proletariat
could do what Lenin was still convinced it would do.¹⁸
In an article in Pravda in April 1918, Lenin summed up what the Bolsheviks
had accomplished since the October Revolution by claiming that the Soviet state
was now ‘approximately at the level [France] had reached in 1793 and 1871’.¹⁹ In
fact, the Soviet state had already achieved more than what its French precursors
could legitimately take credit for by introducing throughout Russia ‘the highest

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 346. ¹⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘Neschastnyi mir’, ibid., pp. 382–3.

¹⁷ V. I. Lenin, ‘Strannoe i chudovishchnoe’, ibid., pp. 404–5.
¹⁸ V. I. Lenin, ‘IV chrezvychainyi vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXVI, pp. 107–9.
¹⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Ocherednye zadachi sovetskoi vlasti’, ibid., p. 175.
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type of state—Soviet power’.²⁰ The next day, in a speech delivered to a session of

the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet government, Lenin went further,
claiming not only that the Bolsheviks had exceeded the accomplishments of the
Jacobins, but that, by remaining in power despite the relentless hostility of their
enemies, they had succeeded where the Jacobins had failed. Notwithstanding the
praise he had previously lavished on the Jacobins—not to mention his calling
himself a Jacobin in the early 1900s—Lenin now wrote, uncharacteristically, that
the Jacobins had shown themselves to lack the necessary ruthlessness: instead of
destroying their enemies, they merely co-opted them, with the result that the
haute-bourgeoisie thereafter exacted its revenge and removed them from power.²¹
In 1917 the Bolsheviks did not made the same mistake: ‘[we] suppressed the
Alexeevs, the Kornilovs, and the Kerenskys’.²² All that remained to be done was
‘to put all the saboteurs to work under our control, under the control of Soviet
power, to put in place government organs so that there will be strict account-
ability and control’.²³
Lenin’s evaluation of the Jacobins closely tracked his sense of the security of
the Soviet state, which until the end of the Civil War in 1921 boiled down to
whether he thought it could survive until the proletarian revolutions he expected
elsewhere in Europe had occurred. When he was optimistic in that regard, or at
least not despondent, he either praised the Jacobins or made excuses for their
failings. When he was less sanguine, he found them lacking the qualities needed
to defend themselves successfully. Lenin was most critical of the Jacobins in
1918, largely because in the first three months of the year the Germans could
easily have overthrown the Soviet regime, and in the last six it had to fight a civil
war the outcome of which remained very much in doubt. But by 1919, especially
after the tide of battle had turned and a Bolshevik victory seemed inevitable,
Lenin could be more charitable. For him that meant praising the Jacobins for
dealing with their enemies decisively, harshly, and, most important of all,
comprehensively—while simultaneously stressing the differences he saw between
the Jacobins, who ultimately lost power, and the Bolsheviks, whom he now
thought unlikely to suffer the same fate.²⁴
As early as 20 January, in a speech to the All-Russian Trade Union Congress
in Moscow, Lenin considered the Soviet regime strong enough for him to
acknowledge ‘that we been more fortunate than the men who made the French

²⁰ Ibid., p.175.
²¹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Doklad ob ocherednykh zadachakh sovetskoi vlasti’, ibid., pp. 256, 266.
²² Ibid., p. 266. ²³ Ibid., p. 266.
²⁴ It is certainly possible that Lenin’s confidence was purely rhetorical, and that his words were a
form of bravado concealing fear and uncertainty. But it seems that anyone who could continue to
believe until 1921 that proletarian revolutions would shortly erupt in other parts of Europe; that these
revolutions would be successful; and that the proletariat in the countries where this happened would
have the time, the energy, and the resources to assist the Bolsheviks, had to have enormous self-
confidence.
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Revolution, which was defeated by an alliance of monarchical and backward

countries’.²⁵ In March 1919, in a speech delivered to the Eighth Party Congress
in Moscow, Lenin pronounced the Bolsheviks more competent than the Conven-
tion in satisfying the demands of their respective peasantries.²⁶ This suggested that
any analogy with the French Revolution was now invalid because the Bolshevik
Revolution, in certain empirically verifiable ways, had exceeded it. But this did not
mean that the analogy had lost its utility. At the First Congress of the Communist
International, which also met in March, Lenin told the assembled delegates that
the denial of rights for which the Bolsheviks were already responsible was justified
because when the bourgeoisie was still ‘revolutionary’, it acted out of the same
need for self-preservation and did the same thing: ‘Neither in England in 1649 nor
in France in 1793 did it allow “freedom of assembly” to monarchists and nobles,
who had summoned foreign troops and “assembled” to organise attempts at
restoration.’²⁷ Since then, Lenin continued, the bourgeoisie had become a reac-
tionary class intent, in Russia, on thwarting the Bolsheviks’ efforts to advance the
course of history, and for that reason no tactic should be excluded in stopping it.
In the meantime, the workers, who thanks to the Bolsheviks now knew what the
bourgeoisie intended, ‘will only laugh at its hypocrisy’.²⁸
In a pamphlet published a few weeks later, Lenin made explicit what had been
merely implicit in earlier statements of his on the use of terror, namely that the
French Revolution had established a standard of excellence in that regard that few,
if any, subsequent revolutions, including the Bolshevik, could ever exceed. Never-
theless, the Bolsheviks should try their best to equal it. Lenin phrased his enco-
mium as follows:
The French Revolution, against which, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, the old powers hurled themselves in order to crush it, we call great
precisely because it was able to rouse to its defence vast masses of people who
resisted the entire world; this was one of its greatest merits.²⁹

With the outcome of the Civil War still in doubt, Lenin, for all his bravado,
admitted his uncertainty about the long-term survival of the Soviet state. This was
because the Bolsheviks had captured power in a backward country, before ‘others
had succeeded in establishing the Soviet form of government’.³⁰ But the French

²⁵ V. I. Lenin, ‘Doklad na II vserossiiskom s”ezde professional’nykh soiuzov 20 ianvaria’, in Lenin,

PSS, vol. XXXVII, p. 447.
²⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘Doklad o rabote v derevne 23 marta’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXVIII, p. 195.
²⁷ V. I. Lenin, ‘Tezisy i doklad o burzhuaznoi demokratii i diktature proletariat’, in Lenin, PSS,
vol. XXXVII, p. 494.
²⁸ Ibid., p. 494.
²⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Uspekhi i trudnosti sovetskoi vlasti’, ibid., p. 52.
³⁰ Ibid., p. 52. This was one of the few times Lenin even hinted that what the Bolsheviks had done in
1917 was in any way unorthodox ideologically.
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Revolution had established a template for revolutionary regimes that wished to

remain in power under difficult circumstances, and Lenin’s pamphlet makes clear
he believed it was the terror the Jacobins inflicted on their enemies that was the
key to their success, however short-lived it turned out to be.
In May Lenin was, if anything, even more effusive in his praise of the revolution
for the absence of scruples its leaders demonstrated when reactionaries and
counter-revolutionaries had a reasonable chance of destroying it. In a speech
delivered to the first All-Russia Congress on Adult Education, Lenin again lumped
together the English and the French Revolutions in justifying the denial of rights
he had recently ordered. He phrased the analogy as follows:
When the great bourgeois revolutionaries in England in 1649 and in France in
1792–93 made their revolutions, they did not grant freedom of assembly to
monarchists. The French Revolution is called great because it did not suffer
from the flabbiness, half-heartedness, and phrase-mongering common among
many of the revolutionaries of 1848. It was an effective revolution which, after
overthrowing the royalists, crushed them completely. And we shall do the same
with the capitalist gentlemen because we know that in order to free the working
people from the oppression of capitalism we must deprive the capitalists of their
right to assemble freely.³¹

It is noteworthy that when Lenin found it necessary to cite the year when the
French Revolution began, he was not consistent. Before 1917 he only occasion-
ally cited 1792 or 1793, which was an economical way of indicating that it was
only when the Convention was established (in 1792) or when the Jacobins
established the Committee of Public Safety (in 1793) that the French Revolution
actually began. But beginning in 1917 these dates appear more often in his
speeches and writings than the traditional one of 1789, which he used in most
of his earlier references. One cannot know for certain why Lenin did this. But
one can conjecture that by citing 1792 or 1793 as the year when the French
Revolution really began (or when it began a new phase so much more advanced
than the first one that it deserved to be called something else), he was now
suggesting ‘an analogy within an analogy’: just as the Bolshevik Revolution was
analogous to the French Revolution, so, too, was the relationship of the Jacobins
to the National and Legislative Assemblies that preceded them analogous to that
between the Bolsheviks and the Provisional Government. In other words, both
the French and the Russian Revolutions were really two revolutions: the first
ones, in 1789 and February 1917 respectively, were bourgeois; the second ones, in
1792–3 and October 1917 respectively, were more radical.

³¹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Rech’ ob obmane naroda lozungami svobody i ravenstva’, in Lenin, PSS,

vol. XXXVIII, p. 349.
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But to extend these analogies further was unwarranted. The revolutions of 1789
and February 1917, and the more radical revolutions of 1792–3 and October 1917
that followed them, were different in several ways. The most obvious of these was
that while the Bolsheviks (in Lenin’s estimation) would surely succeed in replacing
capitalism with socialism and communism, the Jacobins did not remain in power
long enough to make the capitalism that was just emerging in France less
rapacious, much less replace it with a different system of class relations entirely.
Left unsaid, or at least unresolved, in Lenin’s evaluation of the Jacobins was the
apparent contradiction between their class identity—in his descriptions they were
either from the petit-bourgeoisie or the bourgeoisie as a whole—and their sup-
porters, some of whom were from classes or categories of the French population
‘lower’ than the bourgeoisie and thus intent on forcing the Jacobins to posit a
vision of society contrary to that which was dominant in the class to which they
belonged. This, in turn, created a ‘contradiction’ that the Jacobins resolved in the
spring of 1794, when they guillotined the Hébertists and other progressive elem-
ents. But that left them vulnerable to the haute-bourgeoisie on the right, who
dispatched the Jacobins fairly easily a few months later.
But even if, as Lenin suggested, the Jacobins could not make permanent the
‘supra-capitalist’ objectives of its left-wing supporters, the mere fact that they tried
to do so, albeit at times unwillingly and only as a result of external pressure, made
the French Revolution, in its aspirations even more than in its actual achieve-
ments, a Great Revolution. After the Jacobins completed the revolution’s original
objectives of abolishing feudalism, eliminating the monarchy, and proclaiming
France a republic, because of the Jacobins and their more radical supporters it
went beyond these objectives and groped half-blindly and hesitatingly, but with
great audacity and courage, towards the proletarian revolution that, while prema-
ture in the late eighteenth century in France, would be more appropriate (though
still premature, but to a much lesser degree) in the early twentieth century in
Russia. In Lenin’s estimation, the French Revolution was a Great Revolution both
because of the capitalism it facilitated and helped to legitimize politically, and
because of the socialism and communism of which its Jacobin phase was a dim
and distant precursor.
When Lenin invoked the French Revolution, he usually had both its bourgeois
achievements and its neo-bourgeois and proto-proletarian aspirations in mind.
One can therefore take with the proverbial grain of salt his occasional insistence
that it began in 1792–3 with the Jacobins, rather than in 1789 with the Estates-
General and the Bastille. A good example was the speech in May 1918 in which he
invoked the revolution to justify Bolshevik terror. In making his argument, Lenin
seemed to limit the French Revolution to its Jacobin phase. But he also reaffirmed
the revolution’s centrality in history as the bourgeois revolution par excellence,
a force mostly for good that ‘left its imprint on the entire nineteenth century, the
century which gave civilization and culture to all of humanity’, and in so doing
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marked the beginning of modernity itself.³² While the revolution did not make
real its neo-bourgeois aspirations, much less make its bourgeois achievements
invulnerable to their partial retraction after 1815 during the Bourbon Restoration,
it nevertheless left behind a legacy of progressive change that the Bolsheviks would
eventually improve on, and in a succession no less apostolic than that in the early
Christian Church, finally put in place what the most farsighted of all the French
revolutionaries had envisioned. In explaining this succession, in which the still
ongoing Bolshevik Revolution was now superseding the French Revolution and all
the other revolutions, both in France and elsewhere in Europe that preceded it,
Lenin encapsulated the relationship between the French and the Russian Revolu-
tions in the most triumphalist rhetoric imaginable:
Over the past eighteen months our revolution has done immeasurably more for
the proletariat, the class we serve, and for the goal we are striving for, namely the
overthrow of the rule of capital, than the French Revolution did for the class it
served. And that is why we say that even if we take hypothetically the worst
possible outcome, even if tomorrow some lucky Kolchak were to exterminate all
the Bolsheviks, the revolution would still be invincible.³³

Unlike the ‘bourgeois revolutionaries’ who ruled France during its revolution, and
confronted hostility from countries that were still feudal, and also from England,
which was economically more advanced than France, the Bolsheviks, in Lenin’s
description, had already succeeded, in the mere months since the October Revo-
lution, ‘in making the new state organization they created . . . comprehensible,
familiar, and popular to the workers all over the world, so that they now regard
it as their own’.³⁴ Where the French had failed, the Russians, according to Lenin,
would succeed. Socialism was morally superior to even the most humane incar-
nation of industrial capitalism, and for that reason the French Revolution, for all
its greatness, would henceforth remain in the shadow of the October Revolution.
Flowery rhetoric, of course, was no substitute for harsh repression, and it is
worth noting that the Bolsheviks had established a political police fully six months
before the Civil War began. By 1920 it had arrested and executed Russians in
numbers far exceeding the death toll for which the Jacobins had been responsible
in France. In both reigns of terror the principal objective was less to eliminate
actual opposition than to preclude future opposition by frightening everyone still
living into political passivity. In other words, both reigns of terror were meant to
have a prophylactic effect. Potential opponents were deemed more dangerous
than present ones. Accordingly, in both France and Russia the state mobilized

³² Ibid., p. 367. ³³ Ibid., pp. 367–8.

³⁴ Ibid., p. 368. Lenin seemed not to notice the anomaly, from his Marxist perspective, of the first
bourgeois revolution in history occurring not in England, which in 1789 possessed the most advanced
economy in Europe, but somewhere else. If he did, he wisely kept this uncomfortable and unaccount-
able fact to himself.
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much of its resources and established new institutions to ensure that this objective
was achieved. But the most significant difference between the two instances of
mass terror, even more than in the number of victims, was that while the Jacobins
used revolutionary tribunals to pronounce legal judgement, followed by the
guillotine to carry it out, under Lenin the Cheka performed both functions. By
their utilizing the technological advances in mass killing that were achieved from
the eighteenth century to the twentieth, the institutionalized terror the Bolsheviks
practised was more effective than the arrangements the Jacobins had devised. And
while Lenin’s terror paled in comparison to Stalin’s, which permeated practically
every institution and every aspect of personal and social life in the Soviet Union, it
represented nonetheless a great improvement in the impersonal annihilation of
people characteristic of modern history since the French Revolution.
Lenin, of course, was too intelligent not to realize how much Russia, in its
ability to kill people, exceeded that of France during its original revolution. But the
analogy with the Jacobin Terror, while still useful politically, continued to haunt
him even after the tide had turned in the Civil War in 1919, and it became
especially relevant after the Kronstadt Revolt and the simultaneous inauguration
of the NEP, which restored a measure of capitalism and market relations to the
Russian economy, showed the Bolsheviks vulnerable to the charge from the left
that since 1917 they had betrayed their own objectives and were now, to all intents
and purposes, ersatz socialists and revolutionaries.
That the Bolsheviks were cognizant of how dangerous this charge could be
was evident at the Ninth Party Congress in the early spring of 1920. One of the
criticisms of Lenin’s government was that it was not radical enough—which is to
say that it was insufficiently committed to socialism. The criticism was often
expressed in an analogy with the French Revolution: that the purpose of the
October Revolution was not to supersede either the French Revolution or the
February Revolution—both of which were bourgeois—but rather to complete
them. This was apparently the conclusion Alexei Rykov wanted his fellow dele-
gates to draw from remarks Lenin had made earlier about the French Revolution
in which he seemed to deny the feudal roots of the French bourgeoisie; to Rykov
this was a subtle way of suggesting that, in Russia, all Lenin wished to do was to
‘alter the French Revolution’, rather than go beyond it.³⁵ That Rykov’s charge
warranted a public response from Lenin attests to the importance and the
centrality of the French Revolution in how the Bolsheviks conceptualized their
own revolution. What Rykov actually meant by his accusation is unclear; the
most plausible interpretation is that he objected on practical grounds as well as
ideological ones to Lenin’s implication that when the French Revolution began,
the bourgeoisie was a tabula rasa and that that was the reason the policies pursued

³⁵ V. I. Lenin, ‘Rech’ o khoziaistvennom stroitel’stve’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XL, p. 269.

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by some of its elements exceeded the boundaries otherwise imposed on it by its

leaders having grown up under feudalism.
Whatever the reason for it, Rykov’s charge, understandably, incensed Lenin,
who replied that the French bourgeoisie acted differently after the French Revo-
lution began from the way it did under feudalism because that was the way classes
acted once the material circumstances that had previously circumscribed what
they could do had finally changed—as they did in France in the late eighteenth
century. Lenin then moved on to what was, as far as the French Revolution was
concerned, his principal point. While originating under capitalism, the proletariat,
he said, was now enjoying just as much freedom and autonomy after the October
Revolution as the bourgeoisie in France possessed after the French Revolution. In
other words, there was nothing now to prevent the proletariat from building
socialism as quickly as possible—a point that Lenin may have considered essential
to his efforts to sustain morale among the Bolsheviks in light of their inability, as
of yet, to defeat the Whites and end the Civil War. But irrespective of what
motivated it, Lenin’s argument was significant both because it showed his sensi-
tivity to the charge that the Bolsheviks were insufficiently radical—in contrast
to the charge of the Mensheviks that they were excessively radical—and because
it demonstrated how useful historical analogies could be to someone like Lenin
with the tactical flexibility to alter the specific terms of an analogy, or even its
foundational validity, in accordance with the political necessities and exigencies in
any particular situation. For Lenin, analogies were a form of putty, to be moulded
into whatever shape suited his purposes. In this particular instance, Lenin felt the
need to show that the French Revolution and the October Revolution were
practically identical.
One year later, not long after the Bolsheviks had suppressed the Kronstadt
Revolt, Lenin felt compelled to emphasize, in a speech to a congress of transport
workers then meeting in Petrograd, that the Bolsheviks’ victory had been a ‘close-
run thing’, and for precisely that reason they should never refrain from attacking
their enemies with all the power they possessed; if they did anything less than that,
the results could be catastrophic.³⁶ In expressing his fear that being driven from
power was still a real possibility, he did what he had done on several earlier
occasions when his customary self-confidence had yielded, if only temporarily, to
fear and foreboding—namely to invoke the French Revolution for reassurance.
But the Kronstadt Revolt, which transpired barely twenty miles from Petrograd,
had frightened Lenin sufficiently so that not even the exploits of the Jacobins or
the storming of the Bastille could lift his spirits. On the contrary, these iconic
events of a distant revolution now suggested that all revolutions, including the
Bolshevik, were susceptible to the same kind of threats, and that the dangers these

³⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘Rech’ na vserossiiskom s”ezde transportnykh rabochikh’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XLIII,
pp. 140–1.
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posed could be fatal. Even though the French Revolution, until Thermidor,
survived them, there was no guarantee that the Bolshevik Revolution would do
the same. Revolutions, he said, were thwarted ‘when the toilers, with temporary
peasant support, establish short-lived dictatorships that have not consolidated
power, so that after a brief period everything tends to slip back. . . . This was true
of the Great French Revolution and, on a smaller scale is true of all revolutions.’³⁷
The same danger, Lenin continued, still faced the Bolsheviks: The ‘petit-
bourgeois-anarchist elements’ that had revolted at Kronstadt still lurked in other
parts of Russia, and unless the Soviet government hunted them down and
destroyed them, the Bolsheviks ‘would slide down as the French Revolution
did’.³⁸ But if they mustered the strength and the force of will to defeat this element,
‘the movement of the communist revolution that is growing in Europe will be
further reinforced’.³⁹
According to Lenin, revolutionaries could never be too vigilant. In April 1921,
with the unpleasant memory of the Kronstadt Revolt still vivid, Lenin predicted
that the Bolsheviks would either harness the petit-bourgeoisie for their own
purposes or be destroyed by it, just the way the French Revolution had been
betrayed by it when Napoleon came to power in 1799; in this instance he forgot
that, in his version of the revolution, it had ended five years earlier, when
Thermidor began.⁴⁰ Two months later, in an address to the Third Congress of
the Communist International, Lenin singled out Miliukov, the SRs, and the
Mensheviks for calling disingenuously for democracy and for ‘Soviets without
the Bolsheviks’ during the Kronstadt Revolt; Miliukov, in particular, aroused
Lenin’s ire because, as the leader of the haute-bourgeoisie in Russia, he sought
precisely what his counterparts in France had been able to achieve in 1794 and
again in 1848–9, namely the destruction of a revolution that for all its limitations
was progressive and beneficial.⁴¹ In December, Lenin stated that ‘the workers and
peasants in France showed themselves capable of waging a legitimate, just, and
revolutionary war against their feudal aristocracy when the latter wanted to
strangle the Great French Revolution of the eighteenth century’.⁴² But the same
task was even easier now because not only France but almost all of Europe was still
exhausted by the First World War and thoroughly balkanized by the Treaty of
Versailles.⁴³
It is quite appropriate that in this, the last statement Lenin made that concerned
the French Revolution, he should have returned to the theme that runs like a

³⁷ Ibid., pp. 140–1. ³⁸ Ibid., p. 141. ³⁹ Ibid., p. 141.

⁴⁰ V. I. Lenin, ‘O prodovol’stvennom naloge (znachenie novoi politiki i ee usloviia)’, ibid., pp. 207–9.
⁴¹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Rol’ ‘chistoi demokratii’ II i II1/2 Internatsionalov, eserov i men’shevikov kak
soiuznikov kapitala’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XLIV, p. 11.
⁴² V. I. Lenin, ‘O tezisakh po agrarnomu voprosu frantsuzskoi kommunisticheskoi partii’, ibid.,
p. 277.
⁴³ Ibid., p. 277.
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thread through his ruminations on the revolution, and indeed his entire career as
a Marxist revolutionary, namely that individuals who engage in revolution as a
profession need not be imprisoned by the limits ideology imposes. Revolutionaries
sufficiently willing to take risks that could easily lead to their own defeat and
annihilation should not shrink from exceeding these limits if there is a reasonable
chance of success. And if exceeding these limits requires coercion and violence
and bloodshed, so much the better: objectives are achieved and opponents of these
objectives are eliminated simultaneously. What seems implicit in the totality of
Lenin’s career, not just it his various judgements of the French Revolution, is that
the only law of revolutions that matters is a willingness to adopt whatever
methods are necessary to achieve one’s objectives. Finally, the French Revolution
reinforced Lenin’s inclination to trust his political instincts; the more audacious
they were, the less prepared his enemies would be to oppose him. Danton might
have been one of the losers in the French Revolution, but the audacity he
recommended Lenin would adopt for his own purposes and thereby confer on
Robespierre’s ill-fated rival a form of posthumous vindication.

* * *
Unlike Lenin, who after the October Revolution seemed of two minds on the issue
of terror, at times doubting its necessity but never its morality, Trotsky always
pushed for the Bolsheviks to practise it. Any hesitation he said he felt was for
rhetorical effect, a way of disguising as ambivalence an enthusiasm, exceeded by
few other Bolsheviks, for mass terror on a scale surpassing that of the Jacobins’.⁴⁴
Its only defect when the Jacobins practised it, as far as Trotsky was concerned, was
that technology in the eighteenth century had not advanced sufficiently to make
possible the mass, institutionalized killing of the twentieth century.
On 1 December 1917, when Lenin was still temporizing on the issue of terror,
Trotsky, after noting that some in Russia ‘wax indignant’ at its use, said that if the
Bolsheviks could not succeed in defeating their class enemies by conventional
means, terror would be the only alternative.⁴⁵ Any terror the Bolsheviks practised,
he continued, should be ‘modelled on the terror of the Great French Revolution.
Not the fortress but the guillotine will await our enemies’.⁴⁶ On 2 December, after
justifying the recent decree outlawing the Kadets, as a result of which many of
their leaders were taken into custody, Trotsky offered a ritual obeisance to

⁴⁴ Pëtr Kropotkin may have had the Trotsky’s willingness to practise terror in mind when asked, in
December 1917, if the Paris Commune would be Lenin’s model for the new Soviet state. After
responding that the French Revolution provided a more likely antecedent, Kropotkin added (errone-
ously) that Lenin lacked ‘revolutionary ideals’, thereby suggesting that his commitment to the revolu-
tion could easily change. But Kropotkin said nothing comparable about Trotsky, commenting only that
the French Revolution followed ‘a pattern’ congenial to him. Edgar Sisson, One Hundred Red Days:
A Personal Chronicle of the Bolshevik Revolution (New Haven CT, 1931), p. 121.
⁴⁵ Quoted in Keep, Debate on Soviet Power, p. 177.
⁴⁶ Quoted in ibid., p. 178.
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moderation by stating that ‘we have not executed anybody and have no intention
of doing so’.⁴⁷ But he went on to say, menacingly, that ‘there are moments of
popular anger and the Kadets themselves have been looking for trouble’.⁴⁸ To
make certain that his threat was understood, Trotsky noted that ‘during the
French Revolution the Jacobins sent to the guillotine people more honest [than
the Kadets] who obstructed the people’s will’.⁴⁹ To reinforce the impression that
the Bolsheviks would deal with their enemies without the slightest sentimentality,
Trotsky called the guillotine ‘a remarkable invention’ that had the singular benefit
of making men ‘shorter by one foot’.⁵⁰
Not only in 1917 but for several years afterward, Trotsky proudly compared
himself to Robespierre and Saint-Just; partly to substantiate the comparisons, and
the larger one between the French and the Russian Revolutions, he wanted the
Bolsheviks to issue their own Declaration of the Rights of Man.⁵¹ But Danton was
the revolutionary Trotsky admired most (after Lenin), in part because he con-
sidered Danton’s oratorical abilities equal to his own; in one account it was said
that he imagined being Danton’s reincarnation.⁵² After a statue of the French
orator and revolutionary was erected in Petrograd in 1919, Trotsky was photo-
graphed standing proudly alongside it. Of course Trotsky’s pressing the compari-
son was not without its drawbacks; he had no wish to replicate Danton’s fate,
on the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotine worked its will at the hands of
Robespierre.⁵³ However, the most appropriate comparison, after Trotsky’s exploits
in creating a Bolshevik army and commanding it effectively enough to defeat the
Whites, was not to Danton, nor to Robespierre or Saint-Just, but to Lazare Carnot,
who oversaw the organization and mobilization of the revolutionary armies that
defended France and the French Revolution against external enemies in the mid-
1790s.⁵⁴
Not long after the October Revolution, Trotsky tried to persuade Lenin and the
other leaders of the new regime to try Nicholas II publicly, and then, after his
conviction, sentence him to death; a guillotine would already have been erected in
Palace Square in Petrograd to achieve the prescribed result.⁵⁵ In arguing for this to

⁴⁷ L. Trotsky, ‘Rech’ na zasedanii petrogradskogo soveta ob otnoshenii k uchreditel’nomu sobraniiu

i partii’, Delo naroda (2 December 1917), in Trotsky, Sochineniia, vol. III: Part 2, p. 138.
⁴⁸ Ibid. ⁴⁹ Ibid. ⁵⁰ Quoted in Getzler, Martov, p. 176.
⁵¹ Shlapentokh, French Revolution and the Russian Anti-Intellectual Tradition, p. 254.
⁵² Pierre Fervacque, La Vie Orgueilleuse de Trotski (Paris, 1929), p. 125. In his PhD dissertation,
‘Uses of the Past: Bolshevism and the French Revolutionary Tradition’ (Harvard University, 1989),
p. 189, Gabriel Schoenfeld speculates plausibly that Stalin’s dictatorship, for all the bitter criticisms
Trotsky levelled against it, served a positive role for Trotsky, enabling him, vis-à-vis Stalin, to be the
Russian Danton.
⁵³ Eastman, ‘Jacobinism and Bolshevism’, p. 73.
⁵⁴ Nicolas Krasso, ‘Trotsky’s Marxism’, in Trotsky: The Great Debate Renewed, edited by Nicolas
Krasso (St Louis MO, 1972), p. 22.
⁵⁵ Shlapentokh, ‘Images of the French Revolution in the February and Bolshevik Revolutions’, p. 46;
Lev Trotsky, Dnevnik i pis’ma, edited by Iu. G. Fel’shtinskii (Moscow, 1986), p. 100. In 1917 a rumour
circulated in Petrograd that the guillotine could now be electrified, and thus would be capable of
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happen, Trotsky, who imagined himself as the chief prosecutor in the trial, did not
have to make explicit the parallel between what he hoped would be the fate of
Nicholas II and what was actually the fate of Louis XVI. Trotsky’s proposal,
however, was not accepted, but that did not diminish his enthusiasm for the
application of terror. In June 1918 he warned the Whites and all the other enemies
of the Bolsheviks that ‘Soviet power has still not employed the terror of the French
Revolution . . . and that the patience of the Soviet government could run out’.⁵⁶ To
underscore that he meant his threat seriously, he repeated his earlier observation
about the guillotine reducing people’s height by the length of their head.⁵⁷
Even before the Civil War ended, Trotsky ascribed victory he expected to the
terror he had recommended on the basis of the Jacobin Terror in the French
Revolution.⁵⁸ In his essay, Between Red and White, written in 1922, Trotsky evoked
the French Revolution yet again, this time, in a chapter entitled ‘The Georgian
Gironde’, for the purpose of denigrating the Mensheviks in Georgia. The republic
they had established there in 1917 was not a socialist one; its leaders were
Wilsonian liberals masquerading as socialists.⁵⁹ Never one to acknowledge error,
Trotsky expressed no qualms about annihilating class enemies regardless of their
specific identity—the Whites, the kulaks (i.e. the most affluent peasants), and ‘the
bourgeoisie’ were all the same to him—and he later condemned Stalin’s Terror in
the mid-1930s only because its victims included his supporters and one of his sons.
Trotsky and Lenin were not the only Bolsheviks to justify harsh measures
against their enemies, and to do so by citing the Jacobins; their argument in reality
boiled down to the notion that because the Jacobins practised terror in the French
Revolution, and since the French Revolution, like the October Revolution, was
progressive in furthering the course of history, for them to employ the same tactic
for the same purpose was not only justified but politically prudent. This, no doubt,
was what prompted other Bolsheviks, such as V. V. Osinskii, to argue in Pravda in
September 1918 that the punishments the bourgeoisie deserved—in his mind
these varied, depending on the degree to which its members posed a political
threat to the new regime, from execution to forced labour to mere confinement in
concentration camps—were justified because the Jacobins had likewise killed large
numbers of evil people for equally virtuous reasons.⁶⁰ Other Bolsheviks were no

decapitating 500 people with only one movement of the blade. Julia Cantcuzene, Revolutionary Days
(New York, 1970), p. 342.

⁵⁶ Quoted in Shlapentokh, Counter-Revolution in Revolution, p. 123.

⁵⁷ Ibid.
⁵⁸ L. Trotsky, ‘Doklad na ob”edinennom zasedanii III s”ezda Sovnarkhozov i Moskovskogo Soveta
Rab. i kr, Deputatov’, Ekonomikicheskaia zhizn’, no. 18 (28 January 1920), in Trotsky, Sochineniia,
vol. XV, p. 56.
⁵⁹ Leon Trotsky, Between Red and White: A Study of Some Fundamental Questions of Revolution
(New York, 1975), pp. 68–72.
⁶⁰ V. V. Osinskii, ‘Belyi i krasnyi terror,’ Pravda, no. 192 (8 September 1918): p. 3.
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less cold-blooded in how they believed enemies of the October Revolution should
be neutralized, and similarly cited its French predecessor for moral corroboration
and legitimacy.
But the French Revolution served other purposes in the years that followed the
October Revolution. For Stalin, it was actually something to minimize. As a
Georgian, Stalin saw the October Revolution more as the first step in the eman-
cipation of the oppressed peoples of the East than as the culmination of the
various revolutions, most of them in France, that had occurred in the West.
This meant that the French Revolution was of only limited utility. As a bourgeois
revolution, it did not speak to the interests of the proletariat. Nor, as a Western
revolution, was it relevant to the peoples of the East. Stalin articulated the first
of these axioms in a speech in January 1918 to the Third Congress of Soviets, in
which he claimed that the French Revolution essentially defined what it meant to
be French. France, he said, was ‘that land of bourgeois democracy’.⁶¹ In April 1920
Stalin again minimized the applicability of the revolution, this time to Russia
itself. Both in time and space, it was fundamentally different from the Revolution
of 1905 and the October Revolution: the French Revolution occurred when the
proletariat was weak, while the two later revolutions occurred when the proletariat
was stronger (in 1905) and stronger still (in 1917).⁶² Stated simply, which is how
Stalin usually expressed himself on issues involving Marxist ideology—not
because he was unintelligent or ignorant of its intricacies, but because he wanted
his readers to understand him—Stalin’s position differed significantly from what
by 1920 had become the Party Line: that the October Revolution was the inevitable
successor to the French Revolution, and for that reason the two revolutions should
be considered part of a larger unfolding of history, of which the Bolsheviks served
as its current instrument and beneficiary.
Stalin, by contrast, was intent on establishing the self-sufficiency of the October
Revolution, which in his mind lent to what the Bolsheviks were doing a different
kind of virtue. To Stalin what legitimized the October Revolution, and lent to it its
nobility of purpose, apart from the myth that it was carried out spontaneously by
the proletariat, was that it succeeded without the assistance of other countries.
In 1917 the Bolsheviks had acted alone, and the utility of their doing so was that
it served to clarify Russia’s relationship to the West—that it was the antithesis of
the West, and largely sui generis in its history and culture. Indeed, if there was any
part of the world to which the Bolsheviks should now be devoting special
attention, it was the lands to their east. Indeed, in his ‘theses’ on ‘the national
question’ presented to the Tenth Party Congress when it convened in March,
Stalin took pains to clarify the reasons why countries in Western Europe were

⁶¹ J. V. Stalin, ‘Zakliuchitel’noe slovo po dokladu o natsional’nom voprose’, in Stalin, Sochineniia,

vol. IV, p. 36.
⁶² J. V. Stalin, ‘Lenin, kak organizator i vozhd’ RKP’, ibid., p. 311.
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different—politically, economically, and ideologically—from those in Eastern

Europe. In his mind, these boiled down to a single historical peculiarity: the states
that emerged in Eastern Europe were uniquely affected by non-European peoples,
among them the Turks and the Mongols, whose depredations ensured that the
states that succeeded them, notably Austria, Hungary, and Russia, were multi-
national.⁶³ Left unsaid, but clearly implicit in Stalin’s analysis, was that the other
parts of the world the Turks and the Mongols had once imperialized were also
multinational—and thus equally unaffected by Western history and culture.
Like Stalin, Bukharin often viewed events in Russia from a global perspective.
But whereas Stalin often excluded Western Europe from the parts of the world he
considered susceptible to the Bolsheviks’ message, Bukharin did the opposite. In
his view the Bolsheviks could learn much from Europe—and from the French
Revolution in particular. But unlike Trotsky, Bukharin did not consider the latter
just a European phenomenon. In the model it presented to posterity, and in the
ideas and moral values it introduced, the French Revolution had relevance well
beyond both Europe and Russia. At its core, it was a supra-European revolution,
indeed a prototype for revolution everywhere. In fact, the only thing that distin-
guished one country and one period of history from another was the time it took
in each of them for socialism and communism to be achieved.
In much of what he wrote from 1917 to the mid-1920s Bukharin repeated what
by then had become Leninist orthodoxy on the French Revolution. Like other
Bolsheviks he practically deified the Jacobins as models of revolutionary valor;
eulogizing Dzerzhinskii in 1926, he paid him the ultimate compliment by repeat-
ing Lenin’s earlier description of the ruthless and morally uncompromising police
chief as ‘a proletarian Jacobin’.⁶⁴ In The ABC of Communism, co-authored with
Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, he made clear his belief that the phraseology Lenin used
to characterize the Jacobins also characterized the Bolsheviks—and that the
reverse was also true. Of course, in Bukharin’s Manichean view of the world, the
Bolsheviks’ enemies had to be demonized in the most damning rhetoric imagin-
able. For having supported Russia’s involvement in the First World War, and for
counselling leniency for the SR defendants in the first show-trial in Russia in 1922,
Plekhanov, according to Bukharin, was just a latter-day Girondin, whose perfidy
and hypocrisy in claiming falsely to be a genuine Marxist and socialist contrasted

⁶³ J. V. Stalin, ‘Ob ocherednykh zadachakh partii v natsional’nom voprose. Tezisy k s”ezdu RKP(b),
utverzhdennye TsK partii’, ibid., pp. 15–16. Stalin’s view of the French Revolution was also idiosyn-
cratic, at least among the Bolsheviks, in that in contrast to Lenin and Marx, he praised their respective
bêtes noirs, Blanqui and Ferdinand Lassalle, who he said were weak on theoretical and ideological
matters, but strong on practical ones—in contrast to Plekhanov and Kautsky, for whom the reverse was
true. Given Stalin’s own penchant for the practical, one suspects that if forced to choose between the
two sets of revolutionaries, he would have opted for the former, despite their denigration by Lenin and
Marx, the only two persons in the Bolshevik and Marxist universe Stalin inhabited whom he considered
his superiors. Stalin, ‘Lenin, kak organizator i vozhd’ RKP’, ibid., p. 314.
⁶⁴ ‘ “Rech” tov. N. I. Bukharina’, Pravda, no. 168(3397) (24 July 1926): p. 3.
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sharply with the honesty and valour of the Jacobins.⁶⁵ The French Revolution, in
other words, could be seen as a struggle within a struggle, as the Jacobins fought
the Girondins while the revolution they both claimed to personify was fighting
desperately to beat back its foreign enemies.
But the French Revolution, in Bukharin’s estimation, was more than a morality
play in which the roles of the virtuous and the iniquitous were obvious to
everyone. He cited it in The ABC of Communism not just to demonstrate that,
as the archetypical bourgeois revolution, it could not possibly prefigure the
October Revolution in any of the ways in which the latter, as a socialist revolution,
was unique; in 1919, when the book was written, no revolutions similar to the
Bolshevik had succeeded, and those that had occurred had failed. Rather, the
French Revolution was invoked to demonstrate certain general laws of revolution;
one of these was that the resistance they generate is bound in almost every
instance to result in civil war. In addition, the revolution in France preached a
message of opposition to political authority attractive to everyone suffering from
oppression irrespective of their class or station in life:
The revolutionary French bourgeoisie, as represented by Danton, Robespierre,
and the other noted figures of the first epoch of the revolution, appealed to all the
people of the world on behalf of deliverance from every form of tyranny; the
Marseillaise, written by Rouget de l’Isle, and sung by the armies of the revolution,
is dear to the hearts of all oppressed peoples.⁶⁶

For Bukharin the French Revolution’s influence on the course of history was
potentially limitless. In an essay on historical materialism in 1921, he made clear
that its principal achievement was not in bringing capitalism to France, but rather
enabling it to develop everywhere. In that way, the French Revolution transcended
the particular material circumstances that caused it. Indeed, its consequences were
not confined to politics or the economy: ‘[The French Revolution] created a rich
national literature; it produced numerous men of genius [who were] painters,
prose writers, poets, and philosophers’.⁶⁷ More than other Bolsheviks, Bukharin
embraced the notion that revolutions transformed the arts and aesthetic principles
as well as politics, and that by substituting new genres and modes of expression for
old ones, revolutions enrich the lives of everyone. Moreover, the very fact that
Bukharin wrote knowledgeably about the arts shows that to him they had an
intrinsic worth that transcended time and space. This, too, he seemed to suggest,
was a universal law of revolution. Art had a way of projecting itself beyond what
was possible in politics and in economic relationships, and for that reason
Bukharin sincerely approved of the vocational freedom artists enjoyed under
Lenin without repudiating his opinion that the only two-party system he would

⁶⁵ N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism (Monmouth, Wales, 2006), p. 154.
⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 198. ⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 197.
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countenance in the Soviet Union was one in which one party ruled and the other
was in prison.⁶⁸ This, in fact, was a fairly accurate description of the Soviet Union
when its leaders were sponsoring extravagant pageants and celebrations designed
to mimic the fêtes the Jacobins had produced to symbolize their transformational
objectives.
In sharp contrast to Bukharin’s vision of the French Revolution was the way
two other Bolsheviks viewed it. For David Riazanov, whose principal contribution
to Bolshevism was publishing a comprehensive collection of the works of Marx
and Engels, the French Revolution might well have been two revolutions, the first
a bourgeois revolution led by the bourgeoisie, the second one a bourgeois revo-
lution led by classes and categories of the population less prosperous and powerful
than the bourgeoisie; these included the workers of Paris, such as they were in
1792, when the Jacobins, ‘as representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, came to
power and pressed the demands of their class to their logical conclusions’.⁶⁹ While
Riazanov did not draw any analogy between the French and the Russian Revolu-
tions in his joint biography of Marx and Engels, where his analysis of the Jacobins
appeared, one can easily imagine how he would have conceptualized it: the
Provisional Government’s equivalent in France would be the National and Legis-
lative Assemblies that governed the country from 1789 to 1792, while the new
Soviet government would be reminiscent of the Jacobins, though not its replica
because the classes the Bolsheviks represented were even more radical than those
the Jacobins had claimed to represent in France. The genuine ambivalence with
which Riazanov viewed the Jacobins—more progressive than the feudal nobility,
but not nearly enough to rival the proletariat—is readily apparent in the joint
biography.⁷⁰
Karl Radek hardly differed from Riazanov in how he viewed the French Revo-
lution. However, he chose to emphasize its unfulfilled aspirations rather than its
actual accomplishments. Radek was suspicious of arguments that the Jacobins
themselves—in contrast to the classes they represented—were proletarian. In fact,
as he explained in 1920 in a book entitled Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism,
there were always revolutionaries to the left of the Jacobins, such as Jean-François
Varlet and Jacques Roux, who, like the Jacobins, differed in their class origin from
their particular political constituency. But because they and their supporters were
more radical than the Jacobins, Varlet and Roux soon became political liabilities,
and the Jacobins had no choice but to send them, in the spring of 1794, to the
guillotine. This seemed, at first, to ensure the Jacobins’ survival politically. Having
completed the destruction of feudalism in France, there was nothing left for them

⁶⁸ Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 201.

⁶⁹ David Riazanov, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: An Introduction to their Lives and Work
(New York and London, 1973), p. 19.
⁷⁰ Ibid., pp. 18–19.
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to do given their origins in the petit-bourgeoisie. In fact, by eliminating the sans-

culottes and the others to the left of them ideologically, they reduced their political
base to such an extent that the success of the coup d’état on 9 Thermidor was a
foregone conclusion.⁷¹ But even if the Jacobins had not done things that were so
manifestly self-defeating, because they had outlived their historical usefulness, they
would have lost power no matter what they did; the only variable in their downfall
was its timing.
None of what Radek wrote about the French Revolution differed significantly
with what Lenin had already argued. Both men maintained that the Jacobins, for
all their achievements, were in the end imprisoned by the times in which they
lived, and when they tried to escape from their confinement, history and the
Marxist dialectic brought them down. Moreover, Radek resembled Lenin in one
other way, namely in his ability to assassinate the character of anyone who
disagreed with him; the only difference was that the latter preferred the rhetorical
equivalent of a sledgehammer to express his arguments ad hominem, while the
former used cutting sarcasm.⁷² Radek’s book was intended as a response to the
criticisms Karl Kautsky had recently levelled at the Bolsheviks, and it was entirely
in keeping with Radek’s contempt for the German socialist that he dismissed
his criticisms, which included references to the French Revolution and to the
Jacobins, as expressions of his ‘castrated Marxism’.⁷³
Intentionally or not, Kautsky’s critique of the October Revolution was guaran-
teed, in the case of the Bolsheviks, to be met with a torrent of invective intended to
destroy the author’s credentials as a socialist. Although they had already done
much to discredit them, one suspects that Radek, and also Lenin and Trotsky,
believed still more had to be done to finish the job. Had Kautsky lost all credibility
among European socialists, they probably would not have attacked him so relent-
lessly. But that is what they did. What triggered the assault was Kautsky’s first
extended denunciation of Bolshevism, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, pub-
lished in 1918. It was followed two years later by an even more thoroughgoing
repudiation of Bolshevism in a book entitled Terrorism and Communism. In both
works Kautsky invoked the French Revolution to clarify and strengthen his
objections.

⁷¹ Karl Radek, Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism (Detroit MI, n.d.), pp. 16–21.
⁷² A typical example of Radek’s modus operandi in that respect was his response, at the Twelfth
Party Congress in 1923, to Voroshilov’s comment, as Radek followed Trotsky towards the podium, that
‘the lion (because Trotsky’s first name in Russian was also the word for the animal) is followed by his
tail’. Radek replied that it was ‘better to be Trotsky’s tail than Stalin’s ass’. When the latter inevitably got
wind of this, he asked Radek if his rejoinder was one of his jokes, to which Radek replied: ‘Yes, but I did
not invent the one about you being the leader of the international proletariat.’ Ben Lewis, Hammer &
Tickle: A Cultural History of Communism (New York, 2009), p. 60. One may safely infer that from that
moment on, Radek, to Stalin, was a dead man walking.
⁷³ Radek, Proletarian Dictatorship, p. 19.
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In the first of these works Kautsky reversed his view, first expressed after the
1905 Revolution, that the second, and presumably more successful bourgeois
revolution in Russia that would follow it need not be carried to completion by
the bourgeoisie; a coalition of the peasantry and the proletariat, which was what
Lenin recommended, could act on its behalf. According to Kautsky, something
similar had happened in the French Revolution, when the Jacobins, representing a
coalition of elements of the urban and rural lower classes, took power from the
bourgeoisie. But the Jacobins lost power before their more radical supporters
could carry out a socialist revolution. This, however, need not be the fate of the
Bolsheviks, who might take power and then proceed seamlessly to the construc-
tion of socialism.⁷⁴ Of course when Kautsky was contemplating these hypothet-
icals, no one in Russia or anywhere else in Europe had exercised his imagination to
the same extent. Kautsky, in other words, was proceeding, if only in his own mind,
where no other European Marxist, not even Lenin or Trotsky, had gone before.
By the time Kautsky was writing The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, however,
reality, rather than mere possibilities, was what concerned him. The Bolsheviks
had taken power in what they claimed to be a proletarian revolution. From his
observations of the new Bolshevik regime, Kautsky felt compelled to acknowledge
that the possibility of a proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917—and thus the
possibility of a proletarian regime in Russia in 1918—was actually a fantasy. In
reality, Russia in 1917 was ready only for a bourgeoisie revolution, and the only
way the government it established could be proletarian was if this government was
a dictatorship. The October Revolution, in other words, had been a hoax. Its
perpetrators had taken power under false pretenses. The Bolsheviks had far
exceeded the Marxist parameters of what was politically possible; given that
capitalism in Russia had emerged only a quarter-century earlier, the only revolu-
tion in 1917 that could have produced a stable regime was a bourgeois revolution.
In fact, the very prematurity of the October Revolution had made the application
of terror a virtual necessity; without it the Bolsheviks would surely lose power—as
the Jacobins did.⁷⁵
By 1920 what the Bolsheviks had done since his writing The Dictatorship of the
Proletariat only confirmed Kautsky’s earlier objections to both the October
Revolution and the terror he thought the Bolsheviks had no choice but to inflict
because of it. But the very fact that the Bolsheviks had adopted that particular
tactic—as Kautsky carefully explained in Terrorism and Communism—was proof
they would soon lose power, and all one had to do to convince anyone who

⁷⁴ Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Ann Arbor MI, 1964), pp. 55, 101–2, 116,
148–9, and passim.
⁷⁵ Ibid., p. 57. In his analysis of Kautsky’s condemnation of Bolshevism, Leszek Kolakowski
recognized the role the Jacobins played in it, and made clear his agreement with the German socialist’s
analysis. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution (Oxford,
1978), vol. II, p. 45.
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doubted it was to note that the Jacobins, who like the Bolsheviks were weak and
felt the need to appear strong, had done the same thing and lost power anyway.
Terror, in short, was morally wrong because there were no circumstances in which
it could succeed in protecting governments like the Jacobins’ whose objectives,
considered on their merits, were progressive and therefore morally justified.
Terror was detrimental to all that was best in the French Revolution because it
could not prevent its betrayal by the Jacobins’ successors.⁷⁶ And to underscore the
point that mass killings of any kind, not just those involving premeditation, as was
true for the Jacobins’, were both counterproductive and morally wrong, Kautsky
included in Terrorism and Communism his opprobrium of the massacres predat-
ing the Jacobins’ in the French Revolution, in particular those that accompanied
the storming of the Bastille. For revolutions to succeed, they must be consensual,
or at least command sufficient popular support so that terror will not be required
to perpetuate the new regimes that follow them.⁷⁷ In Kautsky’s ethical calculus of
the tactics revolutionaries could choose to achieve their objectives, terror was so
morally corrupting and repugnant that it was alien even to animals, who killed
only for survival.⁷⁸
Kautsky failed to indicate if there were other circumstances in which terror,
as a matter of policy, was morally justified, as, for example, in its application by
a government that had come to power consensually but now was threatened by a
minority that refused to acknowledge its legitimacy. But for the Bolsheviks, the
meaning of Kautsky’s exegesis on the morality of terror was undeniable. Its
purpose was nothing less than to deny the moral legitimacy of the October
Revolution, which for the Bolsheviks was tantamount to proclaiming that the
nascent Soviet state did not deserve to survive. Kautsky’s argument could be boiled
down to a logical syllogism: like the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks took power prema-
turely; as happened to the Jacobins, this caused the Bolsheviks to practise terror,
which was costing them what little popular support they had; thus they would be
toppled by a contemporary equivalent of the Directory or Napoleon. In the book,
which was written while the Civil War in Russia was still in doubt, Kautsky did not
indicate if he thought the Whites were capable of defeating the Bolsheviks, but he
clearly believed that if the Whites did not topple them, some other coalition of
reactionary elements would do so—and for Kautsky that was an outcome even (or
especially) socialists should wish for.

⁷⁶ Karl Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Contribution to the Natural History of Revolution
(London, 1920), pp. 38–43 and passim.
⁷⁷ Ibid., pp. 134, 137–8.
⁷⁸ Ibid., pp. 121–7. In explaining why the Jacobins practised terror, Stanley Hoffmann adopted a
similarly ‘functionalist’ interpretation, arguing that while Robespierre and the others on the Committee
of Public Safety thought their own moral virtue entitled them to kill people, they had no intention of
practising mass terror before ‘the hectic and heated circumstances in which France almost died in 1793’
forced them to do so. Hoffmann, ‘The French Revolution and the Language of Violence’, p. 155.
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Lenin and Trotsky of course were outraged by Kautsky’s entire critique, which
seemed to situate what they had done in 1917 and thereafter well beyond the
bounds of what Marxism permitted. Trotsky, in particular, took umbrage at
anyone who questioned his perspicacity in recommending a revolution that not
even Marx—if one excluded his late flirtation with the notion of conflating the
bourgeois and proletarian revolutions in Russia into one—believed could endure.
And it was Trotsky, not Lenin, who in his rebuttal invoked the French Revolution,
quite possibly in the belief that by refuting Kautsky’s views on the French
Revolution, he was casting doubt on the German socialist’s credentials as an
analyst of the Bolshevik Revolution.⁷⁹
Early in his critique, which was published in 1920, Trotsky made clear that the
two revolutions were really signposts on the road directing humanity to its own
emancipation. Neither revolution could be understood without consideration of
the other. The French Revolution was ‘the greatest event in modern history’, not to
be surpassed, or even equalled until the Bolshevik Revolution.⁸⁰ The French
Revolution, in other words, was not just an earlier analogue of the Bolshevik
Revolution, but part of a larger unfolding of history in which the second revolu-
tion was an indication of how far humanity had progressed since the first one; for
that reason the French Revolution had a special relevance to the Bolsheviks that
nothing else in history, not even the 1905 Revolution, provided. The Red Army
was a latter-day reincarnation of the French revolutionary armies, and the terror
that was applied by the Jacobins was directed against enemies who had the same
objective of obstructing the course of history as those the Bolsheviks currently
faced in the Civil War. The fact that the Jacobins’ enemies were both internal and
foreign only heightened the danger they posed, and justified the means the
Jacobins adopted to defeat them. Trotsky summarized the relationship between
the two revolutions as follows:
[T]he Russian Revolution, which culminated in the dictatorship of the proletar-
iat, began with just that work which was done in France at the end of the
eighteenth century. Our forefathers, in centuries gone by, did not take the trouble
to prepare the democratic way—by means of revolutionary terrorism—for
milder manners in our revolution.⁸¹

For Trotsky, terror was not some extraneous appendage to the two revolutions, in
the moral evaluation of which it could be cavalierly ignored. Rather, it comprised
their very essence. The audacity of what revolutions try to do makes resistance
inevitable, and the fact that in the French Revolution things worsened for the

⁷⁹ Lenin’s response was published as a pamphlet entitled Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i renegat Kautskii
in Petrograd in 1918. It also appeared, greatly condensed but with the identical title, in Pravda, no. 219
(11 October 1918): p. 3.
⁸⁰ Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (Ann Arbor MI, 1969), p. 49.
⁸¹ Ibid., p. 24.
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Jacobins before they improved only underscored the wisdom of their not allowing
any ‘bourgeois’ moral scruples to hold them back. Like Kautsky, Trotsky chose to
rationalize the terror the Bolsheviks were then inflicting on their own enemies in
the form of a syllogism. The French Revolution was a good thing for France and
for humanity; the October Revolution was similarly beneficial; thus the tactics that
were adopted in the French Revolution that enabled it to achieve its objectives
were ones the Bolsheviks, no less legitimately, could employ.⁸² In Trotsky’s
formulation of the relationship between means and ends in revolutions he con-
sidered morally virtuous, the moral value of the former was identical to that of the
latter. This of course was contrary to the usual supposition that ‘the ends do not
justify the means’. Trotsky was not claiming that the moral virtue of communism
justified tactics intended to achieve it, such as the mass extermination of real or
potential enemies that were evil. Rather, he was arguing that terror was justified
when it was adopted to achieve a virtuous objective, but morally abhorrent when
used to achieve an objective that was immoral. Implicit in Trotsky’s formulation
was that there were no limits to the terror governments might justifiably inflict as
long as their objectives remained virtuous.
Of course to Kautsky, Trotsky’s logic was incomprehensible, which only further
confirmed Trotsky’s opinion that by criticizing the Bolsheviks, Kautsky was
betraying socialism just as much as he did by supporting Germany’s declaration
of war in 1914. That Kautsky was still considered a socialist by many self-
described socialists in Europe infuriated Trotsky because it implied support for
Kautsky’s charge that the tactics the Bolsheviks were employing to ensure the
Soviet state’s survival were unethical not just in the ‘bourgeois’ sense of the word,
but also in the way socialists defined it.⁸³
Another prominent socialist who cited the French Revolution in strengthening
her critique of the October Revolution was Rosa Luxemburg. In an essay written
shortly before her assassination in 1919, she began her critique in an unexpected
way. Instead of stressing the dissimilarities between the two revolutions, so that
the iniquity of the Bolshevik was accentuated by the virtue of the French, she
stressed what she considered their similarity; the Bolsheviks, she said, were ‘the
historic heirs’ of the Jacobins.⁸⁴ Moreover, the French Revolution did wonderful

⁸² Ibid., pp. 23–5, 49–50, 55–9.

⁸³ Years later, the Soviet historian V. G. Revunenkov was more charitable than Trotsky, and far less
given to rhetorical hyperbole, in cataloguing Kautsky’s errors in his analysis of the French Revolution.
While in Revunenkov’s estimation Kautsky was correct in stressing its ‘populist’ aspects, personified
most obviously in the sans-culottes, he was also, unfortunately, given to an overly ‘schematised’ view of
the revolution that exaggerated the influence of the sans-culottes to such an extent that he ignored the
degree to which the Jacobins, by the time their dictatorship ended, represented little more than a
segment of the petit-bourgeoisie. Although he did not say so explicitly, it seems logical to conclude that
to Revunenkov this was the reason—notwithstanding Kautsky’s unfair condemnation of it—that the
Jacobins were compelled to practise mass terror. Revunenkov, Ocherki po istorii Velikoi frantsuzskoi
revoliutsii, p. 105.
⁸⁴ Luxemburg, Russian Revolution, p. 41.
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things, and for that reason the Jacobins, who best embodied what it stood for,
deserved enormous credit. Their seizure of power (and also the means they
employed to remain in power, although Luxemburg did not make this point
explicitly) was:
the only means of saving the conquests of the revolution, of achieving a republic,
of smashing feudalism, of organising a revolutionary defence against inner as
well as outer foes, of suppressing the conspiracies of counter-revolution, and [of ]
spreading the revolutionary wave from France to all of Europe.⁸⁵

In contrast to Kautsky, who considered the Girondins genuine revolutionaries and

an acceptable alternative to the Jacobins, Luxemburg argued that whatever virtues
the Girondins possessed, their moderation made chimerical any scenario in which
they could have come to power and then avoid the ostensible excesses of which the
Jacobins were culpable. In any revolution, she wrote, ‘the golden mean’ cannot be
maintained.⁸⁶
For Luxemburg a moderate revolution was an oxymoron, as impossible in
France as in Russia. The French and Russian Revolutions, in fact, followed a
remarkably similar trajectory even though France and Russia, in their histories
and culture, were not at all alike. Russian peasants were far more distrustful of the
Bolsheviks than French peasants were of the Jacobins. But none of that had any
bearing on whether the Bolsheviks would remain in power and whether the
policies they followed would facilitate rather than hinder the achievement of
socialism. Where the Bolsheviks had gone wrong, in her opinion, was in not
trusting the Russian people to see the wisdom in what the Bolsheviks intended.
Disbanding the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 was foolish not because
democracy was always and everywhere preferable. Exercised to benefit capitalists
or reactionaries, it was harmful. But for a regime like the Bolshevik that had taken
power without popular support, it was essential. For that reason the Bolsheviks
should have allowed the assembly to function for its heuristic potential, because it
was a forum in which the Bolsheviks could demonstrate their support for the
peasantry while simultaneously persuading them that only by accepting socialism
could their poverty and oppression disappear. In the process, the Bolsheviks
would acquire badly needed credibility.⁸⁷ For Luxemburg this sequence of events
had occurred once before, namely in France during the bourgeois monarchy of
Louis Philippe, which was when the elements in the French population that still
resisted the French Revolution finally accepted it.⁸⁸
The message Luxemburg intended for the Bolsheviks was that unless they
allowed the people the opportunity to express their opinions, the popular support
they still enjoyed would be reduced to the point where they could only rule
through the application of force. Lost would be governance by popular consensus,

⁸⁵ Ibid., p. 37. ⁸⁶ Ibid., p. 38. ⁸⁷ Ibid., pp. 60–2. ⁸⁸ Ibid., p. 62.

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based not so much on agreement concerning the policies pursued in the present as
on acceptance of the promise socialism held out of a society in which the material
needs of the people were met and the spiritual contentment every human being
was entitled to was enjoyed. In 1918, when Luxemburg was writing, the whole
future of the Great Bolshevik Experiment—to which Luxemburg, for all her fears
of Lenin’s authoritarianism, was fundamentally sympathetic—still hung in the
balance, its outcome a function of whether the Bolsheviks could impress upon the
peasants how better off they were with the Bolsheviks in power to protect them
and to instruct them in the virtues of socialism. Luxemburg issued her critique
of the Bolsheviks cognizant that the ideological legitimacy of the October Revo-
lution was based on the socialist credentials of the Bolsheviks, about which she
was never in doubt. But she also recognized that the political legitimacy of the
October Revolution—whether the Russian people would support it voluntarily—
was very much in doubt because it had actually been an armed insurrection
lacking the support a genuine revolution commanded. The regime that resulted
was therefore a dictatorship—a proletarian dictatorship, to be sure, but a dicta-
torship nevertheless—and for that reason the Bolsheviks still had a great deal of
work to do—not as oppressors but as propagandists for an ideology the benevo-
lence of which she always assumed. Luxemburg did not object to proletarian
dictatorships per se, but rather to those that were established without majoritarian
support. For that reason, her acknowledgement that the regime headed by Lenin
and Trotsky was in fact such a dictatorship might have generated a response from
either or both of them as vitriolic and ad hominem as that which they directed at
Kautsky. But Luxemburg’s essay was not published until 1922, and her apotheosis
as a martyr to the cause of communism following her murder in 1919—to which
both Lenin and Trotsky added their condolences—made even a reasoned rebuttal
impolitic.⁸⁹
Other critics of the Bolsheviks were spared their rhetorical wrath. Among the
fortunate few were Russian liberals. By 1920 they had long ceased influencing
events in Russia, the vast majority of them either having left the country volun-
tarily after the October Revolution or forced to do so by the government. This was
true of Pëtr Struve, who by 1917 had long abandoned Marxism and adopted a
liberalism unusually attentive to peasants’ needs and aspirations. In condemning
actions of the Bolsheviks he considered politically unwise and morally objection-
able, Struve on one occasion cited the French Revolution, which in one respect he
considered analogous to the October Revolution. Both revolutions, he wrote, were

⁸⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Rech’ na mitinge protesta protiv ubiistva Karla Libknekhta i Rozy Liuksemburg 10
ianvaria 1919 g.’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXVII, p. 434. In 1932 Trotsky would minimize Luxemburg’s
criticism of the new Bolshevik regime while also exonerating her of Stalin’s charge that she was a
‘centrist’ rather than a genuine communist. He also strongly suggested that the aspects of the Bolshevik
regime she found objectionable were characteristic of Stalin’s rule, rather than Lenin’s. Leon Trotsky,
‘Hands Off Rosa Luxemburg!’ The Militant (6 and 13 August 1932), p. 4.
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principally challenged not by forces external to them, but by their own internal
dynamics. In the October Revolution these included a hypertrophied military and
the authoritarianism in Bolshevism itself, with which Struve, who as a former
Marxist knew Lenin well, was quite familiar. In the French Revolution the forces
that challenged it—Struve did not name them but it is clear he meant the
Directory, and possibly also Napoleon—halted the revolution but did not betray
it by reversing the transformative changes it made. In that respect the October
Revolution was radically different. According to Struve, the October Revolution
contained within itself the seeds of its betrayal.⁹⁰
Among the SRs, a comparable consensus emerged after the Treaty of Brest-
Litovsk, which, by formalizing Russia’s withdrawal from the First World War,
caused the Left SRs, who had previously supported the Bolshevik regime, to join
with the SR party in opposing it. Isaak Steinberg, a Left SR who had served as
Minister of Justice in the new government before it ordered his arrest and penal
incarceration, condemned the regime for its betrayal of socialism. In expressing
his disgust, he singled out the Bolsheviks’ infatuation with violence, which had
given rise in Russia to what he called ironically ‘the sacred guillotine’.⁹¹ The
mass arrests of Kadets, moreover, seemed to him a repetition of the mistakes of
the French Revolution, which before his apostasy he wrongly thought the
Bolsheviks had outgrown.⁹² Following his arrest, Steinberg rued how easily
and quickly in both the French and the Bolshevik Revolutions people could
descend ‘from the height of power to the gates of prison’.⁹³ Opinions critical of
the Bolsheviks, such as Steinberg’s, were of course nothing new to SRs like
Viktor Chernov who had never supported the October Revolution, and several
of them contributed articles to Delo and Delo Naroda condemning the Bolshevik
terror and apotheosizing victims of the French equivalent, most notably Danton.⁹⁴
Pitirim Sorokin recalled later that when the Bolsheviks were harassing the SRs
prior to their final prohibition and banishment, he felt especially empathetic to
the Girondins.⁹⁵
Not surprisingly, several French historians who had judged the February
Revolution a worthy successor of the French viewed the October Revolution as
a betrayal of both revolutions, and tangible evidence of history, as it were, going
backwards. It took time for them to reach this conclusion. Alphonse Aulard
gradually soured on the Bolsheviks after 1917, though not sufficiently, while the
Civil War still raged, to prefer a White victory. He signed a petition, published in
L’Humanité in 1919, opposing foreign intervention; in the same year, while
standing for election to the French National Assembly, he summarized his

⁹⁰ P. Struve, ‘Razmyshleniia o russkoi revoliutsii’, Russkaia mysl’ (January–February, 1921): pp. 35–6.
⁹¹ I. N. Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution (London, 1955), p. 137.
⁹² Ibid., p. 59. ⁹³ Ibid., p. 158.
⁹⁴ Shlapentokh, French Revolution and the Russian Anti-Democratic Tradition, p. 274.
⁹⁵ Sorokin, Leaves from a Russian Diary, p. 93.
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position on Russia in the form of a slogan, ‘Neither Bolshevism nor Reaction’.⁹⁶

But by 1923 he was sufficiently disgusted with all things Russian that he dispar-
aged Russian peasants, who he knew comprised a majority of the population, as
contemplative, apathetic, and inclined to mysticism. Their insatiable hunger for
land, moreover, had made them ‘petit-bourgeois’ in their politics, to the extent
that they had any—a charge the editor of Volia Rossii, which published the article
that contained Aulard’s accusation, angrily denied.⁹⁷ By the time of his death in
1928 Aulard’s objections to Bolshevism had hardened to the point where he
deemed fascist Italy its illegitimate offspring.⁹⁸
Despite the pungency of their criticism, because the threat they posed to the
Bolsheviks politically was minimal or nonexistent, Struve, Aulard, and even the
SRs, whose presence in Russia might have given their criticisms an immediacy and
credibility foreigners and émigrés lacked, could all be safely ignored. If critics such
as these required rebuttal, the task could be left to Soviet historians.⁹⁹ When the
Mensheviks criticized the new Soviet state, however, the Bolsheviks realized that
answering their charges was a priority. However weak politically, the Mensheviks’
ideological proximity to the Bolsheviks, along with the fact that both Martov and
Axelrod had a personal history with Lenin of roughly a quarter-century, meant
that if Lenin and Trotsky were preoccupied with even more pressing obligations to
respond themselves, others would have to do so in their place.
To the Bolsheviks, denying the ideological legitimacy of the October Revolution
was perhaps the greatest sin Marxist socialists could commit. To do so was
tantamount to rejecting the Soviet state the revolution produced. The Mensheviks
of course were well aware of this, as they were of the similarities between the
Bolsheviks and the Jacobins, which ensured that criticizing the latter could be a
subtle way of criticizing the former. This was precisely the strategy lesser-known
Mensheviks adopted. Familiar with the intelligentsia’s stratagem while the mon-
archy existed of using ‘Aesopian language’ to express their opposition to it—that is
to say, of disguising the true object of their opprobrium by criticizing something the
censorship would not realize was comparable to it—they came to the tactic natur-
ally. But the leaders of the Mensheviks drew the analogy directly. In December 1917
Fëdor Dan took to the pages of Iskra to attack Trotsky explicitly as ‘a home-bred

⁹⁶ Ian H. Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf (London, 1997), p. 110. Kondratieva claims that by 1919
Aulard had already become ‘an enemy’ of the Bolshevik regime and was collaborating with Russian
émigrés for the purpose of eventually overthrowing it. Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 174.
⁹⁷ A. A. Aulard, ‘Dve revoliutsii’, pp. 17, 20.
⁹⁸ Michel Vovelle, ‘1789–1917: The Game of Analogies’, in The French Revolution and the Creation
of Modern Political Culture, edited by Keith Michael Baker (New York, 1994), pp. 353–4.
⁹⁹ See, for example, A. Maletskii, ‘Nasilovanie teorii ili teoriia nasiliia gospodina Olarda’, Kommu-
nisticheskii internatsional, no. 7 (1925): pp. 82–3, where the author berated Aulard for recently
justifying the terror of the French Revolution as a ‘functional’ response to the requirements imposed
by war. Because Maletskii considered the Jacobin terror analogous to the Bolsheviks’, Aulard’s
justification, in his opinion, was not strong enough.
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Robespierre’.¹⁰⁰ Iulii Martov, after writing privately to Axelrod on 1 December that

‘only now has the “Jacobin” character in Leninism . . . been exposed in full measure’,
singled out Trotsky publicly three days later for his praising the guillotine’s prowess
as a means of execution.¹⁰¹ To Martov, this particular instrument of revolutionary
justice not only destroyed the innocent; it also coarsened and emboldened everyone
who used it. He concluded his indictment with a plea to his readers to ‘beware of the
guillotine!’¹⁰² Finally, when Iurii Larin, a professional historian also serving as a
Bolshevik commissar, cited the French Revolution in Pravda justifying the exclu-
sion of the Kadets from the Constituent Assembly, Martov, in Vpered, took Larin to
task for applying the methods of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which
included terror, to the twentieth. Such methods, he wrote, were the result of political
weakness and led directly to the betrayal of the revolution the Jacobins desired first
by the Directory and then by Napoleon.¹⁰³
Notwithstanding Martov’s criticisms of the Jacobins, there were many aspects
of the French Revolution he considered laudable. In its totality, its record was
mixed. That caused him, in distinguishing the good from the bad, to contradict
himself. In his letter of 1 December to Axelrod, he noted that before 1917 only a
bourgeois revolution was possible in Russia and that it would resemble the
French Revolution in its benevolence. But now that the October Revolution had
occurred, he had to acknowledge his error: because he had never expected a
second revolution to follow the first one so quickly, he could not possibly have
predicted that the arrangements that resulted from the second resolution were
neither bourgeois nor proletarian but rather something different, namely a
pseudo-proletarian dictatorship—Martov could not come up with a less turgid
designation—that was in fact emblematic of the less savoury aspects of the
French Revolution, in particular its tendency to embolden, rather than to
diminish, the forces it unleashed that were intent on ruling dictatorially.¹⁰⁴
But barely two weeks later, in Novyi luch, he condemned the Bolsheviks’ attacks
on the upcoming Constituent Assembly by citing how in 1792 the ‘revolutionary
vanguard’—by which Martov meant the Jacobins—did not force the Convention
to adopt the Jacobins’ radical policies, but instead achieved the same result by
peaceful suasion.¹⁰⁵ In making sense of the clear contradiction between Martov’s
two assertions—the second one, on 15 December, essentially exonerated the

¹⁰⁰ Quoted in Shlapentokh, Counter-Revolution in Revolution, p. 121.

¹⁰¹ Quoted in Ascher, Pavel Axelrod, p. 338.
¹⁰² Quoted in Getzler, Martov, p. 176.
¹⁰³ Iu. Larin, ‘Eshche o Kadetakh’, Pravda, no. 200(131) (9 December 1917): p. 1; Martov quoted in
Getzler, Martov, p. 173.
¹⁰⁴ Martov even described Lenin’s followers as sans-culottes. Jane Burbank, Intelligentsia and
Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917–1922 (New York, 1986), p. 20.
¹⁰⁵ Iu. O. Martov, ‘Revoliutsiia i uchreditel’noe sobranie’, Novyi luch, no. 12 (15 December 1917), in
Iu. O Martov, 1917–1922. Pis’ma i dokumenty (Moscow, 2014), pp. 367–8. According to Martov the
Girondins in the Convention were as amenable to this as the Jacobins were. This was because, in
Martov’s view, the Girondins and the Jacobins belonged to the same social class. Ibid.
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Jacobins of the charge for which he had condemned them on 1 December—one

might suggest that, to Martov, and to several other Mensheviks as well, the
French Revolution was like Janus, the Roman god with two face: one virtuous,
the other iniquitous. For that reason, in evaluating contemporary events, the
temptation to invoke ‘the face’ of the French Revolution that supported one’s
particular interpretation or explanation was virtually irresistible.
Martov’s ambivalence remained unresolved in 1918. In March, two months
after the Bolsheviks had confirmed Martov’s worst fears and disbanded the
Constituent Assembly, he wrote in Vpered that the event reminded him of
9 Thermidor—quite possibly the first public reference in Russia after the October
Revolution to this seminal event in the French Revolution that was generally
agreed to have inaugurated a period of reaction and retrenchment.¹⁰⁶ But while
reversing the policies of the Jacobins, Thermidor, according to Martov, did not
lead directly and immediately to an actual counter-revolution. In fact, in Martov’s
description of the phenomenon, the Thermidorians who initially wielded power
after the coup that toppled the Jacobins were genuine revolutionaries who simply
believed Robespierre and Saint-Just had gone too far. To the extent that they
dismantled much of the paraphernalia of the Jacobin Terror and reversed other
extreme policies the Jacobins pursued, Thermidor was a good thing for France.
But what made Thermidor, on balance, a tragedy was that, midway through it,
moderates were succeeded by reactionaries, who proceeded to repress revolution-
aries like Babeuf who threatened them; Martov did not say exactly when this
happened but one suspects he had in mind the coup of 18 Fructidor (4 September
1797).¹⁰⁷ These Thermidorians, in contrast to the virtuous ones who preceded
them in power, were ‘duplicitous adventurists’ who intended for France a dicta-
torship bent on reversing the advances that had been made since the revolution
began nearly a decade earlier.¹⁰⁸ What made all of this relevant to Russia, Martov
contended, was that the Bolsheviks, by imitating the Jacobins, were creating the
conditions for a Russian Thermidor, in which ‘gluttonous locusts’ would take
power in much the way the aforementioned adventurists had done in France.¹⁰⁹
Martov’s article, while clear in the analogy it posited between the Bolsheviks
and the Jacobins, confused more than it clarified when it seemed to suggest a
comparable analogy between the Mensheviks and Thermidor. If the former
analogy was valid, one would think that for Martov the second analogy had to
be valid as well. And if that were the case, it would suggest that the Mensheviks
were destined to take power, just as the Thermidorians did. But the distinction
Martov drew between good Thermidorians (1794–7) and bad ones (1797–9)
called all of this in question, and one has to wonder whether an analogy between

¹⁰⁶ Martov, ‘Nakanune russkogo termidora’, Vpered, no. 22(9) (March 1918), cited in Kondratieva,
Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 216, n. 40.
¹⁰⁷ Ibid., pp. 63–5. ¹⁰⁸ Ibid., p. 64. ¹⁰⁹ Ibid., p. 64.
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the Mensheviks and the Thermidorians was one any Menshevik who accepted
Martov’s analysis of the French Revolution would want to pursue. The reason they
would not is obvious: if, in the French Revolution, virtuous Thermidorians lost
power to evil ones, and if the Mensheviks were analogous to the former, then it
would follow, according to the terms of the analogy, that the Mensheviks were
destined to take power but then sometime later to relinquish it—and to persons
less virtuous than they. With such an outcome an integral part of the analogy, no
Menshevik would want to accept it. Complicating matters further was Martov’s
failure to explain who precisely in 1918 was the Russian equivalent of the evil
Thermidorians. One possibility was the military. Another was a socialist party
gone astray (which could conceivably have been the Bolsheviks were it not for the
fact that, in Martov’s scheme of things, they were already Russian Jacobins). Yet
another was Russian liberals, who, while not counter-revolutionary, nonetheless
thought Russian socialists were too extreme and had taken the Russian Revolution
too far. But Martov offered no guidance in this respect.
Martov’s intellectual acrobatics were a product of his belief, shared universally
by Marxist socialists, that history mattered—that, however obliquely and imper-
fectly, the present was prefigured in the past, and that invoking it to explain the
present brought clarity and resolve rather than obfuscation and paralysis. Even in
the last years of his life, he could not extricate himself from the abstract world of
historical analogies that was more real to him than the history they purportedly
explained. Specifically, he determined that the Bolsheviks could be admired for
their resemblance to the Jacobins without admiring, or even considering inevit-
able, what followed the Jacobins in the French Revolution. In 1923 he wrote that
the Jacobins ruled France as a dictatorship, and that the ‘revolutionary commit-
tees’ they established in 1794 to perpetuate themselves in power were ‘absolutely
identical’ to those the Bolsheviks had been obliged to create in 1919.¹¹⁰ Not
surprisingly, other leading Mensheviks drew the same comparison. In articles
written in 1918, Feodor Dan analogized the ongoing Bolshevik terror to that
which the Jacobins had unleashed in France—but without invoking Thermidor,
much less analysing it, as Martov did.¹¹¹ From Dan’s analysis, one could easily draw
the intended conclusion that the hypertrophied state Lenin was creating was
oblivious to the needs and wishes of the people. Mixing his historical references
freely, Dan also condemned the Bolsheviks for creating ‘a Caesarist dictatorship’
that might culminate in a reaction leading inexorably to a reversion to capitalism.¹¹²
In 1920 Pavel Axelrod, after Plekhanov’s death the grey eminence of
Menshevism, analogized the Bolsheviks to the Jacobins to demonstrate that
Martov’s analogy was incorrect. According to Axelrod, Martov had actually

¹¹⁰ Martov, Mirovoi bol’shevizm, p. 40.

¹¹¹ Shlapentokh, Counter-Revolution in Revolution, p. 121.
¹¹² F. Dan, ‘Bol’shevistskii bonapartizm’, Novaia zaria, no. 3–4 (20 May 1918): p. 16.
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been too lenient in his condemnation of Bolshevism. However similarly the

Jacobins and the Bolsheviks betrayed a revolution that until they each took
power had been a virtuous one, in the attributes that really mattered they were
dissimilar, and certainly not identical. Ethically, the Bolsheviks were far worse
than the Jacobins. There was nothing even remotely progressive about the state
they created, and Axelrod underscored how strongly he believed this by express-
ing his regret that he had ever claimed any analogy to the Jacobins.¹¹³ Whatever
resemblance there was was merely that which exists ‘between an original and a
clever parody, or between a grandiose, elemental event and a skillful imitation of
it’.¹¹⁴ Reiterating his belief that the Bolsheviks’ commitment to Marxism was
bogus, Axelrod included in his essay the comment that the Mensheviks, not the
Bolsheviks, were the rightful custodians of the interests of the proletariat, and for
that reason could never be analogized to the Girondins, who were capitalist.¹¹⁵
Axelrod’s remonstrations, like Martov’s lodged in books and articles published
abroad, evoked nothing like the vituperation that followed Kautsky’s. By then,
Axelrod was elderly, and with Martov suffering symptoms of the cancer that
would take his life a few years later, Lenin and Trotsky could reasonably expect
their animadversions to stop soon. For that reason, and because Lenin and
Trotsky were too preoccupied with other matters to take the time to refute the
two Mensheviks themselves, the historian N. M. Lukin was selected to serve as
their surrogate. Lukin was an appropriate choice. Having worked before the
October Revolution on the Bolshevik newspaper Nash put’, he could be expected
not to deviate from the party orthodoxy that the October Revolution was a
proletarian revolution. And as a professor of history at Moscow University he
could also be relied upon to substantiate his conclusions empirically.¹¹⁶
In his response, Lukin mostly agreed with Axelrod that the French and Russian
Revolutions were different in fundamental ways. But he drew from this the very
different conclusion that the October Revolution was ideologically legitimate.
The difference between the two revolutions was ultimately a matter of timing.
According to Lukin, the French Revolution occurred not only earlier than the
October Revolution, but during an earlier stage of history. In France in the late
eighteenth century, a proletariat did not exist. The Jacobin dictatorship was itself
petit-bourgeois because that was the class to which the Jacobins belonged at
birth, and as a result they were constitutionally incapable of carrying out policies
beneficial to the lower classes even though they knew they would lose power

¹¹³ ‘Tov. P. B. Aksel’rod o bol’shevizme i bor’be s nim’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 6 (20 April
1921): pp. 3–7 & no. 7 (4 May 1921): pp. 3–5. The article includes excerpts from a letter Axelrod had
written to Martov in 1920.
¹¹⁴ Ibid., no. 6 (20 April 1921), p. 4. ¹¹⁵ Ibid., no. 6 (20 April 1921), p. 5.
¹¹⁶ In 1936 he was named director of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences. But instead
of the position providing immunity from Stalin’s Terror, it made him a logical target of it. In 1938 he
was arrested and died in prison in 1940. Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 217, n. 52.
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without their support. This, in fact, was what happened in the spring and early
summer of 1794, with the result that on 9 Thermidor the haute-bourgeoisie
deposed the Jacobins and thereafter treated the lower classes with a malevolence
consistent with what one would expect of the bourgeoisie whenever it held
power. The Bolsheviks, however, were different. They were proletarian. While
Lukin understandably did not explain how this could be the case given that
the vast majority of the Bolsheviks were not themselves from the proletariat or
even, with rare exceptions like Stalin, from the lower classes generally, the reader
was expected to draw this conclusion, presumably because of everything the
Bolsheviks had done, and were still doing, to benefit the proletariat since taking
power just a few months before. The proletariat, for its part, was much larger
than the lower classes that supported the Jacobins in the French Revolution, and
Lukin was certain its support for the Bolsheviks would prevent anything even
remotely resembling a Thermidorian reaction or counter-revolution. Support
from the proletariat abroad made such a lamentable outcome even less likely.
For that reason, Lukin concluded, enemies of the Bolsheviks at home, princi-
pally the SRs and the Mensheviks, should not expect support from any countries
where the proletariat was powerful—by which he meant of course Western and
Central Europe. There the capitalists had all they could handle from their
indigenous working classes without involving themselves in a pointless effort
to overturn the verdict of the October Revolution in Russia.¹¹⁷
Like virtually all Soviet historians prior to the Gorbachev era, Lukin believed
that to classify historical events was tantamount to explaining them. This was
evident in the biography of Robespierre he was writing when he was called upon
to reply to Martov.¹¹⁸ Many years later, A. Z. Manfred called the biography ‘the first
Marxist monograph in Russia on the great French bourgeois revolutionary’.¹¹⁹
Given Manfred’s ideological predilections, this was high praise, and Lukin’s
biography was followed by a similar one, in 1925 by Ia. M. Zakher, that also
was well-received.¹²⁰ Among the arguments Lukin advanced was that the reason
the Jacobins fell was because the coalition they represented was, at bottom, an
artificial one. The Jacobins were not monolithic. They were divided into a right
wing, personified by Danton, and a left wing, represented by supporters of
Hébert and the sans-culottes, with Robespierre and his followers occupying the
amorphous and often shifting middle ground between them. The rhetorical
cross-fire Robespierre had to endure not only caused some confusion as to
what he stood for and what he intended for France. It also, more significantly,

¹¹⁷ N. Antonov [N. M. Lukin], ‘Istoricheskaia ekskursiia Martova’, summarized and analysed, but
without attribution, in Kondratieva, Bolsheviki–iakobintsy, pp. 68–9.
¹¹⁸ N. M. Lukin, Robesp’er (Petrograd, 1919); N. M. Lukin, Izbrannye Trudy v trekh tomakh
(Moscow, 1960), vol. I, pp. 17–156.
¹¹⁹ Manfred, Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, pp. 383–4.
¹²⁰ Ia. M. Zakher, M. Robesp’er (Moscow-Leningrad, 1925).
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caused him to eliminate both of these deviations from the centrist orthodoxy he
believed in and was attempting to impose. But since the Jacobins were also
threatened by counter-revolutionary forces, in the form of actual armies intent
on destroying them, after eliminating Danton and his followers Robespierre felt
compelled to adopt many of their policy prescriptions. In addition, Lukin made
the point that, deep in their hearts, Robespierre and the Jacobins preferred
policies based on economic principles, such as free trade, that were advanta-
geous to the bourgeoisie, but for purely political reasons enacted policies, such
as the Maximum, that harmed it.¹²¹ Were they to have remained in power
beyond the summer of 1794, Robespierre and whoever still supported him
would almost surely have eliminated the Maximum and restored at least a
modicum of free trade domestically. In short, the Jacobins were petit-
bourgeoisie forced by classes they did not belong to to pursue policies that
were harmful to the class to which they did.¹²² In the analysis Lukin provided in
his Robespierre biography, he unintentionally illustrated a problem that all
Marxist and Marxist–Leninist historians of the French Revolution had to
resolve, namely whether the terminology they applied to the people they studied
referred to the class into which they were born or to the class or classes that
benefitted from the actions they took.
Because in much of what they wrote about the Jacobins these historians did not
maintain this critical distinction between actions and social origins, the reader has
no way of categorizing the Jacobins by class: were they petit-bourgeois because of
their lineage, or plebeian or proto-proletarian by virtue of their policies? Lukin, in
his writings, opted for the former: Robespierre was amoral and hypocritical, but as
‘an ideologue of the petit-bourgeoisie’, he sensed acutely the inevitability and
historical necessity of capitalism; moreover he was also fearful of the proletariat
it would inevitably create.¹²³ Cynically using emerging elements of the lower

¹²¹ The Maximum was the short-form for the price controls the Jacobins imposed to keep unscru-
pulous profiteers from hoarding goods and then selling them at grossly inflated prices. They were
abolished in December 1794, five months after the Jacobins lost power.
¹²² Lukin, Robesp’er, especially pp. 118–42. Like Lukin, Zakher and Ts. Fridliand attributed the
Jacobins’ conservatism, relative to those to their left politically, to their origins in the petit-bourgeoisie.
Ia. M. Zakher, Parizhskie sektsii 1790–1795 godov (Petrograd, 1921); Ts. Fridliand, ‘Klassovaia bor’ba v
iiune–iiule 1793 goda’, Istorik marksist 2 (1926): pp. 159–209.
¹²³ What this characterization seemed to imply was that neither the Left Jacobins nor those on the
Right whom Robespierre destroyed—for political reasons sequentially rather than simultaneously—
were themselves petit-bourgeois: the former were plebeian or proto-proletarian, while the latter were of
the haute-bourgeoisie. But Lukin did not state this explicitly, and a number of Soviet historians,
including Manfred, who, despite his high opinion of Lukin’s work, argued that the Jacobins, in reality,
were part of a larger bloc that included the middle and petit-bourgeoisie, peasants, and urban plebeians
(whom they sometimes called proletarians or proto-proletarians). Not until the Gorbachev era did
Soviet historians try to emancipate themselves from the constraints of class analysis, and point out its
inadequacies. See, for example, the proceedings of a conference of historians in Moscow in September
1988; the portions on the Jacobins are summarized in A. V. Chudinov, ‘Nazrevshie problemy izuche-
niia istorii velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii (po materialam obsuzhdeniia v Institute vseobshchei istorii
AN SSSR)’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 2 (March–April 1989): pp. 65–74.
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classes to take power, Robespierre had no choice but to dispense with them when
they wanted to extend the French Revolution beyond the bourgeois, or petit-
bourgeois limits history had imposed on it. Given also the omnipresent threat of
counter-revolution aided by hostile forces abroad, Robespierre had no choice but
to turn on these elements of the lower classes that supported him, and send their
leaders to the guillotine. But this only weakened Robespierre further, and not long
afterwards he lost power and was himself guillotined, in large part the victim of
forces beyond his control. Implicit in all of this—and what made Lukin’s biog-
raphy so popular among the cognoscenti in the Communist Party—was its
implication that the fate Robespierre and the Jacobins suffered could never befall
the Bolsheviks. For that reason several Soviet historians of the revolution who
followed Lukin were pleased to reiterate his argument that the Jacobins were petit-
bourgeois and that that was what caused the coalition of lower classes they had
created to disintegrate.¹²⁴

* * *
The role the Jacobins played in the French Revolution was not the only issue
Soviet historians addressed in the first years of Soviet rule. Another was ‘Blan-
quism’, the meaning and relevance of which one might think had been litigated
among the Bolsheviks prior to the October Revolution, with the verdict Lenin
affirmed—that Blanquism encouraged coups d’état lacking mass support and was
thus a perversion of what the Jacobins had done—now etched firmly in Bolshevik
stone. But this was not the case. In 1921, B. I. Gorev, in his biography of Blanqui,
claimed that in his early years Marx had been a Blanquist, by which he meant that
at that time in his life Marx shared Blanqui’s conviction that revolution was both
an art and a tactic requiring the same temperament as required in warfare. In
addition, both Marx and Blanqui stressed the necessity for revolutionaries not to
ignore opportunities in which the likelihood of gaining power was considerable
even when popular support from the classes they claimed to represent and whose
interests they wished to advance was insufficient. The last similarity Gorev noted
was that both Marxists and Blanquists opposed the gradualism that, after both
Marx and Blanqui were dead, re-emerged in Eduard Bernstein’s evolutionary
socialism.¹²⁵

¹²⁴ Ts. Fridliand, Zhan-Pol’ Marat i grazhdanskaia voina XVIII v. (Moscow, 1959), p. 86.
¹²⁵ B. I. Gorev, Ogust Blanki (Moscow, 1921), especially pp. 108–15. In the book Gorev argued that
Plekhanov, despite his opposition to the terrorism of Narodnaia Volia—which he condemned precisely
because those practising it lacked popular support—was no less a Blanquist than Marx. A Menshevik
before becoming a Bolshevik, Gorev may have retained an admiration for Plekhanov inconsistent with
the prevailing Leninist orthodoxy that the Father of Russian Marxism had been both a bad Marxist and
an ineffectual revolutionary; lumping Plekhanov and Marx together might also have been a way of
minimizing the differences between Menshevism and Bolshevisim on the issue of terror, which in turn
would strengthen Gorev’s shaky credentials as a loyal and legitimate Bolshevik and supporter of the
Soviet state. But at least in this last respect Gorev had nothing to worry about. By 1921 Plekhanov was
dead, and his opinions no longer consequential politically. For that reason Gorev’s critics ignored what
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Not surprisingly, Gorev’s ideologically aberrant assertions produced an angry

response. In an article in 1923, a Bolshevik writing pseudonymously as ‘Sineira’
took Gorev to task for his apparent deviations from the Leninist axiom that
Blanquism was not only a perversion of Jacobinism but also, more significantly,
a perversion of Marxism. Sineira stated flatly that Gorev was wrong—that Marx
and Lenin always stressed that revolutions led by an elite required mass support,
and that if they lacked it they were destined to fail. By denying this fundamental
tenet of Marxism-Leninism, Gorev, in Sineira’s estimation, showed the same lack
of understanding of class struggle and its centrality in human endeavour of which
Blanqui himself was plainly culpable. The fact that the October Revolution
actually resembled what Blanqui preferred—rather than the mass upheaval the
Bolsheviks claimed it was—made the need to dismiss his credentials as an
estimable advocate and practitioner of revolution especially urgent.¹²⁶
In another broadside, also in 1923, Sineira claimed, once again, that Gorev,
erroneously, had turned Blanquism into a generic category encompassing all the
ways class struggle manifested itself in political revolutions. After rejecting the
criticism from Gorev’s supporters that he had denied Blanqui’s credentials as a
revolutionary, Sineira argued that all he was suggesting was that Blanqui was not a
Marxist revolutionary. In fact, the only attribute Blanqui shared with Marx was
that they were revolutionaries and were both courageous. Moreover, the only
arguable causal relationship between them was that Marx had influenced Blanqui,
rather than the other way around, as Gorev had suggested. And once that was
established, Sineira rejected Gorev’s claim that Marx’s support in the last years of
his life of the terrorism of Narodnaia Volia revealed a fundamental affinity
between the two men. According to Sineira, Marx never—not even when he
wrote nice things about Narodnaia Volia—shared Blanqui’s belief that the polit-
ical transformation revolutions entailed need not be preceded by an economic
transformation.¹²⁷
After Gorev responded, fairly weakly, that Sineira, in maximizing differences
between Blanqui and Marx that were actually inconsequential, was engaging in a
form of ‘scholasticism’, the debate came to an end, with the orthodoxy Sineira had
expressed reaffirmed.¹²⁸ But one aspect of it—that which concerned Narodnaia

he had written about Plekhanov, and focused their rhetorical fire on what he had written about Marx
instead.

¹²⁶ ‘Sineira’, ‘Est li v marksizme elementy blankizm?’ Pechat’ i revoliutsii, no. 5 (1923): pp. 112–115.
¹²⁷ ‘Sineira’, ‘Zakliuchitel’noe slovo k diskussii ob elementakh blankizma v marksizme’, Pechat’ i
revoliutsiia, no. 7 (1923), pp. 119–23.
¹²⁸ In 1928, however, those adhering to this view were the object of a mild rebuke. David Riazanov,
who in 1921 had founded the Marx–Engels Institute and was generally considered the principal
authority among the Bolsheviks on matters concerning Marx and Engels, noted (wrongly) in an article
on relations between Marx and Blanqui that Lenin always held Blanqui in high regard. D. Riazanov,
‘The Relations of Marx with Blanqui’, Labour Monthly: A Magazine of International Labour 10, no. 8
(August 1928), p. 492.
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Volia—re-emerged in the context of a somewhat different issue, which also

involved the French Revolution—only this time what was at stake was whether
the revolution had influenced the Bolsheviks directly, or whether its influence
was transmitted by the so-called Russian Jacobins of the late nineteenth century,
who unwittingly modified it to reflect Russian national history and culture. The
question of the historical provenance of Bolshevism—whether it was Russian
or French or, more broadly, Russian or non-Russian—had hovered over the
Bolsheviks practically since their emergence in 1903 as a distinct and identifiable
faction within the RSDLP. But it was not until the early 1920s, when the
Bolsheviks’ supremacy in Russia could no longer be doubted, and they finally
had the security to ruminate about their ideological origins, that the debate was
actually joined.
S. I. Mitskevich fired the first rhetorical shot. In 1923, in an article in Prole-
tarskaia revoliutstiia, he argued that in their tactics and organizational principles,
the Russian Jacobins of the late nineteenth century, most notably Zheliabov and
Tkachev, strongly resembled Lenin and the Bolsheviks. However unrealistic, even
utopian, their objectives given Russia’s unreadiness for a workers’ revolution, the
Russian Jacobins shared Lenin’s conviction that power in a revolutionary party
had to be centralized if it was to survive in a repressive autocracy, much less
destroy it once conditions had become more favourable. Moreover, the resem-
blance, according to Mitskevich, was not coincidental. Lenin inherited his desid-
erata on such matters from the Russian Jacobins, and the causal relationship that
existed in that regard extended to programmatic issues as well, such as the
confiscation of Church property and the immediate and rapid nationalization of
land.¹²⁹ In his article Mitskevich failed to answer the question his argument
suggested, namely why it was that a term borrowed from the French Revolution
should be applied to prominent actors in the Russian revolutionary movement
who did what they did because of observations and experiences having little or
nothing to do with the French Revolution. The views shared by Narodnaia Volia
and the Bolsheviks were the result of Russian realities, not French or European
ones. Moreover, in light of this one might question whether the term ‘Russian
Jacobin’ had any utility or relevance at all. It is true that the narodovol’tsy were
cognizant of the original Jacobins in France, and greatly admired them; in certain
ways they even tried to imitate them. But could one really believe that if the French
Revolution had not occurred, the narodovol’tsy, whose memory Mitskevich
honoured (incongruously) by calling them Jacobins, would have acted differently
in any significant and meaningful ways? Mitskevich could conceivably have
replied that using the term ‘Jacobin’ for the narodovol’tsy was warranted because
the similarities between them and the Jacobins in France were real. But that

¹²⁹ S. I. Mitskevich, ‘Russkie iakobintsy’, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 6–7 (18–19) (1923): pp. 3–26.
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response would still have not explained why the narodovol’tsy became revolution-
aries in the first place. One cannot emphasize enough, in this particular context,
that congruence and causality are different.
Not surprisingly in light of its failings, Mitskevich’s article was not followed by
others expressing agreement. But M. N. Pokrovskii, who after the October Revolu-
tion had served under Lunacharskii in the Commissariat of Education, and in 1921
had helped to establish the Institute of Red Professors, a post-graduate school for
persons seeking additional training in the humanities, used the occasion of Lenin’s
death to express views remarkably similar to Mitskevich’s. In a speech memorial-
izing the founder of the Soviet state, Pokrovskii reiterated Mitskevich’s argument
that in matters concerning tactics and the distribution of political power within a
revolutionary party, the Bolsheviks owed a great deal to the Russian Jacobins, who
preceded them in the revolutionary movement.¹³⁰ Best exemplified by Zaichnevskii
and Tkachev, the Russian Jacobins recognized the need for conspiracy just the way
the Bolsheviks did several decades later; for that reason Pokrovskii lauded as ‘the
first document of Bolshevism’ the proclamation Zaichnevskii had written in 1862
setting out the objectives of Molodaia Rossiia, which he founded.¹³¹ In his confusion
of means and ends, in believing that the tactics Russian Jacobins like Tkachev
adopted justified calling them proto-Marxists irrespective of the fact that their
objectives were not Marxist at all, Pokrovskii betrayed an inability to keep his
categories straight. For that reason, it was easy, in the Stalin era, to attack him as
ideologically deviant. But in 1924 this was still far in the future. The more relevant
point, in terms of tracking the degree to which Pokrovskii’s argument went beyond
Mitskevich’s, was that Pokrovskii seemed to extend the temporal limits of Russian
Jacobinism backwards from the narodovol’tsy of the 1870s and 1880s to Zaichnevs-
kii and Molodaia Rossiia in the 1860s. Intentionally or not, his doing so strength-
ened Mitskevich’s central point that the roots of Russian Marxism were Russian.
Given its contents, Mitskevich’s article was guaranteed to raise the hackles of
many Bolsheviks. Lenin, just like Plekhanov and the other Russian Marxists
who preceded him in the Russian revolutionary movement, had taken pains to
distinguish the Bolsheviks from the narodovol’tsy, whose courage, while laudable,
they all believed was wasted on attempts to perpetuate a peasant revolution
that, according to orthodox Marxist theory, could never eliminate the poverty
peasants experienced; this could only come about as a result of a proletarian
revolution. What is more, Mitskevich’s clear implication that the origins of
Bolshevism could be found at least partly in Russia, specifically in Russian
history and culture, contradicted the notion all Russian Marxists were obliged
to accept and to affirm publicly that the origins of Bolshevism lay exclusively in

¹³⁰ M. N. Pokrovskii, ‘Lenin v russkoi revoliutsii’, Vestnik kommunisticheskoi akedemii, no. 7 (1924):
pp. 8–21.
¹³¹ Ibid., p. 13.
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Marxism. In that spirit, N. N. Baturin, in 1924, also in Proletarskaia revoliutsiia,

responded heatedly to what Mitskevich and Pokrovskii had alleged.¹³² He began
by stating why the term ‘Jacobin’—the provenance of which he acknowledged
was French rather than Russian—was nonetheless applicable to the Bolsheviks.
In contrast to the Mensheviks, who preferred a form of ‘organizational indi-
vidualism and anarchism’, the Bolsheviks shared the Jacobins’ ‘organizational
centralism’. Temperamentally they were virtually the same.¹³³ Of course there
were significant differences between the two sets of revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks,
according to Baturin, were living at a time when, for reasons both political and
technological, they had means of achieving their objectives far more powerful
than any the Jacobins possessed. But as real as these differences were, they
paled in comparison to those that distinguished the Bolsheviks from the Russian
Jacobins, who resembled neither the Bolsheviks nor the French Jacobins, whose
appellation was wrongly applied to them. The seizure of power the Russian
Jacobins advocated was a palace coup; by contrast the October Revolution was
a mass revolution. Moreover, the Bolsheviks and Narodnaia Volia were pro-
ceeding historically in opposite directions, the former towards socialism and
communism, the latter from anarchism to liberalism. Finally, by calling Tkachev
a proto-Bolshevik, Mitskevich proved that politically he was identical to the
Russian Jacobins he described—neither socialist nor communist but rather
petit-bourgeois, an accusation no Bolshevik who remained faithful to the tenets
of Marxism-Leninism and the objectives of the October Revolution could
possibly find congenial.¹³⁴ Although the debate over Russian Jacobinism showed
that a genuine intellectual pluralism existed in the Soviet Union prior to the
Stalin era, one can fairly consider Baturin’s article, for the ad hominem manner
in which it responded to arguments deemed incompatible with Marxism-
Leninism, an argument for censorship.¹³⁵
The back-and-forth between the two antagonists continued. In an article in
Katorga i Ssylka (Prison and Exile), Mitskevich responded forcefully to Baturin’s
assault. In particular he tried to demonstrate that his earlier comments on Russian
Jacobins had not exceeded what was ideologically acceptable. Russian Jacobins
such as Pëtr Tkachev, while surely precursors of the Bolsheviks, were not com-
mitted to the Marxism the Bolsheviks professed. The socialist utopia Tkachev
envisioned, which by its agrarian orientation would be less attentive than Lenin’s
to the proletariat, was a prime example of this. At the same time, Mitskevich

¹³² N. N. Baturin, ‘O nasledstve russkikh iakobintsev’, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 7 (July 1924):
pp. 82–9.
¹³³ Ibid., p. 87. ¹³⁴ Ibid., pp. 84–9.
¹³⁵ It should be noted that prior to 1927 even so-called bourgeois historians were allowed to write
and to have their works published. George M. Enteen, ‘Marxist Historians during the Cultural
Revolution: A Case Study of Professional In-Fighting’, in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931,
edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick (Bloomington IN, 1984), pp. 155–6.
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endeavoured to distinguish Russian Jacobins from French ones. In his estimation

the former suffered far more than the latter because in Russia capitalism was more
rapacious than the forms it took in Western Europe. For that reason the objectives
of the Russian Jacobins, while not identical to the Bolsheviks’, were more radical
than those of the French Jacobins—a conclusion consistent with Mitskevich’s
original point that the Russian Jacobins, irrespective of where the term that
described them originated, were truly Russian, or at the very least more Russian
than French.¹³⁶
Baturin responded in kind.¹³⁷ After reiterating his earlier argument that Lenin
and the Bolsheviks owed nothing to the Russian Jacobins, who in fact were mostly
petit-bourgeois anarchists wishing they were liberals, Baturin made explicit what
had been merely implicit in his earlier article, namely that while there were
similarities between the Bolsheviks and the French Jacobins, those between the
Russian Jacobins and the French Jacobins were just as real, perhaps even greater.
To be sure, the Russian Jacobins were influenced by socialism, which emerged in
France as a movement long after the French Jacobins had disappeared. But they
were influenced by it only by their need to pretend they espoused it. Their origins
in the petit-bourgeoisie were inescapable, and therefore only someone like Mits-
kevich, with his inadequate knowledge and understanding of Marxism, could
consider the Russian Jacobins precursors of the Bolsheviks. He, Baturin, had
examined the programmes of Zaichnevskii and Tkachev, and could report that
in none of them could be found any of the elements of proletarian socialism. . . .
Instead, they contained all the marks of petit-bourgeois socialist utopias. Between
these reactionary utopias and Bolshevism it is impossible not only to place ‘an
equal sign’, but also to deduce any analogy at all.¹³⁸

Despite their genuine disagreements, Mitskevich and Baturin shared the same
objective of clarifying the circumstances under which Marxism had emerged in
Russia. For Mitskevich, this meant denying, or at least minimizing, the debt
the Bolsheviks owed to Chernyi Peredel. Because the chernoperedel’tsy rejected
terrorism in favour of mass agitation and propaganda, arguing against a causal
relationship between the chernoperedel’tsy and Bolshevism was a convenient way
of affirming one between the narodovol’tsy and Bolshevism.¹³⁹ As for Baturin, the

¹³⁶ S. I. Mitskevich, ‘K voprosu o korniakh bol’shevizma’, Katorga i ssylka, no. 3 (1925): pp. 92–101.
¹³⁷ N. N. Baturin, ‘Eshche o tsvetakh russkogo iakobinstva’, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 8 (1925):
pp. 97–109.
¹³⁸ Ibid., pp. 395–6. In 1927, Baturin’s conjunction of Narodnaia Volia and the French Jacobins
would be repeated by Ia. Starosel’skii, who insisted that the true analogue to the Jacobins in Russia
was not the Bolsheviks but the narodovol’tsy, the terrorism of which he considered subversive of the
emerging proletariat. Ia. Starosel’skii, ‘Burzhuaznaia revoliutsiia i iuridicheskii kretinizm. O rechi
Olara, ‘Teoriia nasiliia i Frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia’, Revoliutsiia pravda, no. 2–3 (1927): p. 95.
Starosel’skii, too, would perish in the Terror.
¹³⁹ Mitskevich, ‘K voprosu’, pp. 92–101.
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vehemence with which he tried to discredit Mitskevich could not disguise com-
pletely his chagrin, which was shared silently by many Bolsheviks, that Marx
had praised Narodnaia Volia so fulsomely, indeed that Marx had praised it at
all, and in so doing suggested that Russia might avoid the capitalist stage of
history entirely. This, of course, was contrary to the very essence of Marxism.
But criticising Marx directly was verboten in the Soviet Union, and carried with
it the risk of public chastisement, the loss of one’s job, or worse. Baturin was
shrewd enough not to do so. Instead, he made his point indirectly. By calling
Narodnaia Volia ‘Jacobin’, and then by appending the prefix ‘Russian’ to the
appellation, he could render nugatory any supposed link between Bolshevism
and the non-Marxist revolutionaries that Marx, in defiance of his own ideology,
had praised. In its place Baturin substituted the ideologically valid link he saw
between the Soviet Union and the French Revolution, which he considered the
first manifestation of a noble tradition of revolution beginning in France and
concluding in Russia.
Not surprisingly, Soviet historians overwhelmingly supported Baturin and
denounced Mitskevich.¹⁴⁰ But the coup de grâce was administered by Stalin
himself, in a letter in 1931 to the editors of Proletarskaia revoliutsiia.¹⁴¹ Devoted
mostly to condemning heresies he had discovered in investigating the whole issue
of a Soviet Thermidor, Stalin’s letter included searing criticism not only of
Mitskevich, but of the editors of Katorga i Sylka for having published the second
of his two articles. In their grovelling response, which under the circumstances
might fairly be excused on the grounds that their vocational survival, and possibly
even their physical survival, was at stake, the editors wrote in a subsequent issue
that ‘we, like other historical journals, occasionally granted a rostrum to those who
had no right to it, who used it to serve their own interests, which they concealed,
and to engage in direct struggle against the proletarian revolution’.¹⁴² Whether
their apologia exempted the editors from imprisonment, execution, or consign-
ment to a labour camp in Stalin’s Terror is unknown.

* * *
The French Revolution figured prominently in the mythology the Bolsheviks
constructed to invest the October Revolution with the legitimacy it needed. This
was the result of a deliberate decision. Long before the October Revolution the
Bolsheviks believed that revolutions like the French were integral to a temporal
trajectory the Bolsheviks were privy to by virtue of their Marxist ideology. The

¹⁴⁰ See, for example, I. A. Teodorovich, ‘Iz epokhi “Narodnoi Voli” ’, Katorga i ssylka, no. 57–8
(1929): pp. 7–44.
¹⁴¹ J. V. Stalin, ‘O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii bol’shevizma’, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 6 (113)
(October 1931): pp. 3–12. The letter also appeared, under the same title, in Bol’shevik, no. 19–20
(October 1931), pp. 10–18.
¹⁴² Quoted in Cyril Black, ed., Rewriting Soviet History (New York, 1962), p. 313.
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French Revolution in particular was significant because in France it ended feu-

dalism while simultaneously inaugurating in Europe an age of industrial capital-
ism that would eventually yield socialism and communism; paradoxically, its
significance for the Bolsheviks was heightened rather than diminished by its
geographical and temporal distance from Russia in 1917. For that reason it
would have been unthinkable for the Bolsheviks not to have analogized their
revolution to the French, and on the basis of the analogies they drew to incorp-
orate its mythology into their own. That the October Revolution resembled a coup
d’état more than a mass revolution was yet another factor forcing the Bolsheviks
to look elsewhere for much of the raw material for their foundational myth. More
than any other event or series of events in history, the French Revolution provided
what they needed.
One must bear in mind that the French Revolution, in 1917, was no longer a
tabula rasa in Russian culture and politics. The 1905 Revolution had done much
to imprint its multifarious meanings into public consciousness, and by 1917
educated and even semi-educated Russians were even more familiar with it. For
that reason, invoking the French Revolution, and effectively fusing the mytholo-
gies of the two revolutions, the French and the Russian, into one was easy.
A knowledgeable and attentive audience already existed, even if the hostility to
the first revolution in some quarters ensured that the second one never gained
universal support. Nevertheless, turning lukewarm supporters into enthusiastic
ones was something for which the French Revolution was uniquely well-
equipped, and making this process even easier was the fact that what most
Russians knew of the French Revolution—in particular its most iconic events,
such as the storming of the Bastille—had already been mythologized in France.¹⁴³
It was this mythologized iteration of the revolution, rather than a narrative
adhering closely to historical reality, that Russians had absorbed and many
now considered gospel truth.¹⁴⁴ Over the course of more than a century, the

¹⁴³ There existed a good deal of misinformation and incomplete information about this particular
event; mythologies often bear only a loose relationship to the truth. Parisian sans-culottes stormed the
Bastille not just because it symbolized monarchical oppression and tyranny. More prosaic consider-
ations also applied. The prison was rumoured to contain stores of cartridges and bullets, which had not
been included with the muskets demonstrators had earlier received. And it contained only seven
prisoners, four of them forgers, one accused of incest, another, who was deranged, was thought an
accomplice in a conspiracy to murder the king; yet another, also deranged, believed himself, depending
on the day, to be either Julius Caesar or God. Finally, there had been a serious proposal in the spring of
1789 to close the prison and demolish it. Christopher Hibbert, The Days Of The French Revolution
(New York, 1981), pp. 70–2. It seems safe to say that very few ordinary Russians knew much of this, or
any of it, and that the Bolsheviks of course were not about to enlighten them. The storming of the
Bastille was a useful myth irrespective of the facts. For a description of the mythology of the French
Revolution as a whole, showing how long it took to develop fully, and the elaborations and emend-
ations it underwent, see Elton, The Revolutionary Idea in France, passim; Maurice Agulhon, Marianne
into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1881 (London and New York, 1981);
and Robert Gildea, Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799–1914 (Cambridge MA, 2008).
¹⁴⁴ The same was true for Europeans generally, for whom, by the twentieth century, the French
Revolution had become ‘a constituent part of [their] collective memory’. Peter Fritzsche, ‘How
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history of the French Revolution had been transformed into hagiography. But as
far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, this only heightened its utility in fostering
their own revolutionary mythology.
But the mythology of the French Revolution was like the proverbial double-
edged sword. That the educated public was familiar with it meant it could be
useful also to their enemies. Aspects of the revolution easily recognizable as
analogous to policies the Bolsheviks followed provided instant fodder for those
opposing these policies. The Jacobin Terror was a prime example. Of course it had
its supporters and apologists, and not all of them were Bolsheviks or Soviet
functionaries. But it was also cited to demonstrate that terror, no matter how
virtuous its objectives, invariably degenerates into mindless and indiscriminate
killings that call into question, and ultimately discredit, the motives of those who
ordered it. To Sergei Kobiakov, who served as defence counsel for several defend-
ants wrongly convicted in the revolutionary tribunals the Bolsheviks established
immediately after the October Revolution, the public executions that followed
reminded him of the September Days in 1792, and the corruption of the prosecu-
tors he encountered in the courtroom he ascribed to their being infected by the
scourge of ‘Maratism’.¹⁴⁵ Among the most notorious of these was N. V. Krylenko,
the chief prosecutor of the Soviet Union in the early 1920s who, as the first
Minister of Justice, prescribed the death penalty for several of the persons
Kobiakov defended. In Kobiakov’s recollection, the ferocity with which Krylenko
sent innocents to their deaths reminded him of Fouquier-Tinville’s during the
Jacobin Terror in the French Revolution.¹⁴⁶ In the opinion of Andrew Kalpash-
nikov, who had returned to Russia from the United States in May 1917 on the
same boat carrying Trotsky, only to be incarcerated in the Peter-Paul Fortress
two months after the October Revolution, Felix Dzerzhinskii, the exceptionally
ruthless head of the Cheka, whom Kalpashnikov had met in April 1918, fully
deserved the sobriquet, usually applied pejoratively, of ‘the Robespierre of the
Russian Revolution’.¹⁴⁷ The same hostility animated residents of Rostov, who,
during the Civil War, sang ‘a Russian Song of Liberty’ that was set to the music of
the Marseillaise.¹⁴⁸

Nostalgia Narrates Modernity’, in The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society
and Culture, edited by Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche (Urbana IL and Chicago IL, 2002), p. 72.

¹⁴⁵ Sergei Kobiakov, ‘Krasnyi sud: Vpechatel’niia zashchitnika revoliutsionnykh tribunalakh’, in

Arkhiv Russkoi revoliutsii (Moscow, 1922), vol. VII, p. 268.
¹⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 255.
¹⁴⁷ Kalpashnikov served as Trotsky’s translator while both men, along with the other Russian
émigrés and exiles on board, were detained in Halifax, Canada, for nearly one month before being
allowed to continue their journey. Andrew Kalpashnikoff, A Prisoner of Trotsky (Garden City NY,
1920), pp. vii, xi, 224.
¹⁴⁸ Rhoda D. Power, Under the Bolshevik Reign of Terror (New York, 1919), p. 23.
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The Bolsheviks, of course, were not about to allow their enemies to monopolize
this mythology for what to them were nefarious purposes. Revolutionary myth-
ologies resemble ordinary propaganda in that they are invoked to clarify, explain,
and defend particular governments and the policies they pursue. But they also are
intended to do much more than that. For revolutionaries like the French and the
Bolshevik, the mythologies they created were meant to provide moral and ideo-
logical legitimacy not only for what they did, as a matter of policy, but also, and
more importantly, for their reason for doing so, specifically to transform their own
society, and eventually all societies, into something so superior to those that
currently exist that it was beyond the ability of ordinary people even to imagine
it. If one accepts Maxim Gorky’s definition of a myth as ‘a process of imagining’,
his assertion should perhaps be emended to take into account the myths revolu-
tionaries foster for the purpose of realizing a vision that, to all those who do not
share it initially, is quite literally inconceivable.¹⁴⁹
For that reason the artistic instruments revolutionaries use in disseminating the
mythology they create are many and varied. These include music, theatre, painting,
sculpture, architecture, literature, poetry, the celebration of holidays, the anniver-
saries of significant events, public rituals, celebrations, commemorations, and even
the language of public discourse itself. Their coordinated and deliberate mobiliza-
tion for political objectives helps to create a shared folklore of revolution that
presumably will survive the passage of time and the political vicissitudes every
new political regime must endure. The Bolsheviks were aware of the power and
political security this folklore, or common culture, provided, and they deliberately
placed at its centre their foundational myth: that the October Revolution, which, by
building on what the French Revolution began, made possible the construction of a
communist society characterized by social justice and individual liberation on a scale
heretofore nonexistent in history. Even before their revolution, the Bolsheviks—not
just the more self-enamoured of them, such as Trotsky—had created for themselves
a very theatrical self-image, in which they were actors on the largest stage imagin-
able, that of history itself. As a result, they turned to the task of infusing into the
common culture in Russia the values and personal character traits they believed
consistent with the task they expected the Soviet people to assume of creating
New Soviet Men and Women, who, in the case of the former, have achieved the
full development of their individual personalities. Among their most prominent
personal qualities would be courage, self-confidence, and a willingness to take
risks and to exceed what were thought to be the outer limits of human ability—
but also a child-like obedience and deference to political authority.¹⁵⁰

¹⁴⁹ Maxim Gorky, On Literature (Seattle WA, 1973), p. 244.

¹⁵⁰ Jay Bergman, ‘The Idea of Individual Liberation in Bolshevik Visions of the New Soviet Man’,
European History Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1997): pp. 57–92; Jay Bergman, ‘Valerii Chkalov: Soviet Pilot as
New Soviet Man’, Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 1 (1998): pp. 135–52.
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Most of all the Bolsheviks brought to this endeavour the belief, traceable to
Marx and Engels, that progress is rarely easy, that it requires struggle, and that this
struggle, while not ennobling in the way it was for Social Darwinists, nonetheless
served the purpose of separating those who welcomed the opportunity to over-
come adversity from those who shrank from it. In the latter category, according to
the Bolsheviks, one found the Mensheviks, the SRs, the liberals, and every other
rival of theirs that was left-of-centre on the political spectrum. For that reason
revolutions were tailor-made for the mythology the Bolsheviks tried to create after
the October Revolution, because it showed the Bolsheviks overcoming seemingly
insurmountable obstacles in their struggle for social justice. In the October
Revolution, in sum, practicality and pragmatism were harnessed in the service
of a transformational ideology.
This Bolshevik mythology was, at bottom, didactic. It was intended to instruct
and to inform, and to inculcate in people the values the Bolsheviks cultivated that
had enabled them to take over a country and rule it effectively. To this heuristic
endeavour, the French Revolution, along with the Revolution of 1905, provided
much that was useful.¹⁵¹ A prime example, replicated artistically countless times
after 1917, was the storming of the Tuilleries, the Paris residence of the Bourbons,
on 10 August 1792, which was memorialized by artists in Russia soon after the
October Revolution; among the other critical turning points of the French Revo-
lution Russian artists, writers, and poets chose to render was the insurrection in
the spring of 1793 that eliminated the Girondins as a political force, thereby
creating a vacuum filled by the Jacobins, and the murder of Marat by Charlotte
Corday.¹⁵² Other representations based on the French Revolution included a bas-
relief of soldiers carrying a flag with the revolutionary triad—liberté, égalité,
fraternité—emblazoned on it; one of these was a replication of a painting by
Jacques-Louis David, ‘The Oath of the Montagnards’, under which was written
the well-known aphorism of the artist: ‘Once the enemies of the revolution are
gone, they are no longer waiting for you’.¹⁵³ Surviving one’s enemies, and then
destroying them because they stood in the way of the revolution achieving its
objectives, was a common theme in Bolshevik propaganda.
The most useful event in that regard, not surprisingly, was the storming of the
Bastille, which perfectly encapsulated the Bolsheviks’ image of themselves as
the avant-garde of the proletariat storming the seemingly impregnable parapets
of the bourgeoisie. Stalin neatly captured the Promethean essence of the tasks the

¹⁵¹ The best known myth to which the Revolution of 1905 gave rise concerned the uprising on the
battleship Potemkin, with the facts of which Sergei Eisenstein took considerable liberties in the film he
produced and directed in 1925. Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality
(London, 1999), pp. 70–3; Richard Taylor, The Battleship Potemkin: The Film Companion (New York,
2000), p. 54 and passim.
¹⁵² N. T. Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v zhurnal’noi i prikladnoi grafike.
1917–1940 gg.’, Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik (1989), p. 219.
¹⁵³ Ibid., pp. 211, 212.
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Bolsheviks had set for themselves in his stated belief that ‘there are no fortresses
the Bolsheviks cannot storm’.¹⁵⁴ The Bolsheviks, in other words, would do sym-
bolically what the Parisian sans-culottes, on 14 July 1789, had done literally. To be
sure, building socialism and communism—which is what Stalin had in mind—
was different from defeating the reactionary enemies of the Bolsheviks. But the
Bastille, once its storming was mythologized, could symbolize any obstacle or
impediment, and for that reason its replication in Russia after the October
Revolution—in theatrical productions, placards and posters, and all kinds of
literature, both highbrow and popular—was a common occurrence. The film
directors Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Meyerhold both directed productions
replicating the event, the former in 1920, the latter in 1921.¹⁵⁵ Boris Pasternak,
while never writing the novel on the French Revolution he long envisioned,
nevertheless produced in the summer of 1917 two ‘dialogues’, the first between
Saint-Just and Henrietta Leba, which was never published, the second between
Saint-Just and Robespierre, which appeared in Znamia Truda (The Banner of
Labour) in 1918.¹⁵⁶ Among the placards and posters with which the Bolsheviks
adorned public spaces was one in 1920 depicting the storming of the Winter
Palace in 1917. The artist’s name was not provided, but the unattributed poem at
the bottom described the official residence of the tsars as ‘capitalism’s Bastille’.¹⁵⁷
Approximately two hundred theatres produced plays in the decade following the
October Revolution that in one way or another were concerned the French Revo-
lution.¹⁵⁸ Of these, by far the most influential was Romaine Rolland’s, written in
1902, which in Russia was titled Vziatie Bastilii (The Storming of the Bastille) rather
than by its original one, Le 14 juillet, almost certainly because it was more dramatic
and captured the element of struggle the Bolsheviks found especially appealing and
relevant to their ideological objectives.¹⁵⁹ The play was first performed in the
summer of 1918 at a theatre in Petrograd run by the well-known director and
actor, A. A. Mgebrov, who before the extended run the play enjoyed had supposedly
submitted it to Lunacharskii, who approved it. Mgebrov emphasized the courage
and élan of those storming the Parisian prison, which was clearly meant to
symbolize all that was the reactionary and retrograde in pre-revolutionary France.

¹⁵⁴ J. V. Stalin, ‘O rabotakh aprel’skogo ob”edinennogo plenuma TsK i TsKK (13 April 1928)’, in
Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. XI, p. 58.
¹⁵⁵ N. T. Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v spektaklaiakh sovetskogo teatra.
1917–1940 gg.’, Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik (1989), p. 468.
¹⁵⁶ Ilina, ‘Obraz evropeiskikh revoliutsii i russkaia kul’tura’, p. 386.
¹⁵⁷ Sovet politicheskii plakat: iz kollektsii gosudarstvennoi biblioteki SSSR imeni V. I. Lenina
(Moscow, 1984), p. 15. The title at the top of the poster reads, in translation: ‘1917 – October –
1920. Three Years Ago, Comrade – Do You Remember?’
¹⁵⁸ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v spektaklaiakh sovetskogo teatra’, p. 473.
¹⁵⁹ A concise explication and analysis of the French original is in David James Fisher’s, Romain
Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (New Brunswick NJ, 2004), pp. 22–4. Rolland’s play
Danton was also performed in Russia, but to less effect. Huntley Carter, The New Theatre and Cinema
of Soviet Russia (London, 1924), p. 15.
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To heighten the collective nature of the heroism the play depicted, the cast,
including extras, numbered one hundred and fifty.¹⁶⁰ In that way the play was a
mass celebration, similar to, albeit on a smaller scale, the re-enactment, along the
banks of the Neva River in Petrograd, of the same event, on 7 November 1918, to
celebrate the first anniversary of the storming of the Winter Palace; in the festivities
a replica of the Bastille was ignited just when ships of the Baltic Fleet, by pre-
arrangement, were passing by. Not surprisingly, fireworks and searchlights were
employed to heighten the drama.¹⁶¹
By 1927, however, Rolland’s play had lost its allure. A production in that year
was criticized publicly as an oversized caricature of reality that no longer spoke to
the aspirations of the theatre-going public.¹⁶² Left unsaid was that the play was
unsuitable in the era of the NEP, which, in its implementation, entailed a cautious
pragmatism inconsistent with the heroism central to the play; according to the
official announcement, the play would not be included among those performed to
commemorate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution because it was
frivolous and irrelevant to the occasion.¹⁶³ But barely two years later the Soviet
Union was engaged in rapid industrialization, as called for in the first Five Year
Plan, which resembled the storming of the Bastille in the heroism and persever-
ance that were required to fulfil its prescribed quotas. Plays like Rolland’s were
therefore’ relevant again, and were followed in 1939 by the publication of his
laudatory biography of Robespierre.¹⁶⁴ By 1935 Rolland had become the Soviet
Union’s best known Western apologist, and for his slavish devotion was granted
an audience with Stalin.¹⁶⁵
The motif of storming enemy fortresses was common in Soviet culture even
before Stalin used it as a metaphor for establishing socialism and communism. But
the Bolsheviks at times reversed the normative values implicit in the metaphor, so
that, in a mirror-image of the storming of the Bastille, the Soviet Union was itself a
fortress protecting the Soviet people from voracious and duplicitous enemies
attempting to storm it. Posters replicating this new dichotomy were common in
Soviet cities and factories.¹⁶⁶ The Bolsheviks’ fear of counter-revolution resulting
from the enmity of the capitalist powers outside Russia was real, and before the
Great Depression rendered nugatory any actual action to achieve this result, was to
some degree justified. These circumstances suggested a state of siege similar to that
which the French Revolution passed through in the 1790s, and the Bolsheviks found

¹⁶⁰ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v spektaklaiakh sovetskogo teatra’, pp. 467–8.
¹⁶¹ Limonov. ‘Prazdnestva Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii v 1789–93 gg.’, pp. 403, 405, 407.
¹⁶² Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v spektaklaiakh sovetskogo teatra’, p. 473.
¹⁶³ Susan M. Corbesero, ‘The Anniversaries of the October Revolution, 1918–1927: Politics and
Imagery’ (PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2005), p. 189.
¹⁶⁴ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskoi revoliutsii v knizhnoi grafike. 1917–1940 gg.’, p. 414.
¹⁶⁵ Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Soviet Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors
to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York, 2012), p. 237.
¹⁶⁶ Stephen White, The Bolshevik Poster (New Haven CT, 1988) pp. 44, 45.
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this, too, rich in symbolism they could utilize in impressing upon the Soviet people
the dangers they faced from abroad even after internal enemies like the SRs, the
Kadets, and the Mensheviks had all been routed. In 1921 the Soviet battleship that
was called Petropavlovsk when it was launched in 1911 was renamed Marat after it
was recovered from Kronstadt sailors holding its officers captive for the duration of
the revolt. That these sailors formalized their demands on board the vessel probably
figured in the government’s decision to rename it quickly.¹⁶⁷ Marat remained on
active duty for the next thirty-one years; in 1937 its presence in London at the
coronation of King George VI was considered evidence of the Soviets’ recognition
of the solemnity and importance of the occasion—notwithstanding the sentiments
of the monarchy-hating revolutionary for whom the ship was named—and in 1941
it was sunk by the Luftwaffe but soon raised, repaired, and recommissioned, this
time as Volkov (obviously a Russian word and a common last name), because
Stalin had decided the Soviet Union should fight the Nazis as a war of national
liberation; ships once named for foreigners, even ones as illustrious in the ranks of
revolutionary martyrs as Marat, now required monikers that were unmistakably
Russian.¹⁶⁸ Another battleship, renamed Mirabeau in 1917, patrolled the Black
Sea during the Civil War, in which capacity it may have engaged a French ship—
because France was supporting the Whites—of the very same name.¹⁶⁹ It is not
known if the Soviet Mirabeau participated in its subsequent sinking.¹⁷⁰
Battleships were not the only things renamed with the French Revolution in
mind. In its imitation, many of the trees planted in Russia in the 1920s and
thereafter were called ‘freedom trees’.¹⁷¹ For the same reason, courts were
renamed ‘tribunals’.¹⁷² Nikolaevskii Street in Moscow became Marat Street.¹⁷³
Moreover, borrowings such as these were not limited to inanimate objects.
Babies were named for Marat, Robespierre, and Danton; some even received
the monikers ‘Giotin’ and ‘Bastil’.¹⁷⁴ Amazingly, this practice even extended into
the animal kingdom. Either by felicitous coincidence or conscious decision, the
horse pulling Stalin’s sled on a portion of his trip to Siberia in January 1928 was
named ‘Marat’.¹⁷⁵
Much of this appropriation of the French Revolution was spontaneous, even
among the Bolsheviks, who needed no prompting from party officials to call

¹⁶⁷ Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921 (New York, 1974), pp. 72–4, 213.
¹⁶⁸ M. J. Whitley, Battleships of World War Two: An International Encyclopedia (Annapolis MD,
1998), p. 217; Siegfried Breyer, Soviet Warship Development 1917–1937 (London, 1992), vol. I,
pp. 35, 228.
¹⁶⁹ A. V. Ado, ‘Zhivoe nasledie velikoi revoliutsii: Predislovie k serii knig “Velikaia frantsuzskaia
revoliutsiia. Dokumenty i issledovaniia” ’, in Frantsuzskie rabochie: ot velikoi burzhuaznoi revoliutsii do
revoliutsii 1848 goda, edited by E. M. Kozhokin (Moscow, 1985), p. 9.
¹⁷⁰ General Loukomsky, Memoirs of the Russian Revolution (London, 1922), p. 224; Lobanov-
Rostovsky, Grinding Mill, p. 320.
¹⁷¹ Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, p. 159. ¹⁷² Kobiakov, ‘Krasnyi sud’, p. 246.
¹⁷³ Dalin, ‘K istorii izucheniia Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii v SSSR’, p. 107.
¹⁷⁴ Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 111. ¹⁷⁵ Kotkin, Stalin, p. 679.
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Dzerzhinskii ‘the Saint-Just of the Russian Revolution’, or Mikhail Larin, a

member of the committee charged with nationalizing private property, ‘the
Saint-Just of Russian Economics’.¹⁷⁶ Nevertheless, in keeping with their Prome-
thean ethos, which required them to change even the most mundane aspects of
daily life, the Bolsheviks were not about to trust the Soviet people to remould
themselves on their own. This task, so integral to the Bolsheviks’ commitment to
creating a new species of human being, necessitated their intervention. They
ordered publishing houses to produce short, clearly written biographies suitable
for a mass audience—Danton, Robespierre, and Marat were among the subjects—
as part of a series called ‘How the Proletariat Perpetuates Remembrance’.¹⁷⁷
N. M. Lukin, under the pen name N. Antonov, wrote a long essay of Charles I,
Louis XVI, and Nicholas II.¹⁷⁸ Even more to the point, the Bolsheviks, in keeping
with the Marxist assumption they shared that to name something was to define it,
and that to rename something was to change it, called the old tsarist ministries
‘commissariats’, in obvious imitation of the commissaires, who played a critical
role provisioning the armies of the French Revolution.¹⁷⁹ And because the cus-
tomary term of address while the monarchy existed seemed to them too formal
and evocative of still-existing class divisions, the Bolsheviks encouraged the
continuation of the practice, common during the French Revolution and resumed
in Russia after the collapse of the monarchy, of calling men grazhdanin and
women grazhdanka; the difference was that these appellations were now infused
with emancipatory and transformational implications.¹⁸⁰
The ultimate objective of all of this was to create a new, distinctively ‘proletar-
ian’ consciousness. This, in turn, would eventually inform the actions and behav-
iour of the New Soviet Man, the creation of whom was the ultimate objective of
Bolshevism. All of the arts would be mobilized in this endeavour—especially the
visual arts, which both in Russia and in Western Europe had by this time been
reinvigorated and enriched by new modes of expression, such as Cubism and the
many varieties of Futurism that, at least initially, were understandably incompre-
hensible to most Russians. Nevertheless, works of sculpture, even more than
paintings, were thought to be especially effective in reaching the enormously
large numbers of people whose consciousness the Bolsheviks sought to remould.
If produced with weather-resistant materials, sculpture, unlike most paintings,
could be displayed outdoors, where it could be seen, without the effort required to
visit a museum, by literally millions of Soviet citizens. Placement outdoors also

¹⁷⁶ Liberman, Building Lenin’s Russia, p. 22.

¹⁷⁷ N. T. Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v programme monumental’noi propagandy’,
in Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik (1989), pp. 148, 151.
¹⁷⁸ N. Antonov, [N. M. Lukin], Karl I—Liudovik XVI—Nikolai II (Moscow, 1918).
¹⁷⁹ Alan I. Forrest, The Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham NC, 1990), pp. 131–7. The
Bolsheviks were not the first to use the term. Kerensky had established ‘people’s commissariats’ in the
army, but did not apply the term to civilian institutions. Lobanov-Rostovsky, Grinding Mill, p. 211.
¹⁸⁰ Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, p. 31.
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meant that there was no limit on size. In keeping with their Promethean aspir-
ations, sculpture produced under the Bolsheviks could be bolshoi (‘big’).¹⁸¹
To that effect, a formal decree of the Council of People’s Commissars, dated
17 July 1918, and signed by Lenin, appeared in Izvestiia on the same day. It was
also published a month later in Iskusstvo (The Arts). It called for the replace-
ment of tsarist monuments by exactly sixty-six new ones, each honouring ‘an
outstanding person in the fields of revolutionary and social activity, philosophy,
literature, science, and art’.¹⁸² Although Lunacharskii was tasked with the
implementation of the resolution, the press of his multifarious responsibilities
required Lenin’s intervention when he believed Lunacharskii derelict in fulfilling
his obligation.¹⁸³ It should be borne in mind that the Soviet leader attached
considerable importance to the creation and appropriate placement of this new
‘monumental’ art. Even though the Bolsheviks were themselves well-versed in
European culture, and mostly appreciative of its artistic achievements, they also
believed that the revolution in politics they had brought about in October 1917,
and the transformation of the economy and society that would soon follow it,
should be accompanied by a comparable revolution in the arts. Several organ-
izations of writers and artists, such as Prolekult, tried quite deliberately to create
works that were distinctively ‘proletarian’ in both style and subject matter. But
no consensus existed on what exactly constituted proletarian art, and until the
Stalin era the Soviet government did not consider its obligations to include
the formulation of any binding requirements on writers and artists. In fact, the
Sculptors’ Union sponsored competitions, loosely overseen by Lunacharskii, to
determine who would sculpt a particular personage: the participants submitted a
bust or a bas relief; those deemed outstanding the sculptor would redo using
stronger materials if that was necessary; apparently every sculptor, not just the
winners, was paid 7,000 rubles for their efforts, half of which was provided in
advance. Because the belief was common that Russian artists were incapable of
producing ‘monumental art’ comparable to that of Delacroix and Daumier,
there was no expectation that the works that were submitted would resemble

¹⁸¹ There were of course painters who celebrated the October Revolution by infusing what they
understood to be its emancipatory message into their depictions of figures in the French Revolution
considered comparable to the Bolsheviks. M. K. Sokolov, for example, produced an entire cycle of
works, mostly biographical, emphasizing the heroism of Mirabeau, Sieyès, Lafayette, Danton, Babeuf,
Marat, and Saint-Just, among others. N. T. Unaniants, ‘M. K. Sokolov. Tskil “Velikaia frantsuzskaia
revoliutsiia” ’, Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik (1989), pp. 330–41.
¹⁸² Christina Lodder, ‘Lenin’s Plan of Monumental Propaganda’, Sbornik: Papers of the Sixth
and Seventh International Conferences of the Study Group of the Russian Revolution (Leeds, 1981),
p. 70; John E. Bowlt, ‘Russian Sculpture and Lenin’s Plan of Monumental Propaganda’, in Art and
Architecture in the Service of Politics, edited by Henry Armond Millon and Linda Nochlin (Cambridge
MA, 1978), pp. 185–6; Lenin, in May 1918, had called for practically the same thing. V. V. Shleev,
Revoliutsiia i izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo (Moscow, 1987), p. 270.
¹⁸³ Lodder, ‘Lenin’s Plan of Monumental Propaganda’, pp. 69–70.
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those of any particular sculptor. As a result, the viewing public, who adjudicated
these competitions, enjoyed considerable latitude in their decisions.¹⁸⁴
The results were quite eclectic; even monuments that were Cubist and Futurist
stylistically were among those considered worthy of display.¹⁸⁵ The same was true
of the sixty-six cultural luminaries whose achievements the monuments were
intended to commemorate. These included the writers Voltaire, Gogol, and
Lermontov; the painters Rublev and Cézanne; the composers Chopin, Scriabin,
and Rimskii-Korsakov; rebels and revolutionaries thought to be precursors of the
Bolsheviks, such as Spartacus; revolutionary intelligenty including Radishchev,
Pestel’, Herzen, and Chernyshevskii; and Stepan Khalturin and Sofiia Perovskaia
of Narodnaia Volia. European revolutionaries whose busts would adorn Russia’s
cities and countryside included Lassalle, Garibaldi, and of course Marx and
Engels. French revolutionaries were well-represented; among those singled out
for commemoration were Robespierre, Danton, Marat, and even some criticized
by Lenin and other Bolsheviks for not being Marxist, or not Marxist enough, such
as Fourier, Saint-Simon, Blanqui, and Jaurès; whatever misgivings they had about
their choices ideologically, the Bolsheviks nonetheless thought it prudent to
include these ‘renegades’, at least visually, in the apostolic succession of revolu-
tions and revolutionaries they believed had achieved its highest expression in
1917.¹⁸⁶ In that way, all memory of what had happened prior to the October
Revolution would not be effaced, and history—as personified in these sixty-six
extraordinary human beings—would become one long prologue to what the
Bolsheviks had accomplished in 1917 and would soon accomplish in the future.
For some of the historical figures, their representation artistically was not
easy. This was especially true for Robespierre. Commissioned by Lenin himself,
his bust, which was sculpted by Beatrise Sandomirskaia, was placed in the
Alexandrovskii Garden, not far from the Kremlin and on the route Lenin
followed on foot to his office there. The formal unveiling was set deliberately
for 7 November 1918.¹⁸⁷ Another bust, sculpted by N. A. Andreev, would by

¹⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 72; Nilsson, ‘Spring 1918. The Arts and the Commissar’, p. 46.
¹⁸⁵ Unfortunately, a number of these monuments collapsed, some only a short time after their
completion. Among these was a statue of Danton, which stood in a public square in Moscow close to
the Kremlin. Others, including several of Marat and Babeuf, were started but never completed. This
should not be construed as evidence that the Bolsheviks did not care about them, or that their belief that
the French Revolution played a central role in creating a mythology about their own revolution was
flagging. The simplest explanation was the most likely: because some of the materials sculptors hoped
to use, such as concrete, were needed for more important purposes, such as housing and the production
of weapons, the less weather-resistant materials that were used instead caused the sculpture to fall apart,
sometimes even before it was completed. Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v programme
monumental’noi propagandy’, pp. 150, 152.
¹⁸⁶ Bowlt, ‘Russian Sculpture and Lenin’s Plan’, 186; Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v
programme monumental’noi propagandy’, p. 152; Mikhail Guerman, Art of the October Revolution
(New York, 1979), pp. 10–12.
¹⁸⁷ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v programme monumental’noi propagandy’,
p. 152.
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prearrangement be unveiled simultaneously in Petrograd.¹⁸⁸ Because prior to

1917 not even the French had memorialized Robespierre in a work of sculpture,
Sandomirskaia’s and Andreev’s were likely the first anywhere in the world to
honour him in that particular fashion.¹⁸⁹ At the ceremonies in Moscow marking
the occasion, at which, along with a large crowd of onlookers, a delegation of
French socialists was present, Kamenev, among others, provided panegyrics
appropriate for the occasion, lauding l’Incorruptible for ‘crushing the counter-
revolution in France with an iron hand’.¹⁹⁰ Lenin pronounced himself pleased
with the results—he commented that the statue in Moscow deftly captured
Robespierre’s ‘decisiveness’—and commissioned Lukin to write a tribute in the
form of a pamphlet that would be widely distributed.¹⁹¹
But the statue was vandalized that very evening, and four days later, following
driving rain, it broke into pieces, and was never repaired or replaced. The same
fate befell the statue in Petrograd.¹⁹² Surely one reason for this apparent indiffer-
ence, which is especially incongruous given the tributes that were delivered when
the two statutes had been unveiled, was the aforementioned shortage of materials,
such as granite and bronze, sturdy enough to endure bad weather. Sculptors had
to make do with gypsum, cement, and concrete—the last of these was what the
statute in Moscow was made of—which caused many of the other monuments
that were constructed with these materials to collapse.¹⁹³ Another possible reason
was that there was a shortage of competent sculptors in Russia because the better
ones had emigrated after the October Revolution.¹⁹⁴ If that was indeed the case,
Lenin and Lunacharskii would almost certainly have been aware of it. But one
suspects there was more to the failure to repair the shattered monuments, or to
replace them with new ones, than just pragmatic considerations. Lenin evidently
changed his mind on the efficacy of monumental art, at least insofar as prior
revolutions like the French were concerned, and rebuffed later suggestions that
another statue of Robespierre be built. According to Lunacharskii, writing many
years later, Lenin concluded that the monuments still standing had not had their
intended effect on the population, largely because the sculptors who created them

¹⁸⁸ Ilina, ‘Obraz evropeiskikh revoliutsii i russkaia kul’tura’, 392.

¹⁸⁹ John Hardman, Robespierre (London and New York, 1999), p. 214.
¹⁹⁰ Quoted in Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, p. 236; Bonch-Bruevich, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol.
III, pp. 365–6.
¹⁹¹ Bonch-Bruevich, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. III, p. 365; Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia
revoliutsiia v programme monumnetal’noi propagandy’, p. 152. I. Stepanov authored a comparable
tribute, also in the form of a pamphlet, following the unveiling of a statue of Marat. Ilina, ‘Obraz
evropeiskikh revoliutsii i russkaia kul’tura’, p. 392.
¹⁹² Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, p. 236; Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v pro-
gramme monumental’noi propagandy’, p. 152.
¹⁹³ Vsevolod Voinov, ‘Zhivopos’, in Oktiabr’ v iskusstve i literature 1917–1927 (Leningrad, 1928),
p. 64. For the same reason a bust of Marat in Moscow met the same fate. Dalin, ‘K istorii izucheniia
Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii v SSSR’, p. 152; Bonch-Bruevich, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. III, p. 366.
¹⁹⁴ Bonch-Bruevich, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. III, pp. 365–6; Ia. Tugendkhol’d in Nasha Rodina
(1918), cited in Nilsson, ‘Spring 1918. The Arts and the Commissar’, p. 46.
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were ignorant of their propagandistic potential.¹⁹⁵ Finally, one suspects that

politics played a role. Robespierre, while genuinely admired by the Bolsheviks
for his personal qualities and for the prowess he showed politically in organizing
the Jacobins before and after they took power, in the final analysis had led what
amounted to a bourgeois revolution, not a proletarian one. For that reason, when
his statue was unveiled Lenin still had qualms, or at least serious reservations,
about the application of the kind of mass terror for which Robespierre, more than
any other Jacobin with the possible exception of Saint-Just, had been responsible.
Even if the institutionalized killing mass terror required could be morally justified
in light of its purportedly noble objectives, there was no guarantee, at least not
when Lenin first considered its application, that it would succeed. And if it failed,
those responsible were likely to be among its victims. Robespierre’s demise was an
obvious example of that.
If one bears this in mind, then the similar fate of the monuments to his
memory, and to those of other Jacobins such as Marat, can be understood as the
result of a compromise: the Jacobin leaders deserved the Bolsheviks’ respect and
admiration, which should be given expression in the form of sculpted memorials,
but should something happen to them, no measures to repair or replace them
would be taken.¹⁹⁶ In fact, there is reason to believe that at least several of the
Bolsheviks were initially reluctant, in the euphoria following their successful
seizure of power, to emulate the imagery of the French Revolution. Before the
October Revolution, Lunacharskii had indicated his awareness of the potential
mass theatre possessed for spreading propaganda, but failed to mention in this
context the fêtes of the French Revolution.¹⁹⁷ He may even have thought invoking
the French Revolution to legitimize the October Revolution unnecessary.¹⁹⁸ In
1918 he suggested that the existing calendar be abolished and replaced by a new
one, its first day being 25 October 1917, when the Congress of Soviets had
formally legitimized the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power.¹⁹⁹ While the same thing of
course had occurred during the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks doing so would
mean, in effect, that the French Revolution had never happened.

¹⁹⁵ Nilsson, ‘Spring 1918: The Arts and the Commissar’, p. 44; A. V. Lunacharskii, ‘Lenin i isskustvo
(1933)’, in Lenin o kul’ture i iskusstve (Moscow, 1956), p. 526.
¹⁹⁶ As of 1999, there was still no monument to Robespierre anywhere in France that had been
commissioned by the national government. Hardman, Robespierre, 214. The reason may be the lack of
a national consensus on the morality and utility of the terror that remains inextricably a part of his
legacy. On historical figures formally honoured by the creation of a monument to their memory there is
almost always a national consensus that they did good things, or that the good things they did exceeded
those that were bad. This evidently has not been the case in France concerning the Jacobins, although
there is a station on the Paris Métro named for Robespierre and located, appropriately, under the street
that bears his name (Rue Robespierre). Marisa Linton, ‘Robespierre and the Terror’, History Today 56,
no. 8 (August 2006): p. 23.
¹⁹⁷ Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, p. 23.
¹⁹⁸ Nilsson, ‘Spring 1918, ‘The Arts and the Commissars’, p. 25.
¹⁹⁹ Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, p. 236.
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In the end, nothing came of Lunacharskii’s suggestion—partly because he soon

retracted it. The Bolsheviks never changed their calendar, and the French Revo-
lution continued to inform the mythology the Bolsheviks’ were creating about
their own revolution. One must bear in mind that because the Provisional
Government had offered virtually no resistance, the October Revolution, at least
in Petrograd, was a largely bloodless affair in which the Bolsheviks, in Adam
Ulam’s apt phrase, did not seize power but rather ‘picked it up’.²⁰⁰ Even the so-
called ‘Storming of the Winter Palace’ by cadres of Red Guards in reality had
little about it that warranted its grandiloquent designation, with its intimations
of heroic struggle. The palace was essentially undefended, and the ministers of
the Provisional Government whose arrest was the reason for the operation
offered no resistance.²⁰¹ In other words, the October Revolution was actually a
rather pedestrian affair, quickly and easily consummated, without the drama
inherent in a protracted Manichean conflict of good and evil, in which the
Bolsheviks’ enemies resisted them with a fortitude and perseverance overcome
only by the comparable heroism and courage of the Bolsheviks and their
proletarian supporters—thereby making the invocation of another, earlier revo-
lution like the French superfluous.
In its mythological possibilities, the October Revolution was not sufficient.
Time did not begin when it succeeded. The mythology of another revolution
was required. In fact, the Bolsheviks occasionally admitted as much. In the decree
of September 1920 establishing Istpart, a fully functional institution within the
new Soviet government whose jurisdiction was ‘the history of the October Revo-
lution and the Russian Communist Party’, one finds the rather remarkable
statement that ‘our revolution will be a beacon for communists of future gener-
ations just as the French Revolution was at the end of the eighteenth century for
the bourgeoisie. . . . [In that way] the past would serve the present’.²⁰² In the words
of a Russian who witnessed the emergence of this mythology and approved of it,
‘our great emancipatory struggle was enhanced by the influence on it of the arts
and literature of the French Revolution’.²⁰³
Many of the most illustrious novelists and poets lent their talents to this
endeavour, and a goodly number of them employed motifs and images drawn
directly from the French Revolution. N. I. Kareev hoped the works he produced
that included references to the most iconic expressions of the French Revolution—
the storming of the Bastille, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the

²⁰⁰ Ulam, The Bolsheviks, p. 314.

²⁰¹ The ‘bombardment’ of the palace by guns on the battleship Aurora that preceded the assault
damaged the building less than that which occurred during the filming of Oktiabr’, Sergei Eisenstein’s
classic film commissioned in 1927 to commemorate the revolution’s tenth anniversary. Olga Roma-
nova, ‘Eisenstein’s “October”: Between Artistic Invention and the Myth of the Revolution, 2012’, http://
urokiistorii.ru/en/taxonomy/term/200/2822.
²⁰² Corney, Telling October, p. 100; Ko vsem chlenam partii (Moscow, 1920), p. 1.
²⁰³ P. A. Pelshe, Nravy i iskusstvo frantsuzskoi revoliutsii (Petrograd, 1919), 5.
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Marseillaise—would show the two revolutions, the French and the Russian,
causally related; the mythology of the former not only prefigured the second
but informed its meaning and larger significance.²⁰⁴ In 1918 Demian Bednyi
composed a poem, ‘Kommunisticheskaia Marsel’eza’, the very title of which
suggested the same relationship between the two revolutions; in Bednyi’s words,
the French in 1789 and the Russians in 1917 were ‘the fire of a universal blaze’.²⁰⁵
For works such as these, ‘the Court Poet of the Kremlin’, as Bednyi was commonly
referred to, was awarded the Order of the Red Flag in 1923.²⁰⁶ Another sycophant
who needed no prompting to produce works of which the Soviet leadership
approved was Alexei Tolstoy. In 1919 he wrote a play, ‘The Death of Danton’,
that in appealing to the less rational sensibilities of its audience, treated the facts
of the revolutionary’s life and death cavalierly. It showed him conspiring to kill
Robespierre to stop the bloodshed for which the latter was responsible. But
Danton did not succeed in this endeavour—of which Tolstoy makes clear he
strongly approved—and shortly afterwards goes to his death. The entire play is
pervaded by fatalism and a profound sense of helplessness. Because this was the
opposite message to that which the Soviet government expected the play to
convey, four years later Tolstoy solidified his reputation for artistic and ideo-
logical malleability by revising the play to the point where the original version
was unrecognizable. No longer emphasizing Robespierre and Danton as prime
movers of the revolution, it now depicted it as a conflict of social classes and
categories in which the sans-culottes, in terms of their influence, were primus
inter pares. Danton has been reduced very nearly to a nonentity. At best he was a
genuine revolutionary paralysed by his timidity and indecision, at worst not a
revolutionary at all. The tragic figure in the play was now Robespierre, who did
not live to see the revolution’s ultimate victory—which the play implied occurred
in Russia, not France.²⁰⁷
Among the other writers and poets who did what the Soviet leadership expected
of them were A. I. Bezymenskii, who penned a poem, entitled ‘The Sans-Culottes’,
celebrating their heroism;²⁰⁸ Andrei Globa, who wrote on the murder of Marat;²⁰⁹
Vladimir Harbut, whose poem on the storming of the Bastille tried to make plain
the connection between the events of 14 July and those of the Bolsheviks in
October 1917;²¹⁰ and the always enigmatic Ilia Erenburg, whose novel, Zagovor
Ravnykh (The Conspiracy of Equals), was appropriately ambiguous in its

²⁰⁴ Kareev, Prozhitoe i perezhitoe, pp. 290–2.

²⁰⁵ Quoted in N. T. Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v sovetskoi literature.
1917–1940 gg.’, Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik (1989), p. 364.
²⁰⁶ René Fueloep-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in the
Soviet Union (New York, 1965), p. 157.
²⁰⁷ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v sovetskoi literature’, p. 364.
²⁰⁸ Ilina, ‘Obraz evropeiskikh revoliutsii i russkaia kul’tura’, p. 387.
²⁰⁹ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v sovetskoi literature’, p. 358.
²¹⁰ Ibid., p. 364.
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message, initially describing the principal figures of the French Revolution

dispassionately—which is to say in a fashion unbefitting a Soviet propagandist.
By the end, however, any pretence to impartiality has long disappeared. The
reader is expected to conclude that Babeuf was the archetypical revolutionary-
martyr, who devoted his life to the betterment of the French people and paid for
his efforts with his life.²¹¹
All of these works were intended for a mass audience, and written accordingly.
But because the authors retained a measure of autonomy, the government thought
it necessary to supplement them with others it issued itself, sometimes with
expressive and even lurid covers and frontispieces; practically all of them were
short and simple in the message they conveyed. Works written in foreign lan-
guages, such as A Tale of Two Cities and Victor Hugo’s 1793, were translated with
the same considerations in mind.²¹² Moreover, the Bolsheviks were aware that
what remained of the old nobility—historically the most literate class in Russia—
had already emigrated, and they accordingly stressed the art forms for which
literacy was not required. Lenin considered film especially useful in infusing in the
large percentage of the public that was still in varying degrees illiterate a proper
appreciation of the Soviet regime and the goals to which it was committed.²¹³ In
keeping with this requirement, Soviet filmmakers developed a new genre, called
agitki, of films longer than newsreels but shorter than regular features, ranging
from fifteen to thirty minutes long, which was considered enough time to focus on
a particular theme and illuminate its contemporary relevance without unduly
taxing the viewer’s patience. Some of these films, such as ‘Proletarians of the
World Unite’, released in 1919, included references to the French Revolution.²¹⁴
Other art forms accessible to the illiterate performed the same function film did,
though on a much smaller scale. Several ballets about the French Revolution were
produced; the most prominent were Vladimir Femelid’s Karman’ola and Boris
Asafiev’s Plamia Parizha (The Flame of Paris).²¹⁵ Two orchestral overtures about
the French Revolution by the French composer Henri Litolff—one about the
Girondins, the other concerning Robespierre—were performed in Petrograd,
Moscow, and other cities.²¹⁶ The Russian composer S. I. Pototskii never finished
the opera he began that was based on Rolland’s Vziatie Bastilii; nevertheless two
scenes he had written were performed in September 1919 to an audience of Red
Army soldiers.²¹⁷

²¹¹ Ibid., p. 365.

²¹² Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskoi revoliutsii v knizhnoi grafike’, pp. 413–14.
²¹³ Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 98.
²¹⁴ Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917–1953 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 32.
²¹⁵ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v sovetskoi muzykal’noi zhizni. 1917–1940 gg.’,
Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik (1989), p. 445.
²¹⁶ Ibid., p. 443. ²¹⁷ Ibid., p. 443.
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Theatrical productions for the purpose of inculcating the proper revolutionary

consciousness were of course strongly supported by the Soviet government. One
play intended to serve this purpose was Anton Amnuel’s Marat. In the play
Marat’s oratory and his clashes with Lafayette were among the many aspects of
his life that were depicted; especially significant was the stress on Marat’s reluc-
tance to employ indiscriminate terror. First performed in May 1919 in Petrograd,
subsequent productions brought its message to Gomel and Archangel, and to
other locations far from the then Russian capital.²¹⁸ Another play widely per-
formed and highly esteemed by the educated elite in Petrograd and Moscow was
M. E. Levberg’s Danton. At its first performance in June 1919, such literary
luminaries as Maxim Gorky and Alexander Blok were in the audience. Because
the play stressed Danton’s role in organizing resistance in 1792 against the
external enemies intent on invading France and putting an end to the French
Revolution, it was only natural for the audience to conjure in their minds the civil
war in Russia that when the play was first performed, one could easily believe the
Bolsheviks could lose.²¹⁹ Gorky so liked the play that he recommended it to others,
and in comments on the play that would be published in 1921, Blok said that by
seeing the play one ‘realises what is near to us’.²²⁰
Yet another play intended to generate political consciousness was Robespierre.
Written and directed by F. F. Raskolnikov, it depicted the period in 1794 between
the celebration of the Cult of the Supreme Being and Robespierre’s arrest and
execution. A fatalism and a sense of the inevitability of things permeate the
unfolding of events. Robespierre’s views are those of a typical bourgeois, and
thus incompatible with the requirements of the Hébertists and les enragés. As he
becomes increasingly isolated politically, the audience comes to understand that
this is why his support for the Maximum has diminished.²²¹ But the last words of
the play, spoken by an ordinary artisan, underscored Raskolnikov’s conviction
that something superior to the system the Jacobins created has already emerged in
Russia: ‘This was not our regime. Ours will come. We will be victorious.’²²²
As effective as theatrical productions were in conferring on audiences the
mentality the Bolsheviks considered essential in defeating foreign enemies and
undertaking vast projects of social and economic engineering, such as industrial-
ization and the elimination of private property, they also recognized that ordinary
theatre, because it observed certain conventions, such as that the audience would
be a passive recipient of what transpired on the stage, suffered from serious
limitations. Accordingly, the Bolsheviks pioneered a different kind of theatre,
which they preferred to classical productions partly because the latter were

²¹⁸ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v spektaklaiakh sovetskogo teatra’, p. 472.

A production of the same play in 1920 directed by Sergei Eisenstein may have been his first experience
in the role for which he would later become famous; not until 1923 would he direct a film. Ibid., p. 472.
²¹⁹ Ibid., p. 468. ²²⁰ Ibid., pp. 468, 472. ²²¹ Ibid., p. 480.
²²² Ibid., p. 480.
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performed indoors to a very small audience; even plays performed multiple times
reached an infinitesimal percentage of the population. Performed outdoors,
sometimes before several thousands of people, most of whom could not afford
the cost of a ticket to an indoor production, the plays the Bolsheviks preferred
quickly acquired their own taxonomical category, called prazdnichestvo, by which
was meant the phenomenon of staging elaborate celebrations resembling those of
holidays, but with political and ideological themes. In the Bolsheviks’ mind, their
purpose, in addition to helping create a legitimizing mythology of revolutionary
heroism in the face of implacable opposition, was to reduce the distance between
the party and the people, and between the powerful and the powerless; that the
traditional distinction between participant and audience was blurred by the
inclusion in the casts of literally thousands of ordinary citizens serving as extras
gave credence to the notion that just by living in the Soviet Union, ordinary people
were celebrating it.²²³ Indeed, by celebrating historical events, past and present
could be synthesized into a narrative suggesting nothing less than that living in the
Soviet state was in some sense the culmination of history itself. But the roots of
prazdnichestvo were actually traceable to the French Revolution, specifically to the
gargantuan celebratory fêtes the Jacobins staged for the purpose of indoctrinating
the French people in the virtues of their transformational ideology. The Bolsheviks
were not the first to stage such celebrations in Russia. The Provisional Govern-
ment preceded them, but because it lasted for only eight months, the most it could
do, as mentioned earlier, was sponsor commemorations on the Champs de Mars
in Petrograd.²²⁴ The Bolsheviks, by contrast, had more time to experiment, to
figure out which kinds of spectacles would have the greatest effect politically and
ideologically.²²⁵ But about the advisability of staging these spectacles in the first
place, the Bolsheviks had no doubts. The very magnitude of the celebrations—in
the number of participants, the size of the sets, and the universality and timeless-
ness of the themes that were explored—would impress their audience with an
intensity that traditional theatre, indeed no other art form, not even cinema, could
match. The walls encasing the buildings where plays were traditionally performed
would only trivialize the larger cosmic purpose for which these celebrations were
intended, and by being performed outdoors could attract an audience that, at least
in theory, was infinitely large. In that way, large numbers of people could draw the
analogy the Bolsheviks intended between exceeding the conventional boundaries
of the arts on the one hand, and achieving the transformational objectives they

²²³ Malte Rolf, Soviet Mass Festivals, 1917–1991 (Pittsburgh PA, 2013), pp. 1–5; Zh. Tierso, Pesni i
prazdnestva frantsuzskoi revoliutsii (Petrograd, 1919), pp. 139–40.
²²⁴ Corbesero, ‘The Anniversaries of the October Revolution’, p. 14.
²²⁵ Christopher A. P. Binns, in ‘The Changing Face of Power: Revolution and Accommodation in
the Development of the Soviet Ceremonial System: Part I’, Man., vol. 14, no. 4 (1979), p. 587, notes that
these Bolshevik spectaculars were the first in Europe since the French Revolution without any religious
connotation. That he fails to mention those the Provisional Government produced does not vitiate the
general accuracy of his observation.
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considered prerequisites for the achievement of communism on the other. On

occasion Lunacharskii quoted Robespierre on the ability of festivals like the
Jacobins’ to engender the moral and political improvement of participants and
spectators alike:
Gather people together and you will improve them because when grouped
together, people will aspire to like one another, but can only like what they
respect. Give this gathering a great moral and political theme—and love for all
things worthy will grow together with pleasure in every heart because people will
meet each other with pleasure.²²⁶

To reinforce this message, Lunacharskii and Kalinin sometimes delivered speeches

before the action commenced, and even the orations of Desmoulins were repeated
with great fanfare and sometimes followed by the singing of the Marseillaise,
obviously to underscore the solemnity and universality of the occasion.²²⁷
In these mass celebrations, the traditional distinction between the actors and
the audience, reflecting that between fantasy and reality, broke down. Spectators
were sometimes seated onstage, thereby resembling, if only by their location, the
classical Greek chorus.²²⁸ Occasionally they were even enlisted as extras in
productions requiring a large cast, such as those that re-enacted the storming
of the Winter Palace.²²⁹ It was important to Lunacharskii in particular that
theatre be ‘democratic’, in the sense of involving the masses, and the many
productions in which there were more extras than cast members might happily
have served to impress upon the audience the conceit that the coup d’état that
brought the Bolsheviks to power had actually been a mass revolution.²³⁰ Because
the Bolsheviks understood that they were neophytes in producing these spec-
tacles, they found very helpful the instructions Jacques-Louis David provided
the Jacobins for the fêtes they put on in Paris and elsewhere to gin up political
support. The celebrations on May Day, 1918, for example, used music the way
the French painter recommended, and those that included marching followed
routes consistent with what he had prescribed in the 1790s.²³¹ Two years later,
in front of the old stock exchange in Petrograd, some 4,000 actors, before an
audience of 35,000, performed ‘The Mystery of Liberated Labour’, an extrava-
ganza in which heroes the Bolsheviks considered their precursors, such as
Stenka Razin, the sans-culottes, and Spartacus, were singled out for adulation.

²²⁶ Quoted in Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 98.

²²⁷ Ilina, ‘Obraz evropeiskikh revoliutsii i russkaia kul’tura’, p. 401.
²²⁸ Unaniants, Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v spektaklaiakh sovetskogo teatra, p. 468.
²²⁹ Limonov, ‘Prazdnestva Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii v 1789–93 gg.’, p. 399.
²³⁰ Corbesero, ‘The Anniversaries of the October Revolution’, p. 4.
²³¹ Limonov, ‘Prazdnestva Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii v 1789–93 gg.’, p. 398. In November 1918,
on the first anniversary of the October Revolution, marchers carried banners of bare-breasted women, in
the form of angels, with sheathed swords attached at their waists, in an obvious obeisance to Delacroix’s
iconic ‘Liberty on the Barricades’. Corbesero, ‘The Anniversaries of the October Revolution’, p. 57.
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In the opening scenes of the production, with Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ as

musical accompaniment, these embodiments of revolutionary virtue try with
no success to smash the obstacles preventing them from reaching territory
where they will be free. The conclusion the audience is meant to draw from
this is that further attempts will be no less futile. But just when it seems that
progress is not possible, a red star appears in the east, which, as an obvious
symbol of Bolshevism and socialism, heralds the liberation of humanity. Red
banners and liberty trees like those in the French Revolution then emerge on the
stage, as does an actor obviously meant to personify the liberation of labour.
Upon his appearance, the soldiers directly in front of him demonstrably relin-
quish their weapons in belated, but nonetheless genuine recognition that the
peace that now reigns will be permanent. In the last scenes of the play, spotlights
on ships anchored in the Neva are directed towards the stage, sirens blow, and
bands assembled alongside the audience play the Internationale, with both
actors and the audience joining in.²³²
Two months later, another extravaganza was staged, also in front of the stock
exchange in Petrograd, this one celebrating the convocation of the Second Con-
gress of the Third International. Once again searchlights—this time positioned
atop the Peter-Paul Fortress—highlight the action. Several thousand amateur
actors, many of them workers, soldiers, and sailors, recapitulate the history of
humanity as refracted through the revolutions that demonstrate the stages
through which it passes on the way to communism. Over the course of the
performance, first slaves and then Parisian sans-culottes try unsuccessfully to
ascend a stairway at the top of which are evil rulers, their identity unspecified,
defended by soldiers. But soon these rulers are forced to flee amidst great billows
of smoke that enable them to escape with their lives. But new rulers appear, their
identities no less difficult to divine; like their predecessors, they are intended to
personify oppression generically. Their adversaries, however, are different. These
are bald old men carrying impossibly large books, which are meant to show them
utterly detached from reality. From both their appearance and what they say the
audience recognizes them as the leaders of the long-ago discredited Second
International. As expected, they, too, are driven from the stage, and a scene
meant to suggest the First World War is followed quickly by a re-enactment of
the October Revolution, in which the actors are intermingled among the specta-
tors. Finally, soldiers appear, and ships approach on the Neva; both are meant to
symbolize victory in the ongoing civil war.²³³
The spectacle that most thoroughly combined the elements that distinguished
all of them from ordinary theatre was performed in 1920 on the third anniversary

²³² Additional details can be found in Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, pp. 94–5, from which much of
the description has been taken.
²³³ Fueloep-Miller, Mind and Face of Bolshevism, pp. 145–6.
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of the October Revolution.²³⁴ The largest of all, it called for 8,000 actors and
500 musicians. Remarkably, there were nine directors, each with a different degree
of authority. Before an audience of 100,000, it had multiple stages both inside and
outside the Winter Palace. Preceded by a musical overture named for Robespierre,
the play took between four and five hours to perform. Although it was later made
into a film, as a play it was performed only once. Thematically it reduced the
events of 1917 to a linear progression of episodes that one of the directors
considered analogous to the storming of the Bastille.
In ways both monumental and bombastic given the size of the audience, the
number of actors, the grandeur of the setting, and the significance of the occasion,
the production began with a cannon firing a blank. After trumpeters provide the
equivalent of a call to arms, the action starts. On one platform, a figure easily
recognizable as Kerensky is surrounded by generals, capitalists, and assorted
courtiers, and goes about his business to the accompaniment of the Marseillaise.
On another platform are ordinary people. Although their movements are at first
haphazard and uncoordinated, gradually they come to act in unison, thereby
suggesting how powerful they could be as a fighting force. Very soon they form
one. To the strains of the Internationale, and amidst plaintive calls for Lenin, they
are transformed miraculously into Red Guards, and while Kerensky and his
entourage temporize, some of the soldiers defending him defect. On the opposite
platform, as songs are sung, and speakers declaim the virtues of proletarian
revolution, emotions reach a climax. Extras who heretofore have been standing
motionless begin to move, and as they are joined by others driven by the same
objective, they approach Kerensky. But he manages to elude them, and his
supporters—though not Kerensky himself—take refuge inside the Winter Palace,
where the remainder of the saga takes place. The Bolsheviks and their supporters
pursue the now-powerless prime minister, and finally, after forcing their way into
the palace, they take the ministers of the Provisional Government into custody.
With the shooting of rockets and to songs sung by thousands, the Bolshevik
spectacular finally comes to an end, its message clear: in just the way that, in the
middle of the performance, the Internationale supersedes the Marseillaise, so, too,
by the end of it the October Revolution has triumphed over the Provisional
Government, and is poised to achieve for the Soviet people the liberty, justice,
and happiness that not even the French Revolution obtained for the French. The
audience presumably returns to their homes convinced that all of humanity will
eventually partake of the blessings of the October Revolution, which they know
has brought to power a totally new government that has accomplished in barely
two years the equivalent of what it took the French Revolution a decade to achieve.
With this in mind, the Soviet people can now turn away from the past and look to

²³⁴ The description that follows draws heavily on that found in ibid., pp. 147–8.
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the future, when everything they deserve but has been denied them for centuries
will finally be theirs.
* * *
By the mid-1920s, the Bolsheviks had largely abandoned their belief that revolu-
tionary consciousness could be instilled through the expedient of mass spectacles
resembling those of the French Revolution.²³⁵ But the revolution would remain
relevant nevertheless—and in ways it had never been before. The whole issue of a
Soviet Thermidor, which had hardly concerned the Bolsheviks either before the
October Revolution or immediately after it, suddenly became a matter of utmost
importance in the wake of the New Economic Policy Lenin imposed, for prag-
matic reasons, on a reluctant Communist Party; the economic relaxation the NEP
entailed suggested a retreat from the activism implicit in the October Revolution,
and the spectre it evoked of ideological betrayal made analogies with the original
Thermidor inevitable. Unlike the issue of Jacobinism, which, in the context of
Russian Social Democracy, concerned the instrumentalities of revolution—tactics
and organization more than objectives and intended results—invocations of
Thermidor struck at the very heart of the whole Soviet Experiment. For that
reason its mere mention was sufficient was raise the Bolsheviks’ collective blood
pressure. What could be more disturbing, more conducive to self-doubt and the
anger it often gives rise to, than the possibility—even if raised only by analogy with
a phase of another revolution, distant in both time and space—that the Bolsheviks
were now betraying their own objectives? At the very least, the analogy with
Thermidor raised fundamental questions about the nature of the economy and
the political system the Bolsheviks had established, and about the way it was now
developing. Was the Soviet Union evolving into something approaching social-
ism? Was it, in other words, advancing the course of history, as Marx and Engels
had explained it in the mid-nineteenth century? Or was it regressing, the way the
French Revolution did after the Jacobins’ demise, to the arrangements that had
existed in Russia prior to the monarchy’s collapse? Moreover, the possibilities in
what the future portended for the Soviet Union included outcomes neither Marx
nor Lenin had seriously considered. Could the Soviet Union be changing, for
example, into something resembling the Bonapartism that followed the French
Revolution? Even worse, could it somehow be degenerating into something
entirely new, for which there was no analogue in the French Revolution, or in
any prior revolution in history?

²³⁵ The meetings of workers that the Bolsheviks sponsored on a large scale beginning in the 1920s, at
which the workers were encouraged to participate on an equal footing with the party functionaries
running them, have been described as the intended successor to the theatrical spectaculars. Binns, ‘The
Changing Face of Power’, p. 593.
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These were questions of immediate ideological import when ideological

enemies of the Soviet Union first raised them in the early 1920s to explain the
nature of the Soviet system and why it seemed now to be jettisoning policies
conducive to socialism in favour of others, most obviously the NEP, that seemed
to put the country on a road that would lead it backwards to capitalism. As was the
case when Lenin, in the early 1900s, took up the whole issue of Jacobinism,
‘Thermidor’ was first an epithet the Bolsheviks’ enemies found useful in attacking
them, and only later, in responding to the accusation, did the Bolsheviks confront
the dilemma the term implied about the future of the state they had only recently
established. Of course Thermidor was too enticing in its polemical potential for
Lenin’s putative successors in the mid-1920s not to employ it in bludgeoning one
another rhetorically until one of them emerged triumphant. But irrespective of
how Thermidor was used within the highest echelons of the Soviet Communist
Party, the reason for the mortal threat its mere invocation posed to the Soviet
system was the ideologically aberrant way this system began in 1917, when the
Bolsheviks carried out what they claimed to be a proletarian revolution before its
preconditions and prerequisites existed.
Thus the debate over the nature and the relevance of Thermidor in the late
1920s spoke to the very legitimacy of the October Revolution and to the enterprise
of creating socialism in the Soviet Union. If the Soviets were to conclude, or
somehow be forced to acknowledge, that the political and economic system they
put in place in 1917 was now experiencing a regression even only a fraction as
profound as that which had occurred in France from 1794 to 1799, then there
would be good reason to believe that the Soviet Union, having betrayed its own
objectives, was no longer the Soviet Union, but rather something else entirely. In
short, the economic regression symbolized by Thermidor would likely lead to the
political and ideological cul-de-sac personified by Napoleon, and if that happened,
then the whole Bolshevik experiment in building socialism and communism
would be at an end.
A great deal was at stake in the debate over Thermidor, and it is this new phase
in how the French Revolution was received in Russia that now requires our
attention.
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8
The Phantom of the Soviet Thermidor

The possibility of the Soviet Union succumbing to a Soviet Thermidor was first
raised by anti-Soviet Russian émigrés. In the 1920s, inside the self-contained world
these émigrés inhabited, the word itself ‘was on everyone’s lips’.¹ In March 1921,
shortly after the Kronstadt Revolt had been suppressed, the liberal and former
Kadet, M. V. Mirkin-Getsevich, wrote pseudonymously that the revolt was one
more piece of evidence that the Soviet Union was approaching its Thermidor, and
would collapse soon after its arrival.² With the suppression of the revolt still vivid
in his mind, Pavel Miliukov declared flatly that the Soviet Union was already
experiencing a form of ‘reaction’ similar to that which had occurred in France in
the late 1790s.³ The Bolsheviks, of course, could not be pleased by such criticism,
which suggested that the state they ruled might never achieve socialism. Moreover,
by this time the Bolsheviks believed that, by continuing the emancipation of
humanity the French Revolution had begun, they had acquired proprietary rights
to its mythology. The French Revolution was theirs, and no one else’s, to mine for
raw material they could utilize in fashioning a mythology that would win for their
regime the legitimacy they believed it needed. For that reason, the Bolsheviks were
sensitive to attacks from enemies that used the revolution to defame them, and
kept a watchful eye on the émigré press. But the liberal whose invocation of
Thermidor most antagonised them was Nikolai Ustrialov. A former Kadet who
during the Civil War edited the newspaper Admiral Kolchak’s army published, he
took refuge after the war ended in the Chinese city of Harbin, where he found
other Russians in its large émigré community who shared his hostility to the new
Soviet regime.⁴ Even before the Kronstadt Revolt, Ustrialov believed that any
‘economic Brest-Litovsk’—by which he meant a return to capitalism in Russia—
would mean the end of the Soviet Union.⁵ In 1921 he fleshed out this idea in his

¹ Quoted in Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 70.

² B. Mirskii [M. V. Mirkin-Getsevich], ‘Put’ termidora’. Poslednie novosti, no. 266 (3 March 1921):
p. 2. He expressed the same conclusion in ‘14 iiulia’, Poslednie novosti, no. 330 (14 July 1921): p. 2.
³ Cited in N. Ustrialov, ‘Put’ termidora’, in N. Ustrialov, Pod znakom revoliutsii (Harbin, 1927),
p. 41. Ustrialov used the same title Mirkin-Getsevich did to underscore his disagreement with the
latter’s notion of Thermidor as a specific event, rather than as a process.
⁴ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 71. Ustrialov later made his peace with the Soviet regime,
which he had come to believe was a hybrid of Bolshevism and nationalism. After working faithfully for
the Soviet government in the agency that oversaw the Chinese Eastern Railway, he returned to the
Soviet Union in 1935. In 1937 he was arrested and shot.
⁵ Ibid., p. 219.
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contribution to the collection of essays he edited, Smena Vekh (Change of

Signposts), which was published in Prague in the same year, and in Smolensk
one year later.⁶
Despite rejecting socialism and communism, the essays in the collection did not
advocate resistance or opposition to the Soviet state. Rather, they counselled
acceptance of it. Resistance was not necessary. The Soviet Union was destined
to end up a state like those that preceded it in Russian history, which to the
smenovekhovtsy was a good thing because the history of Russia was essentially the
history of Russian nationalism. The Bolsheviks’ reaction to this was not uniformly
hostile. Although the Bolsheviks’ claim to universality required them to reject the
nationalism the smenovekhovtsy recommended, at the Eleventh Party Congress in
1922 Lenin nonetheless commended them for pointing out the growing danger
petty corruption and a widespread commitment to personal enrichment posed to
the regime as a whole.⁷ One can be reasonably certain that that was the reason
Lenin, who had read the collection carefully, approved its publication along with
two volumes of essayscritically evaluating it.⁸
Ustrialov’s contribution was consistent with the general argument of Smena
Vekh. He agreed that the Soviet Union was destined to become a polity strongly
resembling the bourgeois nation states of Western Europe. Where he differed was
in invoking Thermidor to illustrate and to clarify his prediction. Because Thermi-
dor, for the Bolsheviks, was the successor regime to the French Revolution, which
ended when the Jacobin Terror did, the arrival in the Soviet Union of something
resembling it would seem to suggest that the October Revolution had been for
nothing, that it would never be the catalyst sparking socialist revolutions else-
where in Europe or anywhere else. But Ustrialov did not consider the collapse of
Bolshevism and the Soviet Union inevitable. The original Thermidor, he knew, did
not entail the ‘liquidation’ of the French Revolution. Rather, it was only a later
phase of it. For this reason there remained the possibility, should a Soviet
Thermidor emerge, of the Soviet Union returning to its socialist roots. Regressing
further into a Bonapartist dictatorship, as happened in the French Revolution, was
by no means guaranteed. In fact, Thermidor might even be something the Soviet
leadership would welcome, for it would make their ideological message more
palatable to the Soviet people, who presumably desired ‘normalcy’ like that which
the Thermidor in the French Revolution both engendered and reflected. Under

⁶ The title of the collection was taken from the 1909 collection of essays, entitled Vekhi (Signposts) of
which Smena vekh was intended as a corrective. Ustrialov’s essay also appeared in Novosti zhizni, the
newspaper he edited in Harbin. Ibid., p. 72.
⁷ V. I. Lenin, ‘Politicheskii otchet tsentral’nogo komiteta RKP(b)’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XLV, pp. 93–5.
Of course Lenin feared the erosion of communism implicit in this corruption and greed while the
smenovekhovtsy welcomed it as a harbinger of Russia’s post-communist future.
⁸ Edward Hallett Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1924–1926 (New York, 1958), vol. I, p. 58.
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such circumstances, they might even come to feel genuine enthusiasm for the
Soviet regime.⁹
In assessing Ustrialov’s critique of Bolshevism and the Soviet Union, it is
important to remember that the ‘National Bolshevism’ he favoured did not
mean he thought this new hybrid would be more Bolshevik (or socialist) than
nationalist—or, for that matter, more nationalist than Bolshevik. Rather, he
seemed convinced that its dichotomous elements would remain in an uneasy,
but self-perpetuating equilibrium. But to the Bolsheviks themselves, such an
amalgam was unacceptable. And far from mitigating their conviction that his
motives were suspect and his intentions malevolent, Ustrialov’s whole argument,
corroborated as it was by the appropriation of terminology from the French
Revolution, soon produced a reaction among the Bolsheviks much like a bull’s
after a red flag has been placed within his field of vision. Although Ustrialov never
claimed that the Soviet Union had already reached the stage in its historical
development that strongly resembled the French Thermidor, his prediction that
it might soon do so was enough to make his argument—again from the perspec-
tive of the Bolsheviks—a threat. One must bear in mind that, to Ustrialov, the two
Thermidors, the French and the Soviet, were a process, not a single event; the term
signified degeneration towards a particular end point, rather than the end point
itself, which, in the French case, was either Napoleon’s dictatorship, which
completed and stabilized the French Revolution before betraying it, or the explicit
counter-revolution that began in 1815 with the return of the Bourbons. In other
words, it did not mean an event or series of events that in the French Revolution
inevitably resulted in a repudiation of some, but by no means all, of its original
ideology. For Ustrialov Thermidor was a trend, and as such it might be managed
successfully by the Soviet regime. In fact, it might even disappear on its own,
thereby making unnecessary a revolution removing the Bolsheviks from power. If
the Bolsheviks for some reason could not eliminate the Soviet Thermidor, they
could grudgingly accommodate themselves to it in the hope that it would soon
eliminate itself.
But Ustrialov also claimed that any Soviet Thermidor would be more subtle,
and insidious, and thus more difficult to prevent, and later on more difficult to
eliminate, than the Thermidor in France actually was. All that was needed for it to
occur was ‘an insignificant palace coup eliminating the most odious figures [of the
regime] by the hands of their own associates, and in the name of their very own
principles’.¹⁰ The Soviet Thermidor, in other words, would destroy the Soviet
system from within—which would seem to suggest that the supporters of a Soviet
Thermidor could pose plausibly as supporters of the Soviet Union. Internal

⁹ N. V. Ustrialov, ‘Patriotika’, Smena vekh: sbornik statei (Smolensk, 1922), pp. 52–65.
¹⁰ Ibid., p. 70.
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vigilance was therefore necessary if the Soviet leaders were to save the Soviet
system, and perhaps also their own necks, from this particular threat.
The Mensheviks viewed the Soviet Thermidor differently. If, for Ustrialov and
his acolytes, it was a reliable indication that the Soviet Union would end up a
state little different from those that already existed in Western Europe, for the
Mensheviks its presence, or even the mere possibility of its emergence, would
prove their contention that the October Revolution had been premature. A Soviet
Thermidor, in other words, would demonstrate not that socialism in Russia was
impossible because the Russian people, as Ustrialov believed, were more nation-
alist than socialist. Rather, a Soviet Thermidor would lead to the achievement of
socialism, albeit in the distant future after the country had experienced the
requisite oppression that always occurs under capitalism. Even before the
NEP’s emergence served as proof that Thermidor was already a reality, Iulii
Martov, for example, was quick to argue, barely weeks after the October
Revolution, that any attempt to achieve socialism in its immediate aftermath
was hopelessly utopian and bound to fail. The prematurity of the revolution
would make a dictatorship like the Jacobin necessary, but rather than ensuring
the Bolsheviks’ survival, it would accelerate ‘petit-bourgeois tendencies’ many
Mensheviks, including Martov, considered Thermidorian.¹¹
After the NEP was announced and began to be implemented, Martov, in
November 1921, took up the issue again, this time claiming that the new policy
permitting capitalism and market relations on a limited scale was in fact the proof
he had been waiting for that Thermidor, in the Soviet Union, had already
emerged.¹² Remarkably, the Bolsheviks themselves, by issuing the NEP, had
‘thermidorianized’ a not inconsiderable segment of the Soviet economy. But
unlike Ustrialov, Martov saw Thermidor as exclusively an economic phenom-
enon, albeit one that was likely to have significant political repercussions. In the
French Revolution it had led to Napoleon’s dictatorship, but in the Soviet Union it
would lead to a genuinely proletarian regime, which the Kronstadt Revolt, despite
its failure, had given Martov reason to believe might emerge sooner than he had
originally anticipated. And once the proletariat took power, it would complete the
bourgeois revolution the Bolsheviks had interrupted, and sometime later com-
mence the construction of socialism.
According to Martov, now that Thermidor was a reality in the Soviet Union, its
rulers, quite conveniently, would lose power no matter what they did. Should they
abrogate the NEP and begin the massive projects of social and economic engin-
eering considered essential to the establishment of socialism, insurrections like the
Kronstadt Revolt would be commonplace, and the Bolsheviks would be compelled

¹¹ R. Abramovich, ‘Martov i problemy russkogo bol’shevizma’, Sotsialisticheski vestnik, no. 8–9

(24 April 1923): pp. 10–11.
¹² Iu. O. Martov, ‘Na puti k likvidatsii’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 18 (15 October 1921): pp. 2–4.
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to inflict terror the way the Jacobins did. But terror would not save the Bolsheviks
any more than it did the Jacobins. The Bolsheviks would still be vulnerable to
Thermidor, just as the Jacobins were; if it came about in the Soviet Union, it would
lead to a military dictatorship, just like it did in France in 1799. But instead of this
dictatorship being followed by the restoration of a retrograde class, as happened in
France in 1815, the proletariat would eventually overthrow it, and in the end, all
would be well.
In short, Martov was convinced that by eliminating the NEP, the Bolsheviks
would lose power. But should the Bolsheviks do the opposite and continue the
NEP, the result would be no different. An economy partly capitalist and partly
socialist was inherently unstable, and whoever oversaw it would eventually have
to choose one sector over the other. But before this happened, the prematurity
of the October Revolution would weaken the Bolsheviks sufficiently for the
proletariat to take power. Of course Martov in 1921 had no way of knowing
that the Bolsheviks would do away with the NEP some years later, after Martov’s
death. But their doing so would not have altered the conclusion he had reached in
1921 that Bolshevism was doomed; like the Jacobins, they had taken power too
early. In the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie, with the advent of Thermidor,
regained in 1794 the power it lost in 1792, while in the still ongoing Russian
Revolution, according to Martov, the bourgeoisie would at some point in the
future regain the power it lost in October 1917, barely seven months after wresting
it from the monarchy, which, for over a century, had been the political instrument
of the landed nobility. But its prospective victory in Russia would be a pyrrhic one
because the proletariat would soon take power itself.¹³
Another Menshevik, David Dallin, described Thermidor more as a political and
psychological phenomenon than as a reflection of class relations. To him it
entailed an absence of any interest in politics. To Dallin this resulted from a
growing disenchantment with the Promethean imperative of achieving utopia

¹³ Ibid., pp. 3–4. Of course Martov’s overly schematic comparison ignored all sorts of complicating
factors. The Jacobins were no more monolithic, tactically and ideologically, than the Bolsheviks. There
were Left Jacobins and Right Jacobins in France, just the way there emerged a Left Opposition and a
Right Opposition in the Soviet Union in the 1920s; within both dictatorships there were significant
differences and serious debates over the direction the respective revolutions should take. Also, Martov
failed to take into account the possibility that Thermidor in France, instead of following the Jacobin
dictatorship, was prefigured in the economic policies the Jacobins followed after eliminating their own
version of the Left Opposition in the spring of 1794, namely the Hébertists and the more radically
inclined of the sans-culottes. In fact Soviet historians would argue strenuously in the 1920s, when
debates and disagreement with the party’s preferred opinions were still allowed, over whether it was
actually the Jacobins, instead of the Directory and the political forces that established it, who
introduced the policies generally subsumed under the rubric of Thermidor. Finally, Martov never
indicated in any of his writings if he considered Thermidor, in purely economic terms, an actual
counter-revolution or a form of ‘backsliding’ that left the basic accomplishments of the French
Revolution intact. That he wrote of ‘thermidorianization’ suggests that he thought the whole issue
meaningless, inasmuch as Thermidor could stand for a whole spectrum of policies from ‘reactionary’ to
‘counter-revolutionary’.
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either within a regime that valued property rights, as was the case in the French
Revolution, or on behalf of a political system bent on eliminating private property
entirely, as the Soviets, notwithstanding the NEP, intended. That in France
Thermidor was carried out by erstwhile supporters of the Jacobin dictatorship it
replaced—an assertion with which historians of the French Revolution might
disagree—was particularly significant inasmuch as the Soviet Thermidor might
emerge in a similar fashion, namely from within the Soviet leadership rather than
in the aftermath of a revolution in which the Soviet Union itself was overthrown.¹⁴
On this last point, other Mensheviks, including Fëdor Dan, agreed with Dallin.
Significantly, they identified the so-called Right Opposition, headed by Bukharin
and Rykov, that deemed it prudent economically to continue the NEP, as the
unwitting instruments of the Soviet Thermidor, which these Mensheviks believed
would entail the ‘economic NEP’ that already existed causing a ‘political NEP’ to
emerge, in which the Right Opposition would rule the Soviet Union—but not for
the purpose of achieving communism. Bukharin and Rykov and whoever else
joined them in this new ruling elite would install in the Soviet Union something like
the original Thermidor in France, and in that way vindicate the Mensheviks’
decision not to support the October Revolution on the grounds of its prematurity.
Moreover, agitating for a counter-revolution in this particular scenario would be
unnecessary. All the Mensehviks had to do to ensure that the Soviet system collapsed
was to wait.¹⁵ Of course the Mensheviks’ support was the last thing Bukharin and the
Right Opposition wanted or needed, and indeed unscrupulous supporters-turned-
enemies such as Stalin were fully capable of using it to defame them.
The Mensheviks always had trouble understanding Stalin. Prior to his embark-
ing in 1928 on policies that, in purely economic terms, rendered any notion of a
Soviet Thermidor ridiculous, several had concluded that the ongoing terror for
which Stalin was partly responsible was not actually a means for achieving a
counterrevolution.¹⁶ Pëtr Garvi argued in 1927 that the NEP had already caused

¹⁴ D. Dallin, ‘O termidore’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 165 (1 December 1927): pp. 3–10; and
D. Dallin, ‘NEP i anti-NEP’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 5(195) (8 March 1929): pp. 2–3. Dallin
planned to write more on the themes of these articles in a book he started that was tentatively titled The
Russian Thermidor and the Degeneration of Communism, but he never finished it. André Lieblich, From
the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge MA, 1999), p. 377. Ironically, the
scenario Dallin sketched out in these articles of how a facsimile of the original Thermidor would
emerge in the Soviet Union was strikingly similar to the argument a number of Soviet historians were
making simultaneously that by imposing Thermidorian policies before Thermidor actually began, the
Jacobins were blurring the distinction between their own rule and that which followed it. In this view,
the events of 9 Thermidor served merely to accelerate the course of events in the revolution, rather than
reversing them.
¹⁵ Lieblich, From the Other Shore, pp. 147–8.
¹⁶ See, for example, the editorial in Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 154 (20 June 1927): pp. 1–2, entitled
‘Ko vsem sotsial-demokraticheskim rabochim Sovetskogo soiuza’. Dallin was particularly averse to the
notion that Stalin was not the Thermidorian he seemed to be, but rather the very opposite, and the
transformational policies Stalin announced in the winter of 1928–9 must have come as a considerable
shock. Dallin, ‘NEP i anti-NEP’, passim.
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an ‘economic Thermidor’ in the Soviet Union, and that if it continued, it could

easily generate a ‘political Thermidor’ leading inexorably not to socialism but to
capitalism.¹⁷ In fact, the recent defeat of the Left Opposition, which to Garvi was
the only counterweight within the Soviet Communist Party to the forces that were
driving it rightward to Thermidor, suggested that the process might already be
underway, impelled as it was by the Right Opposition—which then included
Stalin. But Garvi implied that should the Right Opposition be defeated, Stalin
would likely emerge as its undisputed successor.¹⁸ Garvi, like most Mensheviks,
misunderstood Stalin; in that respect he was like Trotsky. But unlike Trotsky, he
did not underestimate him.
Because the Mensheviks never quite acknowledged Stalin’s credentials as a
genuine revolutionary committed to communism, they persisted in believing
throughout his rule that the Soviet Union was on the verge of Thermidor or had
already succumbed to it. In 1945, Boris Nikolaevskii, undoubtedly impressed by
Stalin’s adoption during the Second World War of more moderate policies
designed to convince the Soviet people that Soviet rule was preferable to rule by
the Nazis, argued that Thermidor was an inevitable and universal result of
revolutions that occurs when the generation that made the revolution is succeeded
by one that is sceptical of many aspects of it, and therefore seeks to freeze existing
class relationships on the basis of the new, but now familiar and accepted
economic system. As a result, the fulfillment of any earlier, still unkept promises
is no longer possible, as is any chance of the revolution regaining its original
energy and radicalizing its programmatic objectives beyond what those who
made the revolution intended.¹⁹ In March 1956, undoubtedly influenced by
Khrushchev’s heartfelt but incomplete denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth
Party Congress one month earlier, Oreste Rosenfeld wrote that, in the Soviet
Union ‘Thermidor is in full swing’.²⁰ Not long afterwards, Lydia Dan, whose
Menshevism, like that of her husband, had been watered down to the point
where it was practically indistinguishable from a kind of Leninism, decried the
de-Stalinization that Rosenfeld celebrated, and expressed her fear that Khrush-
chev’s descent into Thermidorian reaction might lead to the dissolution of the
collective farms, along with the other defining institutions of the Soviet system.²¹

¹⁷ P. Garvi, ‘Pod znakom termidora’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no 159–60 (22 September 1927): p. 6.
¹⁸ Ibid., p. 5. The so-called Left Opposition, when it emerged in 1923, consisted mostly of supporters
of Trotsky, who was the object of attacks from Zinoviev and Kamenev, his one-time allies against Stalin.
In the spring of 1926, however, the latter joined forces with Trotsky’s to form what is sometimes called
the Joint Opposition or the United Opposition.
¹⁹ B. Nikolaevskii, ‘Termidor’ russkoi revoliutsii’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no 15–16 (573–4)
(6 September 1945): pp. 171–5.
²⁰ Quoted in Liebich, From the Other Shore, p. 286.
²¹ Ibid., p. 285. Though not himself a Menshevik, nor even Russian, Milovan Djilas, in his influential
analysis of Soviet Communism, The New Class, claimed that the bureaucrats and party functionaries
still ruling the Soviet Union had been installed during what he called ‘the Soviet Thermidor’, the
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Although Dan did not say so explicitly, the ultimate outcome of her scenario of the
Soviet Union’s ideological degeneration was the Soviet Union’s collapse, followed
by a Russian equivalent of the Bourbon Restoration in France. Unlike the French
originals, however, these Russian Bourbons would hold onto power, rather than
lose it in a Russian version of the 1830 Revolution in France.

* * *
Predictions of a Soviet Thermidor were just about the last thing the Bolsheviks
wanted to hear once the NEP, which seemed uncannily to resemble it, was
implemented.²² In 1927 Garvi wrote correctly that the Bolsheviks were as much
annoyed by his ability, in emigration, to write openly about Thermidor as they
were by his application of the term to the Soviet Union.²³ For this reason the term
was never mentioned publicly or in the Soviet press until 1925. But the Bolsheviks,
as mentioned, had access to émigré publications, and their familiarity with the
French Revolution made comparisons, mostly sotto voce, inevitable. Trotsky even
admitted that, during the Kronstadt Revolt and the first years of the NEP, he had
had ‘more than a few’ conversations with Lenin about Thermidor and its possible
relevance.²⁴ He also acknowledged in his autobiography, written many years after
the fact, that the analogies liberals and Mensheviks drew in emigration, which at
the time he had derided as ‘superficial’ and ‘unsubstantiated’, were not so ridicu-
lous that he and other Bolsheviks did not draw similar analogies themselves, albeit
privately.²⁵ Lenin, of course, was well-versed in the history of the French Revolu-
tion, and the resemblance between its Thermidorian phase and the NEP was not
lost on him. Nor, for that matter, was he oblivious to the possibility of the Soviet
Union experiencing something analogous to Thermidor without its leadership
being overthrown; in the spring of 1921 he spoke almost flippantly about it while
preparing a report to the Tenth Party Conference on the tax in kind he intended to
propose.²⁶ Along with noting the difficulties of governing peasants reluctant to
part with their produce, Lenin made a point in the report itself that even though

responsibility for which he assigned primarily to Stalin. Milovan Djilas, The New Class (San Diego CA,
1983), p. 51.

²² According to Michel Vovelle, in ‘1789–1917: The Game of Analogies’, p. 369, Lenin coined the
term ‘autothermidorization’ in 1921 to signify the process whereby revolutionary regimes reverted to
conventional ones. I have been unable to find any instance of Lenin using the term in his Polnoe
sobranie sochinenii—though he could have done so in ordinary conversation. In any event, no other
leading Bolshevik, to the best of my knowledge, used the term or attempted to define it.
²³ P. Garvi, ‘Ot sud’by ne uidesh’, Sotsialisticheskie vestnik,no. 161 (7 October 1927): p. 5.
²⁴ Arkhiv Trotskogo. Kommunisticheskaia oppozitsiia v SSSR, 1923–1927 (Moscow, 1990), vol. IV, p. 14.
²⁵ In 1927, in the course of vouching, disingenuously, for Trotsky’s loyalty to the Soviet Union and his
commitment to communism, Bukharin referred specifically to Trotsky’s statement denigrating these
analogies. N. I. Bukharin, ‘Doklad na sobranii aktiva Leningradskoi organizatsii VKP(b) (26 October
1927)’, in N. I. Bukharin, V zashchitiu proletarskoi diktatury: sbornik (Moscow, 1928), p. 234.
²⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘Materialy k X vserossiiskoi konferentsii: plany doklada o prodovol’stvennom naloge’,
in Lenin, PSS, vol. XLIII, p. 403.
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the Civil War was over, the Soviet state still had to do something about the
‘bureaucratic distortions’ from which many of its leading institutions suffered.²⁷
In other words, the Soviet leader was all too cognizant that the symptoms of a
Soviet Thermidor—corruption, careerism, and what would soon be referred to as
‘bureaucratism’—already existed. By the early 1920s ‘careerists’ with no particular
commitment to Marxist ideology had joined the party in such numbers that the
Old Bolsheviks, who remembered the October Revolution fondly while ignoring
the failures and fratricidal conflict that preceded it, were suddenly a small minor-
ity; Stalin’s ability to articulate the resentment of this new generation of com-
munists for the Old Bolsheviks—the intellectual snobbery and the condescension
many of them showed Stalin himself caused him to feel the same resentment
acutely—was a significant factor in his rise to power. But when the party referred
formally, in a resolution at the Eleventh Party Congress in 1922, to the specific
failings they believed conducive to a Soviet Thermidor, the term itself was
conspicuous in its absence. The most Lenin was willing to acknowledge was that
the red tape and corruption he knew was rampant were indicative of bourgeois
decadence and degeneration. The Soviet leader also shelved plans he had for
responding publicly to Ustrialov, probably because doing so would have required
him to explain at length why the latter’s application of the term to the Soviet
Union was unwarranted.²⁸ In that event, refuting the charge of Thermidor would
likely have had the paradoxical effect of giving it greater credibility.
The course of action Lenin wanted the Bolsheviks to follow was to eliminate the
attributes of Soviet politics and society that might cause Thermidor to occur—or
might be plausible evidence that Thermidor was occurring already—without ever
using the term publicly. But by the mid-1920s, after Lenin’s death, the symptoms
of Thermidor were so obvious, and the temptation to use the term as a political
expletive so enticing, that this strategy proved untenable. The whole issue of a
Soviet Thermidor soon became a defining one: from what a Soviet leader thought
about it could be inferred his opinions on a variety of other issues. The first
Bolshevik of any prominence to raise the issue publicly was Pëtr Zalutskii, a
supporter of Zinoviev, at the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925.²⁹ Significantly,
he used the term to signify a species of counter-revolution, in which a onetime
revolutionary government established an economic system much like the one
it had previously abolished. The effect of this was to make the charge that the

²⁷ V. I. Lenin, ‘Zakliuchitel’noe slovo po dokladu o prodovol’stvennom naloge (27 May 1921)’, ibid.,
p. 327.
²⁸ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, pp. 89–91.
²⁹ Zalutskii was a worker but also an autodidact, which may explain his knowledge of French
history. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, p. 244. His having once been an SR, and then a supporter of
Zinoviev, was sufficient reason for him to perish in the Terror. But raising the spectre of Thermidor,
possibly at the instigation of Zinoviev, as Tomskii claimed shortly afterwards, certainly did not improve
his chances of survival. Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 223, n. 72; XIV s”ezd vsesoiuznoi
kommunisticheskoi partii (b). 18–31 dekabria 1925 g.: stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1926), p. 281.
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Soviet Thermidor existed, or might soon exist, even more explosive than if he
had used the term instead as a synonym for a mere ‘reaction’.³⁰ Reversing a
counter-revolution was of course more difficult than reversing a mere reaction
to a revolution. For that reason, accusing someone of advocating the former was
a more serious charge than accusing someone of the latter, but either could be
deemed grounds for public condemnation, expulsion from the party, imprison-
ment, or even worse. The wisest thing a Bolshevik concerned for his career could
do, under the circumstances, was to make certain the word ‘Thermidor’ never
passed his lips.
But the Bolsheviks, if nothing else, were loquacious, and very often excessively so;
that Stalin could hold his tongue better than his rivals played a role in his eventual
success. Moreover, once the struggle to succeed Lenin began after the Soviet leader
had suffered the first of what would be a series of strokes in May 1922, the temptation
to stigmatize one’s rivals as advocates of a Soviet Thermidor was irresistible, and now
that Zalutskii had lanced the proverbial boil, the debate about its existence in the
Soviet Union would rage virtually until the struggle for power itself ended in 1929
with Stalin triumphant.

* * *
There was one Soviet leader in whom the term generated intrinsic interest, and in
whose opinion historical analogies generally, and those involving the French
Revolution specifically, deserved dispassionate analysis. This was Leon Trotsky,
who analysed the analogy with Thermidor at considerable length beginning in the
mid-1920s. Of course Trotsky always claimed his analysis was based entirely on
empirical evidence and was impervious to political considerations. But as his
political fortunes declined, politics increasingly influenced his conclusions. It was
politics, rather than any self-contained reconsideration of the French Revolution,
that eventually caused him, in 1935, to redefine the term itself to enhance its utility
in diatribes against his political enemies. Despite the polemical sleights-of-hand this
required, the evolution of Trotsky’s view of Thermidor deserves attention.
Notwithstanding a single mention of the term in 1903, in which Thermidor was
cited in explaining the gap in the French Revolution between the Jacobins and
Napoleon, Trotsky wrote almost nothing about its possible applicability to the
Soviet Union before Zalutskii raised the issue in 1925.³¹ Over the next two years,
as Zalutskii’s original speculation was the pretext for attacks aimed at Zinoviev
and others, such as Kamenev, who were aligned with him, Trotsky was not among
those who responded critically. The reason for this was that Trotsky’s concept of
Thermidor was similar to Zalutskii’s. But any sympathy he may have felt for
Zalutskii was not sufficient to cause him to come to Zalutskii’s defence. Instead,
he remained silent. Perhaps Trotsky thought responding to these attacks was

³⁰ XIV s”ezd, p. 358. ³¹ Trotsky, Vtoroi s”ezd RSDRP, p. 30.

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beneath his dignity. Perhaps he also still took seriously his earlier admonition that
historical analogies were no substitute for historical analysis. He might even have
refrained, albeit temporarily, from raising the analogy because he thought his
doing so would dishearten the international proletariat even more than he
believed it already was because of capitalism’s survival in Western and Central
Europe even after a socialist revolution in Russia. However one defined the
original Thermidor, whether as a form of counter-revolution or merely as a
reactionary phase within a revolution that would resume its course once the
phase ended, the fact remained that applying the term to the Soviet Union implied
that something had gone very wrong, that the October Revolution had stalled, or
perhaps even reversed itself, and that the proletariat’s hold over the political
institutions of the state was, at the very least, precarious.³² Whatever the reason
or reasons for Trotsky’s silence, by 1927 they no longer mattered. Trotsky lustily
joined the debate. The reason he gave for his reversal was his recent discovery that
one can and should seek analogies with and learn from the past—a lesson he
repeated two years later, when he wrote grandiloquently that ‘not [resorting] to
analogies with the revolutions of past epochs [is] simply to reject the historical
experience of mankind’.³³
Having sanctioned in principle the investigation of historical analogies, Trotsky
now examined the specific validity of the Thermidorian one. His verdict was that
the analogy was inappropriate because the original Thermidor was a genuine
counter-revolution, changing not only class relations, but the political arrange-
ments that arose from them. Even under the NEP, by contrast, the Soviet Union
remained a proletarian state both politically and, for the most part, economically.
Thermidor was certainly a danger, and the fact that the Soviet Union had
developed a large and increasingly autonomous bureaucracy unaccountable to
anyone made possible—if not yet likely—a system comparable to that which
existed in France from 1794 to 1799.
What Trotsky did, in effect, was to accept the definition of Thermidor Ustrialov
and the Mensheviks had offered while rejecting their conclusion, shared by the
German Communists, Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow, that the Soviet Thermi-
dor, as a species of counter-revolution, already existed.³⁴ Yes, Trotsky admitted,
economic deprivation, cultural backwardness, and the failure of proletarian
revolutions in Western Europe had made the Soviet Union susceptible to what
he and others concerned about a Soviet Thermidor often called ‘bureaucratism’.

³² Tamara Kondratieva implies that this last consideration was what caused Trotsky to speak of
‘Thermidorian tendencies’ in the Soviet Union rather than of Thermidor actually existing in the
country. Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 187. While this was surely one reason for Trotsky’s choice of
words, there were other, even more pressing ones.
³³ Leon Trotsky, ‘Thermidor (Summer 1927)’, in Trotsky, CLO (1926–7), p. 263; Leon Trotsky,
‘A Letter to the Italian Left Communists (25 September 1929)’, in WLT (1929), p. 322.
³⁴ Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929–1940 (London, 1963), pp. 53–4.
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This particular phenomenon directly threatened the Soviet Union’s legitimacy as a

socialist and proletarian entity. Unchecked, it would result in the bureaucracy
controlling the means of the production, making decisions on its own instead of
implementing those of the party. But Trotsky and his supporters did not draw
from this unpleasant prospect the pessimistic conclusion it suggested. Instead they
offered a convenient extenuation: because a bureaucracy could not own property,
much less pass it on generationally, it was not a class, and so even if it did
somehow take power, the means of production would remain in the hands of
the proletariat.³⁵
But the proletariat in the Soviet Union could no longer count on all the factions
within the Communist Party to represent it. The forces for Thermidor that
Trotsky thought emanated from the kulaks and institutions such as the army
and the diplomatic corps were assisted by elements within the party that, whatever
their ‘subjective’ intentions, were by their actions making a Soviet Thermidor
‘objectively’ more likely.³⁶ Trotsky’s vivid metaphor for this was of a Thermidor-
ian dragon whose tail (by which he meant the openly counter-revolutionary forces
outside the party) was wagging a head (i.e. the Communist Party) that had lost
control over its body.³⁷ On some occasions in the mid-1920s when Trotsky
addressed the issue of Thermidor, he included Stalin and his supporters among
the forces within the party unconsciously promoting counter-revolution.³⁸ On
other occasions, however, he described the Stalinist faction as ‘a centrist’ body,
positioned precariously between the Bukharinists on the right and his own
supporters (or what remained of them) on the left, while occasionally oscillating
between them on the various questions that arose to bedevil the party as it
grappled with problems it never anticipated.³⁹ Whatever the configuration of
forces in the Soviet Union that were either oblivious to, or actually abetting the
emergence of a Soviet Thermidor, for Trotsky the threat it posed to everything he
had worked to achieve in the Soviet Union was real:
To deny the danger of bourgeois restoration for the dictatorship of the proletariat
in a backward society under capitalist encirclement is inconceivable. Only a

³⁵ Trotsky, ‘Theses on Revolution and Counter-Revolution (26 November 1926)’, in CLO (1980),
pp. 169–72; Trotsky, ‘Thermidor’, in CLO (1926–7), pp. 258–63.
³⁶ Leon Trotsky, ‘The Fear of Our Platform (23 October 1927)’, in CLO (1926–7), pp. 446–7; Leon
Trotsky, ‘The Danger of Bonapartism and the Opposition’s Rule (21 October 1928)’, in CLO (1928–9)
(New York, 1981), p. 275; Leon Trotsky, ‘Where is the Soviet Republic Going? (25 February 1929)’, in
WLT (1929), p. 46; Leon Trotsky, ‘To the Bulgarian Comrades (4 October 1930)’, in WLT (1930–1)
(New York, 1973), p. 45.
³⁷ Leon Trotsky, ‘Declaration to the Sixth Comintern Congress (12 July 1928)’, in CLO (1928–9),
pp. 139–42; Leon Trotsky, ‘Defence of the Soviet Republic and the Opposition (7 September 1929)’, in
WLT (1929), p. 280.
³⁸ Leon Trotsky, ‘Reply to an Ultimatum (16 December 1928)’, in CLO (1928–9), p. 362; Leon
Trotsky, ‘The Bolshevik Opportunists Need Help (1 June1929)’, in WLT (1929), p. 150.
³⁹ Leon Trotsky, ‘At a New Stage (December 1927)’, in CLO (1926–7), pp. 489–90; Leon Trotsky,
‘The Sino-Soviet Conflict and the Opposition (4 August 1929)’, in WLT (1929), p. 216.
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Menshevik or a genuine capitulator who understands neither the international

nor the internal resources of our revolution could speak of the inevitability of a
Thermidor. But only a bureaucrat, a windbag, or a braggart could deny the
possibility of Thermidor.⁴⁰

Moreover, the consequences of a Soviet Thermidor would be extremely serious:

Thermidor . . . does not signify a period of reaction in general, i.e. a period of ebb,
of downsliding, or a weakening of revolutionary positions. Thermidor has a
much more precise meaning. It indicates the direct transfer of power into the
hands of a different class, after which the revolutionary class cannot regain power
except through an armed uprising. The latter requires, in turn, a new revolu-
tionary situation, the inception of which depends upon a whole complex of
domestic and international causes.⁴¹

How, then, could a Soviet Thermidor become a reality? Here, too, Trotsky seemed
unable to make up his mind. Sometimes he speculated that Thermidor could
occur incrementally, in stages, or, in Trotsky’s words, ‘on the instalment plan’,
with the kulaks, the bourgeoisie, and their objective allies within the party and the
bureaucracy gradually reducing the protectors of the proletariat, Trotsky and his
allies, to political impotence’.⁴² At that point, the Soviet Union would cease to be a
workers’ state, and the Thermidorian counter-revolution would be complete. But
on other occasions Trotsky insisted that Thermidor could emerge only as the
result of civil war, which meant that as long as a civil war did not occur in Russia,
Trotsky could continue to argue that Thermidor had not yet occurred.⁴³ Finally,
Trotsky argued at times that Thermidor could be ushered in by a coup of the
army, with Voroshilov or Budenny as the eventual Bonapartist dictator.⁴⁴ Only at
the very end of the 1920s, when Stalin’s power, which Trotsky had consistently
underestimated, could no longer be minimized, did Trotsky come to see his
Georgian rival as the most likely candidate for the Soviet Bonaparte.⁴⁵ Indeed,
as Stalin’s power continued to grow in the early 1930s, despite the turmoil caused
by industrialization and collectivization, Trotsky speculated that the Thermidor-
ian and Bonapartist stages of counter-revolution might be merged, or, the

⁴⁰ Trotsky, ‘Thermidor’, in CLO (1926–7), p. 260.

⁴¹ Trotsky, ‘Defence of the Soviet Republic and the Opposition’, in WLT (1929), p. 279.
⁴² Trotsky, ‘Thermidor’, 263; Leon Trotsky, ‘The July Plenum and the Right Danger (22 July 1928)’,
in CLO (1928–9), p. 175; Leon Trotsky, ‘Speech at the Joint Plenary Session of the CC and the Central
Control Commission (1 August 1927)’, Stalin School of Falsification, p. 172.
⁴³ Trotsky, ‘At a New Stage’, in CLO (1926–7), p. 489.
⁴⁴ Trotsky, ‘The Danger of Bonapartism and the Opposition’s Rule’, in CLO (1928–9), p. 275.
⁴⁵ Leon Trotsky, ‘What is the Immediate Aim of Exiling Trotsky (4 March 1929)?’ in WLT (1929),
p. 61; Leon Trotsky, ‘Communists and the Bourgeois Press (March 1929)’, in WLT (1929), p. 96; Leon
Trotsky, ‘Jacob Blumkin Shot by the Stalinists (4 January 1930)’, in WLT (1930) (New York, 1975),
p. 25.
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alternative, that the Thermidorian stage might be skipped entirely, largely because
the forces Trotsky thought were supporting Stalin in Russia were considerably
more powerful than those that had supported Napoleon in France.⁴⁶
About all of this several observations are appropriate. First, Trotsky’s concern,
which at times came close to being an obsession, that the Soviet Union might
experience its own Thermidor, changed the way he viewed the Jacobins. Before
Thermidor became an issue, Trotsky had not only lauded the Jacobins for their
willingness to overcome any moral scruples about killing people, which were now
just outdated remnants of an earlier age, and to apply as much force and coercion
as they deemed necessary to achieve their objectives. He also identified with the
Jacobins, considering himself a ‘neo-Jacobin’ whose efforts to assist the proletariat
were comparable to those of the original Jacobins to assist the sans-culottes and the
other lower-class elements in France who took control of the French Revolution
after the bourgeoisie, out of cowardice and an absence of will, had relinquished it.
By the late 1920s, however, Trotsky was no longer the valorous conquistador who
had subdued the Provisional Government, the Whites, the SRs, the Kronstadt
Rebels, the Mensheviks, and all the other duplicitous and malevolent enemies of
progress, social justice, and individual emancipation. Instead, he was a defeated, or
nearly defeated oppositionist, who after 1927 was no longer in European Russia,
where all the important political and economic decisions were made, and after
1928 no longer in Russia at all, but rather a stateless exile without the wherewithal
to avenge the enemies in the Kremlin who had emasculated him politically. As a
result, the Jacobins, in his own mind, changed from winners to losers, from victors
to victims. And their defeat was as much a personal insult to Trotsky, because it so
closely resembled his own defeat, as it was a setback for all that was progressive
and hopeful in France after feudalism and the ancien régime had been destroyed.
By sending Robespierre and his confederates to the guillotine, the Thermidorians
eliminated from the earth ‘the most revolutionary force of their time’.⁴⁷ And
because Trotsky himself had been brought down by forces within the Communist
Party who only pretended to be genuine communists, he could not help but depict
the Thermidorians in France as Jacobins who, prior to 9 Thermidor, had pre-
tended to share their noble vision. The result was what he called a second chapter
in the history of the Jacobins, one that emitted an odour so foul that it ‘assail[ed]
one’s nostrils’.⁴⁸ In the testimony he gave in a quasi-trial the party prescribed in
1927 to provide a legal basis for his expulsion from the party and for the additional

⁴⁶ Leon Trotsky, ‘On the Question of Thermidor and Bonapartism (November 1930)’, in WLT
(1930–1), p. 71; Leon Trotsky, ‘Thermidor and Bonapartism (26 November 1930)’, in WLT (1930–1),
p. 76.
⁴⁷ Trotsky, ‘Speech at the Joint Plenary Session of the CC and the Central Control Commission
(1 August 1927)’, Stalin School of Falsification, p. 145.
⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 146.
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punishments it inflicted in 1928 and 1929, Trotsky described the depredations the
ersatz Jacobins had inflicted on the genuine Jacobins as follows:
The party regime stifles everyone who struggles against Thermidor. In the party
the mass worker, the man of the mass, has been stifled. The rank and file is
silent. Recall the history of the Jacobin Clubs. . . . A regime of terror was insti-
tuted; for silence was made compulsory; 100% votes and abstention from all
criticism were made compulsory; thinking in accordance with orders from
above were made obligatory; men were compelled to stop thinking that the
party is a living, independent organism, and not a self-sufficient machine of
power. . . . The Jacobin Clubs, the crucibles of revolution, became the nurseries of
future functionaries of Napoleon. We should learn from the French Revolution.
But is it really necessary to repeat it?⁴⁹

Second, it must be said that if Trotsky’s views on the French Revolution clouded
his political judgement, the requirement that he absolve himself (and, by impli-
cation, Lenin and the October Revolution) of any responsibility for the current
predicament of the Soviet Union surely hampered his understanding of the
French Revolution. For one thing, one might question his holding the Jacobins,
or a goodly number of them, responsible for Thermidor. For another, he roman-
ticized the Jacobins who resisted Thermidor as martyrs despite their having sent
literally hundreds of innocent Frenchmen to their deaths. But the most convincing
evidence that his understanding of the French Revolution left something to be
desired was his notion that the original Thermidor constituted a genuine counter-
revolution. The evidence that it was not is considerable. Thermidor did little to
disturb the agrarian property settlement of the revolution, and it left intact enough
of what the National Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, the Convention, and the
Committee of Public Safety had accomplished, such as the substitution of depart-
ments for provinces, the adoption of the decimal system, and the creation of
France as a republic, so that Napoleon could essentially complete the revolution
by his codification of French civil law and other reforms.⁵⁰ In sum, Trotsky was
wrong. The counter-revolution he believed France to have experienced in the late
1790s did not begin until the last years of Napoleon’s rule and the return of the
Bourbon monarchy in 1815. Permitting history to limit one’s political choices
while allowing the requirements of politics to distort one’s reading of history was
probably not what Trotsky had in mind when he said that one should analyse
historical events and learn from them.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 146.
⁵⁰ Denis Woronoff, The Thermidorean Regime and the Directory 1794–1799 (New York, 1984),
pp. 192–5. To some historians of the French Revolution, the Directory, when considered as the political
expression of the phase of the revolution commonly considered Thermidorian, was characterized by a
non-ideological moderation—neither royalist nor revolutionary—that was the ultimate cause of its
downfall. See, for example, Palmer, Age of Democratic Revolution, vol. II, 212–19.
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Third, and last, Trotsky’s acknowledging the threat of a Soviet Thermidor while
rejecting the reality of it seems another instance of his optimism tempering his
powers of analysis. The Soviet Union, he never tired of insisting even after his own
political demise in the mid-1920s, remained a workers’ state, and even as Trotsky
became alarmed by Stalin’s accumulation of power in the early 1930s, he was not
entirely displeased by the way Stalin used his power to transform Soviet industry
and agriculture.⁵¹ Of course it is difficult to understand, as Robert McNeal has
pointed out, how a regime as ossified by bureaucracy as Trotsky said the Soviet
Union was in the mid-1920s could have embarked on policies as politically risky,
indeed as Promethean, as those that Stalin chose to pursue a few years later.⁵²
Equally preposterous, given Trotsky’s powerlessness in exile, is Isaac Deutscher’s
explanation that Stalin collectivized Soviet agriculture because of pressure from
Trotsky.⁵³ But the most relevant point in this respect is that Trotsky’s analysis of
Thermidor reinforced his belief that, in the end, all would be well, the proletarian
revolution and Trotsky’s reputation intact. However real was the danger that the
Soviet bureaucracy might come to own the means of production as well as
controlling it, and thereby nullifying the October Revolution, Trotsky could still
look to the French Thermidor and proclaim—as he had in the case of the
Jacobins—that for all the similarities he discerned between the two revolutions,
Russia’s would never be analogous to France’s. The bourgeois revolution in France
was stopped on 9 Thermidor and did not resume (in Trotsky’s Marxist scheme of
things) until well into the next century. But the proletarian revolution in Russia,
while threatened by Thermidorian counter-revolution, would survive it, and
continue constructing socialism. Trotsky’s analysis of Thermidor was an example
of bad history producing shortsighted policies, but at least it proved psychologic-
ally comforting.
In contrast to Trotsky, Stalin did not look to the French Revolution for
psychological solace. In evaluating his comments on the Soviet Thermidor, one
must bear in mind that by the late 1920s he had the wherewithal, as the nearly
undisputed leader of the Soviet Union and the successor to Lenin, to prevent it,
and given his ideological objectives, good reason for doing so. The reversion to an
economic system that previously existed—which was precisely what Thermidor
entailed wherever and whenever it came about—was the antithesis of the radical
transformation of the Soviet economy and society he believed his extraordinarily
ambitious policies would bring about. Of course there were some in the party who
wanted the NEP, at least for the foreseeable future, to continue. Bukharin, with his

⁵¹ Trotsky, ‘Thermidor and Bonapartism’, in WLT (1930–1), p. 73.

⁵² Robert McNeal, ‘Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalin’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, no. 5 (1961): p. 95.
See also his ‘Trotskyist Interpretations of Stalinism’, in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation,
edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1977), pp. 30–52. I draw on McNeal’s shrewd analysis in my
own explication of Trotsky’s views on Thermidor and on the French Revolution itself.
⁵³ Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, p. 466.
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call for peasants to ‘enrich themselves’, was the most ardent and eloquent
proponent of this opinion. To Trotsky and other in the Left Opposition, however,
continuing the NEP, irrespective of its benefits economically, was dangerous
politically. However limited it was, the economic freedom the NEP permitted
might engender demands for political freedom, which to a regime like the Soviet,
which came to power in what was essentially an urban insurrection lacking
majoritarian political support, could easily lead to a counter-revolution reversing
everything the Bolsheviks had accomplished.
Stalin, however, had no such concerns. His intention to collectivize Soviet
agriculture and to resume the rapid industrialization the First World War and the
October Revolution had interrupted precluded any possibility of a Soviet Thermi-
dor. Of course there were political advantages to pretending that the threat it
posed was real. Anyone who raised the issue could be attacked because its impli-
cations were so injurious of the Bolsheviks’ pride and sense of accomplishment—
not to mention how completely the economic retrenchment and regression a
Soviet Thermidor implied contradicted the transformational imperatives inherent
in Bolshevism and Soviet communism. But about its becoming a reality in the
Soviet Union, Stalin believed there was no reason to be concerned.
The tactic he adopted rhetorically and for exclusively political purposes was to
claim that merely raising the possibility of Thermidor increased the likelihood of
its occurrence, and that anyone who did so was an enemy of the Soviet Union who
should be dealt with severely. In December 1925, after Zalutskii stated the
concerns shared by many others within the party that the danger of a Soviet
Thermidor was real, Stalin responded that the whole notion was preposterous—
and then made clear that the real threat to the party and the country was from
Trotsky and the Left Opposition.⁵⁴ In December 1926, an editorial in Pravda—for
the publication of which Stalin’s approval was now required—excoriated Trotsky
and the Opposition for their ‘fetid and insipid lies about Thermidor’, which
blinded many in the party, even committed Bolsheviks and communists, to the
very real threat posed by genuine counter-revolutionaries, the most dangerous of
whom, in the considered opinion of the editors, were Trotsky and his closest
confederates.⁵⁵
In other words, it was not Thermidor, but those who deliberately conjured it for
the purpose of destroying the Soviet Union, with whom honest communists,
according to Stalin, should be concerned. In September 1927, after dismissing
‘the foolish and ignorant charges about degeneration and termidoriastvo which
the oppositionists sometimes level against the party’, he declared that he would
not deal with them ‘because they are not worth analysing’—and then ended
his polemic by replicating his earlier syllogism that to warn against a Soviet

⁵⁴ J. V. Stalin, ‘K istorii raznoglasii’, in Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. VII, p. 385.

⁵⁵ ‘Za T. Zinov’evym—T. Trotskii’, Pravda, no. 286(3515) (10 December 1926): p. 2.
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Thermidor was reveal oneself as a supporter of it, and that to support a Soviet
Thermidor was to reveal oneself as an enemy of the Soviet Union.⁵⁶ The Trotskyist
opposition, he said, ‘[was] a hotbed and nursery of degeneration and Thermidor-
ian tendencies’.⁵⁷ In October 1927 he declared all talk of Thermidor ‘twaddle’, and
two months later, at the Fifteenth Party Congress, in the course of responding to
his own, obviously rhetorical question of whether the Soviet Union was currently
a proletariat dictatorship—which according to the stenographic account of the
congress produced laughter among the assembled delegates—he repeated his
earlier charge that raising the danger of Thermidor was tantamount to advocating
its arrival. He formulated his argument as follows:
The opposition says that we are in a state of Thermidorian degeneration. What
does this mean? It means that we do not have a dictatorship of the proletariat,
that both the economy and our politics have collapsed and are going backwards,
that we are advancing not towards socialism, but towards capitalism. This, of
course, is strange and foolish. But the opposition insists on it. . . . . Clearly there is
nothing Leninist in this ‘line’. . . . It is Menshevism of the purest sort. The
opposition is slipping into Menshevism.⁵⁸

In June 1930, in a report to the Central Committee at the Sixteenth Party

Congress, Stalin finally acknowledged the depth of the danger a Soviet Thermi-
dor would pose to both the party and the state. But he now defined Thermidor
differently. No longer just a reactionary phase in a revolution that the revolution
would probably survive, it was now a species of counter-revolution that would be
difficult, or perhaps even impossible, to reverse. But he quickly reassured his
audience that presently there was no cause for alarm. Thanks to his own
vigilance and that of the police—or so Stalin implied—the danger was now safely
in the past. ‘Trotskyism’, he reported, has collapsed. And the Soviet Union, far
from having degenerated into Thermidor, was continuing its long march to
socialism.⁵⁹
Stalin’s objections to the very possibility of a Soviet Thermidor were obviously
self-serving and politically motivated. But there seems to have been an additional
consideration. To establish his credentials to lead a country that was still demo-
graphically Russian, albeit with large numbers of non-Russians of whom Stalin,
being Georgian, was obviously one, he had to proclaim publicly that Russia was
sui generis—that its history, culture, political institutions, and everything else that
constituted its collective identity owed nothing to the rest of the world. This meant

⁵⁶ J. V. Stalin, ‘Politicheskaia fizionomiia russkoi oppositsii’, in Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. X, pp. 165–6.
⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 166.
⁵⁸ J. V. Stalin, ‘Trotskistskaia oppozitsiia prezhde i teper’, ibid., p. 202; J. V. Stalin, ‘Partiia i
oppozitsiia’, ibid., p. 342.
⁵⁹ J. V. Stalin, ‘Voprosy rukovodstva sotsialisticheskim stroitel’stvom’, in Stalin, Sochineniia,
vol. XII, pp. 343–4.
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that drawing analogies between anything Russian and anything non-Russian was
improper; in the 1930s Soviet historians would be shot for doing so. Accordingly,
in The Foundations of Leninism, the first work of his that was written and
published after Lenin’s death, Stalin proclaimed the self-sufficiency of the October
Revolution.⁶⁰ It owed nothing to the bourgeois revolutions in Western Europe
that preceded it—the English, the French, the German, and the Austrian. Stalin
was quick to explain how Russia’s revolution was unique—because ‘the bourgeois
revolution [had] unfolded in Russia under more advanced conditions of class
struggle than in the West’—but he said nothing about why it was unique.⁶¹ This
did not mean he had no opinion. He did. It was that the Russian proletariat—and
thus also the Russian peasants from the ranks of whom the proletariat emerged—
was instinctively more class-conscious and radical politically than its counterparts
in supposedly more advanced countries in Western Europe.⁶² While Stalin’s
opinion was driven by the conviction that expressing it would redound to his
political advantage, it also seems the genuine sentiment of a Georgian seeking
satisfaction in a country, that, for all its current government’s claims to respect the
autonomy of its ethnic minorities, in essence remained Russian, and would
continue to be Russian even after socialism and communism had been achieved.
According to Stalin, analogies with the French Revolution, indeed analogies with
anything neither Soviet nor Russian—no matter how illuminating or politically
useful in providing moral and ideological legitimacy—could not be tolerated,
much less incorporated into party orthodoxy, for to do so was to undermine
the centrality of the Soviet Union in history’s inexorable advance to socialism and
communism. In October 1927, in the same speech in which he dismissed all talk
of Thermidor as ‘twaddle’, he enlarged his critique to include the French Revolu-
tion as a whole. No matter what aspect of it one might analogize to the October
Revolution, the very act of doing so was evidence of disloyalty, even treason, and
for that reason—and also because any such analogies were factually inaccurate—
should be avoided entirely.⁶³ ‘Historical analogies with the French Revolution’,
Stalin warned, ‘have been and continue to be the main argument of all the various
Mensheviks and smenovekhovtsy against the preservation of the proletarian
dictatorship and the possibility of building socialism in our country’.⁶⁴
As it happened, Stalin’s dictum on the inadmissibility of historical analogies
allowed for exceptions. In November 1927, in an article in Pravda marking
the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, he began by stating that the
revolution differed ‘in principle’ from earlier revolutions in England, France, and
Germany; the progressive nature of their objectives, and the heroism they

⁶⁰ J. V. Stalin, The Foundations of Leninism (New York, 1932), passim. ⁶¹ Ibid., p. 62.
⁶² Ibid., especially pp. 58–72. ⁶³ Stalin, ‘Trotskistskaia oppozitsiia prezhde i teper’, pp. 201–2.
⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 201.
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demanded of their protagonists, Stalin readily acknowledged.⁶⁵ But the long-term

effects of these non-Russian revolutions were limited. All they did was substitute
one class of exploiters for another. The October Revolution was different. The
Bolsheviks who carried it out successfully promised that that would never happen
again, at least not in Russia, and the record of the Soviet Union in the decade that
followed showed that their promise had been kept. Nevertheless, there was one
respect in which the French Revolution and the October Revolution were analo-
gous: they each produced cadres of committed revolutionaries, the Jacobins and
the Bolsheviks respectively, capable of generating legitimate fear among their
enemies.⁶⁶ As a result, neither faced the degree of resistance from abroad that
might have led to military defeat, and as a result they both had the opportunity—
which in the Soviet Union has continued to the present day—to perform inestim-
able services for their respective revolutions. Stalin expressed this idea in the
following way:
History is repeating itself, though on a new basis. Just as before, during the period
of the downfall of feudalism, the word ‘Jacobin’ evoked terror and loathing
among the aristocrats of all countries, so, too, now, in the period of the downfall
of capitalism, the word ‘Bolshevik’ evokes terror and loathing among the bour-
geoisie in all countries. And just as Paris, earlier, was the refuge and the school for
the revolutionary representatives of the rising bourgeoisie, so, too, is Moscow
now the refuge and the school for the revolutionary representatives of the rising
proletariat.⁶⁷

The other exception Stalin allowed to the general principle of eschewing analogies
concerned the respective agencies of repression in revolutionary France and Soviet
Russia:
The GPU, or Cheka, is the punitive organ of the Soviet state. It is an organ more
or less analogous to the Committee of Public Safety, which was created during
the Great French Revolution. It punishes primarily spies, conspirators, terrorists,
bandits, profiteers, and counterfeiters. It is something in the nature of a military-
political tribunal established for the purpose of protecting the interests of the
revolution from the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie and their agents.⁶⁸

What these particular exceptions suggested was that when it came to political
power—acquiring it, holding onto it, and applying it on behalf of ideological
objectives that were transformational—Stalin would not be bound by any of the

⁶⁵ J. V. Stalin, ‘Mezhdunarodnyi kharakter Oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii’, ibid., pp. 239–40.

⁶⁶ Ibid., pp. 240, 247.
⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 247. Also in 1927, Stalin reproached the Kuomintang in China, warning them that if they
did not learn to act like Jacobins, and demonstrate a willingness to use violence and coercion, they
would never take power. K. McDermott and J. Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International
Communism from Lenin to Stalin (New York, 1999), p. 177.
⁶⁸ Stalin, ‘Beseda s pervoi amerikanskoi rabochei delegatsiei’, in Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. X, p. 234.
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strictures or limitations he had previous expostulated. And just as he justified

policies that sacrificed the interests of international communism to those of the
Soviet Union on the grounds that these two sets of interests were actually identical,
so, too, did he eliminate in his own mind the apparent contradiction between a
maxim on the inadmissibility of historical analogies and the exceptions to it he not
only acknowledged but proudly affirmed.

* * *
As Trotsky and Stalin were propounding their very different views on using
analogies to clarify the Soviet Union’s development, the debate within the party
over the specific issue of the Soviet Thermidor quickly became primarily a political
one. Under the circumstances, it is hard to see how this could have been otherwise.
The French Revolution and the analogies to its Thermidorian phase were an
integral aspect both of the struggle to succeed Lenin in the mid-1920s and of
the simultaneous debate on the NEP, which irrespective of its positive effect on the
Soviet economy was never meant to be anything more than a temporary expedi-
ent. Politically, ideologically, and even (or perhaps especially) psychologically, it
was, in the final analysis, incompatible with Bolshevism. The policies that virtually
all of the Bolsheviks believed would follow it, namely rapid industrialization and
the collectivization of agriculture, were intended to eliminate any remnants of the
capitalism the NEP allowed, and would satisfy the Promethean imperative in
Bolshevism, of which the NEP, with its moderation and economic backsliding,
was the antithesis. What is often forgotten in accounts of this so-called Second
Revolution is that it was intended to preclude a Soviet Thermidor. But until these
transformational policies could be initiated, a Thermidorian reaction in the Soviet
Union was a real possibility, and for that reason the political benefits of raising the
issue remained. Smearing those within the party who warned of a Soviet Thermi-
dor as its advocates was too tempting for many Bolsheviks not to do so. And so, in
the late 1920s, the debate within the party continued.
Further emboldening Bolsheviks to use the issue for political purposes was
the publication, in 1925, of a new collection of Ustrialov’s essays, to which the
Bolsheviks had access and with which many of them were soon familiar. In these
essays Ustrialov reiterated his earlier arguments that the Soviet Union was
approaching the equivalent of Thermidor and that it was a very good thing that
it was.⁶⁹ The reaction of the Bolsheviks to this was predictable. Zinoviev was the
first to respond. Writing in Pravda in September 1925, he freely acknowledged
Ustrialov’s claims that the Soviet Union was experiencing ‘degeneration’.⁷⁰ But he
also rejected the conclusion Ustrialov drew that the Soviet system was suffering

⁶⁹ Ustrialov, ‘Put’ termidora,’ pp. 41–7.

⁷⁰ G. Zinoviev, ‘Filosofiia epokhi. K s”ezdu partii’, Pravda, no. 214(3145) (19 September 1925):
pp. 2–3, and Pravda, no. 215(3146) (20 September 1925): pp. 2–3.
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from problems so severe and intractable that it would likely disintegrate at some
point in the foreseeable future. With his customary bravado, Zinoviev reassured
his readers, seemingly ad nauseum for Bolsheviks who had heard such reassur-
ances many times before, that, notwithstanding Ustrialov’s prediction, everything
would be fine in the end. The NEP, which Zinoviev acknowledged might have
eventuated in a genuine counter-revolution, in which the Bolsheviks would either
lose power or preside over a complete regression to capitalism, would soon be
abolished, its positive effect on the Soviet economy exhausted, and replaced by
policies conducive to socialism. Thus anyone who argued, or even merely sug-
gested, that the NEP should be permanent—here Zinoviev clearly had Bukharin
and the Right Opposition in mind—was guilty not only of opposing Lenin, whom
Zinoviev reminded his readers had originated the NEP, but of supporting Ustria-
lov, an émigré and an implacable enemy of Bolshevism.⁷¹ Two months later,
Bukharin replied to Zinoviev. In Pravda he quite deliberately confused Zinoviev’s
description of the Soviet Union for his prescription for the Soviet Union; by
acknowledging the reality of the NEP, Zinoviev was actually indicating his pref-
erence for it. Bukharin then went on to argue, disingenuously, that the bureau-
cratism Zinoviev had decried as a form of degeneration that, if not attended to,
could lead to Thermidor was proof that he now believed the Soviet Thermidor
already existed.⁷²
The public exchange between the two men, each claiming to be Lenin’s rightful
successor, was just one of many in the weeks preceding the Fourteenth Party
Congress. So often was it alleged that the Soviet Union was approaching its
Thermidor, and that those who spoke of it actually welcomed it, that by the
time the Party Congress convened in December, termidor and termindoriantsy
had entered the Russian language; in fact termidorianstvo had practically become
a formal deviation from ideological orthodoxy.⁷³ Further raising the rhetorical
heat in debates about these terms was the fact that their provenance was traceable
to enemies of the Soviet Union like Ustrialov and the Mensheviks. To claim that
Thermidor was approaching was therefore to call, in effect, for the destruction of
the Soviet Union. But it was Zalutskii’s invocation of a Soviet Thermidor that was
ultimately responsible for the issue assuming an importance sufficient to warrant
the party as a whole rendering a formal judgement of it. That he chose the
Fourteenth Party Congress as his venue—rather than an article in Pravda that
many Bolsheviks might not read, and to which they could only respond directly in
letters to the editors, or days later in an article of their own—suggests that that was
precisely his objective, and possibly also that of Zinoviev, his political sponsor and

⁷¹ Ibid.
⁷² N. I. Bukharin, ‘Tsezarizm pod maskoi revoliutsii’, Pravda, no. 259(3190) (13 November 1925):
pp. 2–4, and Pravda, no. 261(3192) 15 (November 1925): pp. 2–3.
⁷³ A. M. Selishchev, Iazyk revoliutsionnoi epokhy: iz nabliudenii nad russkim iazykom (1917–1926)
(Moscow, 2003), p. 17.
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protector. If that was in fact the case, Zalutskii miscalculated badly. Raising the
issue publicly served only to underscore its gravity. The attacks that followed his
remarks were strident, impassioned, and ad hominem. In purely political terms, it
made no sense even to raise the possibility of a Soviet Thermidor. It was too easy
for political enemies to confuse analysis for advocacy, and in that way malign
honest communists as traitors. Bukharin, whose artistic and literary sensibilities
have been lauded as evidence of his humanism, and considered evidence that, had
he taken power instead of Stalin, he would have avoided the worst excrescences of
Stalinism, in 1926 spoke bluntly of ‘the bottomless stupidity of the analogy [with
Thermidor]’.⁷⁴
Zalutskii’s comments on the Soviet Thermidor were not the result of any
epiphany at the party congress itself. Nor were his comments hastily conceived.
Prior to the party congress he had written a pamphlet in which he laid out his
arguments carefully. His thesis was that given certain realities in the Soviet Union,
it could conceivably end up a new species of ‘state capitalism’, which he said was
indistinguishable from ‘Thermidorian degeneration’.⁷⁵ While not yet a reality
either in the Soviet Union or in the Communist Party, a Soviet Thermidor might
emerge in the future because some in the party, perhaps unintentionally and with
the best of intentions, were advocating policies conducive to it. But in the event this
occurred, an expanding stratum of state bureaucrats, rather than the Communist
Party itself, would be responsible for it. At the party congress, Zalutskii under-
scored the urgency of the problem about which he had written earlier, and with
considerable passion implored the delegates to address it. ‘The Thermidorian route
of the development of the Great French Revolution’, he said, ‘must be for us the
object of our attention’, and steps should be taken immediately to prevent it.⁷⁶ One
of these, in his opinion, was avoiding calls like Bukharin’s for the peasantry to
enrich itself. Zalutskii did not cite Bukharin by name, but anyone conversant in
Soviet politics could easily have figured out whom he was referring to. Like
Zinoviev, Zalutskii believed the principal threat to Leninism was Bukharin,
whose political skills he then considered superior to those of the plainspoken
and seemingly ideologically illiterate Georgian who in the end would triumph
over, and subsequently liquidate, all of his rivals. But Zalutskii added that objective
factors, too, such as the continued growth of the kulaks, made the emergence of a
Soviet Thermidor more likely, and perhaps also imminent.⁷⁷
To Zalutskii, the threat of a Soviet Thermidor was real, and its chances
of actually occurring were increased by unnamed party leaders who ‘glossed

⁷⁴ N. I. Bukharin, ‘Na poroge desiatogo goda’, Pravda., no. 258 (7 November 1926): p. 2.
⁷⁵ Robert Vincent Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia
(New York, 1960), p. 255. In fact, Zalutskii’s analogy could not be valid because Thermidor in France
occurred when capitalism was just beginning—in contrast to full-blown capitalism, of which ‘state
capitalism’ is a derivative or a descendant.
⁷⁶ XIV s”ezd vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b), p. 358. ⁷⁷ Ibid.
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over’ issues instead of dealing with them substantively; the result could be ‘a
petit-bourgeois state’.⁷⁸ Even with the qualifications Zalutskii included in his
presentiments of the future, which he clearly intended as a warning rather than
a simple prediction, much less a prediction he would be pleased to see realized, his
comments touched a nerve among the assembled delegates. Just to speculate that
the Soviet Union might become the kind of regime Trotsky in 1917 had consigned
to ‘the dust-bin of history’ was to call into question everything the delegates had
fought for throughout their political lives. To conjoin the term ‘petit-bourgeois’
with predictions of the Soviet Union’s future was to play with political and
ideological dynamite, and the fact that Zalutskii had used the term as a synonym
for Thermidor—which the Bolsheviks believed was what ended the French Revo-
lution prematurely and led inexorably to a restoration of the ancien régime in
1815—made it even more of a pejorative and political expletive than it would
otherwise have been. It now hardly seemed to matter that the French Thermidor
and any Soviet one would have to be different: while Thermidor in France
returned the haute-bourgeoisie to power, its Soviet incarnation would bring the
petit-bourgeoisie to power; presumably qa less affluent strata of the bourgeoisie
could be more easily neutralized by a post-Thermidorian Soviet regime than an
affluent one. But in moments of high drama—of which Zalutskii’s speech certainly
qualified as an example—fine ideological and semantic distinctions lose their
salience. Intentionally or not, Zal;utskii was questioning the very legitimacy of
the October Revolution and the Soviet state, and persons in the party whose
loyalty one might think were irreproachable found themselves accused either of
considering a Soviet Thermidor possible, or of actually advocating it, or even of
having taken concrete steps to ensure its arrival. Before the Fourteenth Party
Congress convened, even Felix Dzerzhinskii, who had ordered the execution of
thousands and fully deserved the sobriquet ‘Iron Felix’, had been forced to admit,
in a letter to Stalin, to joining a conspiracy with Zinoviev and Kamenev that, by
splitting the party, might lead to Thermidor.⁷⁹
The result, for Zalutskii and Zinoviev, was just what one would have expected.
They were subjected to rhetorical fusillades the ferocity of which revealed simul-
taneously how threatened the Bolsheviks were by any mention of Thermidor, but
also the political opportunities that merely mentioning it provided. As far as the
other leading Bolsheviks were concerned, Zalutskii and Zinoviev might just as well
have had targets on their foreheads. Mikhail Tomskii, who at the time controlled
Soviet trade unions and was also a supporter of Bukharin, praised Zalutskii for
saying publicly what others were whispering privately.⁸⁰ But the speakers who

⁷⁸ Ibid.
⁷⁹ ‘Pis’mo F. E. Dzerzhinskogo Stalinu i Orzhonikidze (5-6 October 1925)’, in Politicheskii dnevnik
(Amsterdam, 1970), pp. 238–41. Under pressure, the Soviet police chief disavowed any further
involvement just prior to the Fourteenth Congress in December.
⁸⁰ XIV s”ezd vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b), p. 281.
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followed him made clear that their intentions were not so benign. P. G. Petrovskii,
the president of the Ukrainian Central Committee, stated flatly that by raising
the issue of a Soviet Thermidor publicly, Zalutskii had betrayed the October
Revolution.⁸¹ Alexei Rykov, who had succeeded Lenin in 1924 as the formal
head of the Soviet government, accused Zalutskii of creating ‘an atmosphere of
panic’ at the party congress and in the Communist Party, and called for his
expulsion from the Central Committee; because Rykov held Zinoviev ultimately
responsible for Zalutskii’s apostasy, he prescribed for Zalutskii’s mentor and
superior within the party the identical punishment—as did Lazar Kaganovich,
who cited Zinoviev’s article in Pravda as the source of the disputation currently
roiling the party congress and the Communist Party.⁸² Kliment Voroshilov
limited his denunciation to calling Zalutskii’s views ‘criminal from the perspec-
tive of Communist unity’.⁸³ But a delegate from Tula, cited in the stenographic
record of the congress simply as ‘Kabakov’, called the threat posed by Thermi-
dor greater than earlier ones such as ‘defeatism, liquidationism and Aksel’rodsh-
china’.⁸⁴ One of the reasons that was the case, according to Kabakov, was that
the smenovekhovtsy and the followers of Miliukov were the first to raise the
issue. Although the delegate from Tula did not indicate why the current danger
exceeded the earlier ones he mentioned, his claim that the Thermidorian threat
was now both domestic and foreign, personified by Zalutskii and others inside
the Soviet Union as well as by persons and organizations outside of it, could be
considered the reason for it.⁸⁵ That people opposed to the Soviet Union were
accusing it of succumbing to Thermidor was proof that Thermidor in the Soviet
Union existed.
This was also the gist of a letter composed by the party leadership in Moscow. It
alleged that any analogy with the original Thermidor was suspect because the
Mensheviks and Ustrialov had earlier raised it. Moreover, because Thermidor
meant nothing less than a bourgeois restoration and the end of the whole Soviet
experiment, punitive action of some sort was required against any and all party
members who favoured it, predicted it, or simply warned against it. But these three
deviations from party orthodoxy, in the considered opinion of the authors of the
letter, were not equally dispositive of treason. Zalutskii’s apostasy far exceeded
that of the Trotskyites, who merely raised the possibility of a ‘growing over’
into Thermidor. Zalutskii, to his eternal shame, had gone further. By claiming a
Soviet Thermidor likely, he had embraced a view so at odds with communist
ideology that his capitulation rendered him one of a number of ‘bourgeois
ideologues’ who were bent on the Soviet Union’s demise.⁸⁶

⁸¹ Ibid., p. 169. ⁸² Ibid., pp. 238, 414–15. ⁸³ Ibid., p. 393.

⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 358. ⁸⁵ Ibid., p. 358.
⁸⁶ ‘Otvet MK-RKP (b)—na pis’mo leningradskoi partkonferentsii’, in Partiia i novaia oppozitsiia.
Materialy k prorabotke resheniia i XIV s”ezda VKP (b) (Leningrad, 1926), p. 201.
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Chastened by the torrential invective he had to endure, Zalutskii recanted his

views, and begged his colleagues’ forgiveness in an article in Leningradskaia Pravda
written even before the congress ended.⁸⁷ One could not be certain, from the article
alone, what exactly Zalutskii now regretted having said, and in any event it did not
prevent his expulsion from the Central Committee, nor Zinoviev’s removal as
chairman of the Leningrad Soviet.⁸⁸ But it was sufficient, at least for the immediate
future, to preclude his expulsion, and Zinoviev’s as well, from the Communist Party.
In fact, the general consensus in the party, in the aftermath of the party congress,
was that public discussion of Thermidor did more harm than good, and the only
other formal action it took in connection with the entire matter was to establish a
special commission, headed by Kuibyshev, to investigate it—which of course turned
up no new information that would warrant additional action.⁸⁹ In the spring of
1926, after Zinoviev and Kamenev joined with Trotsky to form what would be
called, pejoratively by their rivals, the Left Opposition, all three and their supporters
refrained from invoking any analogy with the Thermidor in France, or any predic-
tions or warnings about a Thermidor in the Soviet Union.
But debate continued sotto voce within the party, and in the fall of 1926, at the
Fifteenth Party Conference, it became public once again, this time at the insti-
gation of Bukharin. In the aforementioned article in Pravda that appeared shortly
after the conference had convened, he pointedly quoted Goethe’s maxim that
only those who live through history were competent to discuss it.⁹⁰ At the
conference itself, Bukharin condemned as ‘unsubstantiated slander’ the mere
mention of a Soviet Thermidor; those raising the issue were violating ‘the spirit
and the letter and the very essence of Leninism’—a verbal assault for which Stalin
praised Bukharin in terms from which the assembled delegates, had they pos-
sessed prophetic powers, would have immediately recoiled.⁹¹ Bukharin, Stalin
announced with genuine pleasure and admiration, ‘does not argue with [his
enemies]. He slaughters them.’⁹² The conference marked the first time the
party acknowledged formally that in its ranks were members claiming that the
Soviet Union was already experiencing Thermidor, which in practical terms
meant that making the claim was just as contrary to Leninism and Bolshevism
as was Thermidor itself.⁹³ According to Bukharin, those using the term were up
to no good. Their intention was to shock rather than to inform, and by doing so
demonstrated not only a lack of loyalty to the party and to communism but a lack

⁸⁷ XIV s”ezd vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b), p. 230; Novaia oppozitsiia: sbornik materialov
o diskussii 1925 goda (Leningrad, 1926), p. 45.
⁸⁸ Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, 1971), p. 300; Daniels,
Conscience of the Revolution, p. 271.
⁸⁹ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 111.
⁹⁰ Bukharin, ‘Na poroge desiatogo goda’, p. 2. ⁹¹ Ibid.
⁹² XV konferentsiia vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b). 26 oktiabria–3 noiabria 1926 g.:
stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1927), pp. 600–1.
⁹³ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 128.
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of intelligence itself. But for all of this, Bukharin, speaking not only for himself
but also for the party as a whole, professed himself not terribly concerned for the
future. ‘We will go forward and achieve victory irrespective of the prediction of
Thermidor, in spite of it and against it!’⁹⁴ According to the stenographic account
of the conference, his comments were followed by the highest compliment the
party censors, in describing the reaction of the audience, could pay a speaker,
namely that his comments was followed by ‘fervent, prolonged applause culmin-
ating in an ovation’.⁹⁵
At the Seventh Plenum of the Communist International, meeting in Moscow in
late November and early December, 1926, Bukharin resumed his assault. ‘Histor-
ical analogies’, he cautioned once again, ‘must be used extremely carefully’, and
for that reason, he said, he could not imagine anything more ignorant and
contrary to Marxism than applying the notion of ‘Thermidorian degeneration’
to the Soviet Union.⁹⁶ He reminded his audience that Thermidor in the French
Revolution was far from peaceful; in fact it was ‘an open act of counterrevolution’
carried out by the Girondin bourgeoisie and supported by errant Jacobins against
the Robespierre’s dictatorship, which, as a dictatorship of the petit-bourgeoisie,
was destined, in any event, to collapse.⁹⁷ Only an embryonic proletariat existed
in France in the late eighteenth century, and understandably had no sense of itself
as an independent and self-willed entity capable of acting in its own interests,
which Bukharin said consisted of protecting the petit-bourgeoisie (i.e. the Jacobins
even after they had rid themselves of the Hébertists and les enragés) from the
haute-bourgeoisie (i.e. the Thermidorians).⁹⁸ At another session of the plenum,
Bukharin elaborated on his earlier analysis as follows:
Thermidor was victorious [in the French Revolution] because it had to be
victorious, because in the era of the Great French Revolution the haute-capitalist
bourgeoisie was stronger than the petit-bourgeoisie, which was represented
politically by the Jacobin dictatorship. And the Jacobin dictatorship fell because
the proletariat was not strong enough to sustain it, much less to act on its own
behalf, and to thus play an independent role in the revolution. . . . It is absolutely
absurd to say that the economically illiterate [within the party] should raise the
whole issue of Thermidor. Even an elementary familiarity with the French
Revolution and our own history is sufficient to see that raising this issue is
ridiculous and that doing so is to engage in simplification and smacks of vulgarity
and absurdity.⁹⁹

⁹⁴ XV konferentsiia vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b), p. 604. ⁹⁵ Ibid.

⁹⁶ ‘Doklad tov. Bukharina’, Puti mirovoi revoliutsii. Sed’moi rasshirennyi plenum ispolnitel’nogo
Komiteta Kommunisticheskogo internationala, 22 noiabria–16 dekabria 1926: stenograficheskii otchet
(Moscow, 1927), vol. I, p. 80.
⁹⁷ Ibid., p. 81. ⁹⁸ Ibid., p. 81.
⁹⁹ ‘Preniia po dokladu t. Stalina’, Puti mirovoi revoliutsii, vol. II, pp. 118–19. Bukharin repeated his
argument in print, adding only that by raising the analogy the Oppositionists had ‘broken ranks’ with
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At the same plenum, Stalin, even more than Bukharin, eschewed arguments based
on history in favour of ad hominem invective. The rhetorical device he used was a
familiar one: Oppositionists who invoked the analogy were assisting enemies of
the Soviet Union, while Oppositionists who considered it valid but refrained from
invoking it were cowards and hypocrites.¹⁰⁰ Foreign communists at the plenum
argued much the way Stalin did. The French Communist Jacques Doriot accused
the Opposition of avoiding the whole issue of Thermidor—but then proclaimed
himself prepared to flagellate the Opposition should it raise the same issue in the
future.¹⁰¹ Palmiro Togliatti, who would soon become the leader of the Italian
Communist Party, chided the Oppositionists for losing their ‘revolutionary faith’,
the most obvious proof of which was their ‘confusion’ in their consideration of the
analogy.¹⁰² Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German Communist Party, called
Thermidorianism a form of defeatism and capitalism, and at the end of the
plenum supported a resolution that was passed overwhelmingly stating that
raising the analogy with Thermidor advanced the interests of ‘the enemies of
the proletariat and renegades from communism’.¹⁰³
Clearly the Soviet leadership and the Opposition reached diametrically opposite
conclusions on the political utility of raising the possibility of a Soviet Thermidor.
Stalin and Bukharin saw how easily the term could be used to stigmatize their
opponents, while the latter, finally realizing how easily using the term analytically
could be misconstrued as evidence of supporting it, decided to use the term as
little as possible. The fury with which they were attacked convinced Zinoviev and
some of Trotsky’s supporters—though not Trotsky himself, who remained fas-
cinated by historical analogies and used them to impress other Bolsheviks with his
erudition—to use euphemisms for Thermidor, such as ‘bureaucratism’; others
claimed that their whole notion of Thermidor had been misconstrued as identical
to that of Ustrialov and his supporters, the danger from which they termed,
pejoratively, ustrialovshchina (‘the work of the Ustrialovites’); still others down-
played the danger posed by any analogy to the original Thermidor or stopped
mentioning it altogether. A variation on the strategy of distinguishing an accept-
able examination of the Soviet Thermidor (e.g. Trotsky’s) from an unacceptable
one (e.g. Ustrialov’s) was the statement of one of Trotsky’s supporters,
I. N. Stukov, who, when asked at the Fifteenth Party Congress in November
1927 if he was accusing the Central Committee of termidorianstvo, replied that

Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. N. Bukharin, ‘Vystuplenie na VII rasshirennom plenume IKKI’, Pravda,

no. 289 (14 December 1926): pp. 3–4.

¹⁰⁰ J. V. Stalin, ‘Eshche raz o sotsial-demokraticheskom uklone v nashei partii’, in Stalin, Sochineniia,
vol. IX, pp. 48–51, 58.
¹⁰¹ Quoted in Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 134.
¹⁰² Ibid., p. 134. ¹⁰³ Ibid., pp. 134–5.
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the danger it posed was minimal because only persons outside the party, in the
country at large or abroad, were discussing it.¹⁰⁴
But such contrivances fooled no one, and they certainly did not deter Stalin and
Bukharin and their supporters from assailing the Opposition with the same gusto
and joie de vivre they had shown earlier. By 1927 the attacks had escalated to the
point where calm and rational reconsideration of the issue, and of the loyalty (or
lack of it) of those still raising it, was impossible. In two speeches in the beginning
of August, Stalin again angrily denounced all talk of Thermidor. To speak of
tendencies towards its realization in the party was ‘foolish’ and ‘unserious’.¹⁰⁵
Presumably, with Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev now removed from their
positions of leadership in the party and in the Soviet government, the danger to
the Soviet Union the term implied had largely passed. But supporters of the three
men were still causing the leadership trouble. In the same speech, Stalin even
averred that the only way the Soviet Union could experience its own Thermidor
was by renegade party members constantly talking about it. But even if they did so,
they did not really believe a Soviet Thermidor had already come about or even that
such a thing was likely; these ersatz communists therefore raised the issue only to
strengthen the war they were still waging to destroy the Soviet state, though with
less and less chance of success.¹⁰⁶ Confessing in the first of these speeches his
inability to comprehend ‘how there remains in our party people who say it has
become Thermidorian’, by the time he delivered the second one four days later his
bewilderment had turned to contempt: the arguments supporting the charge were
simply ‘stupid’.¹⁰⁷ In fact, if those now levelling it would simply desist, the chance
of Thermidor ever existing in the Soviet Union would be zero.
As for Bukharin, he preferred the public role of Thermidor’s analyst, defining it
as basically a synonym for a particular kind of ‘bourgeois counterrevolution’ that
occurred in France and for which there was some support in the Soviet Union,
though not, he reassured his readers, within the Communist Party, much less in
the Central Committee’.¹⁰⁸ The historian Alexander Slepkov eschewed the schol-
arly analysis one might have expected of a member of his profession, and simply
attacked the Opposition for their ‘Menshevik theories about Thermidor’, while
Dmitrii Maretskii, another historian and supporter of Bukharin, made clear in
Pravda that while the differences between the French and Russian Revolutions
were too great for any analogy with the original Thermidor to withstand scrutiny,
the accusation, by itself, was dangerous and required refutation, which Maretskii,

¹⁰⁴ XV s”ezd. Vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b). Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1935),
vol. I, p. 277.
¹⁰⁵ J. V. Stalin, ‘Rech’ 5 avgusta’, in Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. X, p. 80.
¹⁰⁶ Ibid., p. 81; J. V. Stalin, ‘Rech’ 9 avgusta’, ibid., pp. 85–91.
¹⁰⁷ Stalin, ‘Rech’ 5 avgusta’, ibid., pp. 80–1; Stalin, ‘Rech’ 9 avgusta’, ibid., p. 88.
¹⁰⁸ ‘Doklad tv. Bukharina na sobranii partaktiva Leningradskoi organizatsii VKP (b) 9 avgusta 1927
goda’, Pravda, no. 186 (18 August 1927): p. 3.
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having already written on the subject, obligingly provided.¹⁰⁹ ‘The historical

Thermidor’, he intoned in a pamphlet published in 1927, in no way resembled
‘the sugary-vegetarian Ustrialovite-Oppositionist description’.¹¹⁰ In fact, ‘all ana-
logies, from a Marxist point of view, [were] nonsensical, absurd, and illiterate’.¹¹¹
By the time the Fifteenth Party Congress convened, the Trotskyites, with
nothing more to lose, had gone back to talking openly of ‘the Thermidorian
danger’ and of the need to eliminate it.¹¹² The ‘Proposed Platform’ the Opposition
had made public prior to the congress spoke explicitly of termidorianstvo outside
the party and condemned all those within the party, concentrated in its right wing,
who, by mindlessly repeating Stalin’s rhetoric, were unwittingly assisting in its
realization. The platform also claimed that Lenin’s clairvoyance on the issue
somehow proved the validity of its arguments. Lenin, it claimed, had recognized
the danger a Soviet Thermidor posed to the party long before anyone else did, and
in the early 1920s had even identified the constituencies in the Soviet population
most likely to support it—the kulaks, the NEP men, and ‘careerists’ within the
party guilty of bureaucratism.¹¹³ Karl Radek, ostensibly an Oppositionist and
supporter of Trotsky, nonetheless equivocated when he had to choose between
the platform’s view of Thermidor, which was basically that it was now everywhere,
and that of Stalin and Bukharin, which was that it existed only in the minds of
party renegades and traitors. Thermidor existed, Radek acknowledged, but the
Communist Party, while not uninfected by it, nonetheless included elements
capable of fighting it.¹¹⁴
After the Congress convened, some Oppositionists tried to make amends. The
Soviet Union, they admitted, remained a workers’ state, and the threat of a Soviet
Thermidor was negligible; in fact the term itself was a meaningless verbal con-
struction, a conjunction of historical phenomena, namely Bolshevism and its
reactionary or counterrevolutionary negation, that were incompatible. Thermidor
had not arrived in the Soviet Union, and likely never would. But that was not
enough to stop Stalin and Bukharin and their allies from hurling anathemas at
anyone who opposed them on the issue. Stalin’s response was to claim that even
the Oppositionists who in 1917 had carried signs in Moscow and Leningrad and in

¹⁰⁹ A. Slepkov, Oppozitsionnyi neomen’shevizm. O ‘novoi platforme’, (Moscow, 1927), pp. 29–30,
quoted in Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 137; D. Maretskii, ‘Tak nazyvaemyi ‘termidor’ i
opasnosti pererozhdeniia’, Pravda, no. 166(3698) (24 July 1927): p. 3 and no. 170(3702) (29 July
1927), pp. 2–4.
¹¹⁰ D. Maretskii, Tak nazyvaemyi ‘termidor’ (Moscow/Leningrad), 1927, p. 33.
¹¹¹ Ibid., p. 39.
¹¹² Proekt platforma Bol’shevikov-Lenintsev k XV s”ezdu VKP (b), krizis partii i puti ego preodoleniia,
quoted in Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, pp. 120–1.
¹¹³ Ibid., pp. 120–2.
¹¹⁴ K. Radek, Termidorianskaia opasnost’ i oppozitsiia (Moscow, 1927), cited in Kondratieva,
Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 122. By 1929 Radek had changed his mind and now believed the Soviet
Union was on the verge of Thermidor. The Central Committee, he said, resembled the Convention on
the eve of 9 Thermidor. Deutscher, Prophet Outcast, p. 67.
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other cities supporting socialism and the Bolsheviks could not be trusted; to any
sentient person their defects of character were obvious. Even worse was that they
still favoured what they were now denouncing; their current affirmations of
political loyalty and ideological orthodoxy should, for that reason, be ignored.
To this kind of character assassination the Oppositionists could only deny that
they had any intention of harming the Soviet Union or of obstructing the
construction of socialism, and that they yielded to no one in their hatred of the
ustrialovtsy. But by this time Trotsky had been expelled from the Communist
Party, and the only relevant measure of any argument about Thermidor, or about
any other issue of concern, was whether those making the argument were either
powerful or powerless. In reality, the Opposition had no means of escaping their
earlier embrace of the analogy. Recantations like Zalutskii’s had already been
shown to be useless and, because they smacked so obviously of political calcula-
tion, were counterproductive.¹¹⁵ But to accept the reality of the analogy, to
acknowledge honestly that ‘Thermidor has begun’, was no less destructive of the
Opposition, because the admission was tantamount to acknowledging that the
Soviet Union no longer was a workers’ state, and that their life’s work might
actually have been for nothing.
The Opposition, in short, had boxed itself in—although one is hard pressed to
conjure a strategy that would have avoided the political cul-de-sac in which it
now found itself. For Adolf Ioffe, a longtime supporter of Trotsky and the only
oppositionist to state publicly that Thermidor had begun, the gravity of the
predicament and that of the Soviet Union was reason to take his own life, which
he did in November 1927.¹¹⁶ By that time Stalin and Bukharin were determining
party orthodoxy in all matters of history, not just those concerning the French
Revolution, and Bukharin’s subsequent demise made Stalin the only ‘historian’ in
the Soviet Union whose opinions mattered. All that was left for the latter to do was
to make certain that professional historians in the country understood this and
altered their views accordingly.

* * *
The first indication that something was wrong, that the autonomy Soviet histor-
ians enjoyed was in jeopardy, came at the first Pan-Russian Conference of
Marxist Historians, which met in Moscow from 28 December 1928 to 4 January
1929. Albert Mathiez was condemned for predating the original Thermidor from
9 Thermidor to the destruction of the Hébertists and les enragés in the last
months of the Jacobin dictatorship, and for attacking the NEP as a contemporary
equivalent; his prominence as a historian of the French Revolution, combined
with his ideological and political apostasy, made necessary a concerted campaign

¹¹⁵ XIV s”ezd vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b), p. 230.

¹¹⁶ Mariia Ioffe, ‘Nachalo’, Vremia i my, no. 20 (1977): p. 178.
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against him that even acquired its own name: matezovshchina.¹¹⁷ This ended a
longstanding debate among Russian historians about the nature, timing, evolu-
tion, and consequences of the original Thermidor in the French Revolution, and
whether or not something similar to it was already emerging, or would soon do
so, in the Soviet Union. This debate was just as vigorous as that within the party,
but the degree to which opposing views were dealt with without the ad hominem
vituperation manifested by the likes of Stalin and Bukharin is striking, and stands
in stark contrast to the intellectual sterility that followed in the Stalin era itself.
Before 1929, as long as they did not attack Lenin or deny the legitimacy of the
October Revolution, the freedom Soviet historians were granted was real.
M. N. Pokrovskii, who had joined the party only after the October Revolution,
and in the 1920s professed a position on Russian Jacobinism that the party found
unacceptable, nonetheless remained Rector of the Institute of Red Professors, and
retained a measure of intellectual independence.¹¹⁸ Similarly, while French his-
torians, in addition to Mathiez, such as Aulard and Jaurès, were criticized for
emphasizing insufficiently the role of class and material interests in history, their
writings were not forbidden, and the same was true for historians in the Soviet
Union whose views deviated even more significantly from the tenets of Marxism-
Leninism. The ambivalence with which the party viewed these French historians is
epitomized in allowing new translations of their works—but only with introduc-
tions by Soviet historians criticizing them, sometimes severely.¹¹⁹
Nevertheless, in the 1920s a Party Line on the French Revolution existed, even
when, for much of the decade, it was not enforced. The revolution as a whole was
unmistakably bourgeois both in its original intentions and in its eventual effects.
But it was carried out by the bourgeoisie, as a class, only until 1793, when the
Girondins and other members of the haute-bourgeoisie concluded that their
objectives of eliminating feudalism and abolishing the monarchy had been accom-
plished. At this point, elements of the petit-bourgeoisie, principally the Jacobins,
emboldened by classes below them who found the status quo insufficiently
protective of their interests, tried to radicalize the revolution beyond the limits
France’s historical development in the late eighteenth century would permit.
The terror the Jacobins inflicted domestically and the defeats French armies
inflicted on foreign armies intent on restoring the ancien régime in France enabled
the revolution to continue. But the reprieve it enjoyed was short-lived, and the
French Revolution ended on 9 Thermidor. This was essentially Lenin’s view of

¹¹⁷ Vovelle, ‘1789–1917: The Game of Analogies’, pp. 363, 371–2, 377. The anathema pronounced
on Mathiez did not last long. In 1930 he was made a foreign associate member of the Soviet Academy of
Sciences.
¹¹⁸ Enteen, ‘Marxist Historians during the Cultural Revolution’, pp. 155–6.
¹¹⁹ N. I. Kareev, ‘ “Frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v marksistskoi istoriografii v Rossii”. Vstuplenie i
publikatsiia D. A. Rostislavleva’, in Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik: stat’i i materialy po istorii Frants︠ i︡ i 1989
(Moscow, 1989), pp. 203–4, 209.
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the French Revolution, which had the inestimable political advantage of analo-
gizing the French Revolution (in which the Jacobins and their allies did what the
bourgeoisie as a whole refused to do) to the Russian Revolution (in which the
Bolsheviks carried out the proletarian revolution that the Provisional Govern-
ment, representing the bourgeoisie, was unable to do).
It was in differentiating subdivisions within the coalitions that formed in the
course of the French Revolution that disagreements arose. The most divisive of
these concerned the Jacobins. Soviet historians proposed two very different
interpretations of who the Jacobins were and what they did. While some sharply
distinguished their dictatorship from the Thermidorian reaction that followed it,
others maintained that the Jacobins put in place or continued policies similar to
those pursued under Thermidor; in some instances, according to proponents of
the latter view, the Thermidorians simply continued what the Jacobins began.
Often cited as proof of this was the Jacobins’ refusal to abrogate the Loi Le
Chapelier, promulgated in 1791, that forbade workers from forming guilds for
the protection of their collective interests. The reason for this, in this interpret-
ation, was that the Jacobins sought programmatically to benefit neither the petit-
bourgeoisie, which was the class to which the Jacobins belonged, nor the urban
and rural lower classes, whose leaders the Jacobins eventually sent to the guillo-
tine. Rather, they advanced the interests of the haute-bourgeoisie, which led the
revolution from 1789 to 1793, and would lead the reaction to it that would begin,
seemingly very abruptly, on 9 Thermidor. But appearances were deceptive. On
that day, only the political leadership changed. The more consequential changes
were in the economy, and these, in fact, were quite gradual, beginning before
9 Thermidor and continuing long after it. This evolution was what prompted
Soviet historians to speak of a ‘growing over’ from the Jacobins to Thermidor.
Taken literally, this notion meant that the French Revolution ended twice: polit-
ically (and abruptly) on 9 Thermidor, but economically (and gradually) over
several months.
The most determined and consistent proponent of the orthodox position—that
the French Revolution ended in every way, not just politically, on 9 Thermidor—
was N. M. Lukin. Throughout the 1920s and for some years thereafter his opinion
of the Jacobins remained what it had been in 1918, when he served as a surrogate
for Lenin and Trotsky in condemning Martov’s animadversions on the October
Revolution. The Jacobins, he always argued, were petit-bourgeois, and once in
power the majority of them served the economic interests of their class.¹²⁰ Lukin
was not oblivious to the so-called Left Jacobins, who were sympathetic to the
Hébertists and others claiming to represent the urban and rural lower classes;

¹²⁰ N. Lukin, ‘Lenin i problema iakobinskoi diktatury’, Istorik marksist 1 (1934): pp. 99–146,
constitutes the most complete explication of Lukin’s views on the Jacobins and on the French
Revolution as a whole.
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these Jacobins were actually hostile to capitalism, and profoundly sympathetic to

the interests of the classes and categories of the population below them. In fact the
latter were remarkably similar to those the Bolsheviks represented in 1917.¹²¹ But
the contradiction between the Jacobins’ class and the opinions they espoused
ensured their political defeat; those who survived the purge of the so-called Left
Jacobins in the spring of 1794 lost the political leverage they had over ‘centrist’
Jacobins like Robespierre and Saint-Just. But in their class origin, which to Lukin
was the ultimate determinant of the distribution of political power in the French
Revolution, the Jacobins, despite their disagreements over policy, were all, and
always, petit-bourgeois.¹²²
Lukin was not the only Soviet historian to take this position. V. Kolokolin and
S. Monosov, who had studied under Lukin, did so as well.¹²³ In their view, the
difference between the Jacobins, who were petit-bourgeois, and the Bolsheviks,
whom they insisted were the political instrument and vanguard of the proletariat,
was so enormous that analogies between them, and between the French Revolu-
tion and the October Revolution, would necessarily be ‘superficial’, ‘trite’, and
worst of all, ‘unscientific’.¹²⁴ As for Thermidor, to Kolokolin and Monosov it was
an integral part of the historical process in which capitalism replaced feudalism,
but it was also a cul-de-sac, a temporary regression or reaction that only slightly
delayed capitalism’s inexorable development. The Jacobins were brought down, in
the end, by divisions within their own ranks, which made them easy prey for the
haute-bourgeoisie after both the Left and the Right within their party had been
purged in the spring of 1794. The reaction that followed it was inescapable, and
the distinctive term that was applied to it, and to it alone, captured its distinct-
iveness in the French Revolution. Indeed, Thermidor or something resembling it
was possible only in a bourgeois revolution. And since the revolution in 1917 that
established the Soviet Union was a proletarian revolution, a Soviet Thermidor was
impossible.¹²⁵

¹²¹ Ibid., pp. 100–2. Lukin even went so far as to argue that it was peasant support for the plebeians
in Paris and other cities that enabled the coalition they formed with elements of the petit-bourgeoisie to
advance the revolution before the Jacobins took power as well as afterwards. But once the peasants
acquired land, the wealthiest among them sided with counter-revolutionaries—a betrayal Lukin
underscored by terming them kulaks. Ibid., pp. 109–12.
¹²² Ibid., especially pp. 117–18, 125–7, 132–6. It may not have been a coincidence that the triangular
internal division of the Jacobins into Left, Centre, and Right was seen to prefigure the tripartite division
within the Soviet Communist Party during Stalin’s rise to power into a distinguishable Left (which
included Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev after the latter two had reconciled with the former in 1926),
Centre (Stalin, for a time) and Right (Bukharin, Tomskii, and Rykov). Perhaps because the struggle for
power in the Soviet Union lasted longer than the Jacobins remained in power in France, contenders like
Stalin, as circumstances changed, altered their views for political advantage and moved from one of the
three subdivisions to another.
¹²³ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, pp. 144–5.
¹²⁴ V. Kolokolkin and S. Monosov, Chto takoe termidor? (Moscow, 1928), quoted in ibid.
¹²⁵ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, pp. 145–6. The same argument, of course, was useful
politically to discredit everyone in the Soviet Union who warned of a Soviet Thermidor or claimed it
already existed. The historian A. Zaitsev argued that Thermidor, which he defined as a restoration of
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Other Soviet historians disagreed. While not contesting the axiom Lukin and
others had affirmed (that the Jacobins were petit-bourgeois and thus different
from the sans-culottes and the other ‘proto-proletarians’ who for a time supported
them), they maintained that the Jacobins, once in power, adopted economic
policies so similar to those adopted later during Thermidor that their subsequent
downfall had little or no effect on France economically.
The most articulate proponent of this viewpoint was Ts. Fridliand. In 1926, he
wrote, for example, that ‘on all the basic questions of social and economic policy
the Jacobins offered a distinct programme that was in the interests of the bour-
geoisie’.¹²⁶ In 1927 he was more specific, writing that the Jacobins were pursuing
policies supported by, and beneficial to the industrial and commercial
bourgeoisie—from which he drew the conclusion that Thermidor was more a
continuation than a reversal of what preceded it.¹²⁷ Although he used the term
sparingly, Fridliand had no doubt there had been a ‘growing over’ both in the
economic policies the Jacobins pursued and in the particular stratum of the
bourgeoisie that benefitted from them. But there was a corollary to his argument,
of which he seemed unaware, that robbed the Jacobins of the moral superiority
nearly all Soviet historians, including Fridliand, customarily ascribed to them in
relation to their adversaries. Since very little distinguished the Jacobins program-
matically from the elements of the haute-bourgeoisie that later introduced
Thermidor, and since the Girondins, before losing power to the Jacobins, had
acted objectively in the interests of this same stratum of the bourgeoisie, there was
really very little difference politically between the Jacobins and the Girondins (and
between both of them and the Thermidorians), and certainly no reason, apart
from personal ambition, for their struggle for power in May–June 1793 to have
been so tumultuous. According to Marx—to whose theories of history Fridliand
claimed to be totally faithful—class struggles were always more bitter, more
protracted, and more energetically pursued than those motivated by personal
pique or, in this particular instance, by ambition and a simple lust for power.¹²⁸

the bourgeoisie to political power and economic dominance, could only be conceived of by persons
who themselves were bourgeois. For that reason Trotsky, Zinoviev, and everyone else in the Soviet
Union who were speaking about a Soviet Thermidor were members of the bourgeoisie. His argument
was a variation on the fallacy of cui bono: since a Soviet Thermidor will benefit the bourgeoisie, those
predicting it must be bourgeois themselves. A. Zaitsev, Ob ustrailove, ‘neonepe’ i zhertvakh ustrialovsh-
chiny (Moscow/Leningrad, 1928), pp. 14–15, 37.

¹²⁶ Ts. Fridliand, ‘Klassovaia bor’ba’, p. 167.

¹²⁷ Ts. Fridliand, ‘Perepiska Robesp’era’, Istorik marksist 3 (1927): p. 89.
¹²⁸ In the article Fridliand also noted that ‘nothing in the ideas of Jacques Roux [a leader of the sans-
culottes and les enragés] was foreign to Jacobin ideology’, and that, Kropotkin notwithstanding, neither
Roux nor those he led were communists. Rather, they were Left Jacobins. Ibid., p. 195. This of course
muddies Fridliand’s argument considerably, to the point where the Jacobins, the Girondins, and the
urban poor of Paris were ideologically indistinguishable.
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Nevertheless, several prominent Soviet historians agreed with Fridliand’s

original argument. In 1927, N. P. Freiberg argued that les enragés, who desired a
revolution more democratic in its objectives than that which the Jacobins had
actually created, successfully forced the Jacobins, if not to transform their dicta-
torship into a democracy, at least to support policies they originally opposed. The
most obvious example of this was the Maximum, which was antithetical to the
laissez-faire economics Robespierre and most of the other Jacobins favoured.¹²⁹
What the Jacobins preferred—but which for a time they could not implement
because of political pressure from the left—were policies that benefitted the
bourgeoisie. In that sense, the Jacobins were proto-Thermidorians.¹³⁰ This view
was shared by K. P. Dobroliubskii, who argued that Thermidor continued what
the Jacobins began. Like Fridliand, Dobroliubskii claimed that the latter, once in
power, advanced the interests of the haute-bourgeoisie.¹³¹ For that reason 9
Thermidor merely ‘realigned’ the political arrangements in France so that they
coincided once again with preexisting economic realities.¹³² Ia. M. Zakher agreed
with Dobroliubskii in that respect, but was even more precise in determining
when the Jacobins abandoned the interests of their own class, the petit-
bourgeoisie, and began to serve the interests of the haute-bourgeoisie. According
to Zakher, this occurred after the elimination of both the Dantonists, who were to
Robespierre’s right politically, and the Hébertists, who were to his left. This gave
l’Incorruptible the political freedom and security to lead what was now
unabashedly and undeniably a petit-bourgeois government that served the inter-
ests of the haute-bourgeoisie. To the extent that that was the case, Thermidor was
a continuation of what preceded it.¹³³ In agreement with Zakher, Dobroliubskii,
and Freiberg was P. P. Shchegolev, who in 1927 noted simply that, by the summer
of 1794, the Jacobins had moved decisively to the right, thereby betraying their
lower-class supporters.¹³⁴
This practice of predating Thermidor was first attacked, with the full imprima-
tur of the Communist Party, in the winter of 1928, at a meeting of the Society of

¹²⁹ Doyle, History of the French Revolution, p. 229; Stone, Anatomy of Revolution Revisited, p. 359;
Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, pp. 70, 311.
¹³⁰ N. P. Freiberg, ‘Dekret 19 vandem’era i bor’ba beshenykh za konstitutsiiu 1793 goda’, Istorik
marksist 6 (1927): p. 144. At the same time, Freiberg cautioned that les enragés, while considerably to
the left of the majority of the Jacobins (i.e. those to the right of the Hébertists), were not themselves
proletarians or socialists, let alone communists. Rather, they were urban, petit-bourgeois artisans, like
Babeuf and the Babouvists. Ibid., pp. 172–3.
¹³¹ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 151.
¹³² K. P. Dobroliubskii, ‘Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika termidorianskogo reaktsii’, in Zapisky
Odesskogo Institutu Narodnoi Osviti (Odessa, 1927), vol. I, passim.
¹³³ Ia M. Zakher, Deviatoe termidora (Leningrad, 1926), p. 17.
¹³⁴ P. P. Shchegolev, ‘K kharakteristike ekonomicheskoi politiki termidorianskoi reaktsii’, Istorik
marksist 4 (1927): pp. 75–6.
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Marxist Historians in Moscow.¹³⁵ But afterwards, there were still dissenters,

notably Shchegolev, who persisted in his apostasy, and it was not until the
aforementioned First Pan-Russian Conference one year later that the party, now
entirely Stalin’s political instrument, made clear that no dissent on the whole
matter of Thermidor would be tolerated. One wonders why it took so long for the
party to act. One possible reason is that Lenin had embedded in party orthodoxy
the judgement he first expressed in 1905 that Russian Social Democrats—by
whom of course he meant the Bolsheviks—were ‘the Jacobins of today’. Since
then, the Bolsheviks had come to impute, almost reflexively, a purity of motive
and a hardness of will to the Jacobins that, notwithstanding their ideological
limitations as members of a retrograde class in comparison to the proletariat,
immunized them against charges from within the ideological universe the Bol-
sheviks inhabited that otherwise would have brought down on them the full
weight of the Bolsheviks’ disapproval and contempt.¹³⁶ One such charge was the
betrayal of allies, especially those to one’s left. This, of course, was precisely what
the Jacobins were accused of, however indirectly and implicitly, by Fridliand and
the other Soviet historians who agreed with him.
For that reason, excuses had to be made. Zakher, who saw the proverbial
handwriting on the wall before most others did, reversed himself in 1927, arguing
now that, in light of evidence of which he had previously been unaware,
the historical Thermidor was not part of an evolutionary—or more precisely, a
counterrevolutionary—unfolding of history prepared by [most immediate] the
events of the Great French Revolution that preceded it. The ‘growing over’ into
Thermidor did not precede 9 Thermidor. Instead it followed it. It was not the
cause of 9 Thermidor, but rather the result of it.¹³⁷

To demonstrate his bona fides as a loyal Bolshevik and communist, Zakher

cited Bukharin’s opinion on Thermidor, which was that the Jacobins and the
Thermidorians had nothing in common economically, and that that was why
they were so easily distinguishable morally, politically, and ideologically. But he
also claimed that the congruence between his views and Bukharin’s was entirely
coincidental, because he based his (new) conclusion solely on the historical
record.¹³⁸
In the very same way, and almost certainly out of an instinct for professional
self-preservation, Fridliand, at the same meeting of the Society of Marxist Histor-
ians, followed suit. There, before a packed auditorium, he termed Thermidor ‘a

¹³⁵ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 153.

¹³⁶ Lenin, Shag vpered, dva shaga nazad, p. 370.
¹³⁷ Ia. M. Zakher, ‘Problema ‘termidora’ v svete noveishikh istoricheskikh rabot’, Istorik marksist
6 (1927): p. 242.
¹³⁸ Ibid., p. 239. To solidify his credentials Zakher also excoriated Mathiez for still subscribing to the
thesis of ‘growing over’ despite its having been thoroughly discredited. Ibid., pp. 237–41.
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transformational event’ in the French Revolution, when one class deposed another
and then pursued policies that were qualitatively different.¹³⁹ From this particular
aspect of the revolution he went on to reject the drawing of more general analogies
between the French and the Bolshevik Revolutions on the grounds that they were
fundamentally dissimilar. The French Revolution, being bourgeois-democratic,
could not possibly be similar in any significant way to the October Revolution,
which of course was proletarian and socialist. The differences between them were
so obvious and fundamental that comparing them was ‘vulgar analogising’ and
generally a waste of historians’ valuable time.¹⁴⁰ Among the very few who still
predated the original Thermidor before 9 Thermidor was Shchegolev, who wrote
as late as 1930 that the continuities between the Jacobins and the Directory, which
served the economic interests of the haute-bourgeoisie, were more numerous and
more consequential than what distinguished them politically.¹⁴¹ On this he was
challenged by both Lukin and S. A. Lotte, neither of whom was about to let
themselves be stigmatized by anything the party had condemned.¹⁴²
In light of the party’s belated, but nonetheless forceful denunciation of the
thesis that the transition from the Jacobins to Thermidor was economically
evolutionary, rather than something that occurred suddenly and comprehen-
sively, one is left wondering not only why it took so long for the party to denounce
it, but also why so many Soviet historians persisted in expressing it. Presumably
those who did were aware of Lenin’s personal identification with the Jacobins; no
doubt they also realized that describing them as proto-Thermidorians signifi-
cantly diminished the Jacobins, perhaps to the point where their own credentials
as revolutionaries could be legitimately questioned, or even denied. The best
explanation one can come up with is that describing the Jacobins in this fashion
was to suggest that, at least in France, Thermidorian policies came about by
stealth—that they were put in place by revolutionaries who either did not realize
that by doing so they were betraying the revolution to which they still believed
themselves to be committed, or knew exactly the implications of their actions; if
the latter was the case, then the Jacobins were not revolutionaries at all, but rather
reactionaries intent on returning power to the haute-bourgeoisie, a class less

¹³⁹ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, pp. 153–4; Ts. Fridliand, ‘9-e termidora’, Istorik marksist
7 (1928): pp. 158–9.
¹⁴⁰ Fridliand, ‘9-e termidora’, p. 158.
¹⁴¹ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, pp. 164–6. Shchegolev adhered to the newly established
orthodoxy to the extent to which he disparaged Mathiez, whose views on the Jacobins he now
claimed ‘could not withstand criticism’. P. P. Shchegolev, Posle termidora. Ocherki po istorii
termidorianskoi reaktsii (Leningrad, 1930), p. 4. But he did not disavow his original thesis that, in
their economic policies, the Jacobins prefigured the Thermidorians and, as corroboration, cited the
Maximum, claiming that the changes it underwent after 9 Thermidor were ‘superficial’. Posle
termidora, p. 74.
¹⁴² Dalin, ‘K istorii izucheniia Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii v SSSR’, pp. 112–13; S. A. Lotte,
‘Protiv “matezovshchiny” i “ustrialovshchiny” v istoricheskoi literature’, Problemy marksizma,
2 (1931): p. 210.
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progressive than the petit-bourgeoisie, the class they belonged to by birth. More-
over, by concealing both their motive and their intentions, the Jacobins were guilty
of unconscionable mendacity.

* * *
Superimposed on the political realities in the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s, this
seemingly arcane debate over the meaning of the original Thermidor in the
French Revolution had serious political and ideological implications. What the
notion of a ‘growing over’ seemed to suggest, if one applied it in the Soviet context,
was that Thermidor could come about in the Soviet Union furtively and incre-
mentally, as it had in the French Revolution, and in the absence, until it had
already sunk deep roots in the Soviet economy, of any signal event like Robe-
spierre’s arrest and execution. As the prospect of a Soviet version of the phenom-
enon became plausible after the institution of the NEP, many Bolsheviks believed
it could come about through actions by persons within the Communist Party
itself, who, while pretending to have the interests of the party at heart, in actuality
were intent on harming it, perhaps even on bringing down the entire Soviet
system. The Soviet Thermidor, in short, might resemble a malignancy, metaphor-
ically eating away at the Soviet Union from within, its existence, much less its
deleterious and even catastrophic effects, recognized too late for any surgical
intervention to succeed. This view of how a Soviet Thermidor could arise would
serve the interests of those who would welcome it as well as those who feared it.
For the former it would be a prediction of what hopefully would come true; for the
latter it would be a stark and undeniable warning.
In the end, the Soviet leadership, which by the end of 1928 consisted of Stalin
and his now thoroughly Stalinist entourage, concluded that this particular
explanation of how a Soviet Thermidor might arise was not wrong so much
as irrelevant. What made it so was the Second Revolution Stalin initiated
involving industrialization on a scale and with a rapidity none of the other
Bolsheviks could have anticipated, along with the collectivization of agriculture,
which required brutality and coercion of such magnitude that not even Lenin, at
his most vindictive and ruthless, or Trotsky, who favoured rapid industrializa-
tion before Stalin did, could ever have imagined. Both of these policies, in their
objectives, motivation, and implementation, made impossible any kind of
Thermidorian retrenchment, reaction, or counter-revolution. What had been a
real danger in the 1920s, when NEP existed, simply vanished once Stalin had
determined he would transform the Soviet economy so that it would finally,
after a hiatus of just over a decade, be consonant ideologically with the trans-
formation of politics the October Revolution had brought about in 1917. For
that reason any and all analogies with the French Revolution emphasizing the
commonality of a regression or even of merely a breathing spell would be at best
irrelevant, and at worst harmful. The virtues Stalin wanted the Soviet people to
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emulate were those of a conqueror and a warrior. ‘There are no fortresses’, he

said, ‘that Bolsheviks cannot storm.’¹⁴³ One is hard pressed to conjure an ethos
more different from this Promethean one and more injurious of it, than the
psychology of self-enrichment and the eschewal of political activism implicit in
the original Thermidor in France, at least as the Bolsheviks conceived of it.

¹⁴³ Quoted in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921–1934
(Cambridge, 1979), p. 181.
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9
Stalin
The Jacobins as Proto-Stalinists

Stalin never personally attacked Soviet historians for claiming that in the French
Revolution there was a growing over from the Jacobins to Thermidor. But it was
hardly a coincidence that in 1930, this notion, which just a few years earlier was
propounded by several of the finest historians in the country, was not only
declared incorrect; just expressing it was considered evidence of criminality.¹
Stalin’s notorious attack in 1931 on Soviet historians generally for their all-too-
frequent expressions of ‘rotten liberalism’ made no mention of the issue, and
included nothing about the French Revolution.² But statements he made in the
early 1930s had the effect of restoring the Jacobins to the pantheon of revolution-
aries Lenin said should be admired, if not always emulated. Stalin also added new
reasons for the Jacobins to occupy their pride of place.
Stalin’s natural inclination was to denigrate the French Revolution to the point
where no Soviet citizen would consider drawing analogies to it. In 1930, Soviet
historians prudently followed suit. In addition to calling mere discussion of a
Soviet Thermidor a criminal act, V. Ia. Kirpotin parroted the new party line:
analogies to the French Revolution ‘obscured the differences between a bourgeois
transformation and a socialist one’.³ In the interview Stalin gave to Emil Ludwig in
December 1931, he responded to a question about the role ‘wage equalization’
would play under socialism by attacking ‘the primitive communists’ in both the
English and French Revolutions who favoured it, and cited Marx and Engels to

¹ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 172.

² J. V. Stalin, ‘O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii bol’shevizma’, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 6 (113)
(October 1931): pp. 3–12. Stalin’s attack, which, to give it greater visibility, was published also in the
journal Bol’shevik , was triggered by an article by an obscure historian who had argued, incorrectly in
Stalin’s opinion, that Lenin underestimated the ‘opportunism’ of the leaders of the Second Inter-
national prior to the outbreak of the First World War. But its underlying purpose was to force
historians—the most odious of whom Stalin disparaged in the letter as ‘archive rats’—to follow
whatever ‘line’ the political leadership considered expedient. As a result, historians were purged, albeit
peacefully, and among those who suffered this fate, which included expulsion from the party, was
Fridliand, who upon his subsequent arrest was denounced as a ‘Trotskyite’. Also among those purged—
perhaps surprisingly given his unwavering opposition to the proponents of ‘growing over’—was Lukin,
who suffered the indignities of being condemned as a Zinovievite and of his ostensible errors exposed
publicly. John Barber, ‘Stalin’s Letter to the Editors of Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya’, Soviet Studies, no. 1
(January 1976): pp. 21–2, 39, 40–1; Anatole Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography (Princeton NJ,
1958), p. 201. Like Lukin, Fridliand perished in the Terror.
³ V. Ia. Kirpotin, Ideinye predshestvenniki marksizma-leninizma v Rossii (Moscow, 1950), p. 101.
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corroborate his opinion that strict equality of wages—as opposed to their being
determined equitably and fairly—had no place in a socialist state; in fact, it had
‘nothing in common with Marxism’.⁴ While citing Cromwell in the English
Revolution as the prime exemplar of this opinion, Stalin did not specify who in
the French Revolution made the same mistake. However, it is likely that he was
thinking of Babeuf and the Babouvists, of whom he had never been especially
fond, and perhaps also of Hébert and the Hébertists. In November 1927, almost
certainly on Stalin’s orders, a play entitled ‘The Conspiracy of Equals’ that
depicted its participants favourably was banned after only one performance.⁵
Quite apart from his opposition to the extreme egalitarianism the Babouvists
favoured, Stalin, who then still lacked sufficient power to ensure his political
security, would not want any coup d’état, even one that failed, depicted on stage
in a favourable light.
But Stalin did not merely denigrate several of the leading figures in the French
Revolution, or reject as contrary to Marxism the ideas they espoused. In response
to Ludwig’s next question about whether the October Revolution was ‘in any sense
the continuation and culmination of the Great French Revolution’, Stalin
responded that it was not; in fact his response was so emphatic and categorical
that one is inclined to consider what he said his genuine belief, rather than a
reflection of any political considerations:
The October Revolution is neither the continuation nor the culmination of the
Great French Revolution. The goal of the French Revolution was to liquidate
feudalism in order to establish capitalism. The goal of the October Revolution,
however, is to liquidate capitalism in order to establish socialism.⁶

The significance of what Stalin said to Ludwig should not be underestimated. By

his words, Stalin did nothing less than repudiate, even if only inferentially, the
mythology about the French Revolution Lenin and the Bolsheviks had constructed
since 1905. Where Lenin saw the differences between the French and the October
Revolution as an indication of historical continuity, in which the later revolution
superseded the earlier one without denying its historical necessity, Stalin con-
sidered these differences evidence of discontinuity; because the two revolutions, in
their essence, had little in common, any similarities between them were superfi-
cial. For Stalin, history was purposeful and providential, in the sense of its having a
final resting place, but its phases were distinct, and certainly not transcended by
any ‘growing over’ from one to another. Aristocracies did not relinquish economic
and political supremacy to capitalists voluntarily, any more than capitalists did the

⁴ J. V. Stalin, ‘Beseda s nemetskim pisatelem Emilem Liudvigom’, in Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. XIII,
pp. 118–19.
⁵ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v spektaklaiakh sovetskogo teatra’, p. 473.
⁶ Stalin, ‘Beseda s nemetskim pisatelem Emilem Liudvigom’, p. 123.
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same for the proletariat, which in the Soviet Union was now beginning the
stupendously difficult task of constructing socialism in the face of continued
resistance from capitalists both at home and abroad. But the second of these
transitions owed little to the first one. While sharing an instinct for self-
preservation, aristocracies and capitalists were fundamentally different—and
henceforth this assertion was not debatable in the Soviet Union. In short, Stalin’s
contribution to the conversation about the relationship between Jacobinism in
France and Bolshevism in Russia was to end it. In Stalin’s opinion, which by 1930
was the only one in the Soviet Union that mattered, history was the exact
antithesis of the seamless web it was to many liberals and Social Democrats in
the West, in which its discernible phases offered remarkably little resistance to
those that followed them. At the same time, by stressing the discontinuities in
history to the extent that he did, Stalin was coming dangerously closely to rejecting
the Marxist view of history in its totality.
Stalin’s subsequent pronouncements on the French Revolution either deni-
grated its importance or proclaimed its irrelevance. That its objectives were
bourgeois instead of socialist and its actors foreigners instead of Russians were
unpleasant facts for Stalin, and he usually mentioned them when it suited his
purposes politically to mention the revolution or even, albeit rarely, to praise it. In
Stalin’s first public statement after the Nazi invasion—in which, to rally public
resistance, he referred to the Soviet people as ‘brothers and sisters’—he cited
Napoleon’s intervention in Russia and ensuing defeat as proof that Hitler’s
would meet the same fate.⁷ To be sure, the French Revolution itself had been a
progressive phenomenon, advancing industrial capitalism—which was one reason
Stalin was favourably inclined to Napoleon; his undeniable gifts as a military
strategist and tactician were another. But during the Second World War Stalin felt
compelled to make clear that these were utilized on behalf of a country that—
notwithstanding Napoleon’s month-long occupation of Moscow—never really
threatened Russia’s survival. By contrast, the threat the Nazis posed was a mortal
one; any comparison of Napoleon’s campaign with the Nazis’, he commented
publicly in 1942, on the eve of the anniversary of the October Revolution, ‘will not
bear criticism’.⁸ In the same speech, he noted the numerical disparity between
the three million Soviet soldiers fighting the Nazis and the pitifully small number,
at least by comparison, who fought for Napoleon and France at the battle of
Borodino in the fall of 1812.⁹ Stalin, in other words, felt confident enough by 1942
to acknowledge the Nazis’ military strength—to which he contrasted Napoleon’s

⁷ J. V. Stalin, ‘Vstuplenie po radio 3 iiulia 1941 goda’, in Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1997), vol. XV,
p. 56. Subsequent references to this later edition of Stalin’s works will be rendered as Sochineniia
(1997), followed by the volume and page number.
⁸ J. V. Stalin, ‘Doklad na torzhestvennom zasedanii Moskovskogo Soveta deputatov trudiashchikh-
sia s partinymi i obshchestvennymi organizatsiiami goroda Moskvy (6 November 1942)’, ibid., p. 122.
⁹ Ibid., p. 123.
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military weakness—in a speech intended to convince his listeners that the Nazis
were doomed to defeat. Irrespective of whether the German forces were strong or
weak, in the history lessons his speeches during the Second World War were
intended to impart, one thing never changed—Napoleon’s weakness and, by
implication, that of France as well. Stalin fashioned Soviet resistance of the
Nazis as a patriotic crusade to which all Russians who venerated their country’s
heroics against earlier invaders should pledge their allegiance, and for this reason
alone analogies with foreign countries and their revolutions would not be helpful.
In Stalin’s last years, he had little to say publicly about the French Revolution.
In 1950, in his articles in Pravda on linguistics, he included the comment that
there were limits to what the French Revolution had accomplished: even as it was
transforming politics and the economy, it was powerless to achieve a revolution
in linguistics, which, as an aspect of the ideational ‘superstructure’ that Marx
believed had no existence independent of material reality, Stalin now considered a
tool in moulding the New Soviet Man. By this time, Stalin had convinced himself
that the human personality was infinitely malleable, and could therefore be altered
independently of changes in the material bases of society.¹⁰ For that reason the
Soviets need not wait for the full effects of industrialization and the collectiviza-
tion of agriculture to take effect. A new species of human being could be created
without them.¹¹ But two years later, in Economic Problems of Socialism, his last
work before his death in 1953, the Prometheanism that was so seamlessly inte-
grated into the Marxist ideology he had believed in for the entirety of his public
life prompted him to re-evaluate his previous position that the October Revolu-
tion, in relation to the French Revolution and all other revolutions that preceded
it, was sui generis, and that the only revolutions that might resemble it were future
socialist revolutions elsewhere in the world.¹² ‘Society is not powerless against the
laws of science’ was perhaps the most revelatory statement of the essay, and to
underscore its centrality, Stalin cited the bourgeoisie of the French Revolution to
make clear his belief that the Soviet people were perfectly capable of changing
anything that to others seemed immutable.¹³

¹⁰ Rolf, Soviet Mass Festivals, p. 143. The prazdniki the Bolsheviks staged was one way of instilling
the personal attributes people would manifest under communism before communism existed; Malte
Rolf has aptly called the process of instilling these attributes a form of ‘inner sovietisation’, while also
noting that it yielded mixed results, largely because pre-soviet attitudes, especially where these
concerned Christianity, could not be extirpated entirely. Ibid., pp. 146–50.
¹¹ Using Pavlovian conditioning to change human behaviour radically was another ‘short-cut’ Stalin
hoped would yield the loyal Soviet citizens he wanted before the material preconditions for their
emergence existed. Robert Tucker’s article, ‘Stalin and the Uses of Psychology’, in The Soviet Political
Mind, edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1972), pp. 143–72, is illuminating in this regard. Stalin’s
intense desire to accelerate the course of history suggests that Piatakov’s statement about Lenin making
a proletarian revolution before the preconditions for it existed applies equally to Stalin if one substitutes
‘building socialism’ for ‘making a proletarian revolution’ as that which occurred prematurely in Russia.
¹² J. V. Stalin, Ekonomicheskie problemy sotsializma v SSSR. Otvet tovarishchu Notkinu, Aleksandru
Il’ichu, in Stalin, Sochineniia (1997), vol. XVI, p. 188.
¹³ Ibid.
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However laconic his comments on the French Revolution, and notwithstanding

the infrequency with which he uttered them, in the last years of his life Stalin was
simply too impressed by the Jacobins not to consider their example relevant to his
own political requirements as the leader of a country still surrounded, at least in
his own mind, by enemies intent on destroying it. That he himself was losing some
of the mental acuity he had enjoyed as a younger man made the vigilance he had
manifested earlier in his career even more necessary now. Stalin, in a sense, had
become his own enemy. But because the frailties of old age had been precluded by
the guillotine in 1794, the Jacobins were forever youthful, and worthy of emula-
tion in perpetuity. According to Dmitrii Volkogonov, Stalin esteemed Robespierre
in particular for originating the whole notion of ideological crime, of which entire
categories of the population could be guilty simply by virtue of their existence.¹⁴
Sheila Fitzpatrick notes his admiration of the Law of Suspects the Jacobins decreed
in September 1793; its proviso permitting apprehension for mere suspicion of
criminality was of course consistent with what the Soviet police were allowed to do
for virtually the entirety of Stalin’s rule.¹⁵ Eric Van Ree even claims that Stalin’s
notions of ‘revolutionary dictatorship’ and ‘revolutionary patriotism’ originated in
his understanding of how the Jacobins exercised power once they had acquired it,
and in his study of Stalin’s political thought defines it explicitly as a form of
‘Marxist Jacobinism’.¹⁶
One need not go as far as Van Ree to acknowledge that the Jacobins personified
a regime Stalin looked to for guidance now that what was originally a revolution-
ary party in Russia had become, under Lenin and Stalin, a ruling elite. Of course
neither the Jacobins nor the French Revolution as a whole provided a template for
ruling the Soviet Union in a manner consistent with Stalin’s needs and objectives.
Nevertheless, there were two aspects of the Jacobin dictatorship he found espe-
cially useful, even though the Jacobins had at their disposal nothing like the
modern machinery of coercion and propaganda that was available to Stalin,
which he continued to refine in the last years of his life.
The first of these concerned the application of terror. Emboldened by what he
knew about how the Jacobins had applied it in the 1790s, Stalin increasingly
ordered the elimination of people not just for any ideological recalcitrance they
had supposedly manifested towards the construction of socialism and commun-
ism, but simply because he deemed them personal enemies, and by virtue of that
fact alone, enemies of the Soviet state and the Soviet people.¹⁷ One could even say
that whatever Stalin may have believed about the irrelevance of the French

¹⁴ Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 279.

¹⁵ Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1994), p. 179.
¹⁶ Van Ree, Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, pp. 230–54, 283.
¹⁷ Matthew Lenoe draws this distinction in his article, ‘Fear, Loathing, Conspiracy: The Kirov
Murder’, in The Anatomy of Terror: Political Violence under Stalin, edited by James Harris (Oxford,
2013), p. 201.
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Revolution, he nonetheless admired the Jacobins for the alacrity with which they
killed people. If, in the end, they killed ineffectively and insufficiently, which
caused them to lose power less than two years after acquiring it, he would simply
take care to avoid their mistakes. But to Stalin the similarities with the Jacobins
were just as obvious as the differences. While they might only have had at their
disposal primitive means of execution like the guillotine and slow-firing rifles, the
enemies these weapons eliminated were actually much like those Stalin had to
eliminate in the 1930s in their cunning, their malevolence, and their unsurpass-
able duplicity. Robespierre and Saint-Just would have found nothing untoward
and unrecognizable in the charges in the Show Trials that perfidious communists
inside the Soviet Union were conspiring to destroy the Soviet state at the behest of
foreign intelligence agencies and Trotsky, who, after his exile from the Soviet
Union in 1929, might have reminded the two Jacobins of the Comte de Provence,
the Bourbon Pretender and future Louis XVIII.
The second reason the Jacobins appealed to Stalin was that he could easily
construe them as the personification of French nationalism and patriotism.
Notably absent in Stalinist pronouncements on the French Revolution is any
acknowledgement of its international and universalist pretensions. Far from its
being the first step in the emancipation of humanity, as Marx, Engels, and Lenin
perceived it, the French Revolution in Stalin’s estimation acted to protect the
interests of a nation state and the economic interests of several of the classes that
comprised it. Paradoxically, Stalin’s espousal of Soviet patriotism, especially
during ‘the Great Patriotic War’, instead of precluding admiration for the
Jacobins, and by implication for the French Revolution as a whole, had the
effect of increasing it.
Moreover, Stalin never fully jettisoned Marxist ideology in explaining the
French Revolution. An unsigned tribute in 1939 in the issue of Pravda on the
sesquicentennial of the storming of the Bastille dutifully reiterated the Leninist
view that ‘the French Revolution [was] the most significant event of the modern
era prior to the October Revolution’.¹⁸ Although the bourgeoisie was its principal
beneficiary, the revolution was actually galvanized by the lower classes and thus
truly a popular movement. ‘With the iron fist of terror’, the political instrument
of these classes [i.e. the Jacobins] ‘mercilessly smashed [the revolution’s]
antagonists—the counterrevolutionaries, the opportunists, and the traitors.’¹⁹ In
fact, the Jacobins were the best the French bourgeoisie could produce. But in the
end, the revolution could not transcend its historical limits, and the working class
was still too weak to do what the bourgeoisie was unwilling to do. The result, as
inescapable as it was regrettable, was the Jacobins’ and the revolution’s defeat by
the Thermidorians.

¹⁸ ‘150-letie frantsuzskoi burzhuaznoi revoliutsii’, Pravda, no. 193(7878) (14 July 1939): p. 1.
¹⁹ Ibid.
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After 1917 all of the Bolsheviks could have written this without contradicting
anything else they had written on the Jacobins and the French Revolution. But
there were aspects to this article that were distinctively Stalinist. The anonymous
author or authors made much of the external threat to the revolution posed by
counter-revolutionary monarchies actively seeking its destruction; that these
instruments of feudalism in Europe were aided in their effort by traitors inside
France only made the danger more insidious, and for that reason more difficult to
detect. The Jacobins, while they soon fell victim to it, nonetheless set an enviable
standard of defiance in the face of overwhelming resistance that posterity would
look back to with admiration. Robespierre, Marat, and Saint-Just were just the
most prominent of the actors in the French Revolution ‘to inspire the revolution-
aries of the working class with their massacres of obsolete forces of the old order’,
and in that way set an example the proletariat in Russia in 1917 would emulate
because the Jacobins were not really responsible for their subsequent defeat.²⁰
History was the culprit, rather than any insufficiency of courage, will, and
determination. For that reason the proletariat, who were the pupils of the Jaco-
bins, were now—through the instrument of Stalin’s terror—actually exceeding
their teachers in destroying their enemies once and for all and on behalf of a
regime, which they themselves had established in 1917 and had long since
exceeded the lifespan of the Jacobin one.
Still, as the same article clearly implied, the proletariat in the Soviet Union had
to remain vigilant even after defeating its enemies. Fascism—which was how
Nazism was always referred to in the Soviet Union because ‘National Socialism’
suggested a similarity with socialism itself—always posed a genuine threat to the
Soviet state. What made this warning remarkable was that Stalin, through his
epigones in the press, linked it to the French Revolution, even though fascism, as
‘the most frenzied and the most reactionary circles of finance capital’, was the
political expression of the last stage of industrial capitalism prior to a proletarian
revolution.²¹ The French Revolution, of course, had ushered in the earliest pre-
cursor of this particular kind of capitalism. Nevertheless, the author or authors of
the Pravda article in 1939 claimed that fascism threatened not just the Soviet
Union but also ‘the principles of 1789’.²² This is a remarkable statement for any
Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, or Stalinist to make. It shows loyal Stalinists—after
Stalin had proclaimed as the irrefutable truth that any analogy between the French
and the October Revolutions was not only false but ridiculous because the
revolutions occurred under vastly different circumstances—nonetheless implying,
in the newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party—that this was simply not the
case, indeed that the opposite of what Stalin had said was true. The French and the
October Revolutions were comparable, and any comparison will show them to be

²⁰ Ibid. ²¹ Ibid. ²² Ibid.

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similar. Even more remarkable was the implication that not only the Soviet Union
and socialism, but all existing bourgeois regimes—which by definition were based
on ‘the principles of 1789’—were threatened by fascism. Even though fascists
belonged to the bourgeoisie, they were also, paradoxically, a mortal threat to it.²³
Threatening capitalists and socialists, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, equally
and with the same ferocity it had manifested in coming to power in the countries it
ruled, fascism, in 1939, was far from the last expression politically of ‘finance
capital’, despite the fact that Stalin a decade earlier believed it was destined soon to
disappear, and said so publicly.
The author or authors of the article in Pravda seemed of two minds about the
Jacobins and about the French Revolution generally. They apparently accepted
that the revolution was essential to the development of industrial capitalism, and
then, many years later, to its replacement in the Soviet Union by an economy that
Stalin, in 1936, had publicly termed ‘socialist’. But the article also argued that the
Jacobins, who were indisputably the most consequential of all the parties that led
the revolution during its multiple phases, were concerned most of all with their
own country. In the litany of things the article claimed the Soviet people admired
about the French Revolution, such as the hatred its leaders manifested for the
Catholic Church, it was the Jacobins’ struggle to destroy the foreign enemies of the
revolution, to discover the traitors in their midst and to destroy the foreign
governments that were directing them, that they admired most. When the author
or authors asked what exactly it was that explained the courage and unstinting
dedication the Jacobins mustered in fighting their multifarious and diabolical
enemies, the answer they provided was simple: ‘their love for their rodina’.²⁴
Though usually rendered in English as ‘the motherland’, the word has always
had mystical connotations for Russians, who consider them specific to Russia.
That in this instance the word was applied to a foreign country testifies to the role
the French Revolution and France played in Stalinist politics and culture, despite
Stalin’s own efforts, at times, to minimize it.
Other articles in the same issue of Pravda contained similar arguments.
F. Kheifets termed the Jacobins ‘the most decisive representatives of the revolu-
tionary bourgeoisie’, which from 1789 to 1794, endeavoured to destroy ‘all of the

²³ That fascism and the French Revolution are incompatible in the principles each espoused is an
assertion with which most historians of modern European history would agree. To my knowledge, only
one Western historian of any prominence has claimed the opposite—that fascism ideologically is a
continuation of the French Revolution, namely George Mosse, in his article, ‘Fascism and the French
Revolution’, in The Fascist Revolution: Towards a General Theory of Fascism, edited by George
L. Mosse (New York, 1999), 69–93. In the article Mosse makes much of the Nazis’ mobilizing the
German people on behalf of an extreme nationalism that he identifies as a ‘civic religion’ traceable
historically to the Jacobins. In the abstract, the similarity Mosse argues for may be plausible. But one
suspects that there are more direct antecedents of this aspect of Nazi ideology and practice in German
history that owed little or nothing to the French Revolution.
²⁴ ‘150-letie frantsuzskoi burzhuaznoi revoliutsii’, p. 3.
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remnants of feudalism [and] to establish in France a democratic republic’.²⁵ But

the bourgeoisie in those years was hardly monolithic. In fact, it was riven by a split
between the Jacobins and the Girondins that might have ended the French
Revolution prematurely had the former not been able to neutralize the latter
politically. There was nothing extraordinary about an article in a Soviet newspaper
asserting this. Leninist orthodoxy since 1905 held that the Jacobins were them-
selves from the petit-bourgeoisie and thus more progressive than the Girondins,
who were from the haute-bourgeoisie. Like the other authors who were writing, in
effect, as Stalin’s surrogate, Kheifets contended that the Girondins were even
worse than how Soviet historians and political leaders had described them prior
to the commencement of Stalin’s rule. Above and beyond their ideological crimes,
the Girondins were traitors to the country of France—which meant that the
Jacobins, among their other virtues, were patriots. Moreover, the reason for
such a stark dichotomy was that the Girondins and the Jacobins came from the
two principal factions of the bourgeoisie: the haute-bourgeoisie in the case of the
Girondins, the petit-bourgeoisie in the case of the Jacobins. Politics, in other
words, was a function of class. This, of course, is a fundamental axiom of Marxism
and Marxism-Leninism. But the corollary, which Stalin seemed to use surrogates
in the Soviet press to express, was that under capitalism, and even during the
transition from feudalism to capitalism, the more advanced the class, or the subset
of a class, the more patriotic it would be. Because of the subclass of the bourgeoisie
they belonged to, the Girondins could not help but betray the revolution and
render assistance to its foreign enemies, while the Jacobins—not only because of
the different subclass they represented, but also because they were committed
personally and politically to the survival and welfare of France—could not help
but try to preserve the revolution by defeating these same foreign enemies. The
French Revolution was the Great French Revolution not just because it was
the first bourgeois revolution in history. According to Stalin, again through the
medium of surrogates’ articles in the Soviet press, it was a Great Revolution also
because the Jacobins, like Stalin, recognized that, for a revolution to succeed, its
leaders had to feel a special commitment to their own country, causing them to
place its welfare over any other value or principle they might happen to profess,
because without it, their enemies would destroy not only their own revolution, but
also their own country.
But honouring and protecting and defending their country were not the only
things the Jacobins had to do so that the revolution they supported survived. In
Stalin’s view of history and of human events generally, victors could never rest on
their laurels. Defeated enemies, unless they were eliminated entirely, were always
lurking, intent on avenging their own defeat and destroying all those responsible

²⁵ F. Kheifets, ‘Iakobinskaia diktatura’, Pravda, no. 193(7878) (14 July 1939): p. 3.

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for it. Successful rulers had to be just as vigilant as their enemies were duplicitous.
In Kheifets’ words, they had ‘to extend their hand against the counterrevolution-
ary imperialists’.²⁶ In the case of the Jacobins, this necessitated destroying not only
foreigners who threatened them, but also the Girondins and former supporters of
the Jacobins who had betrayed them; among the traitors the Jacobins eliminated—
with an absence of mercy Kheifets clearly approved of—was Charles Dumouriez,
the French general who in April 1793 had defected to the Austrians because he
feared he would be punished for having lost a battle one month earlier, and also,
though less obviously, for having opposed the execution of Louis XVI two months
before that.²⁷ But the good sense that caused the Jacobins to recognize the links
between their foreign enemies and those inside France was not enough, according
to Kheifets, to save them. Paradoxically, the very steps the Jacobins took to assist
the lower classes—such as allowing peasants to take back land they believed the
aristocracy had wrongly seized years or even decades earlier—accelerated the
transformation of the peasantry into a class of satiated small property owners
who no longer wanted or needed the revolution to continue.
Another policy, according to Kheifets, that had the same effect was the Max-
imum, which the Jacobins put in place, despite their longstanding belief in laissez-
faire economics, to win the support of classes and categories of the population that
were beneath them, most notably the sans-culottes. But among the Jacobins’
supporters were other elements of the population that wanted the Maximum to
end. Forced to choose, the Jacobins, fatefully, chose the latter, and dropped their
support of the Maximum. In the end, the Jacobins lost power anyway, and
Kheifets leaves the reader with the clear impression that no matter what the
Jacobins did, nothing they could have done would have ensured the long-term
continuation of their regime. Having unified France in the face of external danger,
the Jacobins, their historical mission completed, were helpless to prevent the unity
they created dissolve once the danger had passed. But unlike the Jacobins, the
leaders of the Soviet Union—as Kheifets implied strongly at the end—would
triumph over any enemies, foreign or domestic, foolish enough to seek its
destruction. If the Jacobins, in the final analysis, were defeated, more than
anything else, by history itself, the Soviet Union under Stalin transcended history,
which, along with Stalin’s own incomparable abilities, effectively rendered the
Soviet Union omnipotent.²⁸
Other contributors to same issue of Pravda touched on many of the themes
Kheifets stressed. A. Molok described the French Revolution as a patriotic revo-
lution, the enormity of which facilitated the creation of revolutionary armies that

²⁶ Ibid.
²⁷ Valerie Mainz, Days of Glory? Imaging Military Recruitment and the French Revolution (War,
Culture, and Society, 1750–1850) (London, 2016), p. 238; Ian Davidson, The French Revolution: From
Enlightenment to Tyranny (New York, 2016), pp. 149–53.
²⁸ Kheifets, Iakobinskaia diktatura’, p. 3.
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defeated the external forces intent on destroying it.²⁹ In Molok’s description, there
was nothing international or supranational about the revolution. The Jacobins
were its best exemplars, and among the Jacobins, Marat exemplified what made
them, to all intents and purposes, proto-Stalinists—even though Molok himself
did not apply that particular appellation. But he extolled Marat for attacking ‘the
new bourgeois aristocracy’, which, ‘by ripping off the mask of the idols of
the liberal bourgeoisie, the most egregious of whom were Necker and Lafayette,
he exposed the treason of the royal court’.³⁰ Then, fully cognizant of the fact that
the enemies of the revolution were like a hydra, reappearing no matter how many
times they seemed to have been defeated, Marat fought the Girondins—‘the new
masters of the bourgeois republic’—and after them ‘the counterrevolutionaries’,
against whom he directed ‘merciless rhetorical attacks’.³¹ Adopting the phrase-
ology of Stalinism, Molok concluded his paean by crediting Marat, and by
implication the other Jacobins who continued what he had been doing after his
untimely death at the hands of Charlotte Corday, for unmasking ‘enemies of
the people’—the same term that was applied in the Soviet press and in official
pronouncements to the millions of victims of Stalin’s Terror.³²
Molok praised Robespierre even more effusively than he did Marat: ‘Only with
love do patriots and democrats say his name [because] they know that no other
interests existed for him except serving his country.’³³ His greatness and that of
the Jacobins consisted primarily in what they did on behalf of the Committee of
Public Safety in 1793–4, when they led ‘the progressive classes of the time’ and
fought their enemies both internally and abroad. In that respect, and also in
carrying out needed but difficult reforms that benefitted the classes in France
that most needed them, the Jacobins did the dirty work of the revolution, from
which the haute-bourgeoisie had recoiled. But once the Jacobins enacted the
agenda of what was, and had to remain, a bourgeois revolution, they became
expendable, their historical mission accomplished. 9 Thermidor was of course
regrettable, but it could not be averted.³⁴
Also joining in the celebration in Pravda was the eminent Soviet historian
Evgenii Tarlé. That someone of his notoriety was called upon to lend his talents to
honouring the French Revolution in the most prestigious and powerful newspaper
in the Soviet Union attested to the significance of the occasion. Tarlé did not
disappoint.³⁵ He paid the requisite attention to the enemies of the revolution,
particularly the émigrés, whose resemblance to Trotsky and his followers, in
Tarlé’s estimation, was unmistakable. But what made these enemies of the revo-
lution especially diabolical was their enlistment of foreign governments in their
nefarious schemes, which showed these émigrés’ contempt not just for the French

²⁹ A. Molok, ‘Tribuny Konventa’, Pravda, no. 193(7878) (14 July 1939): p. 3.

³⁰ Ibid. ³¹ Ibid. ³² Ibid. ³³ Ibid. ³⁴ Ibid.
³⁵ E. Tarlé, ‘Bor’ba s interventsiei’, Pravda, no. 193(7878) (14 July 1939); p. 3.
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Revolution but for France itself. Absent the Jacobins’ vigilance and single-minded
determination to stop them, Prussian officers, in Tarlé’s description, would not
only have torched Paris after conquering it; they would also have massacred its
children, because if they had failed to do so, ‘[these children] would all grow up to
be Jacobins’.³⁶ Tarlé singled out Robespierre for special commendation: in the
essential enterprise of ‘killing enemies and traitors’, he was nothing short of
‘indomitable’.³⁷ In that respect, as well as in many others that Tarlé evidently
did not think it necessary to enumerate, the French bourgeoisie in 1939 was hardly
worthy of its illustrious predecessor in the French Revolution. But the Soviet
Union, which had recently unmasked and destroyed its own traitors even more
ruthlessly and effectively than the Jacobins did, was nonetheless pleased to
honour a revolution that inaugurated a new chapter in the history of humanity,
the beneficent repercussions of which, after unfolding first in Western Europe
and then a century or so later in Russia, would soon be felt even further eastward,
in Asia.³⁸
During the Stalin era, the French Revolution was not only on Stalin’s mind. It
also figured prominently in the sensibilities of the Stalinists who shared the milieu
the dictator inhabited that became even more insular after the suicide of Stalin’s
second wife in November 1932, which left the Soviet dictator virtually bereft of
family life.³⁹ As Simon Montefiore has amply demonstrated, a genuine subculture
emerged at that time around Stalin to which his subordinates could not remain
oblivious on pain of exclusion from the dictator’s good graces, or worse.⁴⁰ Lazar
Kaganovich, whose limited education and provincial outlook presumably had
rendered him largely ignorant of history other than that of the Bolsheviks,
nevertheless knew enough about the French Revolution to speak coherently, if
superficially and in the self-identifying phraseology of Stalinism, about how the
Jacobins dealt with their enemies. His verdict was that they did so effectively but
lacked the ruthlessness needed to kill all of them, the morality and the practical
necessity of which Kaganovich never questioned. In May 1991, less than three
months before his death, he stated in an interview that while the Jacobins were
justified morally and as a matter of expediency in physically eliminating the
Girondins, they failed to do the same to ‘the swamp’, by which Kaganovich
meant the delegates to the Convention who refused to align themselves with
either the Jacobins or the Girondins. While at times they supported what the
Jacobins did, they never forgot their original enmity, and soon betrayed them.⁴¹
According to Kaganovich, the reason the Jacobins did not defend themselves was

³⁶ Ibid. ³⁷ Ibid. ³⁸ Ibid.

³⁹ The first volume of Svetlana Alliluyeva’s memoirs, Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York, 1967),
are illuminating in this regard, even though her ascription of responsibility of the Terror mostly to
Beria should cause the reader to treat them very carefully.
⁴⁰ Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York, 2003).
⁴¹ G. A. Kumanev, Riadom so Stalinym (Moscow, 1991), p. 78.
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because ‘the swamp was linked to them by many threads’—in other words because
its members had insinuated themselves into the ranks of the Jacobins, thereby
rendering them defenceless.⁴² One can easily imagine Kaganovich at this point
in the interview silently congratulating himself and Stalin for not making the
same mistake.⁴³

* * *
By the mid-1930s, it was clear that the controversy over the ‘growing over’ thesis
had ended with the victory of those who rejected it, and the harsh derogation of
those who had once espoused it was consistent with the larger hardening of an
ideological orthodoxy not only in history but in most matters cultural and
intellectual. Another indication of this was the posthumous denunciation of
Mathiez. Triggered by his intervention on Tarlé’s behalf when the latter’s creden-
tials as a loyal supporter of the Soviet Union were under attack, the campaign
against the much-admired French historian captured perfectly the intermingling
of the personal, the political, and the historical in the litany of errors of which he
was presumably guilty. Among the most-often cited were his signing a petition
protesting the death penalty for forty-eight intellectuals recently convicted of
various crimes, and continuing to maintain that the Jacobins adopted Thermi-
dorian policies while still in power. The attacks these transgressions generated
were followed by pronouncements, with the party’s approval either explicit or
strongly implied, that Mathiez was once again espousing the views of the imperi-
alist bourgeoisie.⁴⁴
To be sure, the debate about the Soviet Thermidor continued among the
Mensheviks. In 1929 Rafael Abramovich had argued, counterintuitively, that
industrialization, because of its rapidity and attendant social and economic
dislocation, actually made termidoriastvo more likely.⁴⁵ By 1935 Fëdor Dan
had gone further. The Soviet Union, he said, had already entered the stage of
Thermidor.⁴⁶ Its industrialization was the most obvious proof of this. In fact, the
very existence of Thermidor in the Soviet Union, he wrote in 1936, meant that its
transformation into a genuine social democracy was possible, perhaps even
likely.⁴⁷ In fact, several other Mensheviks considered the Soviet Union’s joining
the League of Nations in 1933, and its promulgation in 1936 of a constitution with
explicit (but entirely fraudulent) guarantees of civil liberties and free elections,

⁴² Ibid., p. 79.
⁴³ French communists and other apologists in France during the Stalin era not surprisingly viewed
the Jacobin terror in much the way Kaganovich did. Jean Brubat, Le châtiment des espions et des traîtres
sous la Révolution française (Paris, 1937), is a prime example.
⁴⁴ Vovell, ‘1789–1917: The Game of Analogies’, p. 364 and passim.
⁴⁵ R. Abramovich, ‘Termidor i krest’ianstvo’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 7–8 (12 April 1929): p. 5.
⁴⁶ F. Dan, ‘Protiv terrora – za revoliutsiiu’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 1 (10 January 1935): p. 3.
⁴⁷ F. Dan, ‘Puti vozrozhdeniia’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 14–15 (14 August 1936): pp. 9–10.
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visible proof that this transformation had already begun.⁴⁸ But for some, the
Nazi–Soviet Pact in 1939 and the Winter War against Finland three months later
dashed these hopes for good—or, as happened in Trotsky’s case in 1935, prompted
a re-evaluation of the term itself.⁴⁹ In 1940 Dan acknowledged that Thermidor
in the Soviet Union was irreversible, but now he thought it precluded, rather than
facilitated, the Soviet Union’s becoming a social democracy; indeed it confirmed
that the Soviet Union, in its politics, was Bonapartist, or perhaps even fascist.⁵⁰
But by the mid-1930s Stalin no longer cared what the Mensheviks wrote, and in
the criminality the defendants in the show trials were accused of, they figured
hardly at all; Trotsky and foreign intelligence agencies, not the Mensheviks in
emigration, were deemed the masters of the dastardly plots in which the defend-
ants had allegedly participated.⁵¹ Moreover, neither the French Revolution nor the
Jacobins in particular played a role in the trials, and Stalin himself barely men-
tioned them as the Terror that ensued reached its apogee in 1937–8. This did not
mean, of course, that he was prepared, in the case of the French Revolution—or of
other matter on which he had expressed himself publicly—to allow any challenge
or disagreement. While the trials and the Terror continued, Stalin’s claims to a
monopoly of wisdom not just in politics but in virtually all areas of Soviet life was
more emphatic and absolute than it was previously.
But this did not mean that Soviet historians were either totally silent on the
revolution or were in agreement on every aspect of it. Rather, they trod carefully,
‘pulling their punches’ when it seemed the politic thing to do, and generally
focusing their attention on aspects of the revolution on which the Party Line
was unambiguous and unmistakable, thus making deviations from it easy to avoid.
Accordingly, most no longer concerned themselves with the relationship between
the Jacobins and Thermidor, focusing instead on the role the Jacobins played in
the French Revolution as a whole—a role that they, like Stalin, considered a mostly
positive one. The first indication of this shift in emphasis was N. M. Lukin’s article,
‘Lenin and the Problem of the Jacobin Dictatorship’, which appeared in Istorik
marksist in 1934.⁵² Of all the Soviet historians who wrote about the French
Revolution during the Stalin era, Lukin may have most faithfully replicated
Stalin’s own views. However much Stalin may have claimed—as he did in his
interview with Emil Ludwig in 1931—that the October Revolution was not only
not analogous with the French Revolution but owed precious little to it, his views
on the earlier revolution still mattered, and Lukin may have deliberately altered

⁴⁸ B. Dvinov, ‘Na pochve deistvitel’nosti’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 3 (15 February 1940): pp. 32–3.
⁴⁹ B. Dvinov, ‘K partiinoi platforme’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 6 (24 March 1940): pp. 71–5. On
the change in Trotsky’s view, see pp. 428–9.
⁵⁰ F. Dan, ‘Dva puti’, Novyi mir, nos. 1 & 2 (1940), cited in Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy,
p. 186.
⁵¹ Fourteen Mensheviks still living in the Soviet Union had been tried in 1931; all were found guilty,
but none were executed.
⁵² Lukin edited Istorik marksist from 1933 to 1938, when he was arrested.
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his own opinions to coincide with them. Of course neither his article nor his prior
services to the Bolsheviks prevented his subsequent arrest and elimination in the
Terror. But this was not for any lack of effort on his part.
Of course there was much in Lukin’s article that could have been written before
Stalin came to power. In many ways it adhered to the strictures Lenin had placed
on how the French Revolution should be interpreted, particularly as these per-
tained to the Jacobins. The Jacobins, as Lukin described them, were themselves
petit-bourgeois revolutionaries attempting to make real in France the desiderata of
a bourgeois revolution after the haute-bourgeoisie made clear it was unwilling to
do so. With the support of persons who could only aspire to be bourgeois, such as
the Parisian sans-culottes, the Jacobins were nonetheless able to fashion a coali-
tion, not unlike that which Lenin advocated in 1905 and actually assembled in
1917, that brought them to power. For that reason the dictatorship the Jacobins
established could properly be considered ‘bourgeois-democratic’.⁵³ But by 1794
they had gone as far as they could. The bourgeois revolution to which they were
committed had reached its limits.
Where Lukin’s views were different from those he had expressed in the 1920s
was in the emphasis he now placed on class distinctions within the French
peasantry in explaining the Jacobins’ demise, and the end of the French Revolu-
tion itself, on 9 Thermidor.⁵⁴ Specifically—so went his argument—affluent peas-
ants in France, who earlier in the revolution had received the land they demanded,
were simply too strong and too numerous for the ‘rural proletariat’—sometimes
Lukin called them ‘rural sans-culottes’—to overcome, and as a result, the French
Revolution ended when Thermidor began. But nothing comparable to this had
happened, or would ever happen, in the Soviet Union. While in the French
Revolution poor peasants were largely bypassed or used to advance the interests
of other classes, in the Soviet Union their interests were duly considered, their
needs met, and their principal enemies, the kulaks, destroyed. Indeed, in an article
in 1930 Lukin had seemed to suggest, through an analogy with the Jacobins, that
by destroying the kulaks, the Soviet government was doing precisely what the
Jacobins should have done to ensure their survival. For that reason, the Soviets

⁵³ Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, pp. 166–7. This particular argument, which Lukin had made
in works written prior to 1934, was criticized in 1933 by S. A. Lotte, who stressed that the Jacobins made
certain that the coalitions they dominated advanced their own interests, rather than those of the
plebeians and others who supported them. This was why they did not grant the lower classes any rights
or allow their representatives to help the Jacobins make policy. S. A. Lotte, Velikaia frantsuzskaia
revoliutsiia (Moscow/Leningrad 1933), p. 217. But Lukin never suggested that they did. For this reason
Lotte’s criticism was disingenuous. In the end, none of this mattered. Both historians, not just Lukin,
perished in the Terror.
⁵⁴ Lukin, ‘Lenin i problema iakobinskoi diktatury’, pp. 135–6. To be sure, in his 1934 article Lukin in
no way rejected or even qualified his earlier contention that the weakness of the urban lower classes in
France, which he said included a primitive industrial working class, played a major role in the genesis of
the Jacobins’ demise.
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would avoid their own Thermidor.⁵⁵ For the lower classes, the Jacobins were only
lukewarm and inconsistent advocates: they stopped enforcing the Ventôse decrees
confiscating and redistributing émigrés’ estates, and retained the Loi Le Chapelier
banning guilds and the equivalent of unions.⁵⁶ Even when the ‘plebeian’ elements
that supported the Jacobins were most influential, namely from September 1793 to
March 1794, the Jacobins did not exceed the limits their class identity prescribed.
In another departure from earlier writings, Lukin, in 1934, claimed that had
the Hébertists somehow been able to take power from Robespierre and the
other ‘centrist Jacobins’, they would have done to their lower-class supporters
what the centrist Jacobins actually did to them, namely destroy them politically
and physically, and in that way ensure their own survival. But constraints imposed
by class, rather than pragmatism, would explain the Hébertists (hypothetical)
behaviour. The Hébertists, no less than the Jacobins, were from the petit-
bourgeoisie. Hébert himself was by profession a journalist. In short, no revolution
in France in the late eighteenth century could have satisfied the needs of any class
other than the bourgeoisie.⁵⁷ In fact, of all the revolutionaries in the French
Revolution, Babeuf and the Babouvists—or so Lukin’s analysis implied—had the
least chance of improving the lives of the lower classes. Although, in contrast to
the Jacobins and the Hébertists, the Babouvists understood that private property
was the ultimate cause of the lower classes’ impoverishment, publicising their
conviction would have cost them support instead of increasing it. That was why,
as if in recognition of this unpleasant reality, they remained an underground
conspiracy, and made no discernible effort to gain popular support. While the
Babouvists’ condemnation of private property during the French Revolution was
certainly morally valid and empirically descriptive, because of the historical
circumstances in which the revolution occurred, they could never have gained
the power necessary to abolish it.
There were other ways in which Lukin’s article was distinctively Stalinist. Prior
to the Stalin era, Soviet historians had not singled out one foreign enemy among
the many that sought the Jacobins’ destruction. But Lukin, while dutifully citing
Lenin in justifying the Jacobin’s terror and identifying the Girondins as its
principal object, stressed that the treason that prompted it consisted primarily
of the Girondins’ support for France’s arch enemy, Great Britain.⁵⁸ In addition,
Lukin emphasized the role military force played in preventing foreign govern-
ments from defeating France, ending the revolution, and ensuring the return of

⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 136; Alexander Tchoudinov, ‘The Evolution of Russian Discourse on the French
Revolution’, in The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History, edited by Alan
Forrest and Matthias Middell (New York, 2016), p. 289. According to Lukin one of the principal flaws
in Mathiez’s interpretation of the French Revolution was his minimizing the disparity between rich
peasants and poor ones. Lukin, ‘Lenin i problema iakobinskoi diktatury’, pp. 135–6.
⁵⁶ Lukin, ‘Lenin i problema iakobinskoi diktatury’, p. 137.
⁵⁷ Ibid., pp. 135–6. ⁵⁸ Ibid., pp. 107, 130.
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the Bourbons. Stalin would make Soviet historians stress both of these themes
later in the same decade, when he deemed Nazi Germany the Soviet Union’s
principal enemy, and prescribed the application of military power in stopping its
expansionism.⁵⁹
One can understand why in the Stalin era Soviet historians would have to
cultivate the ability to alter their views as circumstances warranted. One senses
that for historians like Lukin, whose Marxism-Leninism was a matter of convic-
tion, rather than the result of abject servility, it was difficult, perhaps even heart-
rending, to make the requisite adjustments. In the end, none of this mattered.
Stalin did not need a reason to have historians—or persons in any other profession
or sphere of Soviet intellectual life—shot or sent to a labour camp. For those whose
intellectual roots were in an ideology other than Bolshevism, their actuarial
prospects were especially precarious. That said, expressing an opinion inconsist-
ent with, or even contrary to the Party Line was not in every instance conducive to
imprisonment, exile to a labour camp, or execution. Some were better than others
in anticipating objections or changes in the party line, and modulating their
opinions accordingly. One of the most adept in navigating the ideological land
mines to which so many other historians fell victim in the Terror was Evgenii
Tarlé, who not only survived the Terror but was still active professionally at the
end of it.
Tarlé’s career was a series of peregrinations between respectability and virtual
oblivion.⁶⁰ His earliest political views were nebulous, and his interest in French
history predated service to with the Soviet regime.⁶¹ But the views he expressed in
the 1920s did not deviate in any significant way from Marxist ideology, and he did
not suffer professionally or personally for espousing them. Although not a mem-
ber of the Communist Party, he became a ‘corresponding member’ of the Acad-
emy of Sciences in 1921, and joined the Society of Marxist Historians soon after it
was established in 1925. However, Pokrovskii, who was the founding president of
the society and the editor of its journal, Istorik marksist, attacked Tarlé in 1929,
accusing him specifically of ignoring the role of the individual in history; Pok-
rovskii even impugned him as a traitor who harboured the desire to become the
foreign minister in any capitalist government that might replace the Soviet one. Of
course Tarlé’s ‘unsavory’ past ideologically helped to make such an unfounded
and absurd accusation plausible.⁶²

⁵⁹ Of course this prescription ended in August 1939 with the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact—
only to be revived after Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941.
⁶⁰ Ann. K. Erickson, ‘E. V. Tarlé: The Career of a Historian under the Soviet Regime’, American
Slavic and East European Review 19, no. 2 (April 1960): pp. 202–16. I have drawn on this article for
biographical information and also for insights into Tarlé’s historical works.
⁶¹ A. E. Manfred claimed that, at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Tarlé was not yet a Marxist.
Erickson, ‘Tarlé’, p. 203.
⁶² Erickson, ‘Tarlé’, pp. 203–4; Enteen, ‘Marxist Historians during the Cultural Revolution’,
pp. 156–7.
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As expected, Tarlé was arrested in 1930 and a year later sent into internal exile
in Kazakhstan. But Stalin considered his talents as a historian useful in dissemin-
ating Soviet propaganda—in much the way he valued Maxim Gorky’s abilities as a
writer—and Tarlé returned from exile in 1934. Chastened by the experience, he
published works fulsomely praising Mikhail Kutuzov and Pëtr Bagration, the
Russian commanders principally responsible for driving Napoleon out of Russia
in 1812. In 1936 he published a full-scale biography of the French emperor (which
appeared in English translation in 1937).⁶³ Cognizant that the biography would be
published only if it conformed to the strictures of Marxism-Leninism while also
substantiating Stalin’s belief in the singular role individuals (like himself) played
in history, Tarlé knew he had to tread carefully. Should he stress human agency at
the expense of economic determinism, he would be denounced no less severely
than if he had viewed the French emperor as a mere captive of impersonal forces
beyond his control. But Tarlé threaded this ideological needle successfully. In the
biography he readily acknowledged Napoleon’s singular prowess as a military
tactician and strategist. But he also described the French emperor as the unwitting
instrument of the capitalist bourgeoisie that had come to power in the French
Revolution. Napoleon’s attempts to subordinate the rest of Europe to his will and
dominion marked ‘the birth of the stubborn conflict of new social and economic
forces, a conflict which did not begin with Napoleon or end with him, and whose
basic significance consisted in the victorious assault of the middle class against the
feudal and semi-feudal order in France and Europe’.⁶⁴ The wars he fought with
England were at bottom a struggle between ‘commercial and industrial groups’ in
both countries, each of which was seeking control over more backward ones:
hence Napoleon’s incursion into Russia in 1812.⁶⁵
As for Napoleon’s relationship to the French Revolution, Tarlé rejected the
claim that by completing the revolution, he confirmed its victory ex post facto.
Instead, Tarlé described the French Emperor as a transitional figure who, after
extinguishing in France the revolutionary flame that had burned so fiercely,
nonetheless carried the message of the French Revolution to the rest of Europe.⁶⁶
But in both of these endeavours Napoleon never represented the interests of any
segment of the bourgeoisie other than its uppermost echelons, which, in Tarlé’s
schematization of the revolution, took power not in 1789, as most Bolsheviks and
virtually all Soviet historians insisted, but in 1794, when Thermidor began.⁶⁷
Napoleon’s coup d’état on 18 Brumaire confirmed its supremacy, which the

⁶³ Eugene Tarlé, Bonaparte (London, 1937). Because Tarlé and the Soviet historians who criticized
him all evaluated Napoleon at least partly on the basis of his relationship to the French Revolution, and
because none considered his rule emblematic of a uniquely Bonapartist regime, I am analysing their
views here, in the section of the book concerned with the French Revolution, rather than in that which
is concerned with Bonapartism, a concept that emerged later in the nineteenth century in the context of
Louis Napoleon’s dictatorship.
⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 10. ⁶⁵ Ibid., pp. 10–11. ⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 407.
⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 406.
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prospective French emperor did nothing to diminish despite the fact that for
political reasons he claimed to champion the peasantry, who provided the major-
ity of the recruits for his army.
But Tarlé’s biography suffered from a serious defect that caused its author,
for good reason, to fear for his life. By 1936 Stalin had already conceptualized
in his own mind the hybrid of Marxism-Leninism and Russian nationalism
first expressed in 1924 in his theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’, which held
that the Bolsheviks could by themselves construct a socialist society even if its
completion and subsequent evolution into communism still required proletarian
revolutions elsewhere in Europe.⁶⁸ Although it is not known if Stalin actually read
Tarlé’s biography, there is no doubt that he knew of it, and approved the attacks to
which its author was subjected by Soviet historians, the principal claim of whom
was that it downplayed the role peasant resistance had played in Napoleon’s
defeat.
Rather than contest these attacks or simply ignore them—to do either would
have been suicidal professionally and possibly even physically—Tarlé, prudently,
took them seriously, and produced another, very different biography. Published in
1938, it reserved for the Russian people a good deal of the credit for the victory the
Russian army achieved; in the author’s estimation, they fought with ‘heroic
fortitude’.⁶⁹ In this new iteration of Napoleon’s life and career, Tarlé singled out
the peasantry for commendation. The assistance it rendered the partisans fighting
the Grand Armée from the rear was crucial in weakening it, so that after with-
drawing from Moscow, it could not contest Kutuzov’s forces pushing it westward
towards the border with Prussia. Not even serfdom, in Tarlé’s estimation of the
peasantry’s resistance, diminished its sense of national identity.⁷⁰ As for Napoleon
himself, he was no longer the progressive figure he was in the original biography.
Instead, Tarlé now depicted him as an insatiable imperialist for whom the Russian
campaign was the most ‘predatory’ of all those he embarked on in a long career as
a conqueror.⁷¹ To underscore the obvious similarities between Napoleon and
Hitler, and to reassure his readers that Russia would defeat the latter with the
same determination that had enabled it to repulse the former, Tarlé stressed that
the lessons Soviet generals could draw from Napoleon’s defeat would ensure the
Soviet Union’s victory in the event that Hitler would be foolish enough to attack it.
Conversely, German generals could not find in ‘the Hitlerite textbooks’ they
studied any comparable insights concerning Russia’s military strategy in 1812
that might still be relevant to any forthcoming Nazi invasion.⁷²
For all of this, there were passages in the book in which Tarlé ascribed
Napoleon’s defeat to factors other than the personal qualities of Kutuzov on the

⁶⁸ Kotkin, Stalin, p. 555.

⁶⁹ Eugene Tarlé, Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia (New York, 1942), p. 4.
⁷⁰ Ibid., p. 352. ⁷¹ Ibid., p. 405. ⁷² Ibid., p. 407.
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one hand, and the collective virtue of the Russian peasantry on the other. Rather,
what ensured Napoleon’s defeat was simply the fact that his forces were overex-
tended militarily, and were fighting in a climate that was literally unendurable and
in political terms extraordinarily unfavourable. But the book was sufficiently
stocked with the triumphalist clichés redolent of the Russian nationalism Stalin
had found lacking in the original version for its author to be awarded the Stalin
Prize in 1942 for his contribution, which concerned Kutuzov and the objectives
Alexander I hoped to achieve by defeating Napoleon, to an official history of
diplomacy.⁷³ Moreover, Stalin refraining until 1947, in an article in Bol’shevik,
from publicly praising Kutuzov for employing the same tactics against Napoleon
that Stalin himself had ordered his generals to pursue against the Nazis, and which
the Soviet dictator said were responsible for both victories, the first in 1812 over
the French, and the second in 1945 over the Germans.⁷⁴ By 1947 Tarlé was
working on a very different project, a biography of the French diplomat Talleyr-
and, which, after it appeared in 1948, was praised in Voprosy istorii for refuting
unnamed ‘bourgeois historians’ who ascribed the wily Frenchman’s success to his
personal qualities, rather than to objective conditions.⁷⁵ It was also lauded for
making Talleyrand’s ‘bourgeois’ diplomacy accessible not just to historians of
France but to ordinary people, who might otherwise be ignorant of the degree to
which his diplomacy informed the policies of the bourgeoisie in the twentieth
century, including and especially the ‘fascist German barbarians’ who in 1941 had
attacked the Soviet Union.⁷⁶
But none of the praise Tarlé received immunized him against future attacks on
his second, and presumably more ideologically acceptable account of Napoleon’s
Russian campaign. In 1951 it was attacked—thirteen years after its publication—
in the journal Bol’shevik for using ‘bourgeois’ and non-Russian source materials
instead of ideologically reliable Russian ones, and for exaggerating the role of
weather and the geographical spaciousness of Russia to the detriment of Kutuzov
(‘the outstanding military leader of his era’), and of the Russian army as a whole.⁷⁷
Tarlé responded in a letter to the editors of the journal that in the book he was
currently writing on the Napoleonic era he would rectify his earlier errors and
incorporate the insights he gained from his corrections, along with those Stalin
had shared with the Soviet people in his 1947 article, into his analysis of Kutuzov’s
abilities as a military strategist.⁷⁸ But because Tarlé still rejected several of the

⁷³ Erickson, ‘Tarlé’, p. 215.

⁷⁴ ‘Otvet tov. Stalina na pis’mo tov. Razina’, Bol’shevik, no. 3 (February, 1947): pp. 7–8.
⁷⁵ A. Molok, ‘Obzor, E. V. Tarlé, Taleiran (Moscow/Leningrad, 1948)’, Voprosy istorii, no. 10 (1948):
p. 158.
⁷⁶ Ibid.
⁷⁷ S. Kozhukhov, ‘K voprosu osenke roli M. I. Kutuzova v obshestvennoi voine 1812 goda’,
Bol’shevik, no. 15 (August 1951); p. 23.
⁷⁸ E. V. Tarlé, ‘Pis’mo v redaktsiiu zhurnala “Bol’shevik” ’, Bol’shevik, no. 19 (October 1951): pp. 72,
76–7. Tarlé never finished the book.
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criticisms reviewers had levelled against his second biography, the editors judged
his recantation insufficient.⁷⁹ The result of all of this was that in an article in 1952,
Tarlé tried again to make amends. He compared Napoleon’s generalship
unfavourably with Kutuzov, who he now insisted was also the superior diplomat;
most important of all, the Russian commander was a Russian patriot and properly
suspicious of foreigners. His only failing was his personal modesty. Because of it,
even many who knew him were insufficiently appreciative of his talents.⁸⁰ In the
article Tarlé—who could play the fulsome sycophant whenever it was warranted—
even blamed Napoleon (falsely) for the fires just prior to his arrival in Moscow in
1812 that had burned much of the city to the ground.⁸¹
After the Second World War, both Napoleon and the French Revolution itself
were reinterpreted, but well within ideological limits that had previously been
prescribed. In 1946 A. L. Narochnitskii challenged the prevailing view, articulated
originally by Lukin, that the Jacobins, notwithstanding their lower-class sup-
porters, were exclusively bourgeois.⁸² Narochnitskii did not disagree, but argued
that the Jacobins, politically and programmatically, were not monolithic. Nor
were they indistinguishable in terms of their class origin. There was a discrete
and distinguishable right wing in the Jacobin dictatorship, which Narochnitskii
said was drawn not from the lower ranks of the bourgeoisie, but rather from
higher strata within this class, which were bent on self-enrichment; the most
prominent Jacobins so inclined included Danton, Carnot, and Bertrand Barère. In
fact Robespierre and Saint-Just were more apt to satisfy their demands and to
protect their interests than Lukin and most other Soviet historians had been
willing to admit. But in the end the political threat the Right Jacobins posed had
to be neutralized, and their leaders guillotined. Nevertheless, the most dangerous
enemies of Robespierre and Saint-Just were beyond the ranks of the Jacobins,
among the plebeians who sought a property settlement which, while not entailing
the abolition of private ownership, would nonetheless threaten the bourgeois
interests of Robespierre and his allies. However, the Babouvists, in Narochnitskii’s
jaundiced opinion, were so far to the left of these centrist Jacobins that not even
he, who believed that the homogeneity of the Jacobins had long been exaggerated,
thought to include them within the Jacobins’ ideological orbit.
In articles written in 1949 and 1964, Narochnitskii more or less repeated
himself, although in the second of these, he took pains to distinguish the Jacobins,
whom he still described as bourgeois, from les enragés, the sans-culottes, and the

⁷⁹ ‘Ot redaktsii zhurnala “Bol’shevik” ’, ibid., pp. 78–80.

⁸⁰ E. V. Tarlé, ‘Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov—polkovodets i diplomat’, Voprosy istorii, no. 3
(March 1952): pp. 81–2.
⁸¹ Ibid., p. 55.
⁸² A. L. Narochnitskii, ‘Raskol sredi iakobintsev i vneshniaia politika iakobinskoi respubliki s
ianvaria do aprelia 1794’, in Uchenie zapiski Moskovskogo pedagogicheskogo instituta im. V. I. Lenina
(Moscow, 1946), vol. XXXVII, p. 120, cited in Revunenkov, Ocherki po istorii Velikoi frantsuzskoi
revoliutsii, p. 110.
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other plebeian elements who temporarily supported the Jacobins when they
wrongly believed their own interests and those of the Jacobins coincided. But
once this particular fiction could no longer be sustained, the two erstwhile allies in
the struggle to eliminate feudalism and the monarchy became deadly enemies.
Although the Jacobins managed to eliminate the threat from these lower-class
elements, their victory was a pyrrhic one. Without their support, Robespierre was
powerless to resist the charge that he was conspiring with Great Britain, and his
downfall, which followed quickly, was preordained.⁸³
In everything he wrote about the Jacobins, Narochnitskii—in contradistinction
to most Soviet historians—seemed to recognize that how one characterized and
classified them was a matter of perspective. Viewing the Jacobins from within their
own ranks, they appeared, not altogether implausibly, as heterogeneous; indeed
throughout much—but by no means all—of his analysis Narochnitskii situated
himself so that that was how he viewed the Jacobins. But he also recognized that
when he viewed them from a vantage point beyond their own ideological,
geographical, and temporal limits, and specifically from that of a Soviet histor-
ian in the twentieth century, the Jacobins were indubitably bourgeois. For
Narochnitskii this was hardly a pejorative. Once they had shed the ‘deviationists’
both to their right and to their left, the remaining Jacobins were ‘the most
courageous and decisive representatives of the revolutionary class of their
time—the bourgeoisie’.⁸⁴
What so bedeviled Soviet historians when they wrote about the Jacobins was
that they could fairly be described as monolithic and heterogeneous simultan-
eously. When Narochnitskii, for example, considered the Jacobins in isolation
from the world beyond them, he ascribed the policy differences he perceived to
subdivisions with the bourgeoisie. There were Right, Centre, and Left Jacobins,
whose political preferences reflected their origins in the haute-, middle, and petit-
bourgeoisie respectively. These differences were real, and because the terminology
used to describe them in no way contradicted Marxist ideology, Narochnitskii had
no reason to question them. But when he considered the Jacobins in relation to the
rest of France, which in the 1790s was teeming with extremists like the Babouvists
on the left and royalists and faux revolutionaries like the Girondins on the right,
the Jacobins were transformed, in his analysis, into a discrete and ideologically
self-contained entity. He did this, one suspects, partly in the interest of clarity,
partly out of a visceral commitment to the concepts and categories of Marxist

⁸³ A. L. Narochnitskii, ‘Voprosy voiny i mira vo vneshnei politike iakobinskoi respubliki letom 1793
r.’, Uchenie zapiski Moskovskogo pedagogicheskogo instituta im. V. I. Lenin (Moscow, 1949), vol. LVIII,
p. 87, cited in Revunenkov, Ocherki po istorii Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii, p. 111; A. L. Narochnitskii,
‘Voprosy voiny i mira v politike iakobintsev nakanune 9 termidora’, in Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia
politika, diplomatiia XVI–XX veka (Moscow, 1964), especially pp. 469–70, 475, 511.
⁸⁴ Narochnitskii, ‘Raskol sredi iakobinstev’, cited in Revunenkov, Ocherki po istorii Velikoi frant-
suzskoi revoliutsii, pp. 110–11.
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analysis, and partly because, in comparison to everyone who was not a Jacobin, the
Jacobins were monolithic. Thus the contradiction in his descriptions of the Jacobins
was more apparent than real, a matter of perspective rather than of any failing
or mistake in what he wrote. When everything external to them was excluded,
the Jacobins were heterogeneous; when it was included, they were monolithic.
As long as this fundamental distinction is borne in mind, the debates among
Soviet historians on the Jacobins are more easily understood. One can also
comprehend why these debates occurred in the first place. Soviet historians
writing on the French Revolution assumed from the Marxist-Leninist ideology
they accepted that the Jacobins had to belong to a particular class, and that what
the Jacobins believed, said, and did had to reflect that inescapable fact. But as
historians they also could not help but notice differences in belief, oratory, and
action, and felt compelled to incorporate these differences into their analysis by
introducing tripartite distinctions based on class (haute, middle, and petit-
bourgeoisie) and ideology and politics (Right, Centre, Left). Whom they included
in these categories was at times problematic—should the Hébertists, for example,
be considered Left Jacobins, or were they beyond the outer limits of Jacobinism
entirely? Soviet historians, understandably, differed in how they answered such
questions.
As long as Stalin was alive, this kind of ideological hair-splitting did not really
matter. Stalin himself seemed unconcerned by it, and at any rate wrote nothing
about it. For him it was sufficient that Soviet historians consider the Jacobins
French patriots as well as ‘progressive’ in the policies they pursued. Most import-
ant of all, the Jacobins should be praised for their valour in unmasking and
destroying domestic traitors intent on facilitating the efforts of foreign enemies
to end the revolution and bring back the ancien régime. Once the vast projects of
social transformation that had been launched in the late 1920s had been
accomplished—albeit at an appalling cost in human lives—any sympathy Stalin
may have harboured for the left-wing elements in the French Revolution that
wished to go beyond what the Jacobins desired, and in Leninist fashion transform
a bourgeois revolution into a socialist one, disappeared for good. The Soviet
Union, he declared in 1936, was now socialist, and there was no longer any
need for Soviet Babouvists to cajole Soviet Jacobins to go further. The Soviet
Jacobins—of whom Stalin was the paradigmatic example—were fully capable of
proceeding to communism on their own.

* * *
Throughout the Stalin era, the themes Soviet historians stressed in their analysis of
the French Revolution were reflected in the arts and in the popular culture.
E. O. Burgunker’s frontispiece to a collection of poems published shortly before
the first show trial in Moscow in August 1936 depicted Robespierre’s downfall
vividly, and with the clear message that it was the work of malevolent and
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duplicitous conspirators.⁸⁵ Significantly, it showed Robespierre at a lectern,

presumably on the floor of the Convention. Two of the conspirators are trying
to pull Robespierre to the floor, but without success. The third conspirator, who
can see his colleagues’ predicament, is about to stab Robespierre with a knife. That
the latter cannot see the man who will shortly murder him underscores the
conspirators’ cowardice and duplicity. Of course Burgunker has deliberately
compressed Robespierre’s arrest and execution—which in fact occurred over an
entire day—to a matter of seconds.⁸⁶ In fact, there is nothing in what is depicted to
indicate that Robespierre’s enemies are acting in the name of any law. Instead of
arresting the Jacobin leader and adjudicating his criminal culpability, they are
simply killing him—with the result that he does not have the opportunity to die
publicly with a look of defiance that might shame his executioners and memor-
ialize his courage in the minds of any spectators. In this respect it is noteworthy
that, in Burgunker’s creation, the audience to which Robespierre had been orating
is omitted. This has the effect of underscoring the Jacobin’s vulnerability; three
men are engaged in killing just one man, which of course only heightens his
martyrdom, even if, unfortunately, there is no one watching to confirm it.
Burgunker’s frontispiece, in fact, was intended as a morality play in miniature,
in which the moral polarity between the Jacobin leader and his murderers is stark
and unmistakable. Anyone viewing it in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s with
even just a rudimentary knowledge of the French Revolution would understand
that what was depicted was harmful to the revolution, and that what happened to
Robespierre should never happen to Stalin.
Another aspect of the frontispiece worth mentioning, in light of the absence of
any spectators or of anyone other than the murderers and their victim, is the
degree to which the French Revolution was personalized in the figure of Robe-
spierre. This, one suspects, was not accidental. A good deal of the visual art that
appeared during the Stalin era that pertained to the revolution was ‘biographical’.
In much the way the Stalin cult ascribed virtually everything that was virtuous and
praiseworthy in the Soviet Union to Stalin himself, events, especially historical
events, were personalized, and not just to make them more easily understood. In
Stalinist culture and social mores, the complexities of modern life were simplified
into the terms of the longstanding paternalism in Russian history and culture that
presumably would increase the respect, admiration, and obedience Stalin expected
from the Soviet people.⁸⁷ In the Stalin era, the traditional dichotomy in Russian

⁸⁵ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v knizhnoi grafike. 1917–1940 gg.’, p. 420.

⁸⁶ Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, pp. 375–81.
⁸⁷ Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, especially pp. 281–318. Sheila Fitzpatrick, in Everyday
Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999), p. 15,
notes that low-level officials deliberately fostered this paternalism. But she also argues that after the
famine in the early 1930s, many peasants rejected the illusion the government fostered of Stalin as ‘a
good tsar’, ibid., p. 28.
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culture between father and son was deliberately replicated in analogous relation-
ships between teacher and student, mentor and neophyte, and most critical of all,
between ruler and subject.⁸⁸
In much of what artists and writers produced during the Stalin era that touched
on the French Revolution, one can see this same distinction refracted through the
image of the eloquent, courageous, resourceful, and heroic revolutionary acting in
the interests of ordinary people who have the good sense to defer to their betters
and follow their orders unquestioningly; in this respect, they might as well be
children properly obeying their parents. One finds this motif, for example, in
E. I. Kogan’s frontispiece, entitled ‘Robespierre on the Rostrum’, that preceded the
text in a 1939 republication of Rolland’s play.⁸⁹ Quite deliberately Kogan posi-
tioned the rostrum so that Robespierre is elevated in relation to his listeners, who
are obvious enthralled by what he is saying. Even when rendered in strict
portraiture, without onlookers or supporters demonstrating their admiration—
as was the case in the series of drawings M. K. Sokolov produced of Mirabeau,
Sieyès, Lafayette, and Danton—the avuncular, almost Stalin-like wisdom the
leaders of the French Revolution seemed to personify is obvious despite their
relative youthfulness.⁹⁰
Among the other qualities artists stressed when depicting the French Revolu-
tion were heroism and struggle. For that reason, the individuals they selected to
personify the revolution were depicted as larger than life—idealized, romanticized,
and poeticized in varying degrees depending upon the artist’s estimation of them.
A 1940 lithograph of Marat orating before an attentive crowd skillfully imparted
the message that the French Revolution was accomplished by outstanding indi-
viduals far more than by ordinary people, who, when they act, are motivated more
by rhetorical exhortation than by grievances grounded in material exploitation.⁹¹
Even Babeuf, whose communism Stalin considered premature, was accorded the
honour of his bust standing prominently in Minsk in the headquarters of the
Belorussian Communist Party.⁹²
Yet another theme Stalinist artists developed in explicating the deeper meaning
of the French Revolution was its militarization. Above and beyond the application
of force and coercion by civilian leaders intent on extirpating their enemies, the
revolution was notable for the degree to which its iconic moments were military or
quasi-military affairs. This, at any rate, was how artists in the Stalin era depicted
them. Among the lithographs Iu. P. Velikanov produced in the 1930s was one

⁸⁸ Bergman, ‘Valerii Chkalov’, pp. 147–52.

⁸⁹ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v knizhnoi grafike. 1917–1940 gg.’, p. 421.
⁹⁰ N. T. Unaniants, ‘M. K. Sokolov. Tsikl “Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia” ’, pp. 330–47.
⁹¹ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskoi revoliutsii v knizhnoi grafike. 1917–1940 gg.’, p. 425.
⁹² N. T. Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v sovetskom izobrazitel’nom iskusstve’, in
Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik (1989), p. 262.
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showing sans-culottes bombarding the Bastille with cannons.⁹³ In the actual event,
the defenders of the fortress, now serving as a prison, were the ones with cannons;
the sans-culottes were armed only with muskets and swords.⁹⁴ In a similar vein, a
frontispiece A. D. Goncharov drew in 1933 for a score François-Joseph Gossek
had composed attempting to replicate the revolution musically, depicted civilians
marching in neat rows behind musicians as if they were soldiers, and the revolu-
tion itself a military campaign.⁹⁵ Finally, in the frontispiece K. I. Rudakov drew for
a new edition of Rolland’s plays entitled Théâtre de La Révolution, one sees the
Bastille assaulted by what appear to be troops carrying flags and armed with
cannons, and led by their commander, who is on horseback and brandishing a
sword.⁹⁶ In Rudakov’s rendition, this event—which encapsulates for Frenchmen
the spirit, message, and larger meaning of the revolution—is nothing less than a
full-scale military operation. To those viewing it the way Rudakov described it, the
storming of the Bastille was not at all spontaneous—a quality Stalin, no less than
Lenin, generally abhorred in politics and in most other aspects of life.

* * *
In the way it was depicted during the Stalin era—not only by Stalin himself, but
also by historians, writers, and artists—the French Revolution differed signifi-
cantly from how the Bolsheviks had viewed it immediately after the October
Revolution. With Stalin’s rise to power, its universalist aspirations—its claim to
speak on behalf of all people irrespective of their time and place—receded into the
background. What replaced it was a morality play on the virtues of patriotism and
strict obedience to one’s superiors, and on the absolute necessity of ferreting out,
unmasking, and physically destroying one’s country’s enemies. In short, the utility
of the French Revolution did not diminish. But its meaning and its practical
relevance changed considerably. It is certainly true, notwithstanding Stalin’s
protestations to the contrary, that he continued to consider the revolution relevant
to his political needs, and for that reason it remained an integral aspect of the
mythology the original Bolsheviks had begun constructing about their own
revolution even before it actually occurred. And after their revolution brought
the Bolsheviks to power, the earlier revolution in France they considered a
precursor and a precedent retained an immediacy and a relevance that make the
history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1953 inexplicable absent any consider-
ation of its influence.

⁹³ N. T. Unaniants, ‘Iu. P. Velikanov. Seriia “velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia” ’, in Frantsuzskii

ezhegodnik (1989), p. 271.
⁹⁴ To be sure, the cannons were fired only on ceremonial occasions, and evidently were directed so
that their cannon balls would land precisely where there was little that could be damaged. Frantz
Funck-Brentano, Legends of the Bastille (London, 1899), p. 256.
⁹⁵ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v knizhnoi grafike. 1917–1940 gg.’, p. 418.
⁹⁶ Ibid., p. 424.
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This was not the case, however, for most of the remaining years of the Soviet
Union’s existence. From Stalin’s death in 1953 to the advent of perestroika
(‘reconstruction’) and glasnost’ (‘openness’) in the late 1980s, the French Revolu-
tion, while remaining a subject of interest and considerable controversy for
historians, receded in Soviet politics and culture into the background. Indeed,
one could plausibly argue that when Khrushchev and Brezhnev ruled the Soviet
Union from 1953 to 1982, and Iurii Andropov and Viktor Chernenko presided
over it from 1982 to 1985, the French Revolution hardly mattered at all.
But such an argument would not be correct. After 1953 the example of the
French Revolution was still invoked, albeit not nearly as often, and certainly not
with the same intensity, as it was when the Soviet Union was in its ascendancy.
Neither its survival nor its status as a socialist regime was any longer in doubt, at
least as far as its leaders were concerned. Moreover, the distinction the Soviet
Union could justifiably claim for itself as the victor over the Nazis who raised the
Red Flag over the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945, did much to confirm the conviction
of the Soviet leadership that the Soviet system to which the October Revolution
had given birth would endure, and that no other revolutions were needed to
confirm its legitimacy. At last, the October Revolution could be decoupled from
the French Revolution and be considered, to all intents and purposes, sui generis.
But that did not occur, and when the Soviet Union, in the late 1960s, first showed
outward signs of decline, and in the late 1970s of actual decay, the relevance and
the utility of the French Revolution increased. Precisely how it did so must now be
determined.
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10
Returning to the Leninist Line under
Khrushchev and Brezhnev

Soviet leaders invoked the French Revolution infrequently between Stalin’s death
and the Gorbachev era. Neither Khrushchev nor Brezhnev nor the hapless Kon-
stantin Chernenko was intellectually curious, much less an intellectual. The
French Revolution spoke to nothing in their personal or political lives. Only
Iurii Andropov, probably because his portfolio before becoming general secretary
included the surveillance of political dissidents, knew enough about the revolution
to have an opinion of it. While in charge of the KGB, he publicly lauded Felix
Dzerzhinskii—one of his predecessors in the position he held—as a ‘proletarian
Jacobin’ on the centenary of his birth in 1979.¹ But Andropov said nothing about
the revolution, at least not publicly, after becoming general secretary three years
later. In the Soviet press, the revolution did not go unnoticed in these years, but
references were limited mostly to anniversaries of the storming of the Bastille.
Entries in authoritative reference works, most notably the Bol’shaia Sovetskaia
Entsiklopediia, still called the revolution, in imitation of Marx and Lenin, ‘the
Great French Revolution’, and implicitly justified its adjectival honourific on
the grounds that it inaugurated the age of industrial capitalism in France and in
the other parts of Europe that were exposed to its progressive agenda.² The entries
also repeated the relevant tenets of what long ago had become Leninist orthodoxy.
In 1978, for example, the encyclopaedia reiterated Lenin’s sharp distinction
between the original Jacobins and the so-called Russian Jacobins of the late
nineteenth century, denigrating the latter as hopelessly ‘utopian’ and as ideologic-
ally anomalous as the Blanquists in France.³ In the visual arts, the same inatten-
tion prevailed. Painters and sculptors reproduced many of the principal figures of
the revolution, and after Stalin’s death the censorship was relaxed sufficiently so
that personages previously denigrated as tools of the haute bourgeoisie, such
as Mirabeau, could be given the same recognition accorded longstanding heroes

¹ Iu. O. Andropov, Kommunisticheskaia uvezhdennost’—Velikaia sila stroitelei novogo mira: Doklad na

torzhestvennom sobranii v Moskve, posviashchennom 100 letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia F. E. Dzerzhinskogo
(Moscow, 1977), p. 4.
² For example, Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 3rd edn (Moscow, 1971), vol. IV, p. 405.
³ Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Moscow, 1978), vol. XXX, p. 483.
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such as Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Marat.⁴ Although there were still no public
monuments to any of the above-mentioned revolutionaries, Marat enjoyed the
distinction of both a chocolate factory and a street in Leningrad bearing his name,
although a play about his life that was written in 1954 was never performed.⁵
In short, despite the fact that in the three decades between Stalin and Gorba-
chev, editions of Victor Hugo’s 1793 still sold well, interest in the French Revo-
lution waned.⁶ Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko all prized the
privileges from which they and the rest of the so-called nomenklatura benefitted,
even though these privileges were not heritable. In that sense, there remained in
the Soviet Union a self-contained and easily identifiable ruling elite, even though
its composition changed generationally and was not distinguishable from ordin-
ary Soviet citizens by the possession of wealth. Like the Thermidorians of the late
1790s—of the existence of whom one suspects only Andropov, of all the Soviet
leaders cited above, was aware—these leaders had no interest in vast projects of
social and economic engineering on the scale to which Stalin was accustomed.
As a result, the French Revolution, in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, became
something of an anachronism, its exhortatory message relevant more to earlier,
more ‘transformational’ periods of Soviet rule, and its role in the mythology the
regime still needed to justify itself considerably diminished.⁷ But it did not
disappear entirely. Rather, the particular message the Soviet leadership wanted
to impart about the revolution required that its leaders be depicted differently.
This was most apparent in the visual arts. The painter X. A. Avrutis, for example,

⁴ N. T. Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v sovetskom iskusstve i literature’, in Frant-

suzskii ezhegodnik (1989), p. 509.
⁵ Schoenfeld, ‘Uses of the Past’ (PhD dissertation), p. 221; Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia
revoliutsiia v sovetskogo iskusstve i literature’, p. 511.
⁶ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v sovetskom iskusstve i literature’, p. 504.
⁷ In other, less ossified communist regimes, the influence of the French Revolution remained
strong—as it did among their increasingly emboldened opponents. In most of the regimes, the lesson
their leaders gleaned from the revolution was that the Jacobins possessed the toughness necessary to kill
their opponents, and that their virtuous objectives were justification enough. Suong Sikoeun, a leading
figure in the Khmer Rouge, wrote that ‘Robespierre is my hero. Robespierre and Pol Pot: both of them
share the qualities of determination and integrity’. Fidel Castro, according to some who knew him well,
‘loved comparisons to the French Revolution’. Ho Chi Minh, who had attended the founding congress
of the French Communist Party in 1920, wrote in 1945 that ‘French imperialists were abusing the
standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’, and by doing so were ‘acting contrary to the ideals of
humanity and justice’. Sikoeun quoted in Jean-Louis Margolin, ‘Cambodia: The Country of Discon-
certing Crimes’, Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge MA, 1999),
p. 624; Pascal Fontaine, ‘Communism in Latin America’, ibid., p. 651; Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh:
A Political Biography (New York, 1968), pp. 26, 111. The French Revolution also inspired anti-
communists. Students in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in May 1989 sang the Marseillaise to underscore
their opposition to communism and their demand for democratic government. Doyle, History of the
French Revolution, p. 422. On 4 November 1989 some of the 500,000 marchers in East Berlin calling for
an end to the communist regime in East Germany carried signs with the inscription ‘1789–1989’. Gale
Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (New York, 1993), p. 140. Contrary to a popular misconception,
Zhou Enlai was not referring to the French Revolution when, in 1972, he said it was too early to assess it
definitely. What he was referring to was the turmoil in France in the spring of 1968. Richard McGregor,
‘Zhou’s Cryptic Caution Lost in Translation’, The Financial Times (10 June 2011): p. 8.
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produced portraits of most of the major figures of the revolution, including Danton,
Saint-Just, Desmoulins, and Robespierre, in his ‘Cycle of the Great French Revolu-
tion’.⁸ But none was depicted as a resolute and strong-willed advocate of transform-
ational change whose passionate commitment to progress was leavened by rational
calculation of what was, and what was not, politically possible. In one rendition,
painted in 1975, Desmoulins appears frivolous and even effeminate, which were
hardly qualities Brezhnev, who was in power when the portrait was produced, or
any of his predecessors prized or considered appropriate in a political leader.
Another portrait Avrutis produced of Desmoulins, and the one he did of Danton,
seem more like caricatures than depictions consistent with contemporary descrip-
tions. While the explicit brush strokes Avrutis used might suggest emotional
identification, neither of these legendary avatars of modern revolutionary oratory
comes across as especially attractive or impressive. Danton, in fact, appears to be
practically screaming, his teeth bared and his eyes aflame. But it was Avrutis’s
depictions of Robespierre that best captured the post-transformational exhaus-
tion pervasive in the post-Stalin era. In one of his paintings, Robespierre’s
severity, arrogance, and coldness—all traits contemporaries ascribed to him—
are unmistakable.⁹ In another portrait of Robespierre, the French Jacobin comes off
even worse.¹⁰ Avrutis portrays him immediately after his decapitation. Nothing
about the now-deceased leader suggests heroism or courage in the face of adversity.
The onlookers—only their feet are depicted—appear eager to trample the remains.
Robespierre is not a martyr, only a loser, and anyone observing the painting without
foreknowledge of the event it depicted could reasonably infer that the French
Revolution was a dismal failure as well.
Another painter drawn to the revolution, B. A. Tolbert, denigrated Robespierre
differently. One of his paintings of the Jacobin leader is part of a triptych, with
portraits of Thomas More and Tomas Campanella on either side of him; the
impression this leaves is that Robespierre, who lived after both of these men, was
nonetheless part of the period of history to which they belonged.¹¹ This central
figure in the French Revolution—and by implication the French Revolution
itself—are thus not forerunners of future revolutions such as the October Revolu-
tion, but rather the last personification of a pre-modern fervour bearing little, if
any, resemblance to the contemporary Soviet Union, or even to the younger, more
aspirational regime that took power in 1917. Moreover, Robespierre is shown on
the scaffold, minutes, or perhaps mere moments, from his execution. Motionless
and staring straight ahead, with his lips compressed, l’Incorruptible is stoical in the
face of death; there is no intimation of defiance befitting a committed revolution-
ary. What appear to be French soldiers are standing behind him, which suggests
that Tolbert saw Robespierre as the defeated combatant he was for Avrutis.

⁸ Unaniants, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v sovetskom iskusstve i literature’, pp. 508–9.

⁹ Ibid., p. 508. ¹⁰ Ibid., p. 508. ¹¹ Ibid., p. 507.
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Robespierre, in this rendition, has no supporters; he is, in essence, a solitary and

monumental figure rather than one whose death will chagrin the masses he
previously led. In fact it is difficult to imagine—if this painting is the only piece
of evidence about the Jacobins to which a viewer has access—the French people
caring, one way or the other, about Robespierre’s fate.
One might think that the Soviet dissidents, because their condemnation of the
Soviet system was based on moral principles mostly traceable to the Enlighten-
ment, would write a great deal about the French Revolution, the intellectual
origins of which were identical to their own. But only a few actually did.
A possible reason for this was that since the Soviet Union based its own legitimacy
on the French Revolution, the dissidents could hardly do the same. In addition,
dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn who rejected Soviet Communism because
they believed its rationalism and secularism originated in the Enlightenment,
considered the French Revolution—the vehicle that carried its message to the
rest of Europe—counterproductive of the principles found exclusively in Russian
Orthodoxy that they preferred.¹² Finally, many of the dissidents may simply have
considered the specific origins of their opinions unimportant. That their opinions,
in their own minds, were expressive of natural law, and therefore timeless as well
as universally valid, may have made unnecessary, and potentially misleading, the
task of tracing them historically to the French Revolution, or to any other event
specific to any particular time and place.
Among the few who cited aspects of the revolution, if only fleetingly, was Roy
Medvedev. In his critique of Stalinism, Let History Judge, he compared Stalin to
Napoleon, and Stalin’s psyche to that of Napoleon’s police chief, Joseph Fouché.¹³
Another was Dmitrii Volkogonov, who, depending on definitions, may not even
have been a dissident at all; prior to the Gorbachev era, Volkogonov, in contrast to
the dissidents, did not condemn the Soviet system publicly. Nevertheless, his views
on Stalinism, which were as harshly critical as Medvedev’s, were germinating
when the dissident movement existed, and may have been influenced by it. But
however one defines him, Volkogonov’s belief in the French Revolution’s salience
in evaluating the Soviet Union is clear. In an interview during the Gorbachev era, he
noted that every revolution contains within itself ‘the seeds of Thermidor’, and then,
referring to the Stalin era, said that the October Revolution was no exception.¹⁴ But
not every revolution, he continued, need experience a Thermidor like the original

¹² Perhaps the definitive statement and exposition of these principles are the collection of essays,
From under the Rubble, edited by Alexander Solzhenitsyn et al. (New York, 1976). Solzhenitsyn’s
hostility to all things Western, not just its philosophical rationalism and liberalism, is most apparent
in the commencement address he delivered at Harvard University in 1978, reprinted as A World Split
Apart (New York, 1988).
¹³ Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York, 1989),
pp. 571–2, 596–7.
¹⁴ ‘O Staline i Stalinizme: beseda D. A. Volkogonym i R. A. Medvedevym’, Istoriia SSSR, no 4
(1989), p. 102.
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one, and revolutions can mitigate or otherwise modify its effects so as to avoid the
harm it caused France.¹⁵ But every Thermidor, he said, involved some version of
bureaucratism, and Stalin’s regime in that regard was no exception. But according to
Volkogonov, this did not mean—as Trotsky famously insisted—that the Georgian
dictator was a mediocrity and a tool of the bureaucracy, whose growth he fostered.
Rather than look to the French Revolution for explanations of Stalinism, Volkogonov
believed that the Roman Empire offered a far better basis for comparison. Stalin, he
said, was like Caesar, and the system Stalin created a form of Caesarism. But without
the opportunity, during the interview, to explain precisely how the two means of rule
were analogous, Volkogonov further muddied the conceptual waters by claiming in
the interview that Stalinism was also an expression of totalitarianism—which to exist
requires the modern technology Caesar and the Romans obviously lacked.¹⁶
Andrei Sakharov, the dissident most indebted intellectually to the Enlighten-
ment, was among the few who affirmed the causal relationship between the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and understood that the moral abso-
lutism that helped to define the dissident movement reached Russia first by means
of the French Revolution and then through the refractory lens of the pre-
revolutionary intelligentsia. That his dissidence was grounded in the Enlightenment
truly warrants his description as a Russian philosophe.¹⁷ For Sakharov the French
Revolution was a milestone in the history of humanity, which he truly believed was
the history of progress. In contrast to Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov considered reason not
the cause of the evils both men decried, but rather the best corrective of them. Far
from corrupting the moral virtue of the Russian people, reason was for Sakharov the
essential prerequisite to the rule of law, without which a truly just and humane
society that sanctified the individual personality cannot exist. But perhaps because
the dissidents were understandably preoccupied with explaining those aspects of
the Soviet Union they found morally repugnant, they lacked the time or the
inclination to answer the questions Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn addressed, namely
whether the Enlightenment and the French Revolution contributed to the moral
improvement of humanity, and whether these two signal events in Western Civil-
ization were the repository of the moral virtue that suffused the dissidents (as
Sakharov believed), or the ultimate source of the crimes against humanity of which
the Soviet Union was undeniably guilty (as Solzhenitsyn believed).

* * *

¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 102–3. ¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 102–3, 105.

¹⁷ A biography of Sakharov that ascribes his dissidence to the intelligentsia (as well as to the
requirements of science) is Jay Bergman, Meeting the Demands of Reason: The Life and Thought of
Andrei Sakharov (Ithaca NY, 2009). On the dissidents’ indebtedness to the intelligentsia, and their
awareness of it, see Jay Bergman, ‘Soviet Dissidents on the Russian Intelligentsia, 1956–1985: The
Search for a Usable Past’, Russian Review 51, no. 1. (January 1992): pp. 16–35. Also tracing the origins
of the intelligentsia to the Enlightenment is Shatz, Soviet Dissent, especially pp. 12–63. The work of
Sakharov that mostly clearly reveals the Western origins of his dissidence is his most famous one,
Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, edited by Harrison E. Salisbury (New York, 1968).
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Soviet historians, of course, lived in a very different world, philosophically and

morally, from that which the Soviet dissidents inhabited, a world still shaped by
Marxist beliefs about the primacy of class struggle and its role in causing history to
unfold as a series of increasingly progressive stages leading ultimately to eternal
happiness and the satisfaction of all material and spiritual needs.¹⁸ In brief,
everything in history was preparation for what followed it, and for that reason
Soviet historians, unlike the dissidents, had no choice but to believe the French
Revolution worthy of their continued consideration. Of course there were limits to
how far they could deviate from Leninist orthodoxy before transgressing it. But in
the post-Stalin era, these did not preclude debate and disagreement.
Although the official ideology of the Soviet Union was an amalgam of Marx’s
thought and Lenin’s, the two men differed significantly on the French Revolution.
While they both called it a Great Revolution, and agreed that its greatness inhered
in its role as the first bourgeois revolution, they disagreed on the role the
bourgeoisie played in it. For Marx the French Revolution was a bourgeois revo-
lution because the bourgeoisie was both its instrument and principal beneficiary.
For Lenin, the bourgeoisie was more the latter than the former; by 1793 the
bourgeoisie had taken the revolution as far as it could, and a surrogate was needed
to continue it. This turned out to be a hybrid strikingly similar to ‘the democratic-
dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ that, in Lenin’s ideologically self-
serving scheme of things, succeeded the Provisional Government in Russia in
October 1917. But while the first of these hybrids could not survive once it
completed the French Revolution, there were no limits on how far the second
one could go because by 1917 history had reached the point at which the
proletariat was ready to assume the role history assigned it of replacing capitalism
with socialism, and then socialism with communism.
As for the Jacobins in the French Revolution, Marx and Lenin agreed that they
had emerged from the bourgeoisie, only to replace it in power and then drive the
revolution to completion. But Lenin went well beyond anything Marx had written
about the lower classes the Jacobins represented politically. Lenin stressed that the
dictatorship the Jacobins established included elements of the population that
were not bourgeois, and that for a few months in the winter and spring of 1794 the
Jacobins’ objectives far exceeded what was historically possible. According to
Lenin, that was the reason the Jacobins lost power in the summer of 1794; whether
those responsible for imposing these more radical objectives on the Jacobins were
other Jacobins or persons from other classes entirely, Lenin never made clear. But
about one aspect of the Jacobin dictatorship, and about the French Revolution

¹⁸ Roi and Zhores Medvedev were the most prominent of the dissidents who considered Marxist-
Leninism indispensable both in explaining the Soviet Union and in prescribing the principles they
thought would best reform it. But most dissidents were not Marxists or Marxist-Leninists, and a clear
majority of them were hostile to both.
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generally, he was certain—that their principal beneficiary was the bourgeoisie,

and for that reason the French Revolution remained a bourgeois revolution. The
principal losers in the revolution, apart from the aristocracy and the monarchy
that had served as the political instrument of the aristocracy, were the plebeians
and the peasants—and also the more radical Jacobins who supported them—who
sought objectives that were unachievable. This in turn emboldened reactionary
and counter-revolutionary enemies of the revolution both at home and abroad,
and the French Revolution stopped with the advent of Thermidor. To be sure, the
radical objectives of the plebeians and the peasants, and of the elements within the
petit-bourgeoise that shared them, were not socialist or communist. To be so was
impossible. The plebeians were not a proletariat. But their ideological successors
would be, and those in Russia have been engaged since 1917 in the task of creating
a society more radical—and therefore more just and more conducive to the total
liberation of the individual—than anything the Babouvists, the plebeians, and the
Jacobins—in descending order in terms of their radicalism—could have hoped to
establish.
This, at any rate, was what passed for the party line in the post-Stalin Soviet
Union. Nearly all Soviet historians accepted it. But how they expressed it varied
greatly. In 1972 B. G. Veber, after faithfully reiterating it, noted the ‘fierce hatred’
the Great French Revolution still inspired among reactionaries, which, to Lenin
years earlier, proved ‘the vitality and the force of its influence on humanity’ in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁹ V. S. Alexeev-Popov, also in 1972, after
quoting Lenin on the obligation Marxism imposed to respect the French Revolution
‘most profoundly’, singled out the Jacobins for supporting what Lenin had once
described most as ‘the revolutionary people among the revolutionary progressive
classes of their time’.²⁰ The Jacobins were the embodiment of revolutionary virtue—
and thus the Girondins, their implacable opponents, could not be anything other
than the opposite.²¹ Ten years earlier, he and Iu. Ia. Baskin had written that while the
dictatorship the Jacobins had established was, for a short time, a makeshift coalition
of all the lower classes in France, the Jacobins were always in charge of it; indeed the
Jacobins themselves, in contrast to their supporters, were either bourgeois or, more
specifically, petit-bourgeois, depending upon which part of the article one was
reading. But no matter where one located the Jacobins on any spectrum within the
bourgeoisie, there should be no doubt that the French Revolution was a bourgeois
revolution because it ushered in the supremacy of the bourgeoisie.²²

¹⁹ Veber, ‘V. I. Lenin i istoricheskoe nasledie iakobintsev’, p. 6.

²⁰ V. S. Alexeev-Popov, ‘Znachenie opyta velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii dlia russkogo rabochego
dvizheniia nakanune i v period revoliutsii 1905–1907 gg.’, in Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik (1970), p. 35.
²¹ Ibid., pp. 36–7.
²² V. S. Alexeev-Popov and Iu. Ia. Baskin, ‘Problemy istorii iakobinskoi literatury v svete trudov
V. I. Lenina’, in Iz istorii iakobinskoi diktatury 1793–1794, edited by V. S. Alexeev-Popov,
A. Ia. Gansov, and K. D. Petriaev (Odessa, 1962), pp. 25–9.
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In this bedrock assumption one detects the logical fallacy of cui bono—of
confusing the beneficiaries of something, in this case the French Revolution, for
those responsible for it. But irrespective of whether the bourgeoisie carried out the
revolution or merely benefitted from it, Soviet historians were in agreement that
its ultimate beneficiary would be the proletariat. While ratifying politically the new
economic dominion of the bourgeoisie, the French Revolution was also respon-
sible, in the words of K. E. Dzhedzhula, for ‘preparing objectively the conditions
for the rapid development of the proletariat . . . and for the formation and devel-
opment of socialist ideas’ not only in France and in Europe, but also elsewhere in
the world.²³ For A. V. Ado, who produced detailed studies of the peasantry in
France, Lenin deserved the prestige he enjoyed among historians because he
pointed out the contributions the peasantry and the plebeians made to the
revitalization of the French Revolution after the haute-bourgeoisie had tired of
it.²⁴ Lenin’s recognition of this, and of the Jacobins’ ability, as ‘the most conse-
quential bourgeois democrats’, to help the lower classes achieve their objectives,
was why the Soviet leader’s explanation of the French Revolution was superior
even to that of Marx and Engels.²⁵
Several Soviet historians applied the paradigm Lenin had derived from the
French Revolution to other European revolutions. In 1960 B. F. Porshnev, after
reiterating that the French Revolution benefitted the bourgeoisie even though
large elements of it rejected it or simply remained inert, claimed that the same
thing was true for revolutions in Germany in the sixteenth century, England in the
seventeenth century, and of course Russia in the twentieth century.²⁶ These
revolutions demonstrated what Porshnev, following in Lenin’s footsteps, con-
sidered an iron law of revolutions, namely that when a class does not want to
make the revolution to which it is assigned by history to make, classes whose own
revolution has not yet happened can serve as its surrogate. Partly because Plekha-
nov, Kautsky, and Jaurès were all, in Porshnev’s estimation, incapable of recog-
nizing this, they were inferior to Lenin not only as theorists and students of
history, but also, more importantly, as political leaders.²⁷
Most Soviet historians, however, eschewed la longue dureé, avoiding broad
pronouncements on revolutions generically. Instead they focused on the French
Revolution itself, devoting a good deal of their time to clarifying the Jacobins’
relationship to the classes and social categories of the population that were below

²³ Dzhedzhula, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia burzhuaznaia revoliutsiia, p. 3.

²⁴ A. V. Ado, ‘Zhivoe nasledie velikoi revoliutsii’, p. 12.
²⁵ Ado’s opinion was that Lenin ‘developed profoundly the basic views of Marxism [on the French
Revolution]’, ibid.
²⁶ B. F. Porshnev, ‘V. I. Lenin o rannikh burzhuaznykh revoliutsiiakh’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia,
no. 2 (1960): pp. 55–6. Porshnev’s proof that the class that benefitted from the French Revolution had
hardly participated in it was simply to quote Lenin‘s statement that that was the case.
²⁷ Ibid., p. 52. In this litany of blinkered theorists, Porshnev could have included Marx, but of course
did not. He did, however, fault Engels, albeit only tacitly, for not recognizing, as Lenin did, that the
scenario common to revolutions in Germany, England, and France was applicable to all revolutions.
Ibid., p. 55.
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them both politically and economically, and thus unable to radicalize further a
revolution that the Jacobins, with their support, had already radicalized to the
fullest extent the Marxist dialectic would permit given the conditions that pre-
vailed in France in the late eighteenth century. Alexeev-Popov and Baskin, for
example, focused on the bloc the Jacobins led after taking power in the spring of
1793. For them, the relationship between the parties that comprised it was a
microcosm of the revolution as a whole, explaining why, for a time, it succeeded,
only to fail not long afterwards, as its leaders were supplanted by elements in
France intent on either stopping it or reversing it. The authors began by stressing
their rejection of even the slightest intimation that the sans-culottes supporting the
Jacobins were themselves petit-bourgeois. What they were—both for better and
for worse—were plebeians. As such, they lacked the political acumen to run a
government. But they also more than made up for this deficiency in their
enthusiasm, courage, and fortitude. As a result, they served admirably as the
instrument of the Jacobins in the events that brought the Jacobins to power.²⁸
In their analysis, the two authors stressed that there were actually two instances
in the French Revolution in which one class or stratum of the population acted on
behalf of another: the first in August 1792, when the bourgeoisie as a whole could
not continue the revolution and the Jacobins, who were from the petit-
bourgeoisie, had to do so in their place; and then in 1793, when the Jacobins
needed the plebeians to defeat the anti-Jacobin elements in the Convention; had
the plebeians not been able to do this, the Jacobins could not have taken power,
and the French Revolution would have ended not in 1794 (on 9 Thermidor) but in
1793.²⁹ In fact, it was pressure from the plebeians that forced the Jacobins to direct
the terror they initiated not only against royalists, who had always loathed the
revolution and sought the restoration of the ancien régime, but also against the
Girondins and other former supporters of the revolution who turned against it as
it became more radical after the Convention’s establishment in 1792.³⁰
To the extent to which Soviet historians came to a consensus on the Jacobins, it
consisted, more or less, of what Alexeev-Popov and Baskin had written in 1962:
while the assistance of the plebeians was critical to the Jacobins taking power, their
influence after they did was limited. The Jacobins were always in charge of the bloc
that was the social basis for their political supremacy.³¹ For better or for worse,
that reality was unchangeable. Because conditions in France in the late eighteenth
century could never generate a revolution sufficiently radical to satisfy the needs
and serve the interests of the plebeians, they could never find satisfaction in any
coalition or bloc the Jacobins led. The French Revolution could be radicalized to
the extent to which its objectives were those of the Jacobins. But it could never be

²⁸ Alexeev-Popov and Baskin, ‘Problemy istorii iakobinskoi literatury’, p. 87.

²⁹ Ibid., pp. 116, 130. ³⁰ Ibid., p. 137.
³¹ The two authors traced of provenance of this view through earlier Soviet historians to Lenin.
Ibid., pp. 21–3 and passim.
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radicalized to the extent to which its objectives were those of the plebeians. For
that reason the plebeians were destined to suffer disappointment, disenchantment
with the revolution, and ultimately a loss of what little political influence they
possessed. But the fate of the Jacobins would not be, and could not be, much
better. Their victory over the plebeians turned out to be a pyrrhic one, because
without the plebeians’ support, the Jacobins could not by themselves hold off the
forces of counter-revolution that had rejected the revolution practically from the
moment it began, and gathered strength as the radicalization of the revolution
turned erstwhile supporters into enemies. To be sure, the Jacobins, in the spring of
1794, rejected the plebeians (by sending their leaders to the guillotine) before the
plebeians could reject the Jacobins. But the result would be the same irrespective
of the sequence of events. Without the allies the Jacobins needed to take power
and to hold onto it, it was only a matter of time before the Jacobins lost power—
which they did on 9 Thermidor. Under the circumstances, the French Revolution
could not have ended in any other way, or at any other time, give or take a few
weeks or months, than it did.
The larger conclusion post-Stalinist Soviet historians drew from all of this was
that while the October Revolution resembled the French Revolution, and the
Soviet Union the Jacobin dictatorship, the two revolutions and the two regimes
were not identical. In fact, the respective differences between the governments
each revolution brought to power determined why one of them, the Jacobin,
collapsed and the other, the Bolshevik, endured. In the end, Lenin’s
‘democratic-dictatorship’ reflected a genuine confluence of interests among its
tripartite elements—the Bolsheviks, the proletariat, and the peasantry—that was
not the case for the bloc the Jacobins created. Lenin, looking back at the Jacobins,
knew exactly which parts of their legacy he should adopt, and which he should
ignore. This, in fact, was one of the reasons he succeeded. Writing during the
lengthy interregnum between Stalin and Gorbachev, when the Soviet Union
achieved an uneasy equilibrium between Stalinism on the one hand, and radical
reform on the other, Soviet historians had no way of knowing that not terribly far
in the future their confidence in Lenin’s judgement, which caused them to believe
the Soviet Union would last forever, would be shown to have been unwarranted.
But while it lasted, this consensus was very broad, and the part of it that stressed
the inherent instability of the Jacobin dictatorship achieved nearly unanimous
support. Among those who shared in it was V. P. Vol’gin, who in remarks
delivered at a conference celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the October
Revolution, stressed that the Jacobins represented politically the most revolution-
ary classes of the eighteenth century, namely the urban and rural poor.³² But
because of their unshakeable commitment to the preservation of private property,

³² V. P. Volgin, ‘Lenin i revoliutsionnye traditsii frantsuzskogo naroda’, in Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik:

stat’i i materialy po istorii Frantsii 1958 (Moscow, 1959), p. 10.
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the Jacobins could not imagine, much less advocate, the socialism that offered the
only real solution to the poverty and oppression that afflicted these classes. As a
result, the Jacobins lost power.³³
In the same camp as Vol’gin was A. E. Manfred, who wrote more about the
French Revolution than any other Soviet historian in the post-Stalin era.³⁴ On the
Jacobins, Manfred was concise: though petit-bourgeois themselves, they had to
rely on classes below them, which made the bloc they led unstable. But while the
bloc existed, it was truly ‘the party of the French people’, and more than anything
else in the revolution was what made the Jacobins precursors of the Bolsheviks,
and the French Revolution a harbinger of the October Revolution.³⁵ The class
divisions the bloc transcended were real, but the Jacobins proved sufficiently
adroit in fashioning economic policies, such as the Maximum, that addressed
the most vital economic interests of the plebeians, so that the revolution could
continue beyond the limits it had reached in 1792. But the Jacobins could not alter
the fact that these policies were, at bottom, anti-capitalist, and thus incompatible
with the ‘pro-capitalist’ role history had chosen the French Revolution to play.
That the Jacobins would eventually lose power was therefore inevitable. But
Manfred stressed that the principal reason for their fall was not any conflict of
interests between the Jacobins and the plebeians, but rather the congruence of
their interests. Whatever the Jacobins might believe about the Maximum in the
privacy of their own deliberations, their continued public support for the measure
linked them even more closely to the plebeians, and according to Manfred it was
this perceived identity of interests that drove the middle and haute-bourgeoisie to
overthrow the Jacobins on 9 Thermidor.³⁶ Whether, in the Jacobins’ demise, this
identity of interests was the result of conviction or political calculation was
irrelevant. The objective conditions that pertained in France in 1794 permitted
no other outcome.³⁷
Manfred’s analysis thus corroborated the orthodox view in these years that the
French Revolution was analogous to the October Revolution, and that the prin-
cipal reason for this was that the coalition the Jacobins created was comparable to

³³ Ibid., p. 11.
³⁴ His views on the Jacobins are most easily accessed in his article, ‘O prirode iakobinskoi vlasti’,
pp. 92–103.
³⁵ Ibid., p. 100. To describe the coalition the Jacobins led, Manfred used the same words Lenin did
after the 1905 Revolution—‘a revolutionary democratic-dictatorship’—for the regime he intended
establish in 1917. Ibid., p. 102.
³⁶ Bailey Stone describes as ‘irrefutable’ the evidence indicating that the Jacobins always favoured
laissez-faire economics in principle, and supported measures like the Maximum only as an expedient
they would be removed once its political necessity no longer existed. Stone, Anatomy of Revolution
Revisited, p. 359.
³⁷ Manfred, Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, passim. This is also one of the points V. M. Dalin
stressed, on pp. 10–12, in his introduction to Manfred’s history of the revolution, and it was also
supported by E. V. Kiselev in ‘Parizhskaia Kommuna i sektsii 9 Termidora’, in Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik:
Stat’i i materialy po istorii Frantsii 1981 (Moscow, 1983), pp. 106–26.
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the ‘democratic-dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ that was Lenin’s
lodestar prior to 1917. Manfred, of all the Soviet historians who wrote about the
French Revolution, was perhaps the most sensitive to Lenin’s need for inclusivity.
It was for that reason, one suspects, that Manfred took Babeuf and the Babouvists
seriously, rather than simply disparaging them, as most Soviet historians did, for
their naiveté. While conceding that the Babouvists were wrong to believe that
communism could be established in what was still a pre-industrial country, in
which a genuine proletariat did not yet exist in numbers sufficient to make them a
political force, Manfred linked them, nevertheless, to the Jacobins. In his view,
Babeuf was just a more extreme version of Robespierre.³⁸
While Manfred’s deviation from the party line on Babeuf hardly vitiated the
orthodoxy of everything else he wrote about the French Revolution, it did
constitute an instance of genuine originality—of which, in the post-Stalin era,
there were several others. Based on extensive research on the Vendée and other
instances in the revolution in which the peasants played the principal role,
A. V. Ado argued that what occurred in the countryside beginning in 1789 was
a genuine jacquerie—by which he meant a spontaneous, ‘pre-modern’ uprising of
peasants directed against the aristocracy, which was the principal oppressor class
under feudalism.³⁹ In fact, this uprising was the last of its genre in European
history. In Ado’s estimation peasants’ grievances and aspirations were qualita-
tively different from those of the plebeians in French towns and cities, and while it
would be wrong to deduce from this that the French Revolution was actually two
separate revolutions occurring simultaneously, one would not be incorrect in
viewing this particular jacquerie as a revolution occurring within a larger revolu-
tion. The bourgeoisie was the beneficiary of both of these revolutions, in many
cases using the profits it acquired in commercial capitalist activities in towns and
cities to purchase land previously owned by the aristocracy and the Church.⁴⁰
What made Ado’s idiosyncratic interpretation politically suspect was that it called
into question, if only by implication, and only for those cognizant of the analogy
Lenin had drawn between the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks, the identity of interests
Lenin claimed to exist between the Russian proletariat and the Russian peasantry.
But Ado was not punished or even reprimanded for his ideological deviation.
Soviet historians had always been critical of other historians, French or other-
wise, who rejected Marxism and were hostile to the Soviet Union. Magnifying small
differences into large ones, they were especially critical of French historians, such as
Mathiez, who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union but whose methods of analysis
they deemed insufficiently Marxist. Under Stalin this tendency intensified, and

³⁸ A. Z. Manfred, Ocherki istorii Frantsii XVIII–XX vv. (Moscow, 1961), p. 75.

³⁹ A. Ado, Krestianskoe dvizhenie vo Frantsii vo vremia velikoi burzhuaznoi revoliutsii kontsa XVIII
veka (Moscow, 1971), passim.
⁴⁰ Ibid., pp. 5–6.
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after his death it did not disappear entirely. In 1966 V. G. Revunenkov reproved
Jaurês for idealizing the Jacobins while simultaneously denying the bourgeois
character of the Convention, claiming wrongly that it represented the nation, rather
than discrete classes.⁴¹ But while criticism continued under both the Khrushchev
and Brezhnev regimes, Soviet historians were also free to acknowledge any debt they
owed to French historians who earlier had been attacked, such as Mathiez and
Jaurês, and even to Alexis de Tocqueville, who, unlike the historians who could now
be lauded for their perspicacity, had never pretended to be a Marxist or a socialist.⁴²
Credit was accorded also to contemporary French historians of the revolution whose
views could be considered quasi-Marxist, or at least consistent with Marxist tenets,
such as the ubiquity of class struggle. Those receiving such recognition included
Albert Soboul, George Rudé, and Richard Cobb; in 1981 Moscow State University
awarded Soboul an honorary doctorate, and two years later the Soviet government
approved the publication of Jaurès’s multi-volume history of the French Revolu-
tion.⁴³ Only François Furet, whose disapproval of the Soviet Union and disparage-
ment of Marxist interpretations of the French Revolution seemed mutually
reinforcing, remained the object of relentless and bitter criticism.⁴⁴
Of the Soviet historians who in the post-Stalin era deviated from the orthodox
Leninist interpretation, V. G. Revunenkov most actively explored what they could
write without transgressing the limits of what the government permitted. He
rejected the prevailing notion that the dictatorship the Jacobins established
resembled Lenin’s democratic-dictatorship of workers and peasants.⁴⁵ In his
opinion, it was nothing of the sort, and the reason Lenin made such an egregious
error was that he wrote about the Jacobins before previously unknown writings of
Marx and Engels, showing he was wrong, had been discovered.⁴⁶ Had Lenin
known of these materials, Revunenkov reassured his readers, he would have
considered them seriously, and altered his opinion accordingly.
According to Revunenkov, the Jacobins did not lead a bloc that included
Hébertists and lower-class elements variously described as plebeians, sans-culottes,

⁴¹ Revunenkov, Marksizm i problema iakobinskoi diktatury, pp. 58–62. Revunenkov was no less
candid in registering his objections to Kautsky’s, Plekhanov’s, and Kropotkin’s views on the revolution.
Ibid., pp. 51–7, 68–72.
⁴² See, for example, Ado, ‘Zhivoe nasledie velikoi revoliutsii’, pp. 10–13. There is no way of knowing
if 1985 volume containing Ado’s article was published before Gorbachev’s ascension to the position of
general secretary in March of that year. But one can be sure that Ado wrote his contribution sometime
before then.
⁴³ Ibid., p. 13; P. A. Pimenova, ‘O sovetskoi istoriografii Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii (1979–1986
gg.)’, in Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik: stat’i i materialy po istorii Frantsii 1989 (Moscow, 1989), p. 125.
⁴⁴ Ado, ‘Zhivoe nasledie velikoi revoliutsii’, p. 14. One suspects that Furet’s criticisms of Marx, most
prominently in his Marx and the French Revolution, written in the late 1980s, infuriated Soviet
historians even more than his criticisms of the historians themselves.
⁴⁵ Revunenkov presented his argument most comprehensively in ‘Problema iakobinskoi diktatury
v noveishikh rabotakh sovetskikh istorikov’, in V. G. Revunenkov, Problemy vseobshchei istorii
(Leningrad, 1967), pp. 83–92, and in his Marksizm i problema iakobinskoi diktatury.
⁴⁶ Revunenkov, ‘Problema iakobinskoi diktatury’, p. 91.
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and les enragés. In fact such a bloc never existed. Lenin and the Soviet historians
who believed it did were wrong. Rather, the Jacobin dictatorship was like an
umbrella, under which the multifarious elements of the lower classes found shelter,
which in the context of the 1790s in France meant that their lives were protected,
their needs addressed, and their interests advanced, albeit to a far lesser degree
than Soviet historians maintained. The Jacobins were not the equals of those
among the lower classes who supported them. In Revunenkov’s opinion they
were not even primus inter pares. Rather, they were the leaders. For that reason
it was essential that the Jacobins be restored to their rightful place at the very centre
of the events in France once the monarchy was abolished, the Girondins routed,
and the Convention reduced virtually to very nearly a rubber stamp for what the
Jacobins did, which was determined on the basis of the Jacobins’ interests, rather
than on those of the categories of the population they protected. To be sure, the
Jacobins should not be idealized, as Manfred and post-Stalin era historians were
doing, any more than they should be ‘canonized’, of which Lukin and the Stalinist
historians who followed him in the 1930s had been guilty when they erroneously
located what made the Jacobins virtuous in their centralizing political power in
France.⁴⁷ Revunenkov believed there was nothing especially praiseworthy about
the Jacobins in that respect, and while he was careful not to compare the Jacobin
Terror to Stalin’s, his readers could easily infer that he considered these two
episodes of enormous and excessive bloodletting not just historically analogous
but also morally comparable, even though Stalin’s, by mobilizing more techno-
logically advanced means of repression, took more lives. But the point Revunenkov
stressed most strongly about the Jacobins was that their interests were their own,
and that the alliance they formed with other classes and strata of French society
was, and could only be, a matter of convenience. In fact, the Jacobins were right to
dissolve the alliance, as they did in the spring of 1794, when their interests and
those of their allies diverged. In the end, the mental universe the Jacobins inhabited
was not accessible to the sans-culottes and the others who looked to the Jacobins for
protection because the Jacobins and their followers belonged to different classes.
The Jacobins, in contrast to their supporters, came from the bourgeoisie, and no
amount of rhetoric about commonalities of interest could alter that essential fact.⁴⁸
Revunenkov could not have been oblivious to the challenge his opinions posed
not just to Soviet historians specializing in the French Revolution, but to the
historical profession as a whole. Like others in the Soviet elite, historians were
entrusted with the task of perpetuating Leninist orthodoxy within their area of

⁴⁷ Revunenkov, ‘Problema iakobinskoi diktatury’, p. 83.

⁴⁸ Although Revunenkov criticized Albert Soboul for minimizing the role played by the sans-culottes
in the elimination of feudalism in France, he praised him for distinguishing their interests from those of
the Jacobins. Revunenkov, ‘Novoe v izuchenii velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii’, p. 125; Revunenkov,
Marksizm i problema iakobinskoi diktatury, pp. 137–47. See also Tchoudinov, ‘The Evolution of
Russian Discourse on the French Revolution’, pp. 290–1.
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professional expertise. For that reason the response to his work was overwhelm-
ingly critical, and remained so into the 1980s.⁴⁹ Alexeev-Popov attacked Revu-
nenkov for his emphasis on the Jacobins’ ‘egoism’ and their ‘anti-democratic’
tendencies, and for claiming wrongly that was what had caused the Jacobins to
stand ‘against the people’ instead of ‘with the people’.⁵⁰ V. M. Dalin attacked him
for rejecting Lenin’s view of the ‘class basis of the Convention’ and for condemn-
ing the regime the Jacobins established as a ‘terrorist bourgeois dictatorship’.⁵¹
Additionally, Revunenkov was wrong in asserting that, by ignoring the interests of
the lower classes Robespierre and the other Jacobins disallowed ‘democracy for
the people’—which in the orthodox Soviet lexicon had nothing to do with
elections or any of the other paraphernalia of popular rule; rather it implied a
strictly hierarchical party or society in which decisions by the leaders might or
might not reflect the wishes of those below them but, once made, were accepted
unquestioningly. According to Dalin, democracy was precisely what the Jacobins
practised, and for doing so they should be praised instead of condemned.⁵²
Revunenkov’s view of the Jacobins was even condemned formally in 1970 at a
symposium sponsored by the Academy of Sciences that one suspects was con-
vened to do precisely that.⁵³ What the symposium revealed was that while
historians expressing ideologically unorthodox opinions were no longer shot or
sent to labour camps, as was the case under Stalin, they were still subjected to the
formal obloquy of the state, which could ruin reputations as successfully as Stalin’s
terror destroyed lives. Revunenkov’s apostasy was dealt with in a matter that
reflected the larger compromise Khrushchev adopted and the Brezhnev regime
continued between a continuation of the harsh repression of the Stalin era on the
one hand, and the allowance of genuine freedom of expression on the other.
On the issues on which historians could write freely, there remained limits,
even as the punishment for exceeding them was considerably milder. Historians
could not malign Lenin or deny the legitimacy of the October Revolution. Nor
could they write about Menshevik critics of Leninism such as Plekhanov and
Martov unless they included the requisite quotations of Lenin that refuted them.
In the end, Soviet historians still had to accept the philosophical principles of
Marxism-Leninism, even if, in rare cases, they disagreed, as Revunenkov did, on
the specific conclusions they drew from the application of these principles to a

⁴⁹ Iu. F. Kariakin and E. G. Plimak, in Zapretnaia mysl’ obretaet svobodu. 175 let bor’by vokrug
ideinogo naslediia Radishcheva (Moscow, 1966), pp. 286–95, were among the very few whose opinion
of the Jacobins resembled Revunenkov’s.
⁵⁰ Alexeev-Popov, ‘Znachenie opyta velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii’, p. 46.
⁵¹ Dalin, Istoriki Frantsii XIX–XX vekov (Moscow, 1981), p. 81.
⁵² Ibid.
⁵³ Ibid.; Gabriel Schoenfeld, ‘Uses of the Past: Bolshevism and the French Revolutionary Tradition’,
in The French Revolution of 1789 and its Impact, edited by G. W. Schwab and John R. Jeanneney
(Westport CT, 1995), p. 302. Schoenfeld’s article and his1989 PhD dissertation, on which his article was
based, provide a cogent analysis of Revunenkov’s views and those of his critics.
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particular historical issue. What is striking about the dispute Revunenkov’s work
triggered was the degree to which he and his critics were in agreement, most
significantly on the primacy of class and economic interests, not just in the French
Revolution, but in history generally. The question at the core of the dispute—were
the Jacobins’ actions a reflection of their class origins in the bourgeoisie (or in a
particular segment of it), or were they a consequence of leading a coalition with
other classes with whose economic interests those of the Jacobins were tempor-
arily congruent—was such a difficult one that answering it had the effect of
obscuring the larger assumption Revunenkov shared with his critics that economic
interests and class relations were the prime movers of history. In this respect, there
were limits beyond which no Soviet historian who wished to keep his job would go as
long as the philosophical constraints of Marxism and Marxist-Leninism remained in
place. Indeed, one suspects that Soviet historians literally could not imagine writing
history, or at least history they thought worthy of serious consideration, that did not
accept the philosophical assumptions of Marxism-Leninism that were an integral
aspect of every intellectual discipline, not just history, in the Soviet Union from 1953
(or really 1917) to the Gorbachev era.

* * *
Reading what Soviet historians wrote about the French Revolution during these
years does not leave one with the impression that they were straining to escape the
ideological and philosophical straitjacket constricting them. One senses instead
that, with few exceptions, they were unaware of it. To return to Marxism-Leninism
after many years in the intellectually airless atmosphere that was Stalinism—with
its virtual replacement of economic class by Soviet patriotism, which changed the
Jacobins from pre-socialist radicals too enthusiastic for their own good into proto-
NKVD agents rooting out subversives—was to liberate oneself intellectually. To go
beyond Marxism-Leninism, however, was to confine oneself to an intellectual
ghetto, with no chance of escaping it short of renouncing one’s convictions on
the one hand, or taking the almost unimaginable and exceedingly dangerous step
of becoming a dissident on the other. For that reason even French historians
like Mathiez, Soboul, and Lefebvre, who were sympathetic to socialism and the
October Revolution, could not be considered entirely reliable guides in ascertaining
historical truth.⁵⁴ To be sure, there were some historians during the Khrushchev and
Brezhnev eras, such as Iurii Afanasiev, who silently wished to write history in

⁵⁴ Soviet historians’ criticisms under Lenin and Stalin have already been cited. It should also be
noted that Alexeev-Popov and Baskin, in ‘Problemy istorii iakobinskoi literatury’, pp. 46–8, criticized
Soboul and Lefebvre for considering the sans-culottes ‘petit-bourgeois’. A. V. Ado, in Krestianskoe
dvizhenie vo Frantsii, p. 12, upbraided Lefebvre for considering the French Revolution actually two
revolutions, one urban, the other rural.
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defiance of Marxist-Leninist ideology.⁵⁵ But for their numbers to increase signifi-

cantly, a different kind of Soviet leader, who either rejected Marxism-Leninism or
was willing to tolerate other types of history that contradicted it, would have to
emerge. Change, in short, would have to be imposed, or at least strongly encour-
aged, from above.
The question that remained for Soviet historians of the French Revolution after
Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985,
and two years later told them ‘to fill in the blank pages of the Soviet Union’s
history’, was whether they would use their new freedom to write a different kind of
history.⁵⁶ This question was important for a reason that transcended the French
Revolution and how historians in the Soviet Union considered it. Since 1917 the
revolution had been an integral aspect of the mythology of the October Revolu-
tion, legitimizing it by having prefigured it, while also leaving behind a legacy of
heroism, perseverance, and determination that the revolutionaries who took
power in Russia over a century later pledged themselves not just to match, but
to exceed; in doing so these French revolutionaries would be demonstrating not
just their own virtues, but, in embryonic form, the virtues of communism. But the
Soviet Union, during the slightly more than three decades since Stalin died, had
begun to show signs of stagnation, for which the institutions and practices of the
Soviet system itself could plausibly be held responsible.
Thus the larger question that remained unanswered when Gorbachev came to
power was whether the mythology the Soviets had so laboriously constructed to
sanction the Soviet system would continue to do so, or be used by critics of the
Soviet system to show how far it had betrayed the promises and expectations
implicit in its foundational mythology. The role the French Revolution played in
this mythology was therefore something that not just Soviet historians, but all
those with a stake in the future of the Soviet Union itself, including and especially
the new general secretary and his advisors, would have to consider.

⁵⁵ This is easily gleaned from an interview Afansiev gave in the late 1980s, reprinted as ‘The Agony
of the Stalinist System’, in Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev’s Reformers, edited by Stephen
F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel (New York, 1989), especially pp. 97–100.
⁵⁶ M. S. Gorbachev, ‘Ubezhdennost’—opora perestroika’, Izbrannye rechi i stat’i (Moscow, 1987),
vol. IV, p. 373. Gorbachev’s exhortation, translated literally, would be: ‘We must value our Soviet
history of seventy years.’ But it is usually rendered in English as it is here.
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11
Transgressing the Leninist Line
in the Gorbachev Era

During his first two years as the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev
said nothing about the French Revolution. But in 1987 he began to make clear his
agreement with the long-standing dictum in Soviet mythology that the October
Revolution was the rightful successor of the French Revolution: that the second
revolution resumed what the first revolution began but left unfinished, namely the
installation of a new and radically different means of organizing society that
provided not only social justice through the transformation of property relations,
but also the possibility of the individual’s achieving his full potential in whatever
way he defined it. But Gorbachev also believed—although for political reasons he
could not state it publicly—that the Soviet system suffered from serious deficien-
cies that were ethical as well as economic and political. If the October Revolution
brought to power a government that was superior to the governments the French
Revolution had produced, that did not mean, in his opinion, that it could rest on
its laurels. For the Soviet Union to achieve the humane and efficient socialism that
was the ultimate justification for the October Revolution, another revolution
would be needed—only this one would be peaceful, non-confrontational, and
leave untouched the basic institutions and economic arrangements of the Soviet
system. The Communist Party would retain its monopoly of power, and like a
father who knows what is best for his children, guide the Soviet people in their
efforts to create a better life for themselves.
The constellation of policies Gorbachev believed would repair the mistakes and
redress the inadequacies previous Soviet leaders had been unwilling or unable to
prevent was quickly dubbed perestroika—which, in English translation, is usually
rendered as ‘reconstruction’—to indicate that the Soviet Union would be recon-
structed rather than transformed entirely. Not long afterwards, when it appeared
that these policies were not achieving the intended results, the general secretary
inaugurated another policy, called glasnost’, that entailed telling the truth about
the Soviet Union no matter how unpalatable or unflattering it might be. Ideally,
glasnost’ would facilitate perestroika, and perestroika would constitute the third
revolution—after the French and the Bolshevik Revolutions—that would finally
realize the noble objectives each of its predecessors had aspired to, but in the end
could not make real. Just as the October Revolution marked the beginning of a
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stage in the moral improvement of humanity higher than that which the French
Revolution had achieved over a century earlier, so, too, would the achievement of
perestroika signify the attainment of an even more advanced state of human
existence than that which the Soviet Union had reached—but from which it
recently seemed to be retreating when perestroika began.
Instead of dissolving the links Soviet mythology claimed to exist between the
French and the October Revolutions, Gorbachev, in sum, sought to reinforce
them, while at the same time extending the teleology between the two revolutions
to include the third one, which in the Soviet Union was about to commence. That
perestroika was hardly revolutionary in either its means, which would remain
peaceful, or its objectives, which instead of transforming the Soviet system would
improve those aspects of it that were worth salvaging, did not deter him from
claiming that the policies he was implementing would change the Soviet Union
just as radically as the October Revolution had changed Russia and the French
Revolution had changed France.
* * *
Gorbachev expressed this amended teleology on several occasions in the late 1980s.
In 1987, in his first extended exegesis on how exactly he thought perestroika would
improve the Soviet Union, he noted that revolutions in France in 1830, 1848, and
1871 had been required to complete the revolution that began in 1789. The obvious
inference he wanted his readers to draw was that the October Revolution was no
different from the French Revolution in requiring additional revolutions—or
policies like those Gorbachev was implementing peacefully and incrementally—
to make everything it promised real. In 1988, in a speech to the General Assembly
of the United Nations, he stated flatly that the French Revolution was one of the
two historical events that had most shaped the modern world; to this he hardly
needed to add—though he did so anyway—that the October Revolution was the
other one.¹ ‘Each in its own way’, he argued, had ‘contributed to the progress of
humanity’.² But the world, he concluded, was different today, and for that reason
perestroika should supersede the October Revolution the way the October Revo-
lution had superseded the French Revolution.³ In 1989, in remarks to members of a
visiting delegation from France, the general secretary stated that he and the Soviet
people ‘take pride in the French Revolution’ because they can trace to it ‘the roots
of perestroika’.⁴ That his praise was precisely what one would expect from a
politician seeking to ingratiate himself with his audience should not obscure the
fact that, in this particular instance, he was expressing what he actually believed.

¹ ‘Vystuplenie M. S. Gorbacheva v organizatsii Ob”ediennykh Natsii’, Pravda, no. 344 (9 December

1988): pp. 1–3.
² Ibid., p. 1. ³ Ibid., p. 1.
⁴ ‘Vstrecha M. S. Gorbacheva s predstaviteliami frantsuzskoi obshchestvennosti’, Pravda, no. 273
(30 September 1989), p. 1.
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Because Gorbachev’s comments on the French Revolution were few and mostly
fragmentary, one must look to Alexander Yakovlev, the Central Committee
Secretary in charge of ideology and the intellectual architect of perestroika, for a
lengthier and more carefully considered exposition of the view the two men
shared that the revolution was a precursor of perestroika, its influence mediated
by the October Revolution, which chronologically was roughly equidistant
between them. In July 1989, at a conference in Moscow commemorating the
bicentennial of the French Revolution, and with the reform-minded foreign
minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, in the audience, Yakovlev delivered the keynote
address.⁵ Mixing Marxist-Leninist phraseology with language more typical of a
Western intellectual than a Soviet politician, Yakovlev spoke like a philosophe
seeking to escape the ideological constraints imposed by living one’s entire life in
the Soviet Union and absorbing its Marxist-Leninist ideology, which since child-
hood one was told was impervious to refutation.
He began by claiming that Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Helvétius,
whatever their differences, ‘intellectually “ploughed the soil” that produced the
[French] Revolution by destroying faith in traditional authority and morality’.⁶
Perestroika, he said, would do the same. So clearly that even the most inattentive
listener would be aware of it, Yakovlev stated his agreement with Gorbachev that, by
reforming the Soviet Union, perestroika would render the Soviet economy more
efficient than the capitalist economies in the West. Once Western elites were
convinced of this, the ideological competition of the Cold War would lose its
purpose, and Western governments would join with their Soviet counterpart in
ending it. In fact, these governments would be so impressed by the humane socialism
Gorbachev was introducing (or more precisely, reproducing) in the Soviet Union
that they would adopt it themselves. By demonstrating the moral and practical
superiority of socialism to capitalism, perestroika, in other words, would by example
cause the enemies of the Soviet Union not just to stop hating it, but also to emulate it.
But as his speech makes amply clear, Yakovlev’s break with ideological ortho-
doxy remained tantalizingly incomplete. He described the French Revolution as
fundamentally a bourgeois revolution, and reiterated the Soviet shibboleth that the
October Revolution was a proletarian revolution. Like Gorbachev, he still revered
Lenin as the prototypical Social Democrat and Marxist humanist. And like Soviet
historians from Lenin to Brezhnev, he saw the two revolutions as sequentially
related: ‘The impulse of the [French] Revolution, its influence on the historical
process, to no small degree predetermined the form and content of the [October]
Revolution.’⁷

⁵ Schoenfeld, ‘Uses of the Past’ (PhD dissertation), p. 4. Yakovlev’s remarks were published four
days later, as an article entitled ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia i sovremennost’, in Sovetskaia
kultura (15 July 1989): pp. 3–4.
⁶ Yakovlev, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia i sovremennost’, p. 3.
⁷ Ibid., p. 4.
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Like a magnetic field preventing iron filings from escaping it, Marxist ortho-
doxy still limited how far Yakovlev was willing to go in violation of it. Neverthe-
less, what he said about the French Revolution and about its relationship to
perestroika demonstrated that since 1985, when Gorbachev became general sec-
retary, his principal advisor’s opinions on matters of ideology had changed
significantly and in a way that Gorbachev himself might well have considered
close to heretical. The very fact that Yakovlev ascribed to the philosophes a share of
the responsibility for the French Revolution showed how tenuous now was the
hold Marxist orthodoxy exerted on him. According to Marx, events like the
French Revolution that were political were part of an ideational ‘superstructure’
reducible to an interplay of classes reflecting primarily the material conditions in
which people lived. Ideas were a reflection of these material conditions rather than
what determined them. In the case of the Enlightenment, the ideas of Voltaire,
Montesquieu, Helvétius, and the other philosophes were themselves a manifest-
ation of the class relations in France in the eighteenth century—the same relations
that at the end of the same century caused the French Revolution to commence.
But to Yakovlev this revolution, while certainly the result of conflicts among
classes, was also driven by ideas and moral principles, the most influential of
which was ‘the striving for a harmonious society freed of the inequality between
estates and of monarchical tyranny, in which private interests would be compat-
ible with society’s interests’.⁸ Indeed, what made the October Revolution worthy
of emulation everywhere was not just its commitment to the political supremacy
of the proletariat, to the abolition of private property, and to the creation of a
classless society, but also its application in Russia in the twentieth century of the
ethical principles of the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century,
the intellectual impetus to which was the Enlightenment, with its belief in the
liberating properties of reason.
To Yakovlev, the French Revolution, grounded as it was in the Enlightenment,
was the original inspiration both for the October Revolution and for the reforms
Gorbachev was currently implementing under the aegis of perestroika. But it was
also much more than that. Of all the revolution’s benefits, the most enduring was
its vision of human existence based on the liberation of the individual personality,
with reason as the principal tool for determining the institutional arrangements
that would codify this vision and thereby ensure its survival. The values the French
Revolution embodied were eternal. They transcended class, national boundaries,
and time itself. While Yakovlev did not use the term ‘natural law’ in describing the
moral principles he believed were discoverable through the application of reason,
natural law, in fact, was what he was referring to.

⁸ Ibid., p. 3.
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But the speech Yakovlev delivered showed that while he resembled a philosophe
espousing moral principles he considered timeless, absolute, and universal, there
coexisted in his intellectual armoury a Burkean reverence for what he called in his
speech ‘the accumulated wealth of civilization’.⁹ For Yakovlev, this inheritance
was not something any rational human being would dispose of the way one would
a piece of used clothing. For that reason he looked askance at the tendency among
the Jacobins, which they shared with Burke’s intellectual nemesis, Thomas Paine,
to think that they could ‘begin the world over again’, and symbolize their absolute
rejection of the past by substituting a new calendar for the old one.¹⁰ In his speech
Yakovlev made clear that perestroika did not entail a wholesale repudiation of the
past. For him, Gorbachev’s reforms afforded the Soviet people the chance to
resurrect the legacy of the French and the Bolshevik Revolutions, which Yakovlev
truly considered among the most enduring and impressive achievements of
humanity, enriching the Soviet people with a moral capital they should now invest
in improving their own lives, which required not just the rejuvenation of already
existing institutions, but also a process of moral self-improvement. As far as
Yakovlev was concerned, in these two revolutions alone there was enough of
this moral capital so that the Soviet people did not have to look anywhere else to
find it. The only historical events that really mattered were 1789 and 1917.
To be sure, these two revolutions were not identical; the October Revolution
was even, in certain respects, a negation of the French Revolution. It intended the
abolition of an inherently oppressive system of class relations that the earlier
revolution had ushered in. But it was also an enrichment of it. Thus from both
revolutions, not just the Bolshevik, there emerged what Yakovlev considered a
commitment to ‘the democratisation of social life’; with that as its guiding
principle, there began in the Soviet Union ‘the construction of a society of justice
and equality’ that would finally be completed through the application of pere-
stroika and glasnost’.¹¹ For Yakovlev, these two lodestars in the eventual emanci-
pation of all of humanity entailed in the Soviet Union both the government and
the people ‘mobilising the spiritual possibilities inherent in a socialist society’, and
in that way fulfilling the original agenda of what Yakovlev, in orthodox Marxist-
Leninist fashion, still referred to as ‘the Great French Revolution’. But its legacy was
not primarily new and different class relations.¹² Yakovlev acknowledged, but
downplayed considerably, the Marxist-Leninist notion of the French Revolution
as a bourgeois revolution. Rather, its legacy was ideational, spiritual, and ethical. It
marked the first time in human history when ‘anarchy and force yielded to reason,
conscious will, and a high morality based on humanism and social responsibility’.¹³

⁹ Ibid., p. 4.
¹⁰ Thomas Paine, Common Sense, edited by Isaac Kramnick (New York 1976), p. 120.
¹¹ Yakovlev, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia i sovremennost’, p. 4.
¹² Ibid. ¹³ Ibid.
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At the end of his oration, Yakovlev left his audience with the clear impression that
there was hardly any aspect of Soviet politics and culture deserving of respect
and admiration that was not influenced by, or did not benefit from, the French
Revolution.
Of course there were aspects of the revolution that he counselled all right-
minded citizens of the Soviet Union to reject. Yakovlev came down very hard on
the Jacobins, in whom ‘impatience was replaced by intolerance’, thereby causing
‘class struggle to degenerate into hatred’.¹⁴ Ethical objectives, he cautioned, could
not be achieved by unjust methods, which, as the Jacobins applied them, were
counterproductive of the goals they were intended to advance. The French
Revolution would have been better without the Jacobin Terror, just as the October
Revolution would have been better without the terror Lenin inflicted in its
immediate aftermath, and that which Stalin inflicted after Lenin’s. In this respect
Yakovlev parted company with Gorbachev. In his opinion Lenin was hardly the
socialist humanist that Gorbachev clearly (and incorrectly) considered him. In
Yakovlev’s words, the Bolsheviks—who took their cue from their leader, who of
course was Lenin until his death in 1924—were guilty of ‘idealising terror and of
repeating 1793’.¹⁵ But the political freedom and civil equality the French Revolu-
tion guaranteed survived the Jacobins, and in the late twentieth century it
remained a precious inheritance no less relevant than it was at its inception in
1789. In fact, Yakovlev even traced to the French Revolution the notion central to
perestroika that governments have an obligation to provide not just abstract rights,
but also a measure of material security and comfort, without which these rights
would be meaningless. Should the Gorbachev regime succeed in achieving these
objectives, it will have fulfilled the highest aspirations not only of the October
Revolution but of the French Revolution, which for Yakovlev was the original
repository of all that was best in socialism, Soviet communism, and perestroika.
With Gorbachev guiding the Soviet people the way a father does his children, they
could find in the past a virtual template for the future it was Gorbachev’s and
Yakovlev’s obligation, but also their crowning glory, to create.
The bicentennial of the French Revolution prompted others in the Soviet
leadership and in the educated elite to evaluate it. Many of the conclusions they
drew mirrored Yakovlev’s. And because much of what they wrote appeared in the
Soviet press, the revolution’s relationship to the Soviet Union became a matter of
public concern. In a collection of articles in the journal Novoe vremia (New Times)
written for the same occasion, the editors, in their unsigned introduction, reaf-
firmed that the French Revolution was rightly called ‘The Great French Revolu-
tion’ because it was ‘the watershed [in history] between the past and the present’.¹⁶
Quoting Lenin, they stressed its civilizing properties. But they made no mention

¹⁴ Ibid. ¹⁵ Ibid.
¹⁶ ‘1789 + 200 = 1989’, Novoe vremia, no. 28 (1989): p. 38.
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of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, and after acknowledging that the revolution
ended privileges based on caste and feudal obligations, while also abrogating
the legal division of France into three estates, they went on to credit it with
establishing ‘a democratic tradition’ and introducing to the world the concept of
‘the self-determination of nations’. Of the canonical authorities usually invoked on
such occasions, Marx and Engels (though not Lenin) were conspicuous in their
absence, as was, remarkably, the October Revolution itself.¹⁷ The legacy of the
French Revolution transcended it, according to the editors, because its message
was universal: ‘the whole of mankind’, rather than any single country or class
benefitted from it, and its legacy, which changed the history of countries as far
removed from France as those in Latin America, was in fact mostly cultural and
political.¹⁸ The only reference to the Soviet Union was in the context of noting
the coincidence of the bicentennial with ‘the social awakening’ precipitated by
perestroika and glasnost’.¹⁹
The contributors themselves focused on various aspects of the French Revo-
lution. Because of the freedom they enjoyed, their conclusions varied. None
reflected any preexisting orthodoxy or party line. Alexander Sogomonov, for
example, cited the results from a recent poll in France on the French Revolution;
he also noted that, under Stalin, and even during the regimes of Khrushchev and
Brezhnev, these would never have seen the light of day.²⁰ But now anyone in the
Soviet Union who read the journal knew what they were. Lafayette, whom Soviet
historians prior to the Gorbachev era had generally condemned as a traitor to the
revolution, was the most admired, far more than Marat, while Robespierre was
the most hated. Sogomonov made a special point of noting that only committed
communists admired and respected l’Incorruptible—a finding consistent with a
large majority of respondents condemning the execution of Louis XVI.²¹ Another
contributor, Evgenii Kozhokin, focused instead on why the Jacobins fell, arguing
that they were brought down by subordinating social interests to the imperatives
of philosophical absolutes.²² In the French Revolution, ideas mattered more than
class, and Kozhokin made clear that he considered this anomaly—which is what
a Marxist or Marxist-Leninist would have to consider it—applicable not just to
the Jacobins, but to the entire revolution. The inference Kozhokin wanted his
readers to draw was that the revolution reflected the changing relationship in
France in the late eighteenth century between the individual and the state, and
that what caused this relationship to change—far more than class struggle—was
ideology.

¹⁷ Ibid. ¹⁸ Ibid. ¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Alexander Sogomonov, ‘Lafaiet ili Marat’, Novoe vremia, no. 28 (1989): pp. 39–40.
²¹ Ibid.
²² Evgenii Kozhokin, ‘Diktatura i demokrtiia’, Novoe vremia, no. 28 (1989): pp. 38–9.
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Another contributor, Alexei Salmin, went even further than Kozhokin in

eschewing Marxist concepts and categories.²³ For him the French Revolution
was a struggle of ideas—a contest between ‘state-organised Christianity’ and
what he termed ‘the Republican principle’.²⁴ Instead of stressing Leninist shibbol-
eths about a feudal aristocracy initially superseded by a bourgeoisie that soon
found itself a spectator as lower classes led by the Jacobins did the necessary dirty-
work of the revolution, Salmin saw the revolution as a multi-faceted phenomenon,
its animating principles being theological, ideological, social, and political all at
once. The revolution was the result of French society, in all its splendid diversity,
rising up spontaneously against the state and its allied institutions, most notably
the Catholic Church. At the same time, Salmin singled out individuals and
particular periods of the revolution for commendation, while conversely singling
out for condemnation both Napoleon and the Jacobin Terror for the horrific and
mostly unnecessary loss of life of which they were both guilty. Employing under-
statement effectively, Salmin fastened on Marat as the worst of the Jacobins,
whose behaviour in certain situations he described dryly as ‘not particularly
meritorious’.²⁵ By way of comparison, Salmin situated the Marquis de Lafayette,
both for his admirable personal qualities and for the inestimable support he gave
the Americans in their war of independence, at the opposite end of the ethical
spectrum from Marat and the Jacobins. Salmin’s high praise for the French
aristocrat, whose social class had caused Soviet historians either to denigrate
him or to acknowledge his services to the French and American Revolutions
only with the utmost reluctance, was certainly notable. Even more surprising,
however, was Salmin’s designation of the Americans’ struggle against the British
as a war for democracy.²⁶ While to a Western reader Salmin’s contention would
not seem outlandish or even unusual, to his Soviet counterparts his ascription of
America’s founding to an idea, rather than to the interplay of material circum-
stances and economic forces, was nothing short of astonishing.
In the Soviet press, a number of articles on the bicentennial were almost as
unorthodox politically and ideologically. In Pravda B. Bolshakov was moved by
the occasion to describe the French Revolution as ‘the Great French Revolution’.²⁷
But that was his only serious concession to ideology. Unlike those in Novoe
vremia, his article included no exhortations to emulate Marxism-Leninism. Nor
did he couple plaudits for the October Revolution with similar ones for the
French. Instead he referred to recent comments of Margaret Thatcher that the
latter brought with it terror and eventually Napoleon, but also the Declaration of
the Rights of Man, which she traced not to anything French, but rather—perhaps
not surprisingly in light of her nationality—to the Magna Carta. One must bear in

²³ Alexei Salmin, ‘Zhazhda samoochishcheniia i terror’, Novoe vremia, no. 28 (1989): pp. 40–1.
²⁴ Ibid., p. 40. ²⁵ Ibid., p. 41. ²⁶ Ibid., p. 41.
²⁷ B. Bolshakov, ‘Nakanune Iubeleia’, Pravda, no. 195 (14 July 1989): p. 7.
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mind how remarkable it was that, in the pages of the newspaper of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union, the then prime minister of Great Britain—and a
staunch conservative, no less—was cited approvingly in an article that, by its
silence on the virtues of Soviet ideology, might cause its readers to question the
legitimacy, or at least the continued beneficence, of the Soviet Union.
In Izvestiia, the official newspaper of the Soviet government (and therefore
second in authority and prestige only to Pravda), one could read much the same
thing. Iurii Kovalenko, writing in Paris, described the actual preparations for the
bicentennial celebration.²⁸ But the author also included his own opinions. He
berated the French people, albeit mildly, for their nationalism—for not situating
their most illustrious and consequential revolution within the context of the
larger, supranational history of progress that included in England both the
Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution. Even more significantly, Kovalenko
failed to mention, much less to describe in orthodox Marxist fashion, the class
structure of France prior to the French Revolution or as a result of it. Instead he
pronounced the revolution a signal event in the ongoing quest for ‘social justice’,
which he said included the current quest in the Soviet Union for human rights.²⁹
But for all of these encomiums, there were also subtle indications—such as the
burial, on an inside page in the next day’s edition of Izvestiia, of a small photo-
graph of a celebratory gathering on the Place de la Bastille in Paris—that not
everyone in the Soviet leadership agreed with Kovalenko’s positive, albeit ideo-
logically unorthodox commendation of the French Revolution, and might even
have opposed his article’s publication.³⁰
The willingness to examine the French Revolution anew, and to do so, thanks to
Gorbachev, without fear of anything worse than verbal admonishment, extended
to academia. The Soviet economist Nikolai Shmelov stated in 1989, during the
first session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, that history in certain instances
was repetitive, and that in the case of the French Revolution the economic
problems faced by the governments it produced prefigured the budget deficits
and hyperinflation characteristic of the Soviet economy.³¹ Just a few years earlier,
comments like Shmelov’s could not have been uttered publicly. That they con-
tained an accusation reprinted in the most influential newspaper in the Soviet
Union was even more remarkable: the specific problems Shmelov pointed to in
Soviet society were caused, in his opinion, by ‘the administrative-command
system’, which was Gorbachev’s customary appellation for the Soviet system
established by Stalin in the early 1930s.³²

²⁸ Iu. Kovalenko ‘Parizh, 14 iulia . . . : Frantsiia otmechaet 200-letie revoliutsii’, Izvestiia, no. 196
(14 July 1989): p. 4.
²⁹ Ibid. ³⁰ Izvestiia, no. 197 (15 July 1989): p. 4.
³¹ His comments were reprinted in Pravda, no. 160(25878) (9 June 1989), p. 2.
³² Ibid.
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It took time for Soviet historians to utilize fully the freedom they enjoyed in the
Gorbachev era to re-examine issues about which they and their predecessors had
drawn conclusions strictly within the limits imposed by Marxism-Leninism. This
was certainly true of what was written about the French Revolution. In 1986, after
Gorbachev had come to power but before his policies had advanced from the
purely improvisational to those that would soon be codified under the rubric
of perestroika, N. Molchanov publicly admonished the French people for not
commemorating the French Revolution favourably enough.³³ Citing Benjamin
Franklin’s observation that everyone of sound mind and benevolent intentions
had two fatherlands—his own and France—he bemoaned the absence in the latter
of any monument or street named for Robespierre. Up to the spring of 1794, he
argued, the Jacobins reflected in their policies the ‘democratic tendencies’ of the
people they represented.³⁴ The Terror they practised was by no means a precursor
of recent instances of genocide. Rather, the most apt analogy was to the Saint
Bartholomew’s Massacre in France in August 1572—a derogation which for
Molchanov was a subtle way of reassuring his readers that nothing like what the
Jacobins wrongly did was even remotely possible in the Soviet Union. Molchanov
was particularly critical of François Furet for having trivialized the French Revo-
lution, thereby transforming it into something that bore no resemblance to the
actual event. ‘The French Revolution’, he wrote, ‘lives on, but many want to
prevent it from living.’³⁵ Their principal sin, of which Molchanov made clear he
believed other Western historians to be culpable, was to consider the revolution a
forerunner of totalitarianism, which, for Molchanov, was an especially defamatory
characterization not only of France, but also of the Soviet Union.
Not all historians used the freedom the government now allowed to denounce
it. Nor was the orthodoxy on the French Revolution that had prevailed since 1917
always challenged. Some historians simply repeated the by-now hackneyed
clichés. In B. S. Itenberg’s 1988 analysis, the French Revolution remained ‘The
Great French Revolution’.³⁶ In his opinion it marked in political terms the victory
of the bourgeoisie over feudal absolutism, and thus had a profoundly progressive
influence on countries on both sides of the Atlantic. The Jacobins were the most
revolutionary-minded members of the bourgeoisie, so much so that they advanced
the interests of a different social stratum, the plebeians, whose support protected
them against the retrograde and pernicious forces of absolutism and counter-
revolution.³⁷ As for the meaning the French Revolution left for posterity, Itenberg

³³ N. Molchanov, ‘Revoliutsiia na gil’otine: takov smysl diskussii v sviazi s priblizheniem 200-letiia

vziatiia Bastilii’, Literaturnaia gazeta, no 28(5094) (9 July 1986): p. 14.
³⁴ Ibid. ³⁵ Ibid.
³⁶ Itenberg, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, passim.
³⁷ The lingering popularity of opinions such as this may help to explain why the chocolate factory
that prior to perestroika had been named for Marat still bore his name as late as 1989. Schoenfeld, ‘Uses
of the Past’ (PhD dissertation), p. 221.
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expressed the hope that the bicentennial would be a global event marked by the
solidarity of all progressive people, and a way of reminding those insufficiently
enamoured of the French Revolution that, despite its temporal distance from the
present, it nonetheless made possible everything in their lives that was worth-
while.³⁸ In the case of the Soviet Union, a good deal of what happened in the
revolution that was good ‘has often been repeated in the events of Russian life’.³⁹
But for all the ways in which Itenberg remained faithful to the old, and by now
increasingly antiquated Leninist orthodoxy, he expressed his views without the ad
hominem denigration of other historians who disagreed with him that was
required in the Stalin era, and standard practice when Khrushchev and Brezhnev
led the Soviet Union.⁴⁰ One reason for this was that Gorbachev’s invitation to
Soviet historians to investigate Soviet history honestly and openly had the effect of
lowering the rhetorical temperature of the inevitable disagreements that ensued. It
also provided legitimacy to the efforts of historians to write a new kind of history
while still drawing on the old. More than a few tried to reconcile the orthodoxies
they had once accepted with contrary arguments that were now defensible in light
of new evidence. Some went even further, jettisoning Marxism-Leninism entirely.
The result was that, for the first time since the mid-1920s there existed in the
Soviet Union genuine diversity of opinion not only on the French Revolution and
its relationship to the October Revolution, but also on the relevance of the two
revolutions to the various challenges the Soviet Union was facing in the late
twentieth century. Unless they condemned the October Revolution as morally
illegitimate, Soviet historians could argue—and some did argue—that either or
both of the two revolutions were sui generis, and that the teleology socialists and
communists since Marx, Engels, and Lenin believed existed, in which the later
revolution continued what the earlier one began, was in fact chimerical. It was now
politically acceptable to argue, in other words, that the French Revolution and the
Russian Revolution were discrete events and should be evaluated accordingly.
Mikhail Gefter, in an interview in 1988, seemed intent on synthesizing the
longstanding Leninist orthodoxy on the French Revolution with his own idiosyn-
cratic interpretation of it.⁴¹ Thermidor, he said, was something all revolutions
experienced. With this no Leninist could disagree. Lenin had said the same thing
himself. But Gefter went on to argue that the course the Soviet Union had followed
in reaching Thermidor was particular to it, and that the Stalinism it entailed still
powerfully afflicted the Soviet people.⁴² In an article in 1989, S. F. Blumenau and
Iurii Afanasiev, who was by training a historian of France, repeated Lenin’s

³⁸ Itenberg, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzsaia revoliutsiia, p. 231. ³⁹ Ibid., p. 63.

⁴⁰ Jaurès, Aulard, and Mathiez—all of them convenient targets of rhetorical fusillades in the past—
go unmentioned in Itenberg’s book, which exceeds two hundred pages.
⁴¹ Mikhail Gefter, ‘Stalin umer vchera’, in Inogo ne dano edited by Iu. N. Afanasiev (Moscow, 1988),
pp. 297–322.
⁴² Ibid.; Giuseppe Boffa, The Stalin Phenomenon (Ithaca NY, 1992), pp. 184, 187.
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assertion, without including any rejoinder of his own, that the French Revolution
was ‘a bourgeois democratic revolution’.⁴³ But they also cited dissenting opinions,
even François Furet’s, fairly and non-polemically, and showed considerable famil-
iarity not only with what historians in France had written about the French
Revolution but also with the contributions some of them, such as Fernand
Braudel, had made to the study of European history generally.⁴⁴ Yet another
Soviet historian, V. P. Smirnov, while lauding the French Revolution the way
earlier historians had done for its progressive effects on the subsequent course of
European and Russian history, also called on his colleagues to apply to it the ‘new
thinking’ Gorbachev wanted the Soviet people to apply to all aspects of life.⁴⁵ This
meant that the elevated ethical pronouncements of the revolution, such as the
Declaration of the Rights of Man, were more than empty rhetoric to disguise
simple greed. The rights the declaration proclaimed existed independently of the
material circumstances that Smirnov still believed gave rise to them. In fact, they
were the ultimate progenitor of the United Nations Charter, the Universal Dec-
laration of Human Rights, and the Final Act of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which,
in the case of the Helsinki Accords, imposed unambiguous moral obligations on
Soviet Union for having signed it.⁴⁶ The French Revolution was therefore not just
the paradigmatic bourgeois revolution; it was also, in its ethical aspirations, a
universal revolution, its uplifting message applicable everywhere. In sum, it was
‘one of the greatest achievements of civilization’.⁴⁷
Of course not everyone who played a significant role in the revolution was of
high moral character. Babeuf, according to Smirnov, was actually a forerunner of
the ‘barracks communism’ that often deformed the Soviet Union by prescribing a
form of ‘artificial egalitarianism’ that required the regulation of the minutest
details of everyday life.⁴⁸ This in turn necessitated unrelenting surveillance and
an extreme centralization of political power not dissimilar to that which Jacobins
preferred. Smirnov did not refrain from citing the relevant statistics on the Jacobin
Terror, including not only the number of lives it extinguished, which he estimated
at 17,000, but also the number of arrests, which he surmised to have been roughly
a half-million. Quoting Saint-Just’s demand that the government prosecute not
only traitors but the much larger number of Frenchmen who were merely
indifferent to the revolution, Smirnov ascribed the slaughter Saint-Just and his

⁴³ Iu. N. Afanasiev and S. F. Blumenau, ‘Diskussii vokrug Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii’, in

Frantsuzskii ezhegodnik, p. 33.
⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 11.
⁴⁵ Smirnov, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia i sovremennost’, pp. 55–65.
⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 58. The accords were the first document on human rights the Soviet Union signed. By
doing so it also tacitly acknowledged the legitimacy of the Universal Declaration, in the original vote
on the adoption of which in the United Nations in 1948 the Soviet Union had abstained. Mary
Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(New York, 2001), p. 228.
⁴⁷ Ibid., pp. 55, 59. ⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 60.
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compatriots on the Committee of Public Safety carried out to their belief that they
were acting virtuously, that they intended a more just and equitable society, and
thus believed that any method they employed to achieve it was justified.⁴⁹
When Smirnov turned to the Soviet Union, however, his allegiance to Lenin
and Leninism returned with a vengeance. He allowed that, for a long time, human
rights had not been observed in the Soviet Union. But Stalin, not Lenin, was
responsible for that lamentable fact.⁵⁰ In that respect, as well as in others,
Stalinism was a betrayal of Leninism, and for that reason there was nothing
wrong in Stalinism that the resurrection of the original ideals of the October
Revolution could not eliminate. That the Soviet Union, under Stalin, had taken a
wrong turn did not mean Soviet historians today could not assist the Gorbachev
regime in its efforts to resume the heroic endeavour the French Revolution had
begun and the October Revolution continued of creating a humane and just
society—by which Smirnov meant one that was socialist—wherever it was possible
to do so. In his conclusion, he even predicted that since proceeding from capit-
alism to socialism could be peaceful, the violence both of these revolutions
required to succeed could be avoided.⁵¹
V. G. Revunenkov also changed his views on the French Revolution in the
Gorbachev era, embracing in 1989 a position he had previously rejected.⁵²
Revunenkov’s earlier view was that the bloc the Jacobins led in the mid-1790s
provided protection for classes and categories of the population that were not
bourgeois, as the Jacobins were. Despite the confluence of interests that caused the
two principal entities in the bloc to agree to it, the relationship was not based on
any kind of equality. The Jacobins were clearly dominant. In 1989, however,
Revunenkov wrote that ‘the bloc of popular plebeians, workers, and peasants’
who joined forces with the Jacobins were not their junior partners but rather ‘the
driving force of the revolution itself ’.⁵³ In fact, in Revunenkov’s revised rendition
of the French Revolution, the plebeians rather than the Jacobins were its galvan-
izing force, even while the latter were in power. He even quoted from an article
Marx had written in 1848 to make the point that the Jacobins were not the only
ones in France effectuating a bourgeois revolution after the bourgeoisie, consumed
by its own cowardice, refused to continue it. The lower classes played a role in this
endeavour no less essential, or perhaps even more essential, than that of the
Jacobins. Confronted by enemies all around them, these revolutionary elements
of the lower classes
fought only for the realization of the interests of the bourgeoisie, albeit by non-
bourgeois means. The French terror in its entirety was nothing more than the

⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 61–3. ⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 59. ⁵¹ Ibid., p. 65.

⁵² V. G. Revunenkov, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia i traditsii izucheniia i novye podkhody’,
Voprosy istorii, no. 5 (May 1989): pp. 98–116.
⁵³ Ibid., p. 99.
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application of plebeian means of dealing with the enemies of the bourgeoisie,

with absolutism, feudalism, and meshchantsvo [the narrow-minded elements of
the petit bourgeoisie].⁵⁴

In the same article, Revunenkov made clear his (partial) rejection of the conven-
tional wisdom that had prevailed before the Gorbachev era by including
Mirabeau and Lafayette with Robespierre and Marat in the pantheon of heroes
the Bolsheviks had established even before the Soviet Union existed.⁵⁵ Even more
heretical was his acknowledgement that Stalinist historians ‘canonised the
Jacobin dictatorship, glossed over its internal contradictions, and idealised the
Jacobin terror’.⁵⁶ But one can also find judgements in the article with which Lenin
could have agreed. One example was the author’s acknowledging Napoleon’s
destruction of the French republic but nonetheless pronouncing the emperor’s
influence on history progressive because he helped to transmit the ideals of the
French Revolution to the rest of Europe.⁵⁷ There are several others as well. But
these did little to enhance Revunenkov’s reputation among Soviet historians. The
problem was not inaccuracies or omissions. Rather, it was one of timing. Revu-
nenkov rejected the Leninist orthodoxy when it prevailed among Soviet historians
prior to the Gorbachev era, but then accepted large aspects of it just when Soviet
historians, in the Gorbachev era, were questioning it and even, by 1988 and 1989,
openly rejecting it.
In the case of the French Revolution, there were many examples of this. In 1988,
V. Sergeev wrote openly that Robespierre was a hypocrite and an opportunist,
compared to whom even the Girondins—the bête noir of Soviet historians for
decades—were morally preferable.⁵⁸ At the same time, Sergeev argued that the
Jacobin terror was best understood not as a political manifestation of class
struggle, but as an effort to curb simultaneously the waning domination of the
aristocracy and the growing domination of the bourgeoisie. But if the principal
consequences of the terror were economic, its origins, because they were traceable
to Rousseau, were political and ideological. In other words, Sergeev was openly
reversing the causality central to Marxist and Marxist-Leninist ideology between
ideas and the material conditions in which people live.
It was one thing for Soviet historians, as individuals, to write articles implying
that they harboured reservations about the way history had been written earlier in
the Soviet Union. It was another thing for them to repudiate Marxism entirely.
But perhaps the most extreme manifestation of their intellectual independence

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 103. The article Revunenkov quoted from is K. Marx, ‘Burzhuaziia i kontrrevoliutsiia
(1848)’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Sochineniia, 2nd edn (Moscow, 1955), vol. VI, p. 114.
⁵⁵ Revunenkov, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia i traditsii isucheniia i novye podkhody’, p. 116.
⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 109. ⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 116.
⁵⁸ V. Sergeev, ‘Tigr v bolote’, Znanie-sila no. 7 (1988), pp. 65–74. The tiger in the title comes from
Pushkin, who once called Robespierre ‘a sentimental tiger’. Manfred, Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliut-
siia, p. 392.
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and professional autonomy was organizing conferences and symposia in which

judgements were rendered on subjects of their own choosing, rather than the
government’s.
One such conference, in Moscow in September 1988, was sponsored by the
history section of the Academy of Sciences. Just a few years earlier sponsorship by
the academy would have imposed an ideological straitjacket on the participants.
But now things were different. Thirty historians of the French Revolution gath-
ered for the explicit purpose, in the words of its official announcement, of freeing
the history that will henceforth be written on the revolution from ‘dogmatic
schematizations and stereotypes’.⁵⁹ Given the mindset that years of political
indoctrination had created among historians, one might think that the historians
at the conference, after rejecting the prevailing dogma on the revolution, simply
substituted another one. But this was not the case. While most participants
rejected both what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had believed about the French
Revolution and the Marxist conceptual framework that was used to explain it,
the variety and multiplicity of the presentations at the conference belied the
conclusion that, in this particular instance, the cure was just as bad as the disease
it was intended to ameliorate.
H. H. Bolkhovitinov, for example, rejected the Bolsheviks’ ritualized idealiza-
tion of the Jacobins, especially of Robespierre, Marat, and Saint-Just, as ‘knights
without fear or any reason for reproach’.⁶⁰ The Jacobins, he reminded his colleagues,
practised terror not only against reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries, but
against the plebeians and the sans-culottes, whom he described as ‘the true avant-
garde of the revolution’.⁶¹ In Bolkhovitinov’s description, the Jacobins were revo-
lutionaries and counter-revolutionaries simultaneously. To consider them with
anything other than ambivalence was to reduce the practical complexities of history
to an unrealistic simplicity. In fact, the ascription of historical events to economic
factors alone was profoundly misleading. What drove the Jacobins to do what they
did was their ideology, which Bolkhovitinov traced intellectually to the Enlighten-
ment.⁶² Another participant, D. A. Rostislavlev, stated that the differences separat-
ing the Parisian plebeians from the most radical Jacobins were intellectual, political,
and programmatic, and had little to do with class and class interests.⁶³ This, in fact,
was why the overthrow of the Jacobins on 9 Thermidor was so easy and bloodless.
Echoing Rostislavlev, but adducing different evidence for the primacy he placed on
ideas at the expense of economic considerations, both Ye. E. Guseinov and S. Ia.
Karp, in separate presentations, argued against any neat schematization of the
traditional Jacobin–Girondin dichotomy: in Guseinov’s opinion, the Girondins

⁵⁹ Chudinov, ‘Nazrevshie problemy izucheniia istorii velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii’, p. 65.

⁶⁰ Quoted in ibid., p. 66. The reader will recall that the Bolsheviks applied the same encomium, after
his death, to Felix Dzerzhinskii, the first head of the Soviet political police.
⁶¹ Quoted in ibid., p. 66. ⁶² Ibid., p. 66. ⁶³ Ibid., p. 68.
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welcomed support anywhere on the spectrum of economic classes they could find it,
while in Karp’s neither the Jacobins nor the Girondins were politically or ideologic-
ally monolithic.⁶⁴ Yet another participant, E. V. Kiselev, enlarged Karp’s conclusion
to describe the bourgeoisie as a whole.⁶⁵
Other participants were even more direct in rejecting the fundamental tenets
and vocabulary of Marxist-Leninist history as it pertained to the French Revolu-
tion. L. A. Pimenova said she much preferred calling the ancien régime an ‘old
order’ rather than a ‘feudal order’ because the latter descriptive implied an overly
schematized view of French history.⁶⁶ N. Iu. Plavinskii went even further, arguing
that calling the Enlightenment a reflection of bourgeois class relations was sim-
plistic.⁶⁷ Rather, he said, it was a self-contained intellectual movement from which
counter-revolutionaries could extract as much that was congenial to their conser-
vatism as revolutionaries could find that was supportive of their radicalism. Both
sides in the French Revolution, in other words, had a valid claim to be the true
heirs and executors of the Enlightenment. Moreover, they both changed the ideas
they received from the Enlightenment to conform to their dichotomously opposite
needs and aspirations. But perhaps the most emphatic and direct repudiation, in
the context of the French Revolution, of the entire schemata of Marxist-Leninist
history was A. V. Gordon’s.⁶⁸ In the course of criticizing the orthodox view, as
articulated by E. B. Cherniak, that the Jacobins’ ‘utopianism’ was what made their
dictatorship vulnerable to a Thermidorian reaction, he rejected the whole notion
of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution.⁶⁹ The reason for his rejection
was that the revolution unleashed forces that, instead of reflecting class distinc-
tions, transcended them. Sometimes these forces were favourable to the bour-
geoisie; other times they were not. But whatever their provenance, their effects
were not reducible to the overly abstract concept of class.
Because the Soviet leadership, prior to Gorbachev, had always considered
history a form of politics, and in the last years of Stalin’s life a means of
transforming the very mental apparatus with which the Soviet people received
and interpreted the world around them, what was at stake at the conference
transcended history.⁷⁰ Even if only implicitly, the moral legitimacy of the Soviet
Union, based as it was on a mythology in which the French Revolution played an
essential and central role, was challenged, refuted, and even rejected. While
accepting the Leninist truism that the two revolutions and the regimes they
established were related teleologically, more than a few of the historians at the
conference reversed the ethical gloss communists since Lenin had placed on it.

⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 72. ⁶⁵ Ibid., p. 72. ⁶⁶ Quoted in ibid., p. 71.

⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 71. ⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 69.
⁶⁹ E. B. Cherniak, ‘1794-I god. Nekotorye aktual’nye problemy issledovaniia velikoi frantsuzskoi
revoliutsii’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 1 (1989): pp. 77–95; Gordon also disparaged Cherniak’s
view as ‘overly schematic’. Ibid.
⁷⁰ Tucker, ‘Stalin and the Uses of Psychology, especially pp. 151–66.
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Instead of prefiguring, in its own moral virtue, that of the October Revolution, the
French Revolution was a precursor of the horrors the October Revolution made
possible by creating the Soviet system that was responsible for them. One such
historian, V. P. Smirnov, stated openly that ‘the Jacobins created, for the first time
in history, a system of mass terror organised by the state’.⁷¹ His implication that
the terror Lenin and Stalin later unleashed was a more effective and comprehen-
sive replication of what the Jacobins had done was unmistakable and, one
suspects, deliberate. Explicit agreement with what Smirnov had merely implied,
namely that the presence in France’s economy before 1789 of distinctly capitalist
elements showed that the revolution merely changed the political context in which
these elements were evolving, came from A. V. Ado. History itself, he suggested,
was evolutionary, rather than a series of stages punctuated by rapid and trans-
formational upheavals—an opinion that, if applied to France in the eighteenth
century, implied that the revolution that began in 1789 was unnecessary: the
economic and social trends discernable in the late eighteenth century would have
continued into the nineteenth even without it.⁷²
In and of itself, Ado’s implication was heretical enough. But in his remarks he
went even further. The Terror of the Jacobins, he said, was nothing less than ‘the
older brother’, of Stalin’s.⁷³ Of course Soviet historians had said precisely that,
albeit in different ways, practically for the duration of Stalin’s rule. But their
judgement of Stalin’s Terror—that it was not only necessary but also the most
obvious manifestation of the moral virtue both the Jacobins and Stalin
embodied—Ado rejected completely. What Soviet historians and occasionally
Stalin himself had praised, he now condemned. Indeed, one year later,
V. Sergeev, in the aforementioned article in which he eviscerated Robespierre as
a hypocrite and flayed the Jacobins for perverting Rousseau’s ideas in how they
applied them to governance, condemned the Jacobins not simply for establishing a
model Stalin followed and then quickly surpassed. In addition, he held Robe-
spierre and the Jacobins responsible—along with Stalin, Lenin, and the October
Revolution itself—for Stalinism. The Jacobins, in other words, had helped to cause
Stalin’s Terror even though it occurred over a century after the Jacobins had lived
and died. It was in this context that Sergeev coupled his condemnation of
Stalinism with an expression of hope that, by learning about the French Revolu-
tion, the Soviet people would come to understand better the most morally
egregious aspects of the October Revolution.⁷⁴

* * *
One could easily write a history of modern France—or even a history of modern
Europe—that considered much of what followed the French Revolution a

⁷¹ Chudinov, ‘Nazrevshie problemy izucheniia istorii velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii’, p. 66.

⁷² Ibid., p. 70. ⁷³ Quoted in ibid., p. 66.
⁷⁴ Sergeev, ‘Tigr v bolote’, p. 74.
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commentary on it, in which three broad opinions would be discernible: some

judging the revolution excessive, others considering it sufficient, and still others
viewing it as insufficient, and thus requiring additional revolutions either to
complete its agenda or to improve on it. Those espousing in France the last of
these three opinions got their wish. Revolutions erupted there in 1830, 1848, and
1871.⁷⁵ The revolutionaries responsible for these upheavals were well aware of
their provenance in the original revolution, and the result was not farce—in
keeping with how Marx famously encapsulated the historical relationship between
the two Napoleons—but rather, paraphrasing Eugen Weber, the creation of a
‘revolutionary tradition’.⁷⁶ The phrase itself might seem oxymoronic, but histor-
ically it was not. The revolutions in France in the nineteenth century were
distinctively conservative, even though what was being preserved was the convic-
tion that the country required radical change for social justice to be achieved, and
that the first steps towards the realization of a government and a society that
provided it had been taken in the late eighteenth century, beginning in 1789.
The question that now must be addressed is whether the Bolsheviks and their
successors, the Soviets, saw these later revolutions as comprising, with the original
one, a larger tradition of revolution, and if that was the case, whether these later
revolutions were as useful as the first one in conceptualizing a mythology legit-
imizing the October Revolution and the Soviet system that emerged as a result
of it. These later nineteenth-century revolutions will be treated separately and in
chronological order, and hopefully without obscuring what made each of them
unique. But they are included here primarily to demonstrate that together with the
first one they left behind a tradition, established and confirmed in France but
sufficiently applicable elsewhere in time and space to be adapted in the Soviet
Union in order to confer additional legitimacy—above and beyond what
Marxism-Leninism provided—on the intrinsically ennobling enterprise of build-
ing socialism and communism. Within this revolutionary tradition, in other
words, could be found not only a veritable panoply of mistakes to be avoided,
but also tactics and strategies to be adopted, policies on taking power to be
pursued, and characterological traits, as these were manifested by particular
French revolutionaries, to be emulated.

⁷⁵ One can fairly consider the establishment of the Paris Commune a French revolution even though
it occurred only in one city—albeit the most populous and the most politically consequential in the
entire country—because its repercussions extended well beyond Paris to the rest of France.
⁷⁶ Eugen Weber, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Fallout’, in The Permanent Revolution: The French
Revolution and its Legacy: 1789–1799, edited by Geoffrey Best (London, 1988), p. 181. Marx’s exact
words, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 15, were: ‘all facts and personages of great
importance in world history occur, as it were, twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’. In
the first part of the statement, Marx was paraphrasing Hegel.
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PART II
1830
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12
The Revolution That Stopped Too Soon

The French Revolution did not ‘cause’ the revolutions that followed it. But by
providing them a mythology their leaders could draw on in expressing, defending,
and justifying their own particular actions and objectives, the French Revolution
helped to legitimize these revolutions for millions of Frenchmen. When Lafayette,
to sanction the overthrow of the Bourbons and their replacement by the Duc
d’Orléans in 1830, embraced the new king on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville in
Paris, someone in the approving crowd below the two men passed to them a large
tricoleur.¹ In February 1848, the newly created Provisional Government formally
established the Second Republic precisely where the Bastille had once stood;
shortly afterwards the throne of the former king was transported to the same
location and unceremoniously burned.² And in March 1871 Parisians called the
new government they established a commune, in imitation of the institution of the
same name in the French Revolution; two months later the Communards put in
place a new institution of governance and called it a committee of public safety
because they still thought that replicating the vocabulary of the French Revolution
might inspire their defenders to protect them successfully.
But these obeisances were intended not just to safeguard the revolutions that
followed the original one. They also were meant to demonstrate that program-
matically and ideologically these revolutions were its successor—that having
solved only some of the problems afflicting France, the original revolution of
1789 required additional revolutions to finish what it had begun; for some this
required emending the original revolution’s agenda, which, to a significant degree,
was what the Revolutions of 1830, 1848, and 1871 intended. What these revolu-
tions were not intended to create—but which they created anyway—was a coher-
ent revolutionary tradition transferable to other countries, such as Russia, where it
could be infused into ‘native’ mythologies legitimizing objectives no less grandi-
ose, adventurous, and all-encompassing in their applicability than anything that
had been envisioned in France. That in Russia the ideology determining these
objectives came from Germans, not Frenchmen, and was mediated in its

¹ David H. Pinckney, The French Revolution of 1830 (Princeton NJ, 1972), p. 162.
² Agulhon, Marianne into Battle, p. 67; Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York,
2008), p. 56.
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application by Russian national history and culture, in no way diminishes what

France’s revolutions and revolutionaries contributed to it.
* * *
That the Revolution of 1830 failed to capture the Bolsheviks’ imagination to the
extent to which the other revolutions in this revolutionary tradition were able to
do is undeniable. Neither they nor their predecessors in the Russian revolutionary
movement wrote much about it, and what they wrote showed a singular lack of
passion. This is understandable. Compared to 1789, 1848, and 1871, 1830 lacked
high drama. There was nothing in the revolution comparable to the storming of
the Bastille or to the June Days in 1848, when the lower classes battled French
army soldiers valiantly but to no avail, or to the martyrdom the Paris Commune
projected because so many Communards lost their lives defending it. The over-
throw of Charles X and his replacement by Louis Philippe were too easy. Fighting
was limited to three days, and only four days elapsed between its cessation and
Charles’ abdication; one week after that Louis Philippe was proclaimed the King of
the French. Moreover, the latter enjoyed sufficient legitimacy, at least during the
first years of his reign, so that no lavish coronation was considered necessary, and
once the king took power, nothing like the Jacobin Terror was required to protect
it.³ Indeed, the king resisted calls to execute ministers who had served the
Bourbons.⁴ Finally, the Revolution of 1830 lacked the supranational and univer-
salist aspirations of the French Revolution. European monarchs, most of them
conservative, concluded correctly that it posed no threat serious enough to require
the application of military force to defeat it. Instead, an uneasy equilibrium
prevailed, as neither Louis Philippe nor Prince Metternich, perhaps the most
visible symbol of political conservatism in Europe, saw fit to challenge the de
facto political division of Europe between liberal regimes like France and conser-
vative ones like Austria.⁵
It is not surprising that the only art and literature the revolution inspired that
resonated with future generations, and became part of a seemingly timeless
revolutionary mythology in France and elsewhere, were Delacroix’s iconic ‘Liberty
on the Barricades’ and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.⁶ But the events of the
revolution itself—their alacrity, the relatively prosaic way in which they unfolded,
and the fact that they occurred predominantly, if not entirely, in Paris, leaving
other Frenchmen either ignorant of them or mere observers—were not the only

³ Rapport, 1848, 23. Later in the decade the situation changed, and there occurred the first of eight
assassination attempts on the king’s life, all unsuccessful, until his abdication in 1848. Tombs, France
1814–1914, pp. 21, 366.
⁴ Tombs, France 1814–1914, p. 11.
⁵ Jonathan Sperber, Revolutionary Europe 1780–1850 (New York, 2013), p. 366.
⁶ That Hugo’s novel was published in 1862, thirty-two years after the revolution, and that much of it
takes place well before it began, would seem to qualify severely any claim that the 1830 Revolution was
the only reason for the novel’s fame. Nor should there be any doubt that many who read the novel
appreciated it more for its literary merit than for its political message.
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reasons it failed to appeal to the non-rational aspects of the mind so conducive

of the passions from which mythologies of any kind, not just revolutionary ones,
are able to emerge. There was another reason the 1830 Revolution, at least in
comparison to the other French revolutions, failed to stir emotions. The Revolu-
tion of 1830 was not much of a revolution at all. Despite the transformational
implications of the word itself, this particular revolution did not change very
much. Louis Philippe was aware of the symbolism implicit in his eschewing the
royal robes and crowns of the Bourbons for an ordinary business suit. But his
regime, as François Furet has pointed out, was more like the Bourbon Restoration
that preceded it than supporters of either dynasty, the Bourbon or the Orléanist,
were willing to acknowledge.⁷ Other historians have noted that the revolution,
other than substituting one royal family for another, did not precipitate dramatic
changes in the kinds of people running the government.⁸ Both before and after
1830 the institutions of governance were staffed predominantly with the so-called
notables—the amorphous but nonetheless distinctive social stratum that had
emerged in the French Revolution from the economic fusion of the landed upper
classes and the urban bourgeoisie.⁹ What changed in 1830 was that notables who
rejected the French Revolution and accepted the restoration that followed it were
replaced by notables for whom the opposite was the case.¹⁰ Because by 1830
industrialization in France had barely begun, the crowds that participated in
the July Days consisted of artisans and skilled workers rather than an actual
proletariat.¹¹ For this reason the revolution that occurred in 1830 was not, in
Marxist terminology, a proletarian revolution, nor even a true bourgeoisie revo-
lution. The members of the Chamber of Deputies who were elected after the
revolution were remarkably similar in their economic status to those who had
served in its pre-revolutionary predecessor.¹² Fully 90 per cent were landowners,
and as late as 1846, almost one-third were titled nobility.¹³
The Revolution of 1830, in sum, was a predominantly political affair, driven
mainly by a widely shared desire to be rid of the Bourbons once and for all. Louis
Philippe seemed cognizant of his lacking a mandate for transformational change,
and as ruler seemed guided by his sense of a juste milieu.¹⁴ Content to ‘muddle
through’, in much the way the Directors had tried to do in the late 1790s, the new
king’s moderation alienated the political extremes in France no less than the
Directors did, while the coterie of moderates that supported him shrank in

⁷ François Furet, Revolutionary France 1779–1880 (New York, 1988), p. 327.

⁸ Christopher H. Johnson, ‘The Revolution of 1830 in French Economic History’, in 1830 in France,
edited by John M. Merriman (New York, 1975), p. 147.
⁹ Pinckney, French Revolution of 1830, p. 277. ¹⁰ Tombs, France 1814–1914, p. 358.
¹¹ David H. Pinckney, ‘The Crowd in the French Revolution of 1830’, American Historical Review,
70, no. 1 (October 1964), pp. 1–17.
¹² Pinckney, French Revolution of 1830, p. 280. ¹³ Tombs, France 1814–1914, p. 123.
¹⁴ Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times: From the Enlightenment to the Present (New York,
1981), p. 109.
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numbers, so that another revolution seemed inevitable. But its occurrence in 1848
should not obscure the fact that the Orléanist regime he headed lasted eighteen
years, which, compared to other French governments of the nineteenth-century
prior to the Third Republic, was a long time.
For all of these reasons, the 1830 Revolution showed the Bolsheviks that not all
revolutions were equal, and that some were more useful than others. The 1830
Revolution was certainly one of the latter. But the Bolsheviks did not ignore it
entirely, and it influenced their thinking to the extent to which it strengthened
conclusions drawn from other, more stirring French revolutions. Moreover, it
helped them, in conjunction with what they knew about the Revolution of 1848
and the Paris Commune, to combine all three revolutions with the original one to
create in their own minds a genuine tradition of revolutions, of which their own
revolution would be the next one.
Having emerged out of the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century, the
Bolsheviks of course were influenced by what certain intelligenty had written
about the Revolution of 1830. Bakunin, who, until his last years, remained an
incorrigible optimist about all matters political, noted that the 1830 Revolution
confirmed the supremacy of the bourgeoisie in France, thereby consigning to
oblivion ‘the vestiges of feudal and clerical domination’ that still existed when the
French Revolution ended.¹⁵ As a result, the French nobility, after 1830, lost what
little chance it still had of taking power and holding onto it. According to Bakunin,
this was because the bourgeoisie, which by 1830 had become not just the domin-
ant social class but also ‘the defender and preserver of the state’, simply would not
allow this to happen.¹⁶ In fact, by turning on the lower classes that had initially
assisted it, the bourgeoisie seemed to ensure its political supremacy for the
immediate future. But in reading Bakunin’s comments on the revolution, one
senses that notwithstanding the evidence he himself provided of the lower classes’
political passivity and immaturity, he still harboured the secret desire for another
revolution, in which these classes would consign the bourgeoisie to well-deserved
oblivion. For Bakunin, a victorious revolution was always destined to follow
whatever event or series of events that left him, momentarily, disappointed.
Other intelligenty were not so optimistic. The 1830 Revolution showed Cherny-
shevskii that not all revolutions benefitted the lower classes. The problem, as he
later diagnosed it, was that in 1830 they engaged on the side of the middle classes,
who cared nothing for their interests or their needs.¹⁷ But to Chernyshevskii the
problem was not just that the lower classes had made a bad decision. Rather, their
decision reflected a broader aversion, a pervasive indifference to politics generally,

¹⁵ Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, p. 125.

¹⁶ Bakunin, God and the State (New York, 1970), p. 83.
¹⁷ N. G. Chernyshevskii, ‘Iiul’skaia monarkhiia’, in N. G. Chernyshevskii, Izbrannye sochineniia
(Moscow/Leningrad, 1928), vol. I, pp. 316–453.
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which explained why the lower classes had at one time supported the First French
Republic, only to embrace ‘Napoleon’s absolute monarchy’ a few years later.¹⁸
Even the striking workers in Lyon in the early 1830s, he noted ruefully, lacked the
requisite political sophistication to achieve their objectives, or at least to establish
an equilibrium in which neither side enjoyed any significant advantage. Only
when the lower classes embraced socialism would they have a real chance of
eliminating the political institutions that, acting as the agents of the bourgeoisie,
oppressed them. The only solace Chernyshevskii found in the entire debacle was
that the cluelessness of the lower classes was not their fault. In 1830 socialism
barely existed in France, but once it did, the liberals who had emerged victorious
in that same year would soon find their political and economic supremacy
challenged, and not long after that, finally ended.
For Alexander Herzen, 1830 was as much a disappointment as it was for
Chernyshevskii, with whom he shared the conviction that socialism was the
only remedy for the exploitation peasants and workers were destined to endure
wherever an Industrial Revolution occurred. Where he differed was in not finding
fault in the lower classes. Their passivity did not cause the Revolution of 1830 to
fail. Rather, the reason was that it was a political revolution that merely substituted
one ruling dynasty for another. Accordingly, it left the underlying economic
realities in France unchanged. The poverty that existed in France before the
revolution continued after it—which caused Herzen to profess his lack of surprise
when workers in Lyon and Paris actively protested their plight shortly after the
revolution ended.¹⁹ And since Herzen read about the revolution long after its
occurrence, its failure did not have the transformational effect on his ideology that
the failure of the next revolution in France would have eighteen years later.
For revolutionary intelligenty of the generation after Herzen’s, the 1830 Revo-
lution was part of a larger epoch in the emergence and early development of
socialism. Nothing about the revolution was sui generis, or even particularly
distinctive. Rather, in the opinion of Tkachev, it was a political revolution that,
by failing to remedy the economic hardships that caused it, made another
revolution inevitable. The changes the 1830 Revolution produced were beneficial,
but insufficient and, in the end, inconsequential.²⁰ In Tkachev’s analysis there was
little with which Kropotkin, who usually differed with Tkachev on tactical matters,
disagreed. The most complimentary observation Kropotkin could make about the
revolution was that it contributed to the Revolution of 1848. But that—no doubt
to Kropotkin’s regret—was the extent of its influence.²¹
For Marx and Engels, however, the Revolution of 1830 had special significance.
Marx learned of it at a young age from his father Heinrich, who sang not just the
Marseillaise but also Parisienne, the unofficial anthem of the revolution; once

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 415. ¹⁹ Malia, Alexander Herzen, pp. 101–2, 189.

²⁰ Tkachev, ‘Retsenziia no knigu A. Rokhau’, p. 193. ²¹ Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p. 6.
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when the former was sung, someone, possibly Heinrich, waved a handkerchief
made to resemble the tricoleur, with scenes of Parisians fighting on the barricades
in 1830 depicted as well.²² Marx’s first extended comment on the revolution was in
The Holy Family, in which he wrote that, after 1830, the liberal bourgeoisie
continued the progressive changes the French Revolution inaugurated but that
the Restoration had rudely interrupted.²³ The result was that the bourgeoisie no
longer saw the state as the instrument for achieving the liberation of everyone.
Instead, it now ‘acknowledged the state as the official expression of its own
exclusive power and the political recognition of its own special interests’.²⁴ For
that reason, and because the revolution did nothing to change the underlying
economic conditions that had prevailed since the late eighteenth century, a
subsequent revolution—a proletarian revolution—would still have to happen
before the exploitation from which the proletariat suffered first diminished and
then disappeared entirely.
One of Marx’s earliest comments on the revolution was that it changed France
from a system in which the king was the source of political authority to one in
which the king’s authority was henceforth given to him by the people.²⁵ While this
might fairly be considered a progressive development, according to Marx it
actually did nothing to lessen the proletariat’s oppression. But once the proletariat
realized this, its sense of betrayal would precipitate another revolution—and in
1848 it did. Marx fleshed out this idea in articles written two years after the
revolution in that year had been crushed.²⁶ Looking back on its closest precursor
chronologically, Marx stressed that the 1830 Revolution did more than substitute
Orléanists for Bourbons. It also ratified politically a change in the respective
influence and power of the various subclasses within the bourgeoisie: those
engaged in commerce and industry—‘railway kings’, along with the owners of
coal mines, iron works, and forests—joined with bankers and landed aristocrats—
which he said comprised a ‘finance aristocracy’—to form an haute-bourgeoisie
more powerful politically than the mostly petit-bourgeois Jacobins in the French
Revolution.²⁷ Strong enough to exercise power, if only fleetingly, in the last decade
of the eighteenth century, this petit-bourgeoisie, while strengthened in the early
nineteenth century by a large influx of urban professionals, was still too weak in
1830 to resist the growing dominance of the haute-bourgeoisie, which managed to
turn the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe into ‘a joint-stock company for the
exploitation of (France’s) national wealth’.²⁸

²² Sperber, Karl Marx, p. 28. It is not known if the handerkerchief was his possession.
²³ Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, p. 140. ²⁴ Ibid.
²⁵ Rubel, ‘The French Revolution’, p. 21.
²⁶ The articles were published in a journal, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Politisch-Oekonomische Revue,
that Marx produced and edited in London in 1849–50. In 1895 the articles were published as a discrete
essay, with an introduction by Engels, under the title The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850.
Personal communication with Jonathan Sperber (5 November 2018).
²⁷ Marx, The Class Struggles in France, pp. 33–5. ²⁸ Ibid., p. 36.
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By the time the Paris Commune was destroyed in the spring of 1871, its
bloodletting easily exceeding that which had occurred in 1830 and 1848, Marx
could look back on these earlier revolutions not only with the benefit of extended
hindsight, but with the memory of the Commune still vivid in his mind. In the
second draft of The Civil War in France, his magnum opus on the Commune,
Marx described what happened in France in 1830 not so much as a change in the
balance of power within the bourgeoisie as a transfer of political power ‘from the
landowner to the capitalist, and thus from a distant to an immediate opponent of
the workers’.²⁹ Moreover, the Orléanists the revolution brought to power were one
of the many ‘parties of order’ in France in the nineteenth century that used the
state as ‘an undisguised instrument of civil war’; the others that did so were
successively ‘Legitimist, bourgeois republican, and Bonapartist’.³⁰ Writing in
1871, Marx was able view the 1830 Revolution over la longue durée: he could
now situate it historically relative both to the revolution that preceded it and to the
revolutions that followed it, and determine how precisely it differed by virtue of its
occurrence at a different point in the larger history of industrial capitalism.
Central to everything Marx wrote about the 1830 Revolution was that by the
time it occurred, the bourgeoisie had advanced sufficiently since the French
Revolution so that, in any subsequent revolution, it would not, in the middle of
it, transfer to another class the responsibility history conferred on it of safeguard-
ing the emergence of industrial capitalism. This, of course, was what he thought
had happened in the French Revolution. By 1830, however, the ongoing economic
transformation of the French economy from one based on feudalism to a capitalist
one rendered a similar substitution unnecessary. In that year, workers helped the
bourgeoisie make a revolution of which the bourgeoisie was the principal bene-
ficiary, just as they had done in the French Revolution beginning in 1792. But
ending a dynasty in France was easier in 1830 than ending the monarchy itself had
been in 1792 and the bourgeoisie could more easily ignore the wishes and interests
of the lower classes—which by 1830 included an industrial working class growing
in size and becoming increasingly radical politically—and still not lose power.
Paradoxically, the bourgeoisie had an easier time of it in establishing (or re-
establishing) its political supremacy in 1830 than it did in 1789.³¹

²⁹ Quoted in Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, p. 229.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 230. By ‘Legitimist’ Marx meant supporters of the now powerless Bourbons.
³¹ In his 1895 introduction Engels described the 1830 Revolution in much the way Marx did—as a
political revolution that did nothing to change the material conditions in which the proletariat lived. In
that respect, according to Engels, it differed from the French Revolution, which, both in France and in
many other parts of Europe, ended one epoch in history, namely feudalism, and replaced it with
another, namely industrial capitalism. The 1830 Revolution, by contrast, substituted one subclass
within the bourgeoisie for another. But both of these revolutions were bourgeois revolutions, and as
such could not bring about the only thing that would eliminate the proletariat’s exploitation, namely
communism. F. Engels, Introduction to Marx, Class Struggles in France, p. 12.
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What Marx and Engels learned from the 1830 Revolution and its aftermath was
that revolutions do not end when the participants retreat or are driven from their
proverbial battle stations, which in the nineteenth century consisted mostly of
barricades. Setbacks occur, and that was what happened in France during the
three revolutions that followed the first one. But later generations would eventu-
ally resume the struggle, which Marx and Engels were certain would continue
until the oppression that caused revolutions to occur in the first place had been
eliminated. Viewed retrospectively, they could consider these revolutions, along
with their eighteenth-century progenitor and antecedent, organically related. This,
in itself, was cause for optimism. In the progression 1789–1830–1848–1871 there
was the comforting implication of inevitability. No revolution short of the prole-
tarian one yielding socialism and communism was self-contained. Each one, for
its own objectives to be achieved, required another one. And because Marx and
Engels believed that the progressive changes the dialectic made inevitable were
universal, there was no reason this teleology of revolutions could not cross the
borders between countries or even the seas between continents. As a result, later
revolutionaries in far-off Russia could easily convince themselves that to these
four distinct paroxysms of popular anger and discontent in France they would add
a fifth one of their own making. In sum, what the 1830 Revolution contributed to
the creation of this revolutionary tradition was in providing Marx and Engels an
early and very concrete manifestation of their view of history as the unfolding of
one economic system after another, with successful revolutions sounding the
death knell for one that was about to expire, and seemingly unsuccessful ones,
like that in 1830, silently weakening those that survived, thereby delaying their
destruction but not preventing it.
By both temperament and conviction the Mensheviks were inclined to follow
Marx and Engels faithfully. This was especially the case in deciding when exactly
revolutions should be attempted, and which classes should lead them. For Martov,
about whom it could be said, paraphrasing Shakespeare, that he loved Marxism not
wisely but too well, this meant that the 1830 Revolution demonstrated the limits
beyond which the bourgeoisie, in the early nineteenth century, was unwilling to go
in reforming France. Pseudonymously reviewing a book on Lafayette, Martov
called him ‘an ideologue of the bourgeoisie’, and implied strongly that what was
true of the Marquis was true of the class whose interests he had committed himself
to protect.³² For his part, Plekhanov thought more deeply about the revolution. In
the article written in 1889 to mark the centenary of the French Revolution, he
coupled 1830 with the unrest in Lyon in 1831, compared both to the English
revolutions of the seventeenth century (1642–51 and 1688–9), and concluded that
while in England the earlier revolution was the more influential of the two, in

³² Iu. Kedrov [Iu. Martov], ‘Obozrenie V. Ia. Bogucharskogo, Markiz’ Lafaiet: deiatel’ trekh revo-
liutsii ’, Zhizn’ 9 (September 1900): p. 359.
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France the reverse was true: 1830 did little more than ratify what began in 1789, but
the events in Lyon were a harbinger of the proletarian revolution Plekhanov was
convinced would eventually destroy bourgeois democracies wherever they existed
and make possible the construction of socialism and communism.³³ That his
prediction had not yet come true a full century after the French Revolution did
nothing to temper Plekhanov’s confidence in his own powers of prognostication
and, even more importantly as far as he was concerned, in those of Marx and
Engels. In 1889 Plekhanov was politically powerless, and thus could do little but
issue intellectual dicta that were empirically untestable. For this reason the elab-
orate structure and vocabulary Marxism provided for interpreting historical events
acquired, in his own mind, a reality that diminished his ability to comprehend the
realities that existed outside his own mind, in the world around him. This of course
was case for practically all Russian Marxists, with the partial exception of Lenin
and Trotsky, for whom political considerations sometimes overrode ideological
constraints. Until Russia experienced its bourgeois revolution, and thereby
reached the stage of history France had achieved over a century earlier, Mensheviks
like Plekhanov let their minds run free, the conceptual webs they weaved limited
only by the rigid concepts and categories of the Marxism they professed.
* * *
For many years Lenin wrote nothing about the 1830 Revolution. In the spring of
1905, he did not think to mention it when asking in an article if the ongoing
revolution in Russia resembled 1789 or 1848.³⁴ In 1906, in a speech to the Unity
Congress of the RSDLP, he finally referred to it, but only in explaining why the
proletariat in France in the early and mid-1840s might conclude that any revolu-
tion the bourgeoisie led would work to its own disadvantage.³⁵ In 1830, according
to Lenin, the bourgeoisie split economically between its more prosperous elem-
ents, which he described as ‘Legitimist’, and those that comprised the petit-
bourgeoisie, which in its political affiliation was Orléanist.³⁶ Lenin saw no need
to state that the republic that was established in 1848 failed. But he did promise his
audience that should the Bolsheviks find themselves in a situation resembling
France’s in 1848, they would not allow the bourgeoisie to destroy the proletariat;
instead they would seize power the way the Jacobins did in 1793 by taking over the
Convention. In 1909 Lenin once again mentioned 1830; this time he wrote that in
Russia another revolution was imminent, and for that reason Russian socialists
should not ‘liquidate’ their underground apparatus; Stolypin’s ongoing efforts to
de-radicalise the Russian peasantry the way Bismarck had tried to do was bound

³³ Plekhanov, ‘Stoletie velikoi revoliutsii’, p. 56.

³⁴ V. I. Lenin, ‘Revoliutsiia tipa 1789 ili tipa 1848’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. IX, pp. 380–2.
³⁵ V. I. Lenin, ‘Zakliuchitel’noe slovo po voprosu o sovremennom momente i klassovykh zadachakh
proletariata’, ibid., vol. XII, pp. 374–5.
³⁶ Ibid., vol. XII, p. 375.
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to fail. In fact, the future revolution would likely be followed by later ones, thereby
creating a teleology of revolution resembling the French, which included 1830
along with 1848 and 1871.³⁷ Lenin did not say what he would recommend once
this sequence in Russia was complete, but it seemed to follow that preparations for
a proletarian revolution should then commence.
Finally, in an article in 1911 Lenin explained what he considered the causes of
the 1830 Revolution, and how its results increased the gap between France and the
German states regarding the influence and power of their respective middle and
upper classes.³⁸ The 1830 Revolution, he affirmed, made France a bourgeois
monarchy, and to the extent to which it ensured that no other kind of monarchy
could ever emerge in France, it eliminated any chance of a second Bourbon
Restoration. (Here Lenin momentarily forgot about Louis Napoleon’s empire—
which in some ways resembled a monarchy—or did not think it prudent to
mention it.) The reason the revolution succeeded was that the Bourbons, by
1830, could no longer conceal the fact that they were supported by the nobility,
and that its support, rather than that of the ‘liberal bourgeoisie’—by which Lenin
meant the haute-bourgeoisie—was critical to the continuation of the dynasty. The
Revolution of 1830, however, was the result of the nobility’s increasing economic
obsolescence, and the revolution’s success in ending the Bourbon Restoration
ensured that this liberal bourgeoisie thereafter did not have to share power with
anyone. The implication in Lenin’s argument was that Louis Philippe was essen-
tially its puppet or, at the very least its political instrument. But this did not mean
that between 1830 and 1848 the bourgeoisie in France did not evolve. Because it
did, the result in 1848 was a government led by what Lenin called ‘a republican
bourgeoisie’, which he described as ‘a retrained, re-educated, and reborn’ version
of the original bourgeoisie that first gained power in the French Revolution.³⁹
Again Lenin compared France to the German states, where the aristocracy, prior
to Bismarck, never relinquished its hegemony, and the elements of the bourgeoisie
that were ‘liberal’ endeavoured to imitate it rather than to overthrow it, as
happened in France in 1830.⁴⁰
In all of these instances prior to 1917 in which Lenin directly or indirectly
addressed the 1830 Revolution, he considered it on its own terms and within its
own context. But in the celebratory speech he delivered to the Congress of Soviets
on 27 October 1917, as the Bolsheviks were completing their remarkably efficient
(and largely bloodless) insurrection in Petrograd, Lenin viewed it differently.⁴¹
After asking the proletariat in Great Britain, Germany, and France for their
support, to increase the likelihood of their doing so he mentioned the labour

³⁷ V. I. Lenin, ‘I. I. Skvortsovu-Stepanovu’, ibid., vol. XLVII, p. 224.

³⁸ V. I. Lenin, ‘Printsipal’nye voprosy izbiratel’noi kompanii’, ibid., vol. XXI, pp. 83–4.
³⁹ Ibid., vol. XXI, p. 84. ⁴⁰ Ibid., vol. XXI, p. 84.
⁴¹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Doklad o mire’, ibid., vol. XXXV, pp. 16–17.
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movements in each country, specifically the Chartists in England and the workers
in Germany who had sought the revocation of Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws. In
the case of France, he mentioned its workers, who ‘in uprisings repeatedly revealed
the strength of their class-consciousness’.⁴² Undoubtedly Lenin included the 1830
Revolution among these uprisings, and by the phraseology he used made clear that
he was referring to the quartet of revolutions in France that by 1917 had become,
in his considered opinion, a tradition with a collective meaning and mythology.
Although Lenin himself never again referred to the 1830 Revolution in his
writings and public statements, his opinion of it influenced other Bolsheviks.
That the Communist Party imposed no particular interpretation of it, nor thought
to include it in the grandiose theatrical productions in which the French Revolu-
tion figured prominently, made the expression of one’s sincerely held opinions
easier. Nevertheless, Lenin’s opinions on practically everything were too imposing
and formidable for the Bolsheviks to ignore, and what was written about 1830
in the Soviet Union prior to the Gorbachev era was basically a facsimile of the
Leninist original.
Among the first statements after Lenin’s death were David Riazanov’s. As
director of the Marx–Engels Institute since its creation in 1919, Riazanov was
uniquely qualified to opine on matters on which Marx and Engels had expressed
opinions. In his joint biography of Marx and Engels that was published in 1927, he
commented that the 1830 Revolution had occurred when both men were young,
and thus well before their political views had coalesced. For that reason it
exercised an outsized influence that earlier and later events lacked.⁴³ In fact,
Riazanov seemed aware that revolutions, because of the emotions they stirred,
were especially appealing to individuals with sensibilities like those of Marx and
Engels, whom he lauded for their insatiable curiosity about history.
As for the revolution itself, Riazanov described it as an event that transcended
its original time and place. Although it began in France, it ‘swept all over Europe
from West to East’, even inspiring an insurrection in Russia.⁴⁴ In its economic
effects, the Revolution of 1830 emancipated ‘the industrial, commercial, and
financial bourgeoisie’ from the hegemony of the old nobility, which had enforced
its waning, but nonetheless considerable economic supremacy throughout the
Restoration.⁴⁵ But instead of establishing a republic in 1830, which Riazanov
implied was the objective of the non-bourgeois elements of the population,
without whose support and participation the revolution would undoubtedly
have failed, the victorious bourgeoisie opted instead for a constitutional mon-
archy. The bourgeoisie, in other words, was the principal beneficiary of the
revolution even though the proletariat and impoverished peasants were its prin-
cipal instrument. The treachery and hypocrisy the bourgeoisie displayed that

⁴² Ibid., vol. XXXV, p. 17. ⁴³ Riazanov, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, p. 14.
⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 14. ⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 25.
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made possible such an advantageous outcome were characteristic of the class not
just in France but everywhere. But the advantage the bourgeoisie gained in France
in 1830 would soon be challenged by lower classes embittered by the events of that
year and increasingly aware that the bourgeoisie was the source of their own
exploitation.
The first significant expression of the radicalism this new awareness engen-
dered occurred in 1831, in Lyon, among workers in the silk industry. For a few
days, workers controlled the city, and while their demands were entirely eco-
nomic, their example prompted another revolt, also in Lyon, three years later.
Unfortunately, the workers who seized control of the city showed a lamentable,
but entirely understandable lack of ideological consciousness; their demands
remained economic, thereby demonstrating their ignorance of the imperative
essential to a successful proletarian revolution that the capitalist system as a
whole had to be destroyed before any appreciable improvement in their living
conditions could occur. But this in no way diminished the sense of betrayal the
workers experienced when the insurrection failed, and for that reason it was only a
matter of time before they would erupt in violence again.⁴⁶
As for Trotsky, who always viewed revolutions as a form of theatre in which the
participants played roles assigned to them by history itself, the Revolution of 1830
was the equivalent of a sideshow, its trajectory not long enough for its actors to
reveal the full extent of their heroism and bravery, and its consequences not
significant enough to warrant more than a few cursory references in his writings.
Trotsky, of course, was an aficionado of revolutionary bravura, and for him there
were other revolutions in Europe, most notably the Paris Commune, more closely
approximating in their theatricality the pathos he believed made for effective
propaganda, in which struggle led to victory, only to be followed by final defeat
and tragic martyrdom. In his 1925 treatise on what he believed would be the future
evolution of England, he commented that the 1830 Revolution was an impetus to
the Reform Bill the Parliament approved shortly afterwards—which for Trotsky
was hardly an encomium given his disdain for the political gradualism the reform
bill embodied; it graphically violated not only Trotsky’s ideological commitments,
but also his aesthetic sensibilities about how people engaged in politics should
act.⁴⁷ Twelve years later, in The Revolution Betrayed, written long after losing
power himself, the most Trotsky could say about the 1830 Revolution was that, by
substituting one ‘ruling upper crust’ for another, it transferred power not from one
class to another but within the bourgeoisie, thereby precluding any serious
challenge to the latter’s economic supremacy until 1848.⁴⁸ In fact, the particular
stratum within the bourgeoisie that benefitted from the 1830 Revolution would

⁴⁶ Ibid., pp. 25–6. ⁴⁷ Leon Trotsky, Where is Britain Going? (Ann Arbor MI, 1960), p. 22.
⁴⁸ Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? (New
York, 1972), p. 288.
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survive the revolution in 1848, and so dominate the country’s economy in the
second half of the nineteenth century that Trotsky, in 1917, considered it the
paradigmatic example of how high finance under capitalism could determine a
country’s politics and economy: ‘France is the classic land of finance-capital which
leans for its support on the petty bourgeoisie, and for that reason it was ‘the
financial interests of the French Bourse’ that prompted France to go to war in
1914.⁴⁹
Unlike Lenin, who valued the 1830 Revolution as an integral component of the
revolutionary tradition that began in France in 1789, Trotsky seemed to consider
it, if not sui generis, then certainly an event explicable on its own terms, rather
than as a transitional phase between the French Revolution that preceded it and
the revolutions in 1848 and 1871 that followed it. In Trotsky’s description, the
only lesson the 1830 Revolution imparted was to underscore the need, after the
French Revolution ended, for subsequent revolutions to consolidate the victory
the bourgeoisie had secured in 1789. But for Trotsky, 1848 and 1871, far more
than 1830, were linked organically to the original French revolution. While the
elements within the bourgeoisie that emerged victorious in the late eighteenth
century soon afterwards applied capitalist methods and principles in administer-
ing their newly acquired land, they remained a landed class. Not until 1830 would
they yield primacy within the bourgeoisie to more urban and commercial
elements—but even without the 1830 Revolution, this change in the relative
power of subclasses within the bourgeoisie was, to all intents and purposes,
inevitable. More broadly, one senses from Trotsky’s analysis that nothing that
happened in 1830 had to happen in order for another, more radical revolution to
occur.
Soviet historians, with few exceptions, adhered to a Marxist, or at least a class-
based, interpretation of the 1830 Revolution. N. I. Kareev, a Kadet who served in
the Duma but like many Russian liberals was radicalized by reading Cherny-
shevskii, Dobroliubov, and Lavrov, wrote a multi-volume history on how histor-
ians in France interpreted the French Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth
century. Not surprisingly, he saw the 1830 Revolution as a turning point in the
evolution of France from 1789 to 1848. He argued that 1830 marked ‘a new France
[that] was victorious over an old one’.⁵⁰ By this he meant the end of the conflict
between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie that began in 1789. In the comprom-
ise the 1830 Revolution brought about, the aristocracy retained its property but
lost its political power, and for that reason all hope of ever reversing the French
Revolution vanished. Like it or not, the supremacy it yielded to the bourgeoisie

⁴⁹ Leon Trotsky, ‘Democracy, Pacifism, and Imperialism’, Vpered (30 June 1917), in Vladimir Lenin
and Leon Trotsky, The Proletarian Revolution in Russia, edited by Louis B. Fraina (New York, 1918),
pp. 195, 196.
⁵⁰ N. I. Kareev, Frantsuzskie istoriki pervoi poloviny XIX veka (Leningrad, 1924), vol. I, pp. 13–14.
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was permanent. At first, the bourgeoisie had reason to believe that its interests
would be protected by the new Orléanist regime. But it soon recognized that what
it really wanted politically was democracy like that which later informed the
Second Republic until Louis Napoleon used it to create the Second Empire.
In that respect, the bourgeoisie was greatly influenced by histories of the French
Revolution such as Thiers’, which suggested that history was only rarely repetitive,
that the renunciation of power that cost the bourgeoisie so dearly in the French
Revolution at the hands of the Jacobins need not happen again, and that after
taking power in a future revolution, the bourgeoisie, instead of renouncing it as it
did in 1792, would retain it, and thereby ensure its long-term supremacy.⁵¹ In
addition, France had changed sufficiently since 1789 to render obsolete the
democracy the French Revolution practised after Louis XVI was guillotined and
the monarchy abolished. By 1830 the most appropriate system of government for
France, in the sense of meeting the needs of the dominant social classes, was the
‘bourgeois monarchy’ of Louis Philippe. In Kareev’s analysis, the Orléanist king
advanced the interests of the bourgeoisie because he shared its growing fear of the
lower classes. This in turn solidified the king’s credentials as a class monarch,
which enabled him to rule until 1848, long after one might think that changes in
French society had made his abdication and the end of the class monarchy he had
established inevitable.⁵²
In the Stalin era, history was made to serve the interests of the government to an
extent greater than it was when Lenin was alive, and also during the struggle to
succeed him after his death, when a party line did not exist or was difficult to
discern in the rise and fall of competing blocs based more on political interests
than ideology. This was certainly true for historians concerned with France. In
their works, references to the Revolution of 1830 were few. For Stalinist historians
as well as Leninist ones, the later revolution did not exude the universality that had
characterized the French Revolution. But it contained lessons relevant to present-
day politics that prompted Evgenii Tarlé, for one, to point them out. He included
in his aforementioned article in Pravda on the sesquicentennial of the French
Revolution a comparison between supporters of the 1830 Revolution in France,
who sought foreign assistance, and elements in France in the late 1930s who
betrayed their country by supporting Hitler and rejecting the Popular Front
against ‘German fascism’, which, when Tarlé was writing, the Soviet Union still
supported.⁵³
In the post-Stalin era, historians fortunate enough to have survived Stalinist
Terror resumed their endeavours unimpeded unless they violated specified canons

⁵¹ Ibid., p. 140. ⁵² Ibid., pp. 141–2.

⁵³ Tarlé, ‘Bor’ba s interventsiei’, p. 4. Tarlé’s article appeared on 4 July 1939; the Soviet Union and
Nazi Germany did not sign the Non-Aggression Pact, with a secret protocol attached to it, until
23 August.
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of Marxist-Leninist ideology as it applied to history. In reality, virtually everything

not forbidden was allowed. Among historians of France, even V. M. Dalin, who
had spent seventeen years in a labour camp, once again reiterated, seemingly
voluntarily, the Leninist mantra on the 1830 Revolution, writing in 1981 that it
marked a change in class relations above and beyond that for which the French
Revolution, four decades earlier, had been responsible. More broadly, 1830 com-
pleted the transfer of political power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie that
had begun in 1789. But the bourgeoisie in 1830 confronted the opposition of a
class, the proletariat, which barely existed when the French Revolution began.
Although the struggle between the two classes remained unresolved for the next
decade and for most of the one after that, in 1848 the bourgeoisie crushed the
proletariat’s heroic attempt, with assistance from impoverished peasants, to take
power itself. By destroying the Paris Commune, it did the same thing in 1871. But
because the supremacy of a retrograde class over a progressive one was never
permanent, the victories the bourgeoisie enjoyed in 1830, 1848, and 1871 were
pyrrhic ones. The October Revolution, while not sparking a proletarian revolution
in France, was nonetheless the first indication that a revolution there was inevit-
able; the only uncertainty concerned when exactly it would occur.⁵⁴ Similarly,
A. Z. Manfred, in 1983, described the 1830 Revolution as a moment in French
history, and in the history of the bourgeoisie in Europe, when a segment of the
class took power and thereby made permanent the gains its antecedents had made
in the French Revolution. After 1830 there would be no more restorations in
French history, at least none that were committed to the interests of the aristoc-
racy. While acknowledging that to achieve its objective in 1830 the bourgeoisie
required the assistance of ‘the monied aristocracy’, Manfred made clear, if only by
implication, that that requirement did not make the Revolution of 1830 a counter-
revolution.⁵⁵
* * *
To the Bolsheviks, the 1830 Revolution was a success. Replacing Bourbons with
Orléanists, notwithstanding that they both were royal families, was not without
significance in the inexorable ascendency of humanity from feudalism to capital-
ism. Nor, for that matter, was the change the revolution caused in the relationship
between the elements of the bourgeoisie, which benefitted from the revolution
more than it contributed to it, a trivial one. The revolution confirmed in France
(though not in other parts of Europe, including and especially Russia) the
legitimacy of the first French revolution—while also demonstrating that by 1830
the classes involved in that revolution had changed considerably. The bourgeoisie

⁵⁴ Tchoudinov, ‘The Evolution of Russian Discourse on the French Revolution’, p. 291. Dalin,
Istoriki Frantsii, pp. 38–41 and passim. One can glean Dalin’s views on the 1830 Revolution from his
comments on the French historians who described and interpreted it.
⁵⁵ Manfred, Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, p. 368.
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the lower classes confronted in that year and decades afterwards was not the
professionally minded bourgeoisie that had started the French Revolution. Rather,
it was now a commercial class engaged in finance, and increasingly, with the
passage of time, an industrial class. As such, it was more protective of its own
interests, and more willing to use military force—as it would in 1848—to ensure
its continued economic supremacy. In fact, the reason the bourgeoisie called on
the military to suppress the proletariat in 1848 was because the lower classes in
France had also changed dramatically since the late eighteenth century: the
artisans and craftsmen, whose support as sans-culottes was as critical to the
Jacobins’ victory in 1793 as the lack of it was to the Jacobins’ defeat in 1794,
had surrendered pride of place among the oppressed elements in France to a small
but growing industrial working class, the exploitation of which made it potentially
a stronger political force than that the sans-culottes had even showed themselves
to be in the 1790s.
Viewed retrospectively through the prism of Marxism-Leninism, the 1830
Revolution, which confirmed existing economic realities without creating any
new ones, was nonetheless an augury of better things to come—not only in France,
but also in Europe. To be sure, that was not the case for the revolution eighteen
years later. Viewed through the same lens, the Revolution of 1848 in France could
not plausibly be considered anything other than a disaster. Precisely because
expectations when it began of what it might accomplish were so high, its igno-
minious end in the semi-tragic, semi-farcical Second Empire of Louis Napoleon
seemed a cruel trick history had played on its supporters. The only solace one
could draw from the debacle was that the dialectic was not finished with France in
1848, that it would continue to cause economic conditions for the proletariat to
worsen until a proletarian revolution occurred either there, or somewhere else in
the world (as happened in Russia in 1917), and made things right. The defeat the
forces of virtue suffered in France in 1848 was a genuine tragedy, its pathos
underscored by the extravagant and utterly unrealistic hopes its outbreak had
generated. In the minds of the Bolsheviks, the Revolution of 1848 easily over-
shadowed the Revolution of 1830, which by comparison remained a mere episode
in the larger mythology French historians of the French Revolution, such as
Guizot, were already constructing when the revolution occurred, and of which
the Bolsheviks, years later, were well aware.
From the revolution that contributed the least to the French Revolutionary
Tradition—of which it was, nevertheless, an integral part—we now advance in this
teleology of revolutions to 1848, when there occurred a revolution of far greater
significance in the mythology the Bolsheviks constructed about their own revo-
lution and the regime it brought to power.
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PART III
1848
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13
The Revolution That Failed

The 1848 Revolution in France was a disappointment to those who had hoped it
would yield a socialist government. Nevertheless, the revolution did not lack for a
legacy radicals and revolutionaries of later generations found useful, even if it was
mostly a negative one, illuminating mistakes to be avoided rather than successes to
be emulated. But for Russian revolutionaries in particular there was another
reason to consider the revolution carefully. James Billington has described the
revolutions in Europe in 1848 as the last great upheaval on a continent that was
still, socially and economically, pre-industrial.¹ In much of Europe an Industrial
Revolution had not yet occurred, and in countries like France where it had already
begun, the working class still consisted to a large extent of self-employed artisans
and craftsmen, rather than a true proletariat labouring in outsized factories. In this
respect France was not so different from Russia that its revolutions had nothing
Russian revolutionaries might find useful in devising strategies for taking power in
their own country. Moreover, conditions in the countryside in France bore some
resemblance to those in Russia. Much of the peasantry in France, while assuaged
considerably by the property settlement of the French Revolution, was by no
means satisfied by the status quo as France approached mid-century; the 1848
Revolution was not limited to Paris. Nor was it limited to urban elements of the
population. Peasants participated in such large numbers and over such a large
expanse of the country that Peter Amann has described the revolution, in its rural
incarnation, as a peasant jacquerie, the last one in France until the Fifth Republic.²
From this, too, revolutionaries living in Russia, which was even more rural than
France, found both solace and encouragement, for it gave them grounds for
believing, optimistically, that Russian peasants, properly indoctrinated—or per-
haps without indoctrination at all—might prove at least as active politically as
their French counterparts in 1848.
Finally, as several French historians have pointed out, the revolution the French
experienced in 1848 was the result of rising expectations, triggered by rapid
industrial growth in the first half of the 1840s, followed by their rapid extinction
as poor harvests coincided with a financial and industrial slump; these events all at

¹ Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, p. 235.

² Peter Amann, ‘The Changing Outlines of 1848’, American Historical Review 68, no. 4 (July 1963):
p. 947.
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once caused agricultural prices to rise, consumer spending to drop, and

unemployment in towns and cities to ensue.³ The result was a ‘crisis of modern-
ization’ culminating in 1848 in a revolution driven not by those who had bene-
fitted from industrialization, but rather by those it harmed—urban artisans and
craftsmen unable to compete with an industrial labour force, and peasants in the
countryside, whose numbers were increasing faster than the number of jobs in
factories for those who had abandoned agriculture in favour of something more
reliable and remunerative.⁴ For this reason, the 1848 Revolution had special
meaning for Alexander Herzen and the Russian populists, who deemed industrial
capitalism an avoidable evil and looked instead to the peasant commune, with its
implications of socialism, as the instrument of Russia’s moral and political
rejuvenation. As for the Bolsheviks, who welcomed industrialization under the
auspices of a capitalist economy as a necessary prerequisite of socialism, the fact
that the 1848 Revolution was the first one in Europe to include elements intent on
establishing socialism was enough to obscure, if not to block out completely, its
origins in what was still a pre-industrial society.⁵ Although the 1848 Revolution
did not yield victories like those the French Revolution had achieved a half-
century earlier, or fail as poignantly as the Paris Commune would a quarter-
century later, it was not without its attractions for Russians intent on transforming
their own country radically and, if necessary, through violence.⁶
Of all the Russian revolutionaries prior to the Bolsheviks who ascribed the
failure of the 1848 Revolution in France to the treachery and hypocrisy of the
bourgeoisie, Herzen was the most directly affected by this ostensible betrayal.
Indeed, his furious denunciations both shortly after the revolution ended and
in works written long afterwards would cause later revolutionaries in Russia to
make his antipathy to the bourgeoisie their own. Herzen arrived in Paris in May
1848, in time to witness the June Days, the brutality of which seemed to him
emblematic of the moral bankruptcy not just of France but of Western Europe as
a whole. Far from an isolated incident unreflective of the unethical depths to
which Western Civilization had descended, the June Days, for Herzen, were its
microcosmic reflection. Thereafter he would dichotomize Europe ethically as well
as geographically, condemning its Western core as irredeemable, while apotheo-
sizing its Eastern periphery, specifically Russia, as the embodiment of all that was
morally pure and socially just. The element of betrayal loomed large in Herzen’s

³ The harvest in 1846 was the worst in a quarter-century. Tombs, France, 1814–1914, pp. 367, 371.
⁴ Rapport, 1848, p. 32.
⁵ Malia, History’s Locomotives, p. 218. The Bolsheviks might also have found off-putting the refusal
of the Second Republic—excepting only its efforts to foster Polish independence—to export its
revolutionary principles to other parts of Europe by means of military force, considering its mere
example sufficient to achieve the same objective.
⁶ Robert Gildea, ‘1848 in European Collective Memory’, in The Revolutions in Europe 1848–1849:
From Reform to Reaction, edited by R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (New York,
2002), pp. 234–5.
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explanation of the killings he condemned, for which he held primarily responsible

the liberals who had established the Second Republic and issued the orders to
Cavaignac’s troops to use all necessary force to disperse the Parisian lower classes
defending themselves: ‘The men who proclaimed the republic became the assas-
sins of freedom. . . . The liberal names that had resounded in our ears for a score of
years or so are today those of reactionary deputies, traitors [and] inquisitors.’⁷
Although Herzen continued to believe in the original principles of the French
Revolution, after 1848 he deemed them incompatible with the ‘statism’ he per-
ceived in the Second Republic, and considered Europe, not just France, politically
retrograde because of it.⁸
To be sure, Herzen had not liked everything he saw in Paris and in the rest of
France before the revolution began; his observations of the French countryside
while travelling to Italy in December 1847 convinced him that not everything in
the West was morally uplifting, and his description of Paris in the fall of 1847 as
‘unbearably oppressive’ because of ‘the unbelievable decadence’ surrounding him
makes clear that his seemingly sudden and unprecedented rejection of the West in
the summer of 1848 did not emerge ex nihilo.⁹ In addition, the failure of lower-
class Parisians in May to overthrow the National Assembly, which had been
established the month before, perturbed Herzen greatly; in his words, it ‘tore the
bandage from my eyes’.¹⁰ That said, the June Days profoundly affected Herzen
emotionally, unleashing paroxysms of anguish and despair that his earlier disap-
pointment in France had not come close to approximating, and he reacted to the
events in June with an anger suggestive of the moral and philosophical absolutism
characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia as a whole. Herzen described these
events in the ornate language to which he was often given when writing about
matters that produced an emotional response:
Paris! How long did that name burn as a lodestar for the nations; who did not
love it, did not bow to it? But now its time is past; let it disappear from the
stage. . . . Paris has grown old, and youthful dreams no longer become her. . . .
[T]he June Days did not revive Paris; and so the decrepit vampire draws still
more blood, the blood of the just, that same blood which on 27 June reflected the
fire of the torches lit by the exultant hands of the bourgeoisie. . . . What will come
of this blood? Who knows, but no matter what the issue, it is enough if in this
paroxysm of madness, revenge, discord, and retribution, the world that oppresses
the new man while keeping him from living, and thereby preventing the future
from being born, simply disappears. This would be magnificent, and so I say:
long live chaos and destruction.¹¹

⁷ Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shore (New York, 1956), p. 59. ⁸ Ibid., p. 61.
⁹ Malia, Alexander Herzen, pp. 365, 367. ¹⁰ Ibid., p. 371.
¹¹ A. I. Herzen, ‘Posle grozy’, S togo berega, in Herzen, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. V, 417–18.
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Herzen’s emotions in 1848—from the exhilaration that followed the overthrow of

the monarchy in February, through the disillusionment, and then the despair, that
ensued when it dawned on him that the moral bankruptcy and decadence of the
West could not be eliminated by political revolution alone—followed the same
parabolic trajectory that would ensue a decade later, after Tsar Alexander II
promised to abolish serfdom but then established in its place a system in which
most former serfs were still tied to the land.¹²
In short, Herzen took the defeat of the 1848 Revolution as a personal affront, an
insult to his moral and aesthetic sensibilities; as a result of it, France could never
again be worthy of his affection and respect. ‘Place any sort of military insignia on
a Frenchman’s cap’, he wrote not long after the June Days, ‘and he becomes an
oppressor’.¹³ Fortunately for Herzen, in the years that followed the revolution he
discovered what he considered the moral and political antithesis of everything he
found abhorrent in France, namely the obshchina, the uniquely Russian variant of
the peasant commune that, by providing for regular redistribution of the lands
peasants tilled, somehow imbued in them an egalitarianism Herzen considered
evidence of an instinctive rejection of private property. To all intents and pur-
poses, Russian peasants were, unwittingly, socialist, and Herzen’s conviction that
they practised social justice without consciously intending it only heightened their
moral superiority over the urban middle classes he observed in France.
Of course Herzen was not the only intelligent in the aftermath of 1848 to draw
the same comparison and to reach, more or less, the same conclusion. For
Bakunin, the class conflict between the working class and the bourgeoisie that
the June Days brought into unmistakable focus showed that compromise or
reconciliation between them was impossible; for that reason the June Days served
a useful purpose notwithstanding the many lives it extinguished.¹⁴ In Bakunin’s
vivid prose, two forces confronted each other in France in 1848: ‘the savage face of
the people’ and ‘a savage military force’ bent on the people’s total annihilation.¹⁵
The very brutality Cavaignac exhibited when he turned his killers loose was not
the result of cynicism, but of conviction. He was, in Bakunin’s estimation, ‘a very
sincere republican’, and the fact that an ostensibly democratic government had
resorted to extra-democratic means to survive was proof that such governments
could not, under any circumstances, serve as effective and ethical instruments of
revolutionary change.¹⁶ Instead, they should seek the improvements they desired
by activating the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, which in Russia pos-
sessed the additional virtue of being inherently anarchist, their commune tangible
evidence of their instinctive distrust of political authority.

¹² Herzen was so infatuated with Alexander before the harsh reality of the emancipation set in that
he called the tsar, with his customary hyperbole, the ‘Galilean’. Quoted in Adam B. Ulam, Prophets and
Conspirators in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (New Brunswick NJ, 1998), p. 44.
¹³ Quoted in Malia, Alexander Herzen, p. 378. ¹⁴ Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, p. 148.
¹⁵ Ibid., p. 157. ¹⁶ Ibid., p. 159.
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As for Chernyshevskii, who while the 1848 Revolution was still in progress
recognized its necessity after reading Guizot’s history of France, the joy he
experienced after the overthrow of Louis Philippe and the Orléanists, which he
believed would bring both power and material security to the lower classes, was
quickly dashed by what he considered the bourgeoisie’s unconscionable perfidy.¹⁷
Culminating in the June Days, it convinced him that the lower classes had made a
mistake not so much in allying with the bourgeoisie—in reality it could not
eliminate the monarchy by itself, and the bourgeoisie was its only conceivable
ally—but by maintaining the alliance long after it had lost its utility.¹⁸ Once
Cavaignac had killed so many of them, and in doing so had broken their backs
politically, the lower classes, in Chernyshevskii’s opinion, should have recognized
the virtue and the necessity of socialism, which was precisely what he himself did
one year later.¹⁹ But Chernyshevskii differed from Herzen and Bakunin in his
conviction that the Russian peasantry, while more amenable to socialism than any
of its Western European equivalents, was not yet ready for a socialist revolution;
when it would be, he gave no indication. Chernyshevskii’s contemporary, Pëtr
Zaichnevskii, who was also familiar with the events in France in 1848, was even
more critical of the French lower classes, stating flatly in his 1862 pamphlet,
Molodaia Rossiia, that only a dictatorship could have saved the revolutionaries
of 1848, whom he denigrated as ‘pitiful’ for not having established one.²⁰
Later Russian revolutionaries developed further the notion Herzen and Cher-
nyshevskii propounded that the 1848 Revolution was intended only to change the
political arrangements in France, and that by ignoring more fundamental eco-
nomic ones—the lower classes in France were no better off after the revolution
than before it—its failure was assured. This, at any rate, was the lesson the
chernoperedel’tsy drew from their collective analysis of the revolution; Plekhanov
and Axelrod, prior to their conversion to Marxism in the early 1880s, included it
among the revolutions in Europe that they considered evidence of a sort that by
seeking political change (through the assassination of government officials)
instead of spreading propaganda among the masses (for the purpose of inciting
a peasant revolution as soon as the objective preconditions for such a revolution
existed), Narodnaia Volia was reversing the proper sequence of events. Economic
change precedes and is a prerequisite of political change, not the reverse.²¹ The
revolutionaries in France in 1848, in other words, had made the same mistake the
terrorists in Russia were committing, even though the former engaged in mass
politics while the latter adopted a tactic that was essentially a substitute for it.

¹⁷ Dalin, Istoriki Frantsii, p. 17. ¹⁸ Venturi, Roots of Revolution, pp. 161–2.

¹⁹ He also proclaimed himself an admirer of Pierre Leroux and a supporter of Louis Blanc. William
F. Woehrlin, Chernyshevskii: The Man and the Journalist (Cambridge MA, 1971), pp. 55–6.
²⁰ P. Zaichnevskii, ‘Molodaia Rossiia’, in Politicheskie protsessy v Rossii 1860-x gg (po arkhivnym
dokumentam), edited by Mikhail Lemke (Moscow/Petrograd, 1923), vol. II, p. 513.
²¹ Itenberg, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, pp. 109, 133.
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Pëtr Kropotkin came to the same conclusion. The downfall of the monarchy in
1848 was of course a progressive development, but those responsible for it were
derelict in eliminating the economic inequalities the Orléanists, no less than the
Bourbons before them, had allowed to continue. The result was that for more than
a decade after 1848 French socialists were either silent or so disillusioned by the
failure in that year to address these issues that some of them rejected socialism and
settled on something less radical. The problem was not that the revolutionaries of
1848 failed to recognize the primacy of economic interests. Rather, it was that they
trivialized them, focusing on matters of tertiary importance, such as prison labour
and military pensions, instead of providing the lower classes with food, which in
Kropotkin’s idiosyncratic lexicon was a short-form for economic interests gener-
ally. For all of this, however, Kropotkin continued to consider 1848 one of the
three years in French history—1793 and 1871 were the others—when the ethical
abyss between centralized government and the people it exploited was most
apparent.²² By expressing his conviction in this respect, he was implicitly affirm-
ing the existence of a French revolutionary tradition—a tradition he believed
would continue until this exploitation finally ended with the establishment of
socialism. Having risen up to smite their oppressors unsuccessfully no less than
three times in the past—in 1793, 1848, and 1871—the people of France could be
counted on to do the same thing in the future, and as many times as might be
necessary to achieve, at last, their own emancipation.
Finally, Pëtr Tkachev, who believed that using terrorism to change the political
arrangements in Russia would lead inexorably to a peasant revolution transform-
ing the entire economy, acknowledged that in France in 1848 the same sequence
of events did not occur. Politics changed, but the existing economic realities,
which were inherently unfair and exploitative, continued. Not even ‘the barbaric
cruelty’ the bourgeoisie revealed during the June Days could force the lower
classes to radicalize what had been a political revolution by making it an economic
one.²³ Even the plans Louis Blanc had developed for the social transformation of
France were impractical.²⁴ Nevertheless, the history of France from Napoleon
Bonaparte to Louis Napoleon contained lessons Tkachev believed Russian revo-
lutionaries would do well to study carefully. Both in 1830 and 1848 the ruling
monarchy seemed impregnable. But ‘in one night, it lost all its power, and was left
without a roof and shelter, supine near the feet of those whom only yesterday it
could shoot or hang publicly’.²⁵ This particular phase of French history, in short,
demonstrated the positive possibilities of conspiratorial politics.
* * *

²² Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, pp. 7–8, 28, 52.

²³ P. N. Tkachev, ‘Retsenziia na knigu A. Rokhau’, in Tkachev, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. V, p. 191.
²⁴ Ibid., p. 192. ²⁵ Ibid., p. 193.
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All these revolutionaries left behind ideas, perceptions, theories, and recommenda-
tions on which the Bolsheviks would draw, adopting and adapting some, but not
others, in accordance with their own requirements at any particular time. But the
influence of Marx and Engels was more profound; the Bolsheviks were Marxists,
and perforce had to take seriously what Marx, and to a lesser extent Engels, had to
say about the 1848 Revolution in France. It is true that Marx and Engels spent
little time in Paris in the spring of 1848. After arriving in the French capital in
March, after which they established a branch of the Communist League, the
manifesto of which they had written earlier in Brussels, they left for Cologne in
April. To Marx and Engels the uprising in the German city seemed to them a
bourgeois revolution, like that in France a half-century earlier.²⁶ Their decision is
understandable. They were of course both German, and what they thought they
would witness would surely abide by the strictures of their ideology, and in doing
so confirm its validity. Prior to 1848 they were exceedingly sceptical that that
would happen soon. The most laudatory comment Marx had mustered in that
regard was in 1843, when he allowed that Germany ‘had barely reached [its]
1789’.²⁷ But once there, it took some time for Marx, at least, to realize that all the
German revolutions would likely fail. Not until July would he denigrate them, in
their totality, as a mere ‘parody’ of the original French Revolution.²⁸
One might think that Marx’s and Engels’ absence from Paris during the months
following their arrival in Cologne robbed their impressions of the events that were
occurring simultaneously in the French capital of a certain immediacy and an
intensity of emotion; the most notable of these were the June Days, the suppres-
sion by the National Guard one month earlier of demonstrations intended to force
the replacement of the existing assembly by one more sympathetic to the lower
classes, and the events that followed in the late summer and autumn culminating
in Louis Napoleon’s victory in the presidential election in December. But perhaps
surprisingly, that was not the case. In fact, the emotions stirred up by the events in
France in 1848 far exceeded in their intensity those engendered by the other three
French revolutions the two men either observed or analysed retrospectively. One
finds in Marx’s writings on 1848 in particular a degree of personal identification
and involvement, albeit more vicarious than real, that only increased as the initial
jubilation occasioned by the fall of the monarchy in February yielded to anger
after the June Days.

²⁶ Sperber, Karl Marx, pp. 214–7. Neither the Communist League nor the manifesto Marx and
Engels wrote for it had any discernible influence on the course of events in France (or anywhere else in
Europe, for that matter) in 1848. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, p. 279; Rapport, 1848, pp. 212–3.
²⁷ Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (New York, 1970), p. 128.
²⁸ Gerhard Kluchert, ‘The Paradigm and the Parody: Karl Marx and the French Revolution in the
Class Struggles from 1848 to 1851’, History of European Ideas, no. 14 (January 1992): pp. 85–99. In
1909 Lenin used the identical word in expressing his agreement with Marx’s mordant dismissal of these
German revolutions. V. I. Lenin, ‘Tsel’ bor’by proletariata v nashei revoliutsii’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XVII,
p. 388.
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But before Marx’s somewhat belated recognition that a proletarian revolution

in France was hopelessly premature could sink in and become the basis for more
rational calculations in the future, he and Engels beseeched the proletariat to take
advantage of what they both considered to be ‘the death throes’ of capitalism, and
carry out the task that history and the dialectic had conferred on it. Even the June
Days were not irreversible. In November 1848, in one of the many articles Marx
wrote for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the newspaper he had established the
previous spring and continued to edit until it was shut down on orders of the
Cologne police in May 1849, he advocated the establishment in France of a
revolutionary dictatorship based politically on the proletariat; should the prole-
tariat take power, it would not shrink from employing terror as ‘the only way in
which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes
of the new society [could] be shortened, simplified, and concentrated’.²⁹
By 1850, Marx had finally achieved the detachment necessary to explain why
the revolution in France two years earlier had failed, and why any effort to repeat it
would only yield the same desultory result.³⁰ In articles in the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung, he ascribed the defeat the proletariat suffered in Paris to several factors,
all of them, for different reasons, beyond the capability of the proletariat to have
vitiated sufficiently for the outcome of the revolution to have been different.³¹ For
one thing, universal male suffrage in elections to the National Assembly in April
worsened class antagonisms, making impossible the revival of any alliance
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat based on a perceived convergence of
interests (which, in fact, did not exist); this was confirmed in June when the
government closed the National Workshops, which had provided employment for
many workers and others. For another, while the revolutions in 1789 and 1848
included the replacement of a monarchy by a republic, what followed it differed
significantly in the two revolutions. In contrast to the French Revolution, where
the fraternité engendered by foreign invasion transcended class distinctions,
enabling the Jacobins to form a coalition attentive to the needs of the lower
classes, in 1848 no such invasion occurred. In fact, the June Days essentially
precluded France from assisting revolutionaries in other parts of Europe, as it
did in the 1790s, which Marx now considered absolutely essential to the survival
of any future revolution in France. From this he drew the larger conclusion that,
for any subsequent revolution to succeed in France, it also had to succeed in other

²⁹ Quoted in Michael Evans, Karl Marx (London, 2004), p. 137.

³⁰ It took longer for Engels to do the same. In 1851 he was still calling Louis Blanc ‘a pious little
swindler’, and in 1852 still writing that ‘the defeats in Paris in June 1848, and of Vienna in October’,
certainly did far more to ‘revolutionize the mind of the people of those two cities than the victories of
February and March’. ‘Letter, Engels to Ernst Dronke (9 July 1851)’, in Marx and Engels: Collected
Works, vol. XXXVIII, p. 381; Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany in 1848, p. 96.
³¹ All of the citations in the analysis of these articles are to Class Struggles in France, a compendium
of Marx’s articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on the 1848 Revolution that was published in 1895
with an introduction by Engels.
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countries, especially those that bordered it. In 1848, by contrast, the proletariat
and the bourgeoisie were on their own and thus the latter had no compunctions
about turning on the former four months after the revolution began and effect-
ively destroying it as a political force.³² In Marx’s own words, ‘the Paris proletariat
was forced into the June insurrection by the bourgeoisie. In this lay its doom.’³³
But even absent the licence the bourgeoisie rightly concluded it possessed to
destroy the proletariat as a political force in France, Marx believed it would have
found the wherewithal to crush the proletariat anyway. This was because in June it
could call upon 24,000 National Guardsmen—most of them criminals and others
beneath the proletariat in the existing class structure of French society, often
referred to as ‘lumpenproletarians’—to do its dirty work.³⁴ The proletariat, in
other words, faced two enemies, not one, in the summer of 1848. The only class
with which the proletariat could have forged an alliance, and thereby avoided the
predicament in which it found itself, was the peasantry. But Marx, after raising the
possibility of such an alliance, quickly dismissed it, as his longstanding prejudice
against the peasantry, whose way of life he famously termed a form of idiocy,
undoubtedly re-emerged. The peasantry, he stated flatly, was ‘the class that
represents barbarism within civilization’.³⁵
However grudgingly, Marx finally admitted in 1850 that he and Engels and
scientific socialists everywhere should settle in ‘for the long haul’. In his address to
the Communist League in March of that year, he focused almost entirely on
Germany, where the treachery with which the proletariat had been betrayed two
years earlier he ascribed not to the bourgeoisie as a whole, as he had in his analysis
in 1848, but to what he termed ‘a democratic petit-bourgeoisie’.³⁶ In fact, in its
perfidy this German petit-bourgeoisie far exceeded the French bourgeoisie.³⁷ But
Marx’s prescription remained the same: a proletarian revolution in the immediate
future could not succeed, and therefore the best thing for the proletariat to do,
indeed the only thing it could do, was to prepare quietly, beyond the auditory
capabilities of its enemies and under the tutelage of mature professional revolu-
tionaries like Marx himself, for the day in the distant future when circumstances
would finally be more propitious. In sum, there were no shortcuts to socialism.
Engels, however, disagreed. In the last years of his life, Marx’s longtime
collaborator rejected his formulation of the problem. Although not so sanguine

³² Marx, Class Struggles in France, pp. 44–6, 54. ³³ Ibid., pp. 57–8 ³⁴ Ibid., p. 50.
³⁵ Ibid., p. 71.
³⁶ Marx, ‘Address of the Central Authority to the League’, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. X, p. 279.
³⁷ In the 1850s and through most of the 1860s, Marx, unlike Herzen, still considered Paris the most
likely venue in Europe for a successful revolution. In addition he continued to believe that the
precedent of the French Revolution still applied—that a revolution in France would trigger revolutions
elsewhere in Europe. Only in the late 1860s did Marx come to consider Ireland and the German states,
and in the late 1870s Russia, as likely sites for the first significant and serious revolutions in Europe
since 1848. That it came about in Paris in 1871 was thus, for Marx, a pleasant surprise. Sperber, Karl
Marx, pp. 369, 375.
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or naïve to consider proletarian revolutions imminent, he nonetheless recalled the

exploits of the Russian terrorists and reiterated what he had first articulated in
the late 1870s, namely that the peasant commune in Russia could serve as the basis
for socialism; whether it might do so elsewhere was not clear. However, in the
introduction he wrote in 1895 to The Class Struggles in France, Engels allowed that
there was also reason for cautious optimism concerning France and Germany.
Of course there were countervailing tendencies in the two countries that he had to
acknowledge could not be ignored. Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire, for one,
provided proof of ‘the unripeness of the proletarian aspirations of that time’.³⁸ But
Marx’s longtime collaborator also suggested that the consequences of historical
events had to be considered over la longue durée; in the case of France that meant
its longstanding revolutionary tradition could not be ignored. He and Marx, he
wrote, were always cognizant of the effect the mere existence of this revolutionary
tradition in French history had already had on French politics, and for that reason
‘our conceptions of the nature and the path of the “social” revolution proclaimed
in Paris in February 1848, of the revolution of the proletariat, were strongly
coloured by memories of the models of 1789 and 1830’.³⁹
Implicit in Engels’ introduction was that any pessimism one might rightly
consider a normal reaction to the crushing of revolutions in Germany and in
France in 1848 should now give way to optimism; several decades had passed, and
since then conditions in the two countries had changed considerably. In keeping
with his high opinion of the socialist and revolutionary credentials of the Russian
peasantry, Engels took pains to include the absence of peasant support among the
reasons for the proletariat’s defeat, at least in France, in 1848. But unlike Marx, for
whom the peasantry was mostly useless politically and largely extraneous to the
scenario he conjured in which the proletariat would eventually take power, Engels,
in 1895, made clear he believed peasants could play a role in these proletarian
revolutions.
By writing the introduction Engels provided two ways of untying the Gordian
knot in which Marxist orthodoxy had constricted Russian Marxists with its
inescapable imperative (if one ignores Marx’s private statement to Vera Zasulich
in 1881 to the contrary) that proletarian revolutions can only be successful in
countries where the proletariat is capable of taking power by itself. One of these
options was to seek peasant support. The other was for the proletariat (led
presumably by Russian Marxists) to make a bourgeois revolution, from which
the bourgeoisie would be excluded so that a proletarian revolution would follow it;
this would inspire the proletariat in more advanced countries in Europe, such as
Germany, France, or Great Britain, to take power itself. Once its power was secure,
it could then assist any regime the Russian proletariat had established until the

³⁸ Engels, ‘Introduction’ to Marx, Class Struggles in France, p. 17. ³⁹ Ibid., pp. 12–13.
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latter was strong enough to ensure its own regime’s survival. As it happened,
Lenin availed himself of both of these options, with the result that a regime
claiming itself committed to socialism and communism emerged in Russia in
1917, and remained in power for nearly three-quarters of a century.
But the majority of Russian Marxists were not as daring or as flexible ideo-
logically as Lenin proved to be. For Plekhanov and the Mensheviks, Marxism was
sacred doctrine, to be followed faithfully, rather than a smorgasbord of principles,
insights, and historical analysis from which one could pick and choose in deciding
what to do when tactical imperatives conflicted with what the ideology seemed to
suggest, or even clearly required. This was certainly the case for Plekhanov’s
pronouncements on the 1848 Revolution in France. In the article he wrote on
the centenary of the French Revolution, he argued, with respect to 1848, that that
was when France experienced for a second time the sequence of events that had
first occurred in 1830 and 1831, when an inconsequential revolution in 1830 was
followed a year later by a rebellion (in Lyon) that while a failure, was predictive of
a future proletarian uprising in the entire country—an uprising Plekhanov
believed would end the ersatz democracy through which the bourgeoisie had
exploited the proletariat. When Plekhanov was writing, this uprising, of course,
had not arrived, but he was certain it eventually would, because the ideology
predicting it was irrefutable.⁴⁰
As for the 1848 Revolution itself, Plekhanov argued that it had the same effect
that the Revolution of 1830 had on the insurrection in Lyon in 1831. The only
difference was that in 1848 the sequence of a consequential event (the June Days)
following a relatively insignificant one (Louis Philippe’s abdication in February
that left class relations unchanged) occurred within the span of one year, rather
than two. But in every other way, the pattern was the same. The overthrow of the
Orléanists in February 1848 was no more consequential than their ascension to
power in 1830. These were both political changes that did little or nothing to
change the material circumstances in which the French people lived and worked.
The June Days, however, were the equivalent of the Lyon rebellion seventeen years
earlier. While they obviously failed to catapult the proletariat to power, they left
behind a legacy of heroism and martyrdom from which future generations of
workers would find the inspiration to redouble their efforts to establish socialism
in the unlikely event their spirits sagged.⁴¹
What Plekhanov left unsaid in the article—probably because it contradicted
what Marx had written in 1848, when the outcome of the revolution was still
uncertain—was that the workers really had no business rising up in the June Days

⁴⁰ Plekhanov, Stoletie velikoi revoliutsii, pp. 56, 63–4.

⁴¹ In the article, Plekhanov claimed that the same sequence applied in the French Revolution, in the
course of which less consequential events in 1789 were followed by more consequential ones in 1793.
Ibid., pp. 56–7.
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against the bourgeoisie, the political dominance of which, backed up by the army
and the National Guard, was so overwhelming that trying to end it was pointless.
For Plekhanov, it was practically a generic rule of revolutions that whenever the
proletariat was its principal instrument and intended beneficiary, a failed revolu-
tion was worse than no revolution at all. This maxim informed Plekhanov’s
analysis of the 1848 Revolution in an article in 1915, in which he cited approvingly
the comparison Marx had drawn in The Eighteenth Brumaire between the French
Revolution and the Revolution of 1848: whereas in 1789 and thereafter ‘the rule
of the Constitutionalists was followed by the rule of the Girondins, and the rule of
the Girondins by the rule of the Jacobins’, in 1848 the reverse was the case: ‘the
proletarian party appeared as an appendage of the petty-bourgeois democratic
party. It was betrayed and dropped by the latter on April 16 [when large demon-
strations of lower-class Parisians occurred], on 15 May [when an attempted
insurrection failed in Paris], and in the June Days’.⁴² In 1848, in other words,
the revolution, when compared to that which began in 1789, ran backwards. The
former, from February to June, regressed while the latter, from 1789 to 1793,
progressed. This, of course, was consistent with the dictum Plekhanov drew from
Marx concerning the temporal relationship between a bourgeois and a proletarian
revolution: the former must always precede the latter, and a decent interval must
pass—Plekhanov did not provide a rough estimate of its duration—for the second
revolution to succeed. The failure of the proletariat in 1848 to take power was not
the result of any moral, intellectual, or political failing or deficiency. Rather it was
the inevitable consequence of its violating what to Plekhanov was an iron law of
history, namely that its stages can never be compressed, much less skipped
entirely. While sufficiently flexible to conjure a variant of Oriental Despotism to
clarify aspects of Russia’s historical evolution that were inexplicable within the
context of Western feudalism, Plekhanov remained committed to Marxist ideol-
ogy to the point of tactical rigidity, which was why he was a better theorist than a
practical politician.⁴³ Lenin, by contrast, was able to harness his tactical flexibility
in the pursuit of ideological objectives.⁴⁴ In short, Plekhanov thought the history
of France was destined to repeat itself for quite some time. In 1848 the French
proletariat tried to seize power, first in May and then in June, and in both
instances the bourgeoisie defeated it. Should the Russian proletariat attempt the

⁴² Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 42. Lenin laid out Plekhanov’s argument in detail before attacking
it in V. I. Lenin, ‘O dvukh liniakh revoliutsii’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXVII, pp. 76–7.
⁴³ Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov in Russian History and Soviet Historiography (Pittsburgh PA, 1995),
pp. 95–115. Marx and Engels had raised the possibility of a peculiarly Asian equivalent of feudalism in
discussions they had about India in the 1850s. Sperber, Karl Marx, p. 401.
⁴⁴ In 1906 Rosa Luxemburg, in her own analysis of 1848, combined Plekhanov’s decidedly low
opinion of the political consciousness and tactical acumen on the proletariat in France with her belief,
which resembled Lenin’s after 1905, that the proletariat in Russia was capable of mounting another
revolution fairly soon, and that, despite its imminence, it would succeed. Luxemburg, ‘Blankizm i
Socjałdemokracia’, passim.
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same thing, the same result would ensue—and the reason it would was that history
had not progressed sufficiently (at least not in Russia in the late nineteenth or early
twentieth century, where an Industrial Revolution began far later than it did in
Western Europe) for the result to be otherwise.
Other Mensheviks agreed with him. In June 1917 Martov professed his alarm
that the Provisional Government might summon ‘its praetorian guard from the
front [and] play the role of a Cavaignac’.⁴⁵ This, he conceded, would have the
beneficial practical effect of eliminating the Bolsheviks as a political force in
Russia. But it would also destroy the Soviets, and in particular the Petrograd
Soviet—to which Martov, not coincidentally, was addressing when he evoked the
precedent of Cavaignac’s betrayal, of which he knew everyone in his audience
would be cognizant. After Martov finished, Irakli Tsereteli assured him that
neither he nor the Mensheviks nor the Russian proletariat had anything to
worry about. Martov’s analogy, he explained, was mistaken:
Comparing our revolutionary army with the soldiers of Cavaignac, you forget
that the nineteenth-century revolutionary stereotype is quite inapplicable to our
revolution. Then the bourgeoisie, relying on a conservative peasantry and an
army composed of such peasants, disposed of the proletariat and paved the way
for the victorious counter-revolution. But the army of revolutionary Russia is
part of the revolutionary peasantry, and is at one with the working class in the
soviet . . . in consolidating liberty.⁴⁶

Tsereteli may well have been correct in dismissing the chance of a Russian
Cavaignac marching on Petrograd, disbanding the Petrograd Soviet and the
Provisional Government, and instituting a military dictatorship. That Kornilov,
who was the closest (albeit still distant) equivalent of both Cavaignac and
Napoleon Bonaparte in Russia in 1917, was unable to do this—if that in fact
was his actual intention—suggests that he was. But the Georgian Menshevik, who
had no illusions about Lenin’s benevolence (or about Stalin’s), fell prey to a
different delusion when considering the Mensheviks’ options should a genuine
Russian Cavaignac appear. In that instance, he assured the Bolsheviks, ‘we shall
fight in the same ranks with you’.⁴⁷ Such a scenario, one can suggest with some
confidence, would have been an excellent example of the cure being worse than

⁴⁵ Quoted in Victor Chernov, The Great Russian Revolution (New Haven, 1936), p. 29.
⁴⁶ Quoted in ibid., pp. 29–30. German socialists in the late nineteenth century, like their Russian
counterparts, honoured the French who fell in 1848 in the June Days, and also the Communards who
were massacred in Paris in 1871. Beatrix Bouvier, ‘On the Tradition of 1848 in Socialism’, in Europe in
1848: Revolution and Reform, edited by Dieter Dowe et al. (New York, 2001), pp. 891–915. One reason
they did may have been that because the German 1848 had been such a disaster, they could find solace
only in revolutions in other countries. And since their ostensible allegiance was to an international
phenomenon instead of a strictly German one, their admiration of some things French did not carry
with it any sense of betrayal of their own country and culture.
⁴⁷ Tsereteli quoted in V. I. Lenin, ‘Iz kakogo klassovogo istochnika prikhodiat i “pridut” Kaven’iaki’,
in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXII, p. 345.
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the disease. The misperception of non-Bolshevik socialists in Russia, even one as

level-headed as Tsereteli, of ne pas l’ennemis de la gauche, was a common one and,
as it turned out, a dangerous one.

* * *
By its very failure, the 1848 Revolution in France showed Lenin why a proletarian
revolution in Russia, under very different conditions, might succeed. This was
particularly apparent in 1905, when the Russian masses finally eschewed their
longstanding inertia and took action which, under more sagacious leadership,
might have destroyed the monarchy once and for all, and then done the same to
any bourgeois-democratic regime that followed it. This, at any rate, was what
Lenin believed through the entirety of the revolution. Moreover, at no other time
prior to 1917 did Lenin improvise ideologically to the extent that he did in 1905, in
considering how a proletarian revolution in Russia might soon ensue. The adage
that guided him in that year was truly Napoleon’s: On s’engage et puis on voit. But
the scenarios he entertained, and the tactical options he considered, were
grounded in the lessons he drew from the grim realities of the 1848 Revolution
in France.
In March and April 1905, as the revolution gained momentum, in large part the
result of increasingly prevalent anarchy in the countryside, Lenin composed an
article, ‘A Revolution of the 1789 or the 1848 Type’, that was in many ways a
balance sheet comparing Russia in 1905 to France when each of its four modern
revolutions was occurring.⁴⁸ The 1789 and 1848 examples were the most relevant,
Lenin averred, because the differences between what their most radical elements
intended determined their respective outcomes: 1789 was a moderate revolution
that succeeded, while 1848 was a radical revolution that failed. It was obvious
which one Lenin, for psychological reasons as much as for ideological ones,
preferred. The heroism and martyrdom in 1848 appealed to him more than the
half-hearted radicalism of the Jacobins, however admirable they were in charac-
terological terms. He also included a rhetorical swipe at Martynov for preferring
the opposite.⁴⁹ The question for Russia while its revolution was still raging was
whether it should be limited to the curtailment of tsarist authority and the
establishment of a constitution institutionalizing the monarchy’s continuation
(which would resemble 1789), or go beyond that and replace the monarchy with
a republic (which would resemble 1848 prior to the June Days), which might be
followed quickly by a proletarian revolution. Lenin’s article argued for the latter.
But he also took pains to stress that replicating 1848 with a happier ending would
not be easy in Russia. Of course there were good reasons why any revolution in
Russia in 1905 would fail—and why a failed revolution would be worse than no
revolution. These included improved means of communication, compared to

⁴⁸ Lenin, ‘Revoliutsiia tipa 1789 ili tipa 1848’, ibid., vol. IX, pp. 380–2. ⁴⁹ Ibid., vol. IX, p. 382.
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those existing earlier in France, which, during a revolution, according to Lenin,

would benefit the government more than it would the revolutionaries. Also, there
were no concurrent revolutions in Europe or anywhere else to inspire the revo-
lutionaries in Russia. Finally, the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat in Russia in 1905 was greater than it was in France in 1848; for that
reason the bourgeoisie would support the proletariat in Russia, if it did so at all, for
an even shorter time than it did in France in 1848.
But Lenin also specified the reasons why the 1905 Revolution might nonethe-
less succeed. The brevity of bourgeois support, or even its complete absence,
could be advantageous in the event it eliminated quickly any illusions the Russian
proletariat entertained about the bourgeoisie’s benevolence. What is more, ‘the
revolutionary party’ in Russia—by which Lenin meant either the Bolsheviks or
Russian socialists generally—was more advanced ideologically than any of the
revolutionaries in France in 1789, 1848, or 1871. Finally, the grievances of
the lower classes were greater and more varied in Russia than in France; in the
latter there was nothing analogous to the restive nationalities and ethnic minorities
in the former; and the concurrent war with Japan was radicalizing the Russian
people at least as much as the wars France fought in the 1790s radicalized its people,
and made them more, not less, supportive of the French Revolution.⁵⁰ In 1848, by
contrast, there were no foreign enemies that had to be repelled militarily, and
therefore no union sacrée to unify the country and galvanize enthusiasm for the
revolution.⁵¹
A few weeks later, in a report to the Third Congress of the RSDLP, Lenin
returned to the 1848 Revolution, this time to emphasize the treachery not just of
the bourgeoisie in France, but also, more bitingly and at much greater length, of
the petit-bourgeoisie in Germany, about which Marx had written a great deal
in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.⁵² Like Marx, Lenin was even more disappointed
and chagrined by the failure of the German 1848 than by the failure of the
French—though in Marx’s case, the fact that he was German made it almost a
personal affront. In an article in September1905, Lenin once again invoked both the
German and the French 1848, this time juxtaposing their respective results with
those of the French Revolution.⁵³ On a spectrum with complete success at one end
and abject failure at the other, Lenin situated the French Revolution and the German
1848 as if they were polar opposites, with the French 1848 roughly equidistant
between them, leaving his readers to infer that it might had achieved more than

⁵⁰ Ibid., vol. IX, pp. 380–2.

⁵¹ This last point Lenin was content to make indirectly and obliquely, probably because his Marxist
ideology looked askance at any juxtaposition of nationalism and socialism, or at least any that retarded
the realization of the latter.
⁵² Lenin, ‘Doklad ob uchastii sotsial-demokratii vo vremennom revoliutsionnom pravitel’stve’, ibid.,
vol. X, especially pp. 132–3.
⁵³ V. I. Lenin, ‘Chego khotiat i chego boiatsia nashi liberal’nye burzhua?’, ibid., vol. XI, pp. 225–7.
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merely ending the Orléanist Monarchy had circumstances been different or the
workers’ leaders more resourceful, more imaginative, and more tactically shrewd.
The articles Lenin wrote in 1905 that addressed the 1848 Revolution in France
bear a striking resemblance to what Marx had written a half-century earlier when
the revolutions in France and Germany were still in progress and their outcomes
uncertain. Both men succumbed to a euphoria that dulled their judgement—
although Marx soon calmed down and came to his senses, recognizing that the
German bourgeoisie for quite some time would be even less able to make a
bourgeois revolution than the French proletariat would be to make a proletarian
one. Lenin, however, was incorrigible, for several years after the 1905 Revolution
anticipating its repetition and possibly even its radicalization. In fact, one senses
that Lenin prized the Revolution of 1848 in France for its effect on Marx—
primarily to radicalize him, to sharpen his political instincts, and to open his
eyes to the need for a rapid seizure of power much like what Lenin would engineer
in Russia in 1917. For that reason one might speculate that, on an emotional level,
the Marx who soon concluded reluctantly that industrial capitalism in Europe was
not in its death throes but rather surviving its birth pangs disappointed Lenin
profoundly—and that Marx’s later dalliance with Russian terrorism and Narod-
naia Volia heartened Lenin and disappointed him simultaneously: Marx once
again seemed open to the notion of an imminent revolution, albeit in Russia rather
than in France, but wrongly placed his hopes on the Russian peasantry rather than
on the Russian proletariat, perhaps because the latter was still too small for any
alliance of the two classes to be effective.
One would think that the failure of the Moscow uprising in December 1905
would cause Lenin’s optimism to dissipate. The uprising was not only the last
significant event in the revolution, but it was also the only aspect of the revolution
in which the Bolsheviks, in any numbers, participated. But that did not happen. If
anything, the fact that socialists in other countries were just as confident that
another bourgeois revolution in Russia was imminent, and that shortly after it
began it would morph seamlessly into a proletarian one, was cause for genuine
optimism; not even the issuance of the Fundamental Laws in Russia prescribing
the procedures in accordance with which the new parliament (or Duma) would
function, dampened Lenin’s spirits—and the fact that Kautsky—whom the future
Soviet leader would continue to revere until August 1914—shared his confidence
was confirmation that Lenin’s optimism was warranted. In fact, in March 1906, in an
article on ‘The Russian Revolution and the Tasks of the Proletariat’, Lenin mostly let
the German socialist speak on his behalf—which was something Lenin did only
rarely in his speeches and writings—in explaining why the Moscow uprising, unlike
the June Days in 1848, should not be considered an irreversible defeat.⁵⁴ Among the

⁵⁴ V. I. Lenin, ‘Russkaia revoliutsiia i zadachii proletariata’, ibid., vol. XII, pp. 213–16.
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differences, as Kautsky explained them, were that the defeat in Moscow occurred
nowhere else in Russia, while the June Days (in his opinion and Lenin’s) was a
nationwide disaster; that the peasants in Russia supported the 1905 Revolution as a
whole, while the peasantry in France, much of which was more affluent than the
peasantry in Russia, opposed the 1848 Revolution; that the 1905 Revolution was
followed, at least initially, by famine and other problems that predated the revolution
and indeed were what had originally ignited it, while the 1848 Revolution was
followed by prosperity, which made its repetition impossible; and finally, that the
barricades the Bolsheviks erected in Moscow, while obviously not effective enough to
prevent tsarist troops from breaching them, were nonetheless superior to those the
Parisian proletariat had constructed in 1848.
Also in March 1906, Lenin offered yet another argument—this time in his own
voice—for why the Bolsheviks should actually be happy despite the recent defeat
they had suffered in Moscow.⁵⁵ The mental gymnastics he had to perform to reach
his conclusion were considerable. Lenin freely acknowledged that the calm Europe
enjoyed after the suppression of its revolutions in 1848 was real. But that only
proved that changes were occurring sub rosa—and because the same was true in
Russia, a revolution there was actually imminent. The very strength the tsarist
monarchy mustered that enabled it to survive a revolution that lasted for nearly
an entire year was actually proof of its weakness—and to bolster the shaky empirical
foundation on which his argument was based, Lenin noted that the Kadets, on
whose political support the peaceful transformation of Russia into a constitutional
monarchy depended, were destined to collapse as ignominiously as French socialists
did, much to Lenin’s retrospective consternation, in 1848 and 1849. Applied to
Russia, Lenin’s argument that sometimes the best things that happen happen silently
seemed to guarantee the Bolsheviks’ success. If the Kadets collapsed, the Bolsheviks
would replace them, thereby making another bourgeois revolution more likely—only
this time the revolution would not only succeed in deposing the monarchy; it would
thereafter be quickly transmogrified into a proletarian revolution. But if, contrarily,
the Kadets by some chance succeeded in taking power, they would soon lose
it, thereby creating a political vacuum the proletariat and the peasantry would fill.
In other words, no matter what the Kadets did, the Bolsheviks would benefit.⁵⁶
This was not the only argument Lenin mustered in the aftermath of the 1905
Revolution that was based on his understanding of what had happened in France
in 1848. In 1906, in a letter to St Petersburg workers, he lambasted Alexander
Vinogradov, a Menshevik, who, in keeping with his relative moderation, had
recently argued that any future revolution in Russia should ‘follow the lines of
1848–49 and not 1789–93’. In other words, Vinogradov preferred that the future

⁵⁵ V. I. Lenin, ‘Pobeda Kadetov i zadachy rabochei partii’, ibid., vol. XII, pp. 329–32, 352.
⁵⁶ Ibid., vol. XII, passim.
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revolution fail.⁵⁷ To Lenin, Vinogradov’s notion was the most odious form of
defeatism. Lenin wanted conditions to improve in Russia because he believed that
that would make a bourgeois revolution, and therefore any proletarian revolution
that might follow it, more likely rather than less so. But whatever the Kadets did or
did not do, their ‘treachery’ was a permanent component of their politics and
collective persona, and Lenin’s conviction was strengthened by his believing their
treachery having been prefigured in France in 1848, when the ‘liberal bourgeoisie’
did so much to ensure that the closest approximation to a proletarian revolution
that was possible at that particular moment in history—namely the agitation
resulting in the June Days—would fail.⁵⁸
Lenin stressed this point even more emphatically in a report to the Fifth
Congress of the RSDLP in 1907. In the context of attacking Tsereteli for what
Lenin considered the Georgian Menshevik’s ‘political vacillation’, which seemed
to Lenin emblematic of the weakness and political cowardice of the Mensheviks
generally, he rejected Tsereteli’s invocation of the 1848 Revolution to support the
view not only that ‘the conditions for socialism were not yet ripe’, but also that ‘it
is impossible to fight for freedom without some sort of alliance with bourgeois
democracy’.⁵⁹ To Lenin this was idiocy of the highest order, and he invoked what
he considered the real lesson of the 1848 Revolution to refute it:
Both the revolution of 1848 and subsequent historical experience taught inter-
national Social Democracy the very opposite [of Tsereteli’s contention] namely,
that bourgeois democracy stands more and more against the proletariat, that
the struggle for freedom is waged consistently only when the proletariat leads it.
The year 1848 teaches us not to seek alliances with bourgeois democrats. Rather
it teaches us that we need to free the least developed sections of the masses
from the influence of bourgeois democracy, which is incapable of fighting for
democracy.⁶⁰

Lenin’s head was often at war with his heart when evaluating the bourgeoisie in
general, and the French bourgeoisie in 1848 in particular. He could accept
rationally that its perfidy in the long run only worsened its chances for
survival—and for that reason should be welcomed. But on an emotional level he
could not help but deride the class both generically and whenever he viewed its
actions in a particular time or place in the most derogatory and defamatory
terms. Articles he wrote in December 1911, March 1913, and June 1914 revealed
the same visceral hatred of the French bourgeoisie of the mid-nineteenth century

⁵⁷ Lenin, ‘Doklad ob obedinitel’nom s”ezde RSDRP (Pis’mo k Peterburgskim rabochim)’, PSS,

vol. XIII, pp. 20–1.
⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 21.
⁵⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Rech’ o doklade o deiatel’nosti dumskoi frak`tsii’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XV, p. 322.
⁶⁰ Ibid., vol. XV, p. 322.
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that he expressed throughout his political life for the French ‘imperialists’ and
‘capitalists’ of his own generation.⁶¹
Lenin and the other Bolsheviks called the revolution that began in 1789 the
Great French Revolution because, irrespective of its provenance in the discontent
of classes beneath the bourgeoisie such as the sans-culottes and impoverished
peasants, it was, nevertheless, in its essentials, a bourgeois revolution, the first one
in history in which the bourgeoisie was its principal beneficiary. No less critical to
its outsized reputation—neither Marx nor the Bolsheviks applied to any other
revolution (except of course, in Lenin’s case, the October Revolution), the adjec-
tival designation of greatness they applied to the French Revolution—was that it
succeeded. As a result, Lenin expected more of the French bourgeoisie in the
nineteenth century than he did, say, of the German bourgeoisie, which had shown
itself in 1848 to be especially reprehensible in its abject refusal to fight feudal
principalities effectively and energetically. But conditions in the German states
were still fairly primitive compared to those in France in 1848, so the Germans,
whatever their personal deficiencies, could cite these conditions to explain away
their failure. The French bourgeoisie, however, could not do so. In fact, Lenin’s
outrage was partly a function of his belief that the French bourgeoisie in 1830,
1848, and 1871 was even more hostile to the lower classes than it had been in the
French Revolution. By 1911 he cited this hostility in an article explicating the
relationship in Russia that he said existed between genuine socialists like himself
and other Bolsheviks on the one hand, and retrograde and perfidious socialists
and liberals on the other.⁶² What makes the article noteworthy is that, by referring
in the article to ‘the four revolutions in France between 1789 and 1871’, and
writing about them in a way that suggested they had a collective meaning above
and beyond the legacy each one left behind, Lenin showed that, in his mind, these
revolutions had come to comprise a genuine revolutionary tradition.⁶³ By 1911, in
other words, Lenin was invoking a generic category of revolutions both to
corroborate his diagnosis of the present-day political realities in his own country
and to provide guidance on how best to use the insights it provided to the
advantage of the Bolsheviks and of the Russian proletariat.
The outbreak of the First World War, among its other effects on Lenin, caused
him to enlarge this revolutionary tradition to encompass European history as a
whole. In the winter of 1915 he responded to the argument of Alexander Potresov,
one of the first Russian Marxists in Russia but now a committed Menshevik and
opponent of the Bolsheviks, that the war marked the point in Europe’s evolution
in which ‘national isolation’ was superseded by ‘internationalism’ in the relations

⁶¹ V. I. Lenin, ‘O lozungakh i o postanovke dumskoi i vnedumskoi s.-d. raboty’, ibid., vol. XXI, p. 14;
V. I. Lenin, ‘Istoricheskie sud’by ucheniia Karla Marksa’, ibid., vol. XXIII, p. 2; V. I. Lenin, ‘Priemy
bor’by burzhuaznoi intelligentsii protiv rabochikh’, ibid., vol. XXV, p. 321.
⁶² V. I. Lenin, ‘Reformizm v russkoi sotsial-demokratii’, ibid., vol. XX, p. 310.
⁶³ Ibid., vol. XX, p. 310.
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between the countries within the two wartime alliances. This notion, Lenin
insisted, was incorrect. True, the recent outbreak of war signified something larger
than the commencement of hostilities. But what it ushered in was not a benign
internationalism but rather an age of rapacious and exploitative imperialism,
which Lenin would ascribe during the war to the need for the bourgeoisie to
find markets in other parts of the world for the goods the proletariat in Europe had
become too impoverished to purchase.⁶⁴
In placing this new age of imperialism in historical context, it is not surprising
that Lenin should have divided European history into discrete phases since the time
when the bourgeoisie had emerged as a political force. That its power increased from
phase to phase suggested it might also eventually diminish. What is noteworthy
about Lenin’s periodization is that the dates he provided corresponded directly to
revolutions in France. The first of these phases, he wrote, was from the Great French
Revolution to 1871, during which the bourgeoisie, after ending feudalism, was
politically and economically ascendant. Lenin noted that his choice of 1871 to
mark the end of this bourgeois ascendancy was dictated by the Franco-Prussian
War, which catalysed German unification, without which the First World War
would not have happened—although as a consequence of imperialism, something
like it would have happened anyway.⁶⁵
The second epoch in European history Lenin delineated was from 1871 to 1914,
which he described in his polemic against Potresov as an age when the bourgeoisie
declined. According to Lenin, this caused it to become more oppressive of the
proletariat rather than less so. But by immiserating the proletariat to satisfy its
insatiable thirst for profit, the bourgeoisie impoverished itself—or rather would
have done so but for the opportunities that beckoned in lands outside Europe,
where the existing polities could not resist European armies sent by governments
beholden to the bourgeoisie to depose them or to make them dutiful puppets. In
light of Lenin’s description of this second epoch in Europe’s modern history, the
brutality with which the bourgeoisie suppressed the Paris Commune made it an
apt symbol for this second epoch’s commencement.⁶⁶
The role the Revolution in 1848 played in this periodization Lenin explained in
1916 in an article on the self-determination of minorities such as the Poles.
Instead of considering 1848 symbolic of a subdivision within the first phase of
capitalism he claimed was dominant in Europe from 1789 to 1871, Lenin abruptly
changed the years bracketing this phase in the history of capitalism, claiming now

⁶⁴ V. I. Lenin, ‘Pod chuzhim flagom’, ibid., vol. XVI, p. 143; V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest
Stage of Capitalism (London, 2010).
⁶⁵ Lenin, ‘Pod chuzhim flagom’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XVI, pp. 142–3. In a later article co-authored
with Zinoviev, Lenin stated explicitly that it was the Paris Commune—not the Franco-Prussian War
(which of course helped to trigger the establishment of the Commune)—that signified the end of this
period, which, the article made clear, still began with the French Revolution in 1789. V. I. Lenin and
G. Zinoviev, ‘Sotsializm i voina’, ibid., vol. XXVI, pp. 311–12.
⁶⁶ Lenin, ‘Pod chuzhim flagom’, ibid., vol. XVI, p. 143.
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that it began in 1848. If Lenin had explained the substitution because he now
realized that it was in 1848 when many of the stateless nationalities in Eastern
Europe had first expressed their opposition to the Russian, Austro-Hungarian,
and Ottoman Empires, one could understand the substitution. But Lenin did not
do that. He simply changed dates without supplying a different term for the period
from 1789 to 1848, or any iteration of his reason or reasons for doing so.⁶⁷ Perhaps
he thought his readers would recognize that the change he made only applied to
Eastern Europe because they knew that the French Revolution, notwithstanding
its transformational effects on Western Europe, changed Eastern Europe only
marginally, if at all. Whatever Lenin’s reasoning, his invocation of 1848 showed
that it now played a significant role in his thinking at a time when the outcome of
the war Europe was fighting remained uncertain and, in 1915 and 1916, showed
no signs of stopping anytime soon.
In the years immediately preceding 1917, Lenin had a good deal of time on
his hands, and could indulge his penchant for disguising the degradation of
political enemies as dispassionate historical analysis. In 1915, he took exception
to Plekhanov’s argument, which the latter had recently claimed was based on
Marx’s comparison of the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, that the proletariat and
the Marxist revolutionaries who currently supported them had no choice but to
desist from making an actual revolution until the bourgeoisie, which would resist
it, could no longer do so successfully.⁶⁸ This particular argument, whenever the
Mensheviks or any other opponent of the Bolsheviks articulated it, touched a raw
nerve in Lenin, because the passivity it prescribed was so contrary to the ‘volun-
tarist’ component of his temperament. In 1915 his reaction was particularly harsh
in light of the vehemence with which, just a few months earlier, he had attacked
socialists he previously admired, such as Kautsky and Plekhanov, for supporting
their own country’s decision to go to war in 1914. In fact, in January 1917, Lenin
was so embittered by the political paralysis he was experiencing that he lashed out
at the bourgeoisie for the death and destruction its warring factions had caused
since 1914. Minimizing as mere ‘sops’ recent concessions the combatants had
made to improve material conditions for their own people, he analogized them to
concessions ‘the executioners of the 1848 and 1905 Revolutions’ had agreed to
vitiate the murderous effects of their own rapacity and bloodlust.⁶⁹ In short, the
First World War did nothing to soften the hard edges of Lenin’s combative
rhetoric when ideological allies turned enemies made an argument with which
he honestly and strongly disagreed.
In refuting Plekhanov’s argument in 1915, Lenin accurately recapitulated
Marx’s argument, on which Plekhanov had relied in claiming that for the time

⁶⁷ V. I. Lenin, ‘Itogi diskussii o samopredelenii’, ibid., vol. XXX, p. 21.

⁶⁸ V. I. Lenin, ‘O dvukh liniakh revoliutsii’, ibid., vol. XXVII, pp. 76–7.
⁶⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Povorot v mirovoi politike’, ibid., vol. XXX, p. 345.
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being proletarian revolutions anywhere in Europe would fail. He duly noted

Marx’s contention that in the French Revolution moderate governments were
succeeded by more radical ones, but that in 1848 this sequence was reversed.
Lenin did not contest Marx’s assertions; instead he reaffirmed them. But he
personalized his disagreement with the conclusion Plekhanov had drawn from
them by disparaging it as evidence of the latter’s ‘vulgar idealism’.⁷⁰ That was why,
according to Lenin, Plekhanov (and by implication the Mensheviks) could no
more be trusted to protect the interests of the proletariat presently or in the future
than the French petit-bourgeoisie could have been trusted to do so in 1848. In
short, the 1848 Revolution had the effect on Lenin during the First World War not
only of prescribing what he and the Bolsheviks should not do if they decided to
make a revolution in Russia but it also provided fodder for Lenin’s instinctual
belligerence that, in the absence of outlets for his political aspirations, became an
even more prominent part of his personality.
Once the collapse of the monarchy in Russia made practical politics possible for
revolutionaries previously confined to Western Europe, Lenin, after his arrival in
Petrograd at the Finland Station in April, referred to 1848 only infrequently
during the rest of the year, and even less so afterwards. None of the fêtes and
other celebrations the Bolsheviks sponsored to legitimize the October Revolution
referred to it or re-enacted any aspect of it. But the revolution remained, as it were,
just beneath the surface of his politics, to be elevated to consciousness as political
and ideological requirements dictated. Disinclined to invoke a failed revolution
while trying to convince his fellow Bolsheviks to carry out a successful one, Lenin
nevertheless used 1848 as a kind of exclamation point in ad hominem attacks
against his political enemies. To show that in a failed revolution one could find the
inspiration necessary to make a successful one, Lenin invoked the Paris Com-
mune, rather than the events of 1848, because its suppression, by all accounts,
took more lives.⁷¹ Instead, Lenin invoked the socialists who he claimed had
betrayed the French proletariat in 1848 to underscore the iniquity of the socialists
he thought were doing the same to the Russian proletariat in 1917. In March
he attacked Alexander Kerensky as the Russian Louis Blanc, who for Lenin was
the archetype of the moderate socialist whose incomprehension of the political
realities at any particular time was exceeded only by an absence of will, discipline,
decisiveness, integrity, and courage. Blanc’s utter unfitness as a socialist and

⁷⁰ Lenin, ‘O dvukh liniakh revoliutsii’, ibid., vol. XXVII, p. 77.

⁷¹ The number of insurgents killed in the June Days was ‘at least 1,500’. Rapport, 1848, p. 208. By
comparison, estimates of the deaths caused by the suppression of the Commune range from 10,000 to
20,000. The smaller figure is cited in Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and
Russian Revolutions (Princeton NJ, 2002), p. 109, the larger in D. W. Brogan, The Development of
Modern France (1870–1939) (New York, 1966), p. 73. In Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris
Commune (New York, 2014), p. 255, John Merriman argues for a death toll of 15,000; he also considers
the killings a precursor of genocides in the twentieth century because of the degree to which they were
organized and systemic.
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revolutionary Lenin considered evidence that anyone who resembled him in the
Russian revolutionary movement, such as Kerensky, should by rights be excluded
from its ranks; neither man, he sniffed, even understood what socialism was.⁷² In
June Lenin cautioned the Russian proletariat not to listen to the Mensheviks or the
SRs because, like Blanc, they were ‘petit-bourgeois socialists’—which in Lenin’s
lexicon of insults meant they were faux socialists pretending to be real ones.⁷³ And
in August he grouped Blanc ethically, politically, and ideologically with ‘Chernov,
Tsereteli, and the rest of that contemptible crew’.⁷⁴ When, in State and Revolution,
written after the failure of the Bolshevik-led insurrection in July had forced Lenin
to seek refuge in Finland (which retained the autonomy it had enjoyed under the
monarchy), he attacked the ‘sham socialists’ he considered responsible for his
predicament, and compared them to their counterparts in 1848 and 1871, who
similarly betrayed the working class by claiming a bogus harmony of interests
between the workers and their capitalist oppressors.⁷⁵
That Lenin directed his wrath at Cavaignac, rather than at the civilian leader-
ship whose orders he followed, in the only article he wrote in 1917 that was
devoted to the 1848 Revolution, revealed his fear of the Russian army preventing a
proletarian revolution or overthrowing any regime a proletarian revolution might
ensconce in power. In an essay entitled ‘The Class Origins of Present-Day and
“Future” Cavaignacs’, which appeared in Pravda on 16 June, he advised his
readers at the outset to ‘remember the class role played by Cavaignac’.⁷⁶ ‘The
bourgeois republicans’ who came to power in February 1848 were like the Kadets
in objectively pursuing ‘the interests . . . of the ruling class’ irrespective of any kind
words they uttered about the lower classes.⁷⁷ But the proletariat in Paris in 1848
‘aspired not to “reconcile itself ” to the bourgeoisie, but to defeat it’, which
prompted the latter to order the army, under General Cavaignac, ‘to disarm the
Paris workers and to shoot them en masse’.⁷⁸ Such an atrocity would have
constituted little more than a footnote in the history of socialism and communism
were it not for the fact, according to Lenin, that the identical sequence of events
was occurring in Russia. He quickly followed this assertion by professing his
ignorance as to the identity of the Russian Cavaignac; neither Tsereteli nor
Chernov nor even Kerensky was strong enough to play the role of the gravedigger
of the Russian Revolution. But all three were currently ‘pursuing petit-bourgeois
policies that make possible and necessary the appearance of a Cavaignac’.⁷⁹ What
Lenin did make clear in his article was that this Russian Cavaignac—whoever he

⁷² V. I. Lenin, ‘Pis’ma iz daleka (pis’mo 2)’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXI, pp. 30, 32.
⁷³ V. I. Lenin, ‘Velikii otkhod’, ibid., vol. XXXII, p. 311.
⁷⁴ V. I. Lenin, ‘Za derev’iani ne vidiat lesa’, ibid., vol. XXXIV, p. 82.
⁷⁵ Lenin, State and Revolution, pp. 22–3.
⁷⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘Iz kakogo klassovogo istochnika prikhodiat i ‘pridut’ Kaven’iaki?’, in Lenin, PSS,
vol. XXXII, p. 343.
⁷⁷ Ibid., pp. 343–4. ⁷⁸ Ibid., p. 344. ⁷⁹ Ibid., p. 345.
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turned out to be—would not alter existing class relations. Having no political
interests of his own, he would be merely a tool, albeit an effective one, of counter-
revolution.
But fortunately for the proletariat’s political prospects in 1917, the analogy
Lenin took pains to elucidate was a limited one. France in 1848 and Russia in 1917
were different. The Russian proletariat—as he insisted in many other articles he
wrote in 1917—was politically sophisticated, instinctively revolutionary, and
inclined to follow leaders—such as Lenin—cognizant of their own best interests.
Compared to the French proletariat, the Russian was immeasurably better
equipped to make a proletarian revolution: it had more time to come to the
proper conclusion about the causes of its own exploitation. Moreover the social-
ists, or so-called socialists, contesting the Bolsheviks for their loyalty and
allegiance—most egregiously the Mensheviks and SRs—were deficient personally,
politically, and ideologically; among the shortcomings Lenin mentioned were
weakness, unreliability, credulity, timidity, and an inability to make up their
minds.⁸⁰ Although Lenin did not say so explicitly, the reader could readily infer
from his article that the principal reason for the failure of the 1848 Revolution in
France was that there was no French equivalent of either Lenin or the Bolsheviks.
After the October Revolution, Lenin yet again expressed his fear of a Russian
Cavaignac. As in earlier writings, he noted that whoever would assume that
persona would be acting as an instrument of the bourgeoisie, without interests
or aspirations of his own. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks’ trepidation of this par-
ticular contingency obstructing history’s progress was well-founded. Lenin took
up the matter in July 1918, as the Civil War still raged and the Bolsheviks’ political
and physical survival was far from assured. The best deterrent to the scenario he
feared, in which the Bolsheviks were succeeded by a bourgeois dictatorship kept in
power by military force, was the Bolsheviks’ continuing their policy of ‘bringing
the small bourgeoisie under our control’, because not doing so would encourage
‘millions of small [peasant] proprietors’ to take for themselves property previously
nationalized by the state. Should they do so, ‘Napoleons and Cavaignacs [were]
bound to develop’.⁸¹ Lenin was concerned, for good reason, that the external
threat the White armies posed might cause a rebellion within the territory the
Bolsheviks controlled, and that such a rebellion, should it occur, would embolden
the Whites to redouble their efforts even if, in the end, the rebellion was destined
to fail. But once the Bolsheviks won the Civil War, this scenario was no longer
applicable, and references to Russian Cavaignacs in Lenin’s writings disappeared,
even though David Riazanov, the new director of the Marx–Engels Institute,
included materials on the 1848 Revolution, many of them tracked down by

⁸⁰ Ibid., p. 346.
⁸¹ Quoted in James Bunyan and Harold Henry Fisher, eds, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1918:
Documents and Materials (Stanford CA, 1961), p. 685.
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Boris Nikolaevskii, in the voluminous archives of documents on European social-

ism and Marxism he had assiduously assembled in the 1920s.⁸²
* * *
Given his penchant for historical analogies, it is hardly surprising that, of all the
Bolsheviks, Trotsky was the only one who thought it necessary to describe in detail
the meaning and relevance of the 1848 Revolution in France. For Trotsky, just as
for Lenin, the failure of the 1905 Revolution was what triggered his investigation.
He laid out his initial explanation for the revolution’s failure in 1906 in Results and
Prospects. He began by asserting that economic backwardness was the reason why
the proletariat had emerged in Russia to challenge the bourgeoisie politically even
before a bourgeois revolution had succeeded. To Plekhanov and the Mensheviks,
economic backwardness was the most powerful external impediment—an absence
of political consciousness was its internal equivalent—to a proletarian revolution.
Only the dialectic, by generating changes that were as time-consuming as they
were effective, could overcome it. But to Trotsky economic backwardness was not
an obstacle to revolution but an incentive to it. In his mind it held out all sorts of
intriguing possibilities, the most enticing of which, from his perspective, was for a
proletarian revolution either to evolve directly out of a bourgeois revolution—
which in his mind almost happened in 1905—or to occur even before a bourgeois
revolution had begun. That in both scenarios Trotsky violated Marx’s strictures
on when, at what rate, and in which order these revolutions would occur
did not really bother him, because he believed nearly simultaneous revolutions
in Western Europe, carried out by workers inspired by what their colleagues
in Russia were doing, could render Russian workers assistance should they
require it.⁸³
This, in short, was what Trotsky meant by a ‘permanent revolution’. It is
commonly believed that he took the idea from the German Social Democrat
Alexander Helphand (who adopted the revolutionary pseudonym of ‘Parvus’),
with whom Trotsky had lengthy conversations in Munich before they both found
themselves in St Petersburg in 1905.⁸⁴ Strictly speaking, this was true. But it was

⁸² Arup Banerji, Writing History in the Soviet Union (New Delhi, 2008), p. 30.
⁸³ On the first page of the essay, Trotsky pronounced Russia’s historical development ‘distinctive’
and claimed optimistically that it ‘opens up before us completely new historical prospects’. The only
other country whose history he considered similar to Russia’s—specifically in the political impotence of
its bourgeoisie—was Germany. But because Russia’s bourgeoisie and proletariat in 1905 were more
advanced—though not advanced enough to take power—than Germany’s in 1848, the duration of the
revolutions the two countries experienced was different: Germany’s revolution was suppressed
more quickly and efficiently, and thus with fewer lives lost, than Russia’s. Trotsky, Itogi i perspektivy,
pp. 11, 28.
⁸⁴ Deutscher, Prophet Armed, p. 101; Z. A. B. Zeman and W. B. Scharlau, The Merchant of
Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus) (London, 1965), pp. 65–6. In his autobiog-
raphy, Trotsky himself credited Helphand with transforming proletarian revolution ‘from an astro-
nomic “final” goal to a practical task of our own day’. Leon Trotsky, My Life (New York, 1970), p. 167.
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also the case that Trotsky found corroboration of Helphand’s scenario in his own
understanding of the Revolution of 1848 in France and in the German states,
which together served as a template for everything that should not be done if any
future revolution in Russia was to succeed. Trotsky did not think the differences
between the two countries, and between the revolutions they each experienced in
1848, precluded their being analysed, and compared to the 1905 Revolution in
Russia, as if they were one.
Trotsky believed the 1848 Revolutions failed in France and in the German states
because the grievances the lower classes in these two countries had come to believe
could be redressed in a political revolution were simply too disparate and even
contradictory for these classes to join together and fight the princes and monarchs
opposing them as a cohesive bloc. Fighting their opponents separately, instead of
working together, the proletariat and the impoverished elements of the peasantry
capable of overcoming their natural conservatism were destined to fail. In reality,
the revolutions that began in France and Germany in 1848 failed not only also
because such an alliance never lasted long enough for a permanent government
reflecting the interests of its participants to be established. They also failed because
liberals in both countries acted perfidiously, successfully disguising their unalter-
able commitment to the pursuance of their own material interests. For that reason
it was a grievous mistake for the lower classes to have aligned with them initially—
and by the time they realized it, the liberals had called on the army (in the case of
France), or worked out political arrangements with feudal princes (in the German
states), that made a repetition of the June Days in France, or some facsimile of
them in Germany, suicidal. In both parts of Europe order and the status quo ante
were quickly restored. In contrast to the French Revolution, which notwithstand-
ing the disparate economic interests of its participants was a national revolution,
the 1848 Revolutions were class wars, in which the classes that were oppressed
were not sufficiently oppressed to recognize that the differences between them
were less than those between all of them and the class above them.⁸⁵
But all was not lost. The capitalists exploiting the proletariat would themselves
soon diminish in number and eventually become so weak politically that the
proletariat would destroy them and replace capitalism with a proletarian dicta-
torship that itself would melt away with the elimination of classes. Socialism and
then communism would be the happy result. But the activist in Trotsky rebelled
against the patience this scenario required. One senses, in reading everything
Trotsky wrote about the 1848 Revolution in France, that, in contrast to Germany,
where the proletariat was significantly weaker, and the bourgeoisie correspond-
ingly more powerful, than they were in France, he considered the defeat of
the revolution in France a close-run thing. If circumstances, or the actions of

⁸⁵ Trotsky, Itogi i perspektivy, pp. 25–9.

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particular individuals had been just slightly different—if, for example, there had
been someone like Trotsky himself who could have explained to peasants and
workers why their disagreements were trivial in comparison to their grievances,
and that the only way their grievances could be redressed was by overthrowing the
newly established Second Republic or, better yet, by establishing their own
republic before a liberal bourgeois republic hostile to their interests could be
established—the Revolution of 1848 would have succeeded. Specifically, it would
have set in motion, greatly accelerated, the chain of events leading ultimately to
perpetual peace, prosperity, social justice, artistic creativity, and the emancipation
of the individual Trotsky described so eloquently in 1924 in Literature and
Revolution.⁸⁶ Russian revolutionaries could learn much from the Revolutions of
1848, especially the revolution in France. Should they do so, he concluded, ‘the
nineteenth century would not have passed in vain’.⁸⁷
In 1905, which was written between 1907 and 1909, when there were no events
in Russia to distract Trotsky from calmly explicating the reasons the 1905 Revo-
lution had failed, he began by recapitulating the analysis that informed Results and
Prospects. What distinguished 1905 from the earlier work was Trotsky’s explicit
admission that the 1905 Revolution failed—and thus could not evolve seamlessly
into a proletarian revolution—because the circumstances that prevented it were
nearly identical to those that prevailed in 1848, when the bourgeoisie was not yet
powerful enough in Germany to withstand the forces defending feudalism, or in
France to preclude a dictatorship relying for its survival on the army and adopting,
if only symbolically, many of the attributes of military rule; while not himself a
soldier, Louis Napoleon dressed like a general and was the nephew of the most
illustrious military figure in France’s history. At the same time, however, the
bourgeoisie was strong enough in both countries to subdue the proletariat and
any other elements of the lower classes that challenged it. In Trotsky’s formulation,
the ‘liberal bourgeoisie’ triumphed over the proletariat and the peasantry because
‘radical urban elements’ in French and German cities and towns were still socially
and politically amorphous, and thus incapable of convincing the peasantry to join
them in a common effort to depose their respective oppressors.⁸⁸
For this reason the revolutions of 1848 failed, and for the same reason the same
fate befell the revolution in Russia in 1905. But far more than in the earlier work,
Trotsky in 1905 made clear that the French 1848 and the German 1848, while
similar in many ways, were different in the chances each had had of succeeding.
Germany in 1848 had still not experienced its 1789, and accordingly its bour-
geoisie in 1848 was far weaker than the French. For that reason the optimism
about Russia’s future Trotsky gained by believing that the proletariat in France
had a decent chance of gaining power in 1848, and failed to do so only because of

⁸⁶ Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor MI, 1960), especially pp. 253–6.
⁸⁷ Trotsky, Itogi i prospekty, p. 25. ⁸⁸ Trotsky, 1905, p. 49.
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the actions (or the inaction) of specific individuals, was vitiated by the pessimism
suggested by the impossibility of a bourgeois revolution—not to mention a
proletarian one—succeeding in Germany in the very same year. Trotsky’s rueful
acknowledgement of this imparted to 1905 a measure of realism absent in Results
and Prospects. For Trotsky in 1906, the German 1848 was only slightly less
disheartening than the French. By the time he was writing 1905, however, only a
complete suspension of disbelief could have caused him to replicate his earlier
analysis. Only the French revolution in 1848 had any real chance of success, and in
that respect Trotsky was finally at one with Marx and Lenin, for whom the
German Revolution in 1848, once it ended, offered revolutionaries of later gener-
ations absolutely nothing inspirational or even worthy of admiration. In fact, the
subsequent unification of Germany under Bismarck, whose adroit manipulation
of concessions and crackdowns enabled the Hohenzollern monarchy to remain in
power, left France as the only major European country with a revolutionary
tradition worth exploring.
By the time Trotsky became a Bolshevik in the summer of 1917—which was the
next time he took up the 1848 Revolution—his optimism about the prospects for a
proletarian revolution in Russia caused his opinion of the French proletariat in
1848 to improve. In his retelling of the revolution, he made clear his conviction
that French workers had made ‘heroic efforts for independent action’.⁸⁹ But he still
had to qualify his praise by noting that they possessed neither ‘a clear revolution-
ary theory nor an authoritative class organization’, and for that reason ‘[their]
importance in production [was] infinitely lower than the present economic
function of the Russian proletariat’—which was Trotsky’s way of saying that the
latter was ready to transform the bourgeois revolution that in February had
overturned the monarchy into a proletarian revolution overturning the Provi-
sional Government.⁹⁰ He did permit himself a cautionary note: that the proletariat
failed in France in 1848 because the property settlement the first French revolu-
tion applied successfully in the countryside had made the peasantry politically
conservative, and thus oblivious through most of the nineteenth century to the
continued suppression of the urban lower classes. In short, the alliance between
the proletariat and the peasantry that according to Trotsky was the only means by
which a bourgeois revolution and a proletarian one could be sequential, with only
days or at most a few weeks between them, was impossible in France in 1848.⁹¹ But
in 1917 in Russia such an alliance was not only possible; the Bolsheviks, now
acting with the benefit of Trotsky’s counsel, were helping to create it. Indeed, their
doing so was perhaps the most convincing evidence he could offer that the

⁸⁹ Leon Trotsky, ‘Character of the Russian Revolution’, in Lenin and Trotsky, Proletarian Revolution
in Russia, p. 272.
⁹⁰ Ibid.
⁹¹ Trotsky reiterated this particular explanation for the proletariat’s defeat in 1848 in Between Red
and White, p. 79.
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‘productive power’ of the Russian proletariat would soon exercise ‘revolutionary

power’ greatly exceeding its numerical strength.⁹²
Largely because of its treachery in 1848—and in 1871 in its suppression of the
Paris Commune—the French bourgeoisie occupied a special place among the
villains in history Trotsky never tired of excoriating. His belief that the French
bourgeoisie practised an imperialism more rapacious than that of any other
country is reflected in the sheer number of defamatory references in Trotsky’s
writings (exceeded only by similarly derogatory references in Lenin’s) to French
capitalism and French imperialism. During the Civil War both he and Lenin
singled out France for its support of the Whites, and at times their animus seemed
to exceed even that which they still harboured towards Kautsky and the other
German socialists for repudiating their pledge to oppose German involvement in
war in 1914, which to Lenin and Trotsky was prima facie evidence that they were
no longer socialists.⁹³
Once the Civil War ended, Trotsky was more inclined to consider the 1848
Revolutions in Europe successful—this was true even, to a limited extent, in
Germany—if judged by their long-term results. These included ‘sweeping away
the remnants of the regime of guilds and serfdom, and thereby extending the
framework of capitalist development’.⁹⁴ In fact, by 1925 Trotsky was including
1905 in the apostolic sequence of revolutions that began in France in the late
eighteenth century, continued there through the nineteenth century, and culmin-
ated in Russia in 1917.⁹⁵ To justify Russia’s inclusion in this now supranational
revolutionary tradition, Trotsky cited the Decembrist Revolt in 1825, which he
knew was shorter than the four revolutions in France, and because the Decem-
brists could not prevent the continuation of the monarchy in the person of the
newly installed tsar Nicholas I, even less consequential than the Revolution of
1830, which at least ended one dynasty before installing another.⁹⁶ For all his
faults, Trotsky knew too much history not to acknowledge that what the Decem-
brists had engaged in was more an urban insurrection than a mass revolution; the
Russian people were merely its intended beneficiary.⁹⁷ But the distinction he

⁹² Trotsky, ‘Character of the Russian Revolution’, p. 271.

⁹³ A typical example of his special animus were his comments in a speech delivered in Red Square in
1920 honouring the commanders of the Bolshevik forces fighting the Whites. L. Trotsky, ‘Rech’ na
parade v chest’ krasnykh komandirov na Krasnoi ploshchadi’, in L. Trotsky, Kak vooruzhalas’ revo-
liutsiia (na voennoi rabote) (Moscow, 1921), vol. II, pp. 285–7.
⁹⁴ Leon Trotsky, ‘Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist
International (June 1921)’, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-1/ch19b.htm.
⁹⁵ L. Trotsky, ‘1905. Cherez dvadtsat’ let’, Pravda, no. 6(3235) (8 January 1926): p. 5.
⁹⁶ Albeit with misgivings and without great enthusiasm, the Decembrists wanted Constantine,
Nicholas’ older brother, to rule after Alexander I, the oldest brother, had died in November, because
they believed, wrongly, that Constantine shared their liberalism. Mazour, First Russian Revolution,
pp. 158–9.
⁹⁷ The Decembrists did not think to appeal to the crowd observing their ‘standing revolution’ to join
them. Ibid., pp. 175–6.
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established was meant to underscore the centrality of the real revolutions he cited
in the ongoing progression of history that had reached a new plateau, unattained
in any of the French revolutions, with the Bolsheviks’ gaining power in 1917 as the
designated agent of the Russian proletariat; indeed he considered the Bolsheviks
the proletariat’s embodiment.
Trotsky extolled the revolutions he considered part of this larger tradition of
revolution not just for assisting ‘history’ in its long march to the secular nirvana of
communism. He esteemed them also for the transformation they produced in the
revolutionaries who carried them out, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. To
Trotsky there was something ennobling in each revolution—1793, 1848, 1871, and
1905—that future revolutionaries would look back to for examples of the personal
qualities they would need if the new society they established would be a virtuous
one. The personal virtues Trotsky believed revolutionaries needed to make a
successful revolution were the same virtues enabling them, once in power, to
achieve their revolutions’ objectives. In the speech delivered on the twentieth
anniversary of the Bolsheviks’ insurrection in Moscow in December 1905, Trotsky
summoned all of the eloquence of which he was capable in elucidating what he
considered the essence of each of these revolutions and why together they formed
a tradition that should inform the Bolsheviks’ ongoing pursuit of social justice
through the establishment of socialism:

The history of human society included a series of convulsive upsurges of the

oppressed masses against oppressors and oppression. Years and decades of
apparently hopeless servitude have been, are, and will continue to be burst
open by explosions and insurrection. . . . These are the years in human history
which, not only in the memory of revolutionaries, but in that of each thinking
individual in the camp of the oppressed, seem to be forever cast in bronze,
sharply separated from the endless years devoid of personality and shape.
1793 has remained in the memory of humanity as one of those ‘metallurgic’
years, when under the leadership of the Jacobins, those Bolsheviks of the eight-
eenth century, plebeians, sans-culottes, artisans and semi-proletarians—the rag-
amuffins of the Paris suburbs—established an iron dictatorship and meted out
unforgettable punishment to the crowned and privileged rulers of the old society.
1848 lives in the memory of humanity, not so much because the backward
bourgeoisie attempted in that year to get power, but because from under the
cowardly and thieving bourgeoisie the young head of the proletarian lion was
already raising itself.
1871 has been engraved in the memory of workers as the year when the heroic
proletariat of Paris made an attempt, unforgettable in its lessons, to take into its
hands the reins of government of a new civilised society.
1905 is another of those years in human history, particularly ours, that is cast
in bronze. . . . Only 1905 gives us a revolution with a familiar native element.
New generations pass through it. They experience in their flesh and blood its
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experience, its initial semi-victories, its blows, and its stern lessons. The inner
fabric of the people is transformed. Only by experiencing the Revolution of 1905
could our country, twelve years later, write into history the greatest of all years—
1917!⁹⁸

* * *
Stalin’s silence on the 1848 revolutions speaks volumes about his opinion of them.
Martyrdom was not something he aspired to, nor did he consider it ennobling,
much less confirmation of moral superiority. Achieving one’s objectives was far
more important; in most of the issues that concerned him, no other considerations
mattered. The whole issue of ‘Bonapartism’ spoke to his legitimacy as the ruler of a
state formally committed to achieving socialism and communism. For that reason,
he addressed it. But the events of 1848 preceding Louis Napoleon’s ascension to
power and the establishment of the Second Empire had no utility for him. Nor, for
much the same reason, did they attract the attention of Khrushchev or Brezhnev,
or any of the Soviet rulers, excepting Gorbachev, who followed them. And for
Gorbachev the 1848 Revolution mattered mainly as part of a tradition of revolu-
tions in France in which the revolution that began it in 1789 and the revolution
that ended it in 1871 had far more salience to the issues he dealt with than did the
two intervening revolutions in 1830 and 1848.
Once the shackles of Stalinism were removed in the mid-1950s, Soviet histor-
ians, however, wrote a good deal about the 1848 Revolutions in France and
Germany. None deviated from the Leninist orthodoxy that in France the prole-
tariat failed to achieve its objectives because without the support of the peasantry
it could not defeat the bourgeoisie, which stopped at nothing to prevent the
proletariat from radicalizing the political revolution in February ending the
Orléanist monarchy, and carrying out an economic revolution committed to
the socialization of private property. But the way Soviet historians expressed this
orthodoxy—the evidence they chose to corroborate it, the aspects of it they either
emphasized or minimized, and the larger lessons they drew from it—varied
considerably. In 1959 V. P. Volgin stressed the political and ideological immatur-
ity of the proletariat, arguing that the absence of support it needed from the
peasantry was the principal reason it failed to wrest power from the bourgeoisie.⁹⁹
To Volgin, 1848 in France encapsulated perfectly the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and
duplicity of the bourgeoisie—the corrective of which in practical terms was
an industrial working class possessing ‘a scientific understanding of its class
interests’, by which, of course, Volgin meant Marxism-Leninism.¹⁰⁰ In 1960
B. F. Porshnev quoted Engels on the degree to which the bourgeoisie needed the

⁹⁸ Trotsky, ‘1905. Cherez dvadtsat’ let’, p. 5.

⁹⁹ V. P. Volgin, ‘Lenin i revoliutsionnye traditsii frantsuzskogo naroda’, pp. 13–14.
¹⁰⁰ Ibid., p. 14.
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masses to defeat monarchies opposed to it; while in France it succeeded in this

endeavour, in the German states it failed.¹⁰¹ But Porshnev focused on the heroism
of the German proletariat to the virtual exclusion of the French, and the reason for
this was because the German proletariat spoke through the imposing figure of
Marx himself. It was ‘in the pages of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung’, according to
Porshnev, that ‘[the German proletariat] unmasked the readiness of the
bourgeoisie . . . to make a deal with the monarchy and the landowners’.¹⁰² In
1962, V. S. Alexeev-Popov and Iu. Ia. Baskin emphasized that through much of
the year, the proletariat in France acted as part of a radical bloc that included
elements of the petit-bourgeoisie; for that reason it resembled the blocs that had
emerged in 1793 in the French Revolution, and would do so again in 1830 and
1871. However, in contrast to the French Revolution, in which the haute-
bourgeoisie’s betrayal in 1792 was what a caused a bloc of the lower classes that
also included the petit-bourgeoisie to emerge in 1793, the bloc that coalesced in
1848 did so before the bourgeoisie betrayed it. But the objective conditions that
existed in France in 1848 vitiated any chance of this bloc actually defeating the
bourgeoisie and coming to power itself. For that reason the political unity it
possessed was useless. France in 1848 was simply not ready for any class or bloc
of classes that excluded the bourgeoisie and ruled itself.¹⁰³
A. Z. Manfred was especially sensitive to the causal relationship between the
revolutions comprising this tradition. He paid special attention to the way histor-
ians of the French Revolution in nineteenth-century France, most notably Lamar-
tine and Louis Blanc, misapplied in 1848 the revolution’s tactical lessons, and in
doing so made an already difficult task impossible. Louis Blanc, he sniffed, was as
poor a historian of the French Revolution as he was a political leader of the 1848
Revolution. The reconciliation between the Girondins and the Jacobins Blanc
believed would have strengthened the French Revolution would actually have
weakened it, and one of the reasons the proletariat was crushed in 1848 was
because it followed Blanc’s advice in that year to do what he thought the
Girondins and the Jacobins should have done a half-century earlier. But the
alliance Blanc recommended in 1848 would have been no more advantageous to
the proletariat than a similar arrangement would have been in 1789 for the
Parisian sans-culottes.¹⁰⁴ Hardly more constructive in this respect was Lamartine,
like Blanc an ersatz revolutionary, whose preference for the Girondins over the
Jacobins disqualified him from speaking authoritatively on the French Revolution
and acting efficiently and ethically in 1848: for all his animadversions of the
bourgeoisie, Lamartine was never a reliable ally of the proletariat.¹⁰⁵ Betrayed by
both liberals and pseudo-socialists, the proletariat, in 1848, lacked the means to

¹⁰¹ Porshnev, ‘V. I. Lenin o rannikh burzhuaznykh revoliutsiiakh’, p. 51. ¹⁰² Ibid.
¹⁰³ Alexeev-Popov and Baskin, ‘Problemy istorii iakobinskoi literatury’, p. 131. The authors’ com-
ments on 1848 are elliptical and much of their argument must be inferred.
¹⁰⁴ Manfred, Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, pp. 371–2, 381. ¹⁰⁵ Ibid., p. 368.
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overcome the sundry forces intent on defeating it, and Manfred concluded from
his analysis that, for the proletariat, the 1848 Revolution, like the revolutions in
France in 1830 and 1871, was a premature revolution; for that simple reason only
the French Revolution deserved its appellation as a Great Revolution.¹⁰⁶ Manfred’s
comments would be echoed in the Gorbachev era, when the implication in
Manfred’s attacks on Blanc and Lamartine that individuals affect the course
of events as much as objective conditions do was stated explicitly. In 1989
V. A. Gavrilichev cited approvingly Herzen’s derogation of the same two leaders
of the 1848 Revolution in France as ‘short-sighted, weak-willed dilettantes’, fully
deserving condemnation for ‘ruining’ it’.¹⁰⁷
Of the Soviet historians who took up the 1848 Revolution in their scholarship,
B. S. Itenberg’s views most closely tracked Lenin’s. What happened in France in
1848, in his opinion, was that a bourgeois revolution morphed temporarily into a
proletariat one. The proletariat, like the bourgeoisie, was intent, in the spring of
1848, on transforming France into a democratic republic. But fear among other
classes in France that sought an economic transformation to accompany a polit-
ical one caused the class it most directly threatened economically, the bourgeoisie,
to suppress it—first in the June Days, and then in December, when Louis
Napoleon, supported by monarchists and a large percentage of the bourgeoisie,
came to power; that he won the presidency of France in a genuinely free election
did not diminish the illegitimacy of the political supremacy he thereafter
enjoyed.¹⁰⁸
More than most Soviet historians, Itenburg analysed the 1848 Revolution as a
self-contained historical event, its larger significance limited to the role it played in
linking earlier revolutions in France to the Paris Commune twenty-three years
later. Other Soviet historians, however, were not so reticent. B. G. Veber seemed to
study the revolution for the role he believed it played in the political education of
the Bolsheviks, who were cognizant of the pitfalls it prefigured in the dicey
enterprise of conducting a revolution and replacing an old regime with a new
one. According to Veber, Marx and Engels enjoyed the inestimable advantage, in
comparison to other political theorists and advocates of socialist and communism,
of ‘involving themselves in the mass revolutionary struggle of 1848–49’.¹⁰⁹
That gave them the perspective ‘from which to ascertain the future pattern of
the workers’ movement and democracy in different countries’—which for Veber
was a roundabout way of saying that their temporal proximity to the Revolution
of 1848 enabled them, once the revolution ended, to produce a generic template of

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., pp. 368, 405–6.

¹⁰⁷ Gavrilichev, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia v publitsistike revoliutsionnykh demokratov’,
p. 376.
¹⁰⁸ Itenberg, Rossiia i velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia, pp. 47–8.
¹⁰⁹ Veber, ‘V. I. Lenin i istoricheskoe nasledie iakobintsev’, p. 25.
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revolution that Lenin and the Bolsheviks would subsequently rely on in

establishing the Soviet Union.¹¹⁰ But Weber also credited the French revolution-
ary tradition as a whole for the role it played by itself—apart from its value
after passing through the interpretive prism of Marxism—in clarifying Lenin’s
thinking at critical points in his own political and ideological maturation. In
1905, for example, Lenin, in Veber’s estimation, knew enough French history to
recognize that the choice Russia faced in that year was whether the bourgeois
revolution that was underway would resemble 1789 or 1848, and when Lenin
realized that the ongoing revolution in Russia would resemble the latter
rather than the former and that the revolution in Russia would therefore fail,
the lessons he drew from that regrettable, but perhaps inescapable outcome
were the right ones. In short, the success of the October Revolution and
the emergence of the Soviet Union depended considerably on how Lenin inter-
preted the 1905 Revolution, and how Lenin interpreted the 1905 Revolution
depended considerably on how he interpreted the revolutions that preceded it in
France.¹¹¹

* * *
For all of this, the 1848 Revolution in France, considered as a discrete event, did
not inflame and inspire to the degree to which other French revolutions were able
to do. Its success was brief and ephemeral, its defeat seemingly permanent. For
sheer drama, it offered nothing comparable to the storming of the Bastille. Nor,
for that matter, did it harbour any universal aspirations or objectives revolution-
aries elsewhere in Europe or in another part of the world might find congenial.
The socialists and liberals who led the 1848 revolution considered it primarily a
French affair, made by Frenchman in the pursuit of objectives from which the
French people, more than any other, would benefit. Absent in 1848—not just in
France but in Europe as a whole—was any overarching sense of common purpose,
much less any grandiloquent conviction, as there was in the French Revolution,
that what they were engaged in were just the initial steps in the emancipation of
humanity. Moreover, while industrialization in France was certainly accelerating
by the mid nineteenth-century, the working class remained mostly pre-industrial,
consisting mainly of artisans and craftsmen, rather than a genuine proletariat
employed in factories that by their size alone would have increased the magnitude
of strikes and other expressions of discontent. The class consciousness Marxists
were convinced would cause the working class to resist entreaties from
the bourgeoisie to join it in an alliance that, as it happened in 1848, would
bring the working class nothing but misfortune, remained primitive in France.
Moreover, the ‘proletarian internationalism’ that would remain an article of faith

¹¹⁰ Lenin quoted in ibid. ¹¹¹ Ibid., p. 8.

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for a later generations of socialists until its claim to prevent wars was shown in
1914 to be chimerical was still, in 1848, a mere figment of the inflamed imagin-
ations of Marx and Engels. Finally, the fact remained that, viewed retrospectively
from the perspective of twentieth-century revolutionaries like the Bolsheviks, the
Revolution of 1848 in France could not match, for sheer pathos, the Paris
Commune of 1871, the destruction of which took longer and required a far larger
number of troops, thereby increasing exponentially the potential martyrdom of
the Commune’s defenders.
For these reasons the Revolution of 1848, by itself, had precious little to
recommend it when the Bolsheviks had to legitimize their own revolution to the
majority of the Russian people who rejected it. But the Revolution of 1848 in
France was far from irrelevant. Its consideration seemed to generate among the
Bolsheviks the realization that there existed in the history of France a revolution-
ary tradition, that the Revolution of 1848 was a part of it, and that this tradition
had a meaning different from—one might even say greater than—that of the
particular revolutions comprising it.
Moreover, the Revolution of 1848 happened to have a dénouement in the rise to
power of Louis Napoleon and his transmogrification of the Second Republic into
the Second Empire. Among the Bolsheviks, this gave rise to what for them was a
fearful spectre, no less threatening than Thermidor, in its demoralizing and
delegitimizing imputation that any regime they created might degenerate into a
hypertrophied state, ruling ostensibly on behalf of all classes and thus impervious
to its own ideological bankruptcy. This hypertrophied state stood at the apex of a
political system that came to be known among the Bolsheviks as ‘Bonapartism’;
that it emerged in France when the economy was still capitalist did not diminish
the fear among the Bolsheviks of its emerging in Russia even after—or especially
after—the economy there had become socialist. While there was much about
Louis Napoleon’s persona that could be easily satirized, and about his ultimate
demise as a Prussian prisoner of war to make him an object of contempt, he
possessed a savoir faire in matters political without which not even his venerable
lineage as the nephew of the original Napoleon could have ensured his rise to
power. But the Bolsheviks were actually afraid of both Napoleons, the first one just
as much as, and, at times, even more than the second one. Louis Napoleon may
have adopted some of the affectations of the military, such as wearing a uniform
on ceremonial occasions, and also, it seems, whenever his portrait was painted, but
the most likely gravedigger of any proletarian revolution, in the overheated
imaginations of the Bolsheviks, would more likely be someone like Napoleon
Bonaparte: an actual general, or at least an officer, more illustrious, more impos-
ing, and more successful in running a military and winning wars than the nephew
of his, whose success in destroying the Second Republic was what initially sparked
the Bolsheviks’ concern about the larger phenomenon that bore the family name
the two French rulers shared.
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However, regardless of which Napoleon the Bolsheviks considered the real

precedent for the military dictatorship they feared might destroy them, it seems
proper, in this study, to consider the whole phenomenon of Bonapartism an
integral aspect of the French Revolutionary Tradition. After all, the original
Napoleon consolidated and codified the French Revolution before betraying it,
and by doing so made possible a synthesis of two traditions in French history, the
Napoleonic and the Revolutionary, once there emerged in the 1870s a consensus
in France on what Gordon Wright has called ‘the republican ideal’.¹¹² However
amorphous it might be conceptually, and however indeterminable its provenance
in French history given its applicability to two rulers and two periods of history
separated by more than a half-century, Bonapartism had nonetheless become an
integral aspect of the French Revolutionary Tradition by the time the Bolsheviks
discovered this tradition, explored it, and determined its temporal and ideological
limits. An analysis of Bonapartism, as the Bolsheviks perceived it, is therefore
essential in ascertaining the relationship between this tradition and the larger
history of Bolshevism and the Soviet Union.

¹¹² Wright, France in Modern Times, p. 205.

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14
The Phantom of the Russian Bonaparte

Marx and Engels introduced to the Bolsheviks the concept commonly called
‘Bonapartism’.¹ Russian intelligenty, by and large, were aware of the term and
occasionally used it to clarify—for themselves, one suspects, as much as for
others—political systems and methods of rule not explainable in the terminology
to which they were accustomed. But their influence on the Bolsehviks, in this
respect, was minimal. Chernyshevskii confined his analysis of Bonapartism to
reaffirming that it could issue from a successful revolution, as it did in the French
Revolution as well as from a failed revolution, as it did in the case of the
Revolution of 1848.² The phenomenon was never uppermost in his mind, and
for that reason he never specified its attributes, much less the ways in which the
regimes the two Napoleons established differed from other authoritarian regimes
that resembled them. Mikhail Bakunin, with his consummate fear of political
power concentrated in a central government, spoke of the French government
under Gambetta as ‘Bonapartist’ by virtue of its ‘administrative apparatus’.³ But
like Chernyshevskii he did not explain why this particular regime, but not others
that exercised political power similarly, should be given this particular designa-
tion. Finally, Alexander Herzen used the term mostly as a pejorative; that he
applied it to Heinrich Heine’s views on the Revolution of 1830, but to no
government or political leader of any significance, makes clear its irrelevance to
his formulation and conceptualization of his own politics.⁴ When discussing the

¹ That Marx and Engels usually applied the term to the regimes of the two Napoleons does not mean
that they considered the term inapplicable to others. Over the course of their lifetimes, imitators
appeared; in fact Louis Napoleon was an imitator himself, consciously adopting some of the persona of
his uncle in the hope of achieving his own renown. Marx and Engels had no trouble labelling as
‘Bonapartist’ the policies Bismarck pursued in Germany in the 1870s to appease the lower classes with
material benefits, such as old-age insurance, while perpetuating a political system designed to keep
them powerless. Bismarck’s policies, and the political calculations that produced them, were, in fact,
remarkably similar to Louis Napoleon’s. In 1866 Engels explicitly characterized the system Bismarck
created as ‘a Bonapartist semi-dictatorship’. ‘Letter, Engels to Marx (13 April 1866)’, Marx and Engels,
Selected Correspondence, p. 206. While Marx never developed an actual theory of Bonapartism, after his
surprise that someone so supposedly foolish and stupid as Louis Napoleon could come to power in
France had subsided, he accepted the notion that regimes like his could emerge in other countries of
Europe provided their economies were capitalist. Marx never denied explicitly that Bonapartism could
exist under socialism because he did not think it was necessary to do so. To Marx ‘Bonapartist
socialism’ (or ‘socialist Bonapartism’) was an oxymoron.
² Plimak and Khoros, ‘Velikaia frantsuzskaia revoliutsiia i revoliutsionnaia traditsiia v Rossii’, p. 243.
³ Quoted in K. J. Kenafick, Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx (Melbourne, 1948), p. 168.
⁴ Herzen, Past and Thoughts, p. 597.
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two Bonapartes, he mostly disparaged them, and his only comment suggesting
that dictatorships like those the two men established were prototypical of a generic
category was that ‘every revolution creates its own Napoleon’.⁵
It fell to Marx and Engels to explain what a Bonapartist regime consisted of, and
why it should appear in a country such as France that had already experienced a
capitalist revolution elevating the bourgeoisie to power. One must bear in mind
that the two men explained the phenomenon, at least initially, while still disap-
pointed by the failure of the 1848 Revolution. Like Herzen and Bakunin, they
witnessed Louis Napoleon’s ascension to the presidency of France in December
1848, its transformation in 1851 into the power base for a future dictatorship, and
finally, in obvious imitation of his uncle, his proclaiming France an empire and
himself its emperor in 1852.⁶ Because their ideology could not explain, much less
have predicted these events, Marx and Engels both reacted initially to Louis
Napoleon’s triumphs more emotionally than rationally. Beneath the genuine con-
tempt they harboured for the man himself—‘a serious buffoon’ and ‘a crafty roué’
were among the less disparaging descriptions Marx proffered in The Eighteenth
Brumaire—there was an undercurrent of anger and resentment, borne, one sus-
pects, out of genuine bewilderment, in what they first wrote about the man.⁷ Only
after passions had cooled, and Louis’ policies could be evaluated empirically, were
Marx and Engels capable of evaluating his regime calmly and rationally, and
determining whether it warranted the creation of a new generic category of political
regimes to understand it.
Their first response to Louis’ coup was sheer invective. In contrast to the
original Bonaparte, who was a serious and historically consequential figure, his
nephew, according to Engels, was ‘stupid’, the means by which he took power
‘ludicrous’, and the proclamation he issued explaining it ‘fatuous’.⁸ The likelihood
of his government surviving more than a few months was minimal. For all of these
reasons Engels wondered
how much longer the World Spirit, clearly much incensed at mankind, is going to
continue this farce, whether with the year we shall see Consulate, Empire, Restor-
ation and all pass by before our eyes, whether, too, the Napoleonic dynasty must
first be thrashed in the streets of Paris before it is deemed impossible in France, the
devil only knows. But it strikes me things are taking a remarkably lunatic turn and
that the crapauds [i.e. philistines] are heading for an astonishing humiliation.⁹

⁵ Quoted in Mayer, ‘Lenin and the Jacobin Identity’, p. 130.

⁶ The title of Marx’s influential essay on Louis’ seizure of power, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, refers to the date according to the old Jacobin calendar still in effect when Napoleon
Bonaparte seized power in France on 9 November 1799.
⁷ Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, pp. 75–6.
⁸ ‘Letter, Engels to Marx (3 December 1851)’, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. XXXVIII,
p. 504.
⁹ Ibid., vol. XXXVIII, pp. 505–6.
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Two years later, in a letter to Joseph Wedemeyer, Engels was still emphasizing the
personal element in history, denigrating Louis implicitly by praising the military
campaigns of his uncle; the latter were the classic exemplar of how a revolutionary
army, indeed any army, should fight.¹⁰ Engels seemed to recognize that Louis’
success could not be explained either by Marxist ideology or by any exceptional
personal attributes other than reptilian cunning. But rather than soften his earlier
disparagement, he continued his ad hominem invective towards Louis Napoleon,
which he seemed to believe had greater resonance when coupled with ad hominem
praise for Napoleon Bonaparte.
Unlike his longtime collaborator, however, Marx felt compelled to explain
Louis’ rise to power ideologically. The result was The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte. Marx began writing it in December 1851, mere days after the
coup that made Louis Napoleon a dictator; he finished it in April 1852. It was
published first in New York, also in 1852, in the first issue of the German émigré
newspaper Die Revolution. In the essay, Marx offered two explanations, one for
Louis’ gaining power, the other for his holding onto it. Both required Louis’
success to be depersonalized. In explaining Louis’ rise to power, Marx reduced
him to the political instrument of two social strata within the French bourgeoisie;
Louis’ political intelligence, or lack of it, was irrelevant. In the first stratum were
wealthy landowners—in the essay Marx called them Legitimists—who originally
favoured the Bourbons, then resisted the Orléanists, and finally settled on Louis
Napoleon because he was politically malleable. The second consisted of nouveaux-
riches from the financial and industrial elite who had once favoured Louis Philippe
and subsequent Orléanist pretenders, but after 1848 though it wiser, in light of the
first Napoleon’s universally accepted greatness, to support the second one; that he
was a pale imitation of his much-beloved uncle, and thus unlikely to offer
resistance once in power, seemed to confirm the sagacity of their decision.¹¹
At this point in the essay, Marx included among the social classes and sub-
classes of the population that brought Louis Napoleon to power the ‘small-holding
peasants’, whose involvement he now made clear he considered crucial to Louis
Napoleon’s success.¹² Their attraction to him was, at bottom, irrational: despite
tilling land their ancestors had received in the French Revolution, the poorest
peasants, who comprised a majority of the class as a whole, were instinctively
monarchist and therefore susceptible to seductive authoritarians like Louis Napoleon
who promised them everything.¹³ Later in the essay, however, Marx changed
his mind, now claiming that the essential prerequisite for Louis Napoleon’s
continuation in power had nothing to do with the class identity of his supporters,
and everything to do with his creation of a state so much more powerful than the

¹⁰ ‘Letter, Engels to Joseph Wedemeyer (12 April 1853)’, ibid., vol. XXXIX, p. 305.
¹¹ Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, pp. 46–9. ¹² Ibid., p. 123.
¹³ Ibid., pp. 46–9, 123–4.
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bourgeoisie and the landed proprietors whose support, along with that of the
peasants, had made its establishment possible. Marx describes this hypertrophied
state the second Napoleon established as follows:
Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself com-
pletely independent. As against civil society, the state machine has consolidated its
position so thoroughly that the chief of the Society of 10 December [i.e. Louis
Napoleon], suffices for its head, an adventurer blown in from abroad, raised on the
shield by a drunken soldiery, which he has bought with liquor and sausages, and to
which he must continually ply with sausages anew. Hence the downcast despair,
the feeling of most dreadful humiliation and degradation that oppresses the breast
of France and makes her catch her breath. She feels dishonoured.¹⁴

One suspects that the contumely Marx harboured for peasants made it easier for
him to believe that, irrespective of his characterological deficiencies, once Louis
Napoleon was secure as Emperor of the French, he could do pretty much as he
wished. The state machine of which he was its most public and tangible expression
would remain hypertrophied, and neither peasants nor any other class or stratum
of the population could destroy it absent some internal or external catastrophe
befalling France—as it finally did in 1870.¹⁵
One should not underestimate Marx’s contempt for ‘this princely lumpenpro-
letarian’.¹⁶ One suspects that at some level he thought Louis would remain in
power because peasants were even bigger idiots than their leader. But one should
also not ignore the inescapable contradiction between Louis Napoleon’s ostensible
lack of political intelligence and his political success. Becoming president, dictator,
and emperor of France in quick succession was no mean feat. That he did so
hardly more than a decade after two failed attempts to seize power (in 1836 and
1840) had resulted, respectively, in his living in exile in several countries, includ-
ing the United States, and being convicted in court of sedition and sentenced to
life imprisonment in a castle (from which he later escaped) only increased the
enormity of his achievement. Louis Napoleon was not at all the ‘manageable
cretin’ not only Marx, but many others, such as Adolph Thiers, imagined him
to be, and the ignominy he endured as a prisoner of the Prussians in 1870 should
not obscure his very real political intelligence.¹⁷ In explaining Marx’s personal
derogations of Louis Napoleon, which were even more intemperate than those of

¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 122–3.

¹⁵ Of course many of those who voted for Louis in December 1848 had no idea about his beliefs and
what he stood for—which was partly the result of Louis’ own indecision. But peasants entertained
actual delusions. Some thought he was his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte—who by then had been dead for
three decades and whose body had long ago been placed in a marble sarcophagus in Les Invalides in
Paris in conspicuously public ceremonies. Others who voted for Louis thought that, once he was
president, he would pay their taxes. Sperber, The European Revolutions, p. 152.
¹⁶ Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 85.
¹⁷ Quoted in Gildea, Children of the Revolution, p. 58.
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other persons he personally disliked, it must be borne in mind that Louis Napoleon’s
success—which was what had forced him and Engels to conceptualize a new
generic category of political systems—was not supposed to happen. Dictators in
an age of industrial capitalism could not come to power largely because peasants
supported them. Nor could they remain in power by transcending classes
entirely—as Louis Napoleon was able to do quite successfully until the last years
of his rule.¹⁸
There was another factor causing Marx to underestimate Louis Napoleon when
he was writing The Eighteenth Brumaire and still believed a revival of the 1848
Revolution was possible. Louis Napoleon, notwithstanding Marx’s animadver-
sions on his character, effectively dashed his hopes—as it happened, for the rest of
his and Engels’ lives. But unlike other ‘gravediggers’ of revolutions that might
otherwise have succeeded, Louis adopted the persona of a politician genuinely
committed to assuaging the concerns and ameliorating the grievances of the lower
classes. To Marx this was mere political posturing, and for that reason he
concluded that Louis had not rejected the Revolution of 1848 so much as betrayed
it, which made his success in taking power especially infuriating. The 1848
Revolution was for Marx and Engels an opportunity that was lost, rather than
an opportunity that never was. Notwithstanding the determinism implicit in their
dialectical materialism, Louis Napoleon’s victories were by no means preordained.
One can easily imagine a scenario in which, at least until he assumed the title and
the role of emperor, he could have been stopped had either his supporters or his
enemies acted differently.
After the emotional revulsion Marx and Engels felt towards Louis Napoleon
diminished, their new-found moderation caused them to disagree about what
Bonapartism actually was. In a letter in 1868 to François Lafargue (not to be
confused with Marx’s son in-law Paul Lafargue), Marx claimed that ‘Napoleonic
regimes’ were founded on the weariness and [political] impotence of ‘the two
antagonistic classes of society’—by which he meant, of course, the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat.¹⁹ This was consistent with what Marx had written six years earlier
in a letter to Engels, in which he denigrated his fellow German socialist Ferdinand
Lassalle, whom he considered a rival for the affection and support of German
workers, as ‘an enlightened Bonapartist’ for the ‘fantasies’ he ostensibly harboured
about the state encouraging and even sponsoring the establishment of ‘producer

¹⁸ For a mostly positive evaluation of the emperor, see Jasper Ridley, Napoleon III and Eugénie (New
York, 1979), p. 573; Albert Guérard, Napoleon III (Cambridge MA, 1943), pp. 281–93; and Theodore
Zeldin, ‘The Myth of Napoleon III’, History Today 8, no. 2 (February, 1958): pp. 103–9. A very critical
one even locates in the Second Empire the theoretical basis for the totalitarian police states of the
twentieth century. Howard C. Payne, ‘Theory and Practice of Political Police during the Second Empire
in France’, Journal of Modern History 30, no. 1 (March 1958): p. 23. A more recent and balanced
appraisal is Alain Plessis, The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire 1852–1871 (Cambridge, 1985).
¹⁹ ‘Letter, Marx to Lafargue (12 November 1868)’, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. XLII,
p. 334.
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cooperatives’ beneficial to the working class.²⁰ Obscured by Marx’s customary

sarcasm was the conviction that Bonapartism was a transitory form of statism that
could exist only after the entire edifice of industrial capitalism had collapsed in a
proletarian revolution, but before a proletarian dictatorship could be established.
The hypertrophication of the state Bonapartism entailed was itself morally and
politically neutral, and if that was all the phenomenon implied, it would be little
different from a proletarian dictatorship. But what distinguished the former from
the latter was the particular class or classes it existed to protect. A proletarian
dictatorship would benefit the proletariat by nationalizing private property, and in
doing so reduce the number of classes to one. This would mean, in effect, that no
classes existed, and once a classless society existed, there would no longer be any
need for government, which would wither away. Communism would replace
socialism, and its arrival would mark the end of history itself.
A Bonapartist dictatorship was different. It was not a virtual facsimile of a
proletarian dictatorship. It existed to benefit classes that were not on the ‘right
side’ of history and would do everything in its power to protect their interests and
thereby ensure its own survival. In fact, in ‘The Civil War in France’, Marx’s essay
on the Paris Commune that appeared less than a month after its suppression, he
described a Bonapartist regime as one that treated the people it ruled with a
severity that far exceeded that which the bourgeoisie, by means of a bogus
democracy that promised the lower classes political power but never provided it,
normally needed to maintain its supremacy. In Marx’s own phraseology, state
power in Bonapartist empires like Louis Napoleon’s ‘soared high above society’—a
formulation suggesting that whoever ruled Bonapartist regimes might have ori-
ginated in the bourgeoisie but had managed, but in the political power he
accumulated had managed to transcend it.²¹
In Engels’ later references to Bonapartism one finds a different vision of the
relationship between the ruler and the people. While Marx believed this relation-
ship consigned the bourgeoisie to a status only marginally superior to that of all
the other classes of society, Engels saw the relationship approximating that
between equals. In Engels’ conception, the Bonapartist dictator not only remem-
bered the class from which he emerged, but he also perpetuated its privileges. By a
process of elimination, the only class capable of producing such rulers was the
bourgeoisie. In fact, in a letter to Marx in 1866, Engels described a Bonapartist
regime as simply a partial dictatorship in which the dictator remained the political
instrument of the bourgeoisie.²² The dictator clearly had more power than that
which a democratically elected leader exercised under capitalism. But the purpose

²⁰ ‘Letter, Marx to Engels (30 July 1862)’, ibid., vol. XLI, p. 390; George Lichtheim, Marxism
(New York, 1969), p. 95.
²¹ Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France’, in K. Marx and V. I. Lenin, Civil War in France: The Paris
Commune (New York, 1968), p. 56.
²² ‘Letter, Engels to Marx (13 April 1866)’, in Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, p. 205.
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for which this power was employed was effectively the same in both forms of
government—not to transcend classes but to benefit one class, the bourgeoisie. In
that respect the difference between a bourgeois democracy and a Bonapartist
dictatorship was, for Engels, one of degree rather than of kind. The former had
less power than the latter, and that, rather than the goal it was employed to
achieve, was why the two governments required different names. In the letter,
Engels went so far as the characterize Bonapartism as ‘a religion of the modern
bourgeoisie’—by which he meant an arrangement whereby the bourgeoisie hap-
pily acquiesced in the transfer of power from a (bogus) legislature or president to
an avowed dictator because he was no less committed than bourgeois democrats
to maintaining the bourgeoisie’s economic supremacy.²³ Another reason for the
bourgeoisie’s insouciance was because the Bonapartist dictator, once his political
security and prerogatives were assured, would be uniquely able to neutralize the
proletariat’s hostility by redirecting it onto some other entity, which need not be
an economic class; another country would be preferable. As he wrote in 1865,
these arrangements were feasible only in certain conditions, which were precisely
those that pertained in France after the failure of the 1848 Revolution, namely
when the bourgeoisie was too weak and insecure to rule directly, but the prole-
tariat was not yet powerful enough to supersede it by means of a socialist
revolution.²⁴
In short, there was a quid pro quo in Engels’ notion of Bonapartism that was
absent in Marx’s: in the former, the bourgeoisie relinquished political power to the
Bonapartist dictator because it recognized that the dictatorship he personified
would refrain from destroying or in any way tampering with the economic
advantages capitalism had conferred on it. In Marx’s scenario, in other words,
the Bonapartist dictator transcended the bourgeoisie, and presumably was more
powerful and autonomous as a result, while in Engels’ the Bonapartist dictator, for
reasons of his own, allowed himself to be the political instrument of the bour-
geoisie. Of course the difference in the two men’s notions of Bonapartism over the
long run was irrelevant to the ultimate result, which remained a proletarian
revolution that would destroy both the bourgeoisie and the political arrangements,
ranging from bourgeois democracy to a Bonapartist system like Bismarck’s or
Louis Napoleon’s, it contrived to protect its economic dominance. But the inex-
orable contradictions the dialectic was constantly introducing into history ensured
that this dominance could never be permanent. Not even the application of
overwhelming military force—which neither Marx nor Engels considered neces-
sary for a Bonapartist regime to exist, though they both thought it might be

²³ Ibid.
²⁴ Friedrich Engels, The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party, cited in Jost
Dülffer, ‘Bonapartism, Fascism and National Socialism’, Journal of Contemporary History, no. 11
(1976): p. 111.
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necessary in suppressing the proletariat, could achieve this objective. Bonapartism

was for Marx and Engels what imperialism was for Lenin, namely a means by
which the continuation of capitalism beyond earlier predictions of when it would
collapse could be explained.²⁵ Each was an ad hoc addendum to a theory pur-
porting to explain the future of capitalism. Instead of jettisoning the theory when
its predictive powers seemed to have diminished, first Marx and Engels and then, a
half-century or so later, Lenin, looked for easy answers that would repair the
damage empirical reality had inflicted on the theory they all subscribed to,
and reconfirm the inevitability of the glorious end of history in socialism and
communism. In sum, Bonapartism domestically and imperialism abroad were
expedients enabling industrial capitalism to continue long after its anticipated
expiration date.

* * *
Of the Mensheviks, Plekhanov was the only one daring enough, prior to the
October Revolution, to speculate on the ramifications of Bonapartism somehow
manifesting itself either within a socialist party or in a socialist state. Both
scenarios, if they came to pass, would cast doubt on Marxism itself. Marx and
Engels, it is true, were willing to tamper with their life’s work when the terrorists in
Russia in the late nineteenth century seemed to offer a means of accelerating the
life-cycle of industrial capitalism. But for Marx and Engels the terrorism the
Russians practised, by inspiring the peasants to revolt, was a means of achieving
socialism and communism more quickly. Bonapartism, by contrast, would delay
this or even preclude it. For this reason the two men approached the whole matter
of Bonapartism reluctantly; it is also why prior to 1917 the Mensheviks, excepting
Plekhanov, avoided it entirely.
In 1904, in the aftermath of Lenin’s actions at the Second Congress, in which he
called for the creation of a workers’ party, in which political authority was
centralized and its rank and file expected to follow its dictates unthinkingly,
Plekhanov thought it necessary to address the issue. He did so in an essay in
Iskra published also as a pamphlet entitled Centralism or Bonapartism.²⁶ Its
purpose was to distinguish the forms of government each concept implied, and
explain why he preferred the former to the latter; in fact, he proudly proclaimed
himself its advocate. Plekhanov wrote the essay just when he had begun to
harbour doubts about Lenin’s commitment to a socialist party based on the
eventual dominance of the workers over professional revolutionaries like himself
and Lenin once the latter had instilled in the former the revolutionary conscious-
ness necessary for a proletarian revolution to succeed. Prior to that time, these

²⁵ Lenin, Imperialism.
²⁶ G. V. Plekhanov, ‘Tsentralizm ili Bonapartizm’, Iskra, no. 65 (1 May 1904), in Plekhanov,
Sochineniia, vol. XIII, pp. 81–93.
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professional revolutionaries, despite their constituting only a small fraction of the

party’s membership, would run the party until they had taught the workers
everything they needed to know. When that happened, the workers would take
over the party. In fact, Lenin—and every Soviet leader that followed him with the
partial exception of Gorbachev—never allowed this transfer of power to occur
while ruling the Soviet Union, and in the article Plekhanov posited a dichotomy
between centralism, which he favoured, and Bonapartism, which he said was what
Lenin preferred, as a way of expressing his growing concern that Lenin would rule
dictatorially should he ever have the opportunity to do so.
The Bonapartism Plekhanov said Lenin favoured was essentially a means of
establishing political dominance by perpetual ‘plebiscites’ of party members.²⁷
Paradoxically, this entailed, in Plekhanov’s opinion, not so much a rejection of
democratic norms as an overuse of them. What Lenin defended as the mere
‘canvassing’ of members for the purpose of ascertaining their opinions on par-
ticular issues Plekhanov considered a de facto form of dictatorship that would
inevitably tempt the person leading it to falsify the results of these plebiscites. The
result would be a party—and by implication a government should the party come
to power in a revolution—that far exceeded the degree to which its power, to be
employed successfully, had to be centralized. In 1903 Plekhanov had agreed with
Lenin that because a workers’ party had no choice but to operate in Russia
clandestinely, its leaders in exile in Western Europe had to enjoy a monopoly of
political power enabling them to establish policy and to ensure that party cells
back in Russia, which were able to communicate with one another only with
difficulty or not at all, received word of it. In fact, a party that was functionally
Bonapartist stood a far better chance of overcoming this particular obstacle, and
generally speaking would function effectively even if it had to do so clandestinely.
But the downside of a Bonapartist party was the chance, perhaps even the
likelihood, that the dominance of the professional revolutionaries over the work-
ers within the party would be even greater than it would be in a party the structure
of which had been ‘merely’ centralized. Moreover, by 1904 Plekhanov had known
Lenin long enough to know that he preferred a Bonapartist party to a centralized
one, and for that reason alone any manifestation of an incipient Bonapartism
within the recently established RSDLP should be squelched immediately. In
Plekhanov’s pithy summation of the distinction between the two kinds of parties
Russian socialists were considering, a Bonapartist party, in which there was too
much centralization, would likely establish ‘a dictatorship over the proletariat’,
while a party in which there was just the right degree of centralization would
establish ‘a dictatorship of the proletariat’.²⁸ For that reason, Plekhanov proudly
proclaimed himself ‘a centralist, but not a Bonapartist’.²⁹

²⁷ Ibid., p. 93. ²⁸ Ibid., p. 91. ²⁹ Ibid., p. 92.

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For Lenin, Bonapartism and its adjectival derivative were mostly epithets useful
in demeaning and defaming political opponents. But this does not mean these
words had no substantive meaning for him or that the enemies of his against
whom they were directed did not share certain political attributes and aspirations
that could plausibly be considered Bonapartist. Lenin’s first mention of the term
was in a letter in February 1905 to S. I. Gusev and Alexander Bogdanov, the
former a strong supporter of Lenin, the latter an eccentric and not entirely reliable
one whose belief in the rejuvenation of the deceased tested the limits of Lenin’s
patience as much as it exceeded the outer limits of Marxist orthodoxy.³⁰ In the
letter, Lenin attacked unnamed enemies as ‘Bonapartists’ for their recycling calls
for a unity congress at which supporters of Vpered, the newspaper the Bolsheviks
produced, would resolve their differences with supporters of Iskra, the official
newspaper of the RSDLP, once controlled by Lenin but now run by Mensheviks;
the result of all of this would be the restoration of party unity. To Lenin these
differences, while more tactical than ideological, were irreconcilable. But that, in
his opinion, was actually a virtue as far as the proper functioning of a socialist
party was concerned. In addition, the existence within the RSDLP of two separate
newspapers, with the Bolsheviks using one of them to express their own opinions,
enabled them to remain a discrete and distinguishable faction within the party. By
1905 Lenin’s penchant for ‘splitting’ errant Bolsheviks for their ostensible devi-
ations from Marxist orthodoxy had become a major factor, perhaps the decisive
one, in preventing the unity that many within the party desired. Lenin, however,
damned them collectively as Bonapartist, presumably because they claimed to
transcend the differences within the party the way both Bonapartes had done in
France.³¹ Their supposedly noble intentions Lenin dismissed as a form of moral
preening inconsistent with the hard-nosed realism he preferred; whether this was
a quality the two French emperors shared was not something Lenin considered
appropriate for discussion.
One month later, in an article in Vpered entitled ‘The Tricks of the Bonapart-
ists’, Lenin went further, claiming now that the elements within the party that
wanted a party congress were intent on holding one even without the Party
Council’s approval—which under the rules of the party would be illegal. But the
Party Council, for its part, was hardly blameless. According to Lenin, it sought to
rig the process by which delegates to any forthcoming party congress would be
accredited. Indeed, both of these party organs—and by implication the party as a
whole—were acting in violation of their own procedures, and for that reason,
presumably, warranted the appellation Lenin used in the title—but nowhere in the
text—to condemn them.³² As a result, the reader, while finding abundant evidence
for the presumption that all Bonapartists, for one reason or another, were bad,

³⁰ V. I. Lenin, ‘Pis’mo A. A. Bogdanovu i S. I. Gusevu’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. IX, pp. 244–8.
³¹ Ibid., vol. IX, p. 245. ³² V. I. Lenin, ‘Prodelki Bonapartistov’, ibid., vol. IX, pp. 362–6.
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could not glean from the article any understanding of what Bonapartism actually
was. Finally, in an article three years later on why the agrarian reforms proposed
by Pëtr Stolypin would make the radicalization of the Russian peasantry more
likely rather than less so, as the tsarist minister intended, Lenin supplied a
definition. That it now had a specific meaning, however, did not mean that
Lenin no longer considered it useful as an all-purpose political epithet:
Bonapartism [Lenin wrote] is the manoeuvring on the part of a monarchy which
has lost its old patriarchal or feudal, simple and solid foundation—a monarchy
which is obliged to walk a tightrope in order not to fall, to make advances in
order to govern, to bribe in order to please, and to fraternise with the dregs of
society, with outright thieves and swindlers, in order not to rely only on bayonets.
Bonapartism is the objectively necessary evolution of the monarchy in any
bourgeois country, traced by Marx and Engels through an entire series of events
in the modern history of Europe.³³

Bonapartism, in other words, was for Lenin a generic phenomenon, not limited to
France or Russia, even though these were the two countries where it manifested
itself most clearly. Nor was it particular to revolutionary politics. Governments,
even reactionary ones like Stolypin’s, could manifest it. But for Lenin its applica-
tion always reflected the primacy he ascribed in politics to treachery and betrayal,
which for him were as much a reflection of an intensely personal duplicity and
mendacity as it was generic behaviour informed by the requirements of class.
In this instance, however, it was meant to suggest the practice—which Lenin
obviously believed Louis Napoleon had originated in France—of tricking people
impoverished by their own reactionary government into believing any reforms it
proposed were designed to help them, rather than to ensure their obedience when
these reforms, inevitably, made their lives worse rather than better. But with more
than a hint of bravado, Lenin then reassured his readers that this kind of massive
deception could not be effective indefinitely, and that in Russia it would not save
the monarchy—which was Stolypin’s underlying objective—no matter how
attractively his reforms were packaged and presented to the Russian people.
In fact, Stolypin, quite unintentionally, was bent on carrying out the equivalent
of a bourgeois revolution in the Russian countryside, and while like bourgeois
revolutions in Western Europe his reforms might improve conditions temporar-
ily, over the long run they would worsen them to the point where the peasants
would willingly support urban workers in a proletarian revolution. According to
Lenin, after promising a legislature in 1905 to defuse the passions the revolution in
that year had unleashed, the monarchy was now using the actual legislature it had
created in 1906 to legitimize agrarian reforms designed to trick the peasants into
supporting a government that actually loathed them. This kind of mendacity,

³³ V. I. Lenin, ‘Ob otsenke tekushchego momenta’, ibid., vol. XVII, pp. 273–4.
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Lenin concluded, was the essence of Bonapartism, even though oppressive

governments that were configured differently might act just as perfidiously. In
his words, ‘the Russian autocracy wanted to be covered up, dressed up, and decked
out with the help of the Duma’.³⁴ But the repression the Duma was intended to
conceal could not mask the autocracy’s real objectives indefinitely. In fact, ‘each
day of [the Duma’s] existence revealed, exposed, and uncovered the true character
of our state power, its actual class foundations, and its Bonapartism’.³⁵ What made
this particular reference to Bonapartism distinctive was that Lenin mentioned it
separately from the whole issue of class, implying that Bonapartism had more to
do with how a government functioned—in this instance in a fashion that was
especially, even uniquely, deceitful and prevaricating—than with its social
composition.
But describing the class or classes of which Bonapartism was a political
manifestation was not the reason Lenin wrote the article. His objective was
more political than analytical. In 1908 the fortunes of the Bolsheviks were perhaps
at their lowest point during the twelve years between the two revolutions Russia
experienced in the beginning of the twentieth century, and the future Soviet leader
felt a special obligation to conjure a scenario promising imminent rather than
long-term success. Accordingly, Lenin sketched out in the article the sequence of
events that had already begun in Russia that he believed would occur in any
country—excluding of course those that were already socialist—where the gov-
ernment, like Louis Napoleon’s in France in the mid-nineteenth century, was
making a concerted effort to save itself. But the feudalism the Russian monarchy
existed to preserve was destined soon to collapse, and there was nothing Stolypin
could do to prevent it. The most Bonapartist policies like Stolypin’s could achieve
was delay. Of course whether Lenin actually believed this is a matter of pure
conjecture. Nevertheless, one can plausibly speculate that he excoriated Stolypin’s
reforms—which were Bonapartist both because they were imposed on Russian
peasants unilaterally and because they were intended to perpetuate a reactionary
regime in power—because he feared they might actually work. Had Stolypin lived
to a ripe old age instead of falling victim to an assassin’s bullet three years after
Lenin’s article appeared, he might well have been the first Bonapartist in power
to have avoided the total defeat his prototypical predecessors had suffered at
Waterloo and Sedan respectively. It was not for nothing that Lenin, who habitually
disparaged Nicholas II as ‘the idiot Romanov’, genuinely, if grudgingly, respected
Stolypin and at some level feared him for recognizing that a peasantry that was
‘sobre and strong’ might allow the Russian monarchy to endure.³⁶

³⁴ Ibid., vol. XVII, p. 276. ³⁵ Ibid., vol. XVII, p. 276.

³⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘Rech’ v Moskovskom sovete rabochikh, krest’ianskikh i krasnoarmeiskikh deputatov
12 marta g.’, ibid., vol. XXXVI, p. 85; Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, p. 359. The latter phrase
was Stolypin’s.
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Several months after Lenin had identified Stolypin’s reforms as a species of

Bonapartism, he commented on a draft resolution on ‘the tasks of the party’ at a
party conference—not to be confused with the party congresses, which were better
attended and dealt with more consequential matters—and once again used the
same sobriquet to render them, in his mind at least, ineffectual and ephemeral.
This time, however, he called them ‘bourgeois Bonapartist’ rather than simply
‘Bonapartist’.³⁷ By doing so Lenin seemed to be suggesting—regardless of whether
the adjective was applicable in the case of Stolypin—that Bonapartism was
descriptive not only of a feudal government like Russia’s attempting to carry out
a bourgeois revolution without its attendant violence, but other kinds of govern-
ments ruling countries at different stages of historical development. But like his
earlier articles on the same subject, this one stressed that Stolypin’s reforms could
never work, and instead would actually accelerate the political radicalization of the
poorest peasants, mostly by increasing the distance economically between affluent
peasants and impoverished ones. In the end, the monarchy, ironically, would be
Stolypin’s reforms’ most obvious casualty—or so Lenin believed despite his
isolation as a powerless exile in Western Europe.
In the years prior to 1917, Lenin provided a fairly detailed and easily under-
standable description and analysis of Bonapartism. But there was one aspect of his
definition of the term that was conspicuous in its absence. Nowhere in his writings
of those years did Lenin ever suggest that Bonapartism had a military component:
that Bonapartist regimes, to warrant their adjectival descriptive, had to be headed
either by a member of the military—in all likelihood a general or, at the very least,
an officer—or by a civilian who needed the military’s support to come to power
and remain in power. However, in the very different political environment that
pertained in 1917, the military would occupy a prominent place in both Lenin’s
conception of the term and his use of it for political purposes.

* * *
Lenin did not arrive at his newfound conclusion that Bonapartism, to be taxo-
nomically distinct, required the involvement of the military—and that Napoleon
Bonaparte rather than Louis Napoleon was therefore the more appropriate pre-
cedent of a Bonapartist dictator—in a vacuum. In Russia in 1917, after the
monarchy fell, there was talk, much of it grounded in fear, of a Russian Bonaparte,
and when Russians spoke about the imminence of Bonapartism, the precedent
they had in mind was not the second Napoleon—the Napoleon of Marx
and Engels, and until recently of Lenin himself—but rather the first one.³⁸

³⁷ V. I. Lenin, ‘Proekt rezoliutsii o sovremennom momente i zadachakh partii 21–7 dekabria

1908 g.’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XVII, p. 325.
³⁸ Beatty, Red Heart of Russia, p. 155; Pauline Crosley, Intimate Letters from Petrograd (New York,
1920), p. 58. Not surprisingly, some in the army hoped a Russian Napoleon would emerge from their
ranks even before the monarchy collapsed. Shlapentokh, Counter-Revolution in Revolution, pp. 31–3.
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Alexander Kerensky, after becoming prime minister of the Provisional Government

in the summer, was the political figure most commonly thought to aspire to that
particular role. That he had adopted some of the accoutrements of military service,
such as suspending one of his arms in a sling, which wrongly suggested that he had
been wounded in combat, was certainly a factor in sustaining this perception.³⁹
But concern that the February Revolution would be betrayed in much the way the
two Napoleons turned against the revolutions that had made their rise to power
possible long preceded Kerensky’s elevation from the Ministry of Justice. In fact,
the infamous Order Number 1—issued by the Petrograd Soviet almost immedi-
ately after its creation calling on soldiers and sailors to contravene duly-issued
orders of their officers—was intended to preclude a military dictatorship many
thought would resemble Napoleon’s.⁴⁰ In reality, there was good reason for
concern. The anarchy that engulfed Russia in the spring and summer of 1917
created a political vacuum that the Russian military, either on the orders of one of
its own leaders or at the behest of a civilian using the army to advance his own
interests, could easily have filled—if it did not itself disintegrate as peasants in
uniform seeking land simply left their units and journeyed home in the expect-
ation of a monumental ‘black repartition’. To be sure, the substitution of the first
Napoleon for the second as the original inspiration for the dictatorship many in
Russia considered the only alternative to anarchy, made it possible for much of the
left in Russia to view a Bonapartist dictatorship favourably, seeing it as a continu-
ation and a deepening of the February Revolution, rather than a betrayal of it.
Bonaparte, in the minds of most Russian liberals and socialists, had done much
that was progressive and beneficial before becoming an incorrigible imperialist
brought down, in the end (after his generalship had deteriorated just as his belief
in his own infallibility was reaching megalomaniacal dimensions) more by his
successes than by his failures.⁴¹
Viktor Chernov, the leader of the SR Party, was the most prominent of those on
the left who, in the summer of 1917, stated his preference for a ‘Russian
Bonaparte’ replacing the Provisional Government and taking steps to eliminate,
or at least to reduce significantly, the anarchy engulfing Russia; that the Russian
army was suffering defeats that threatened to cause its complete disintegration

But trepidation at the same prospect was more prevalent. In the summer of 1917—to cite just one
example—Bolsheviks in Saratov saw ‘Napoleonic tendencies’ in the Mensheviks there. Donald
J. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca NY, 1986), p. 147.

³⁹ Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, p. 362. In fact Kerensky suffered from bursitis in his shoulder,
which does not exclude his using his condition for political purposes.
⁴⁰ Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March–
April 1917) (Princeton NJ, 1980), vol. I, p. 3. Wildman does not mention Napoleon as the model of a
presumptive military dictator, but many in Petrograd considered him as such irrespective of whether
they favoured a military dictatorship or opposed it.
⁴¹ Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life (New York, 2014), especially pp. 555–802.
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failed to lessen his enthusiasm for such an outcome.⁴² In Chernov’s preferred

scenario, a Russian replica of the original Napoleon would come to power in a ‘a
dry putsch’, by which he meant a coup d’état blessed, incongruously, by the
government it deposed; that Napoleon’s coup in 1799 came close to approximat-
ing such an unusual transfer of political authority may have inured Chernov to the
oxymoronic implications of a legal coup d’état, and more importantly the unlike-
lihood of an army beset by mass desertions and discredited by battlefield defeats
having the wherewithal to come to power legally or in any other way.⁴³ But this
was what Chernov believed. Once in power, whoever was playing the role of the
Russian Bonaparte would proceed to take steps Chernov believed would eventuate
in socialism. Bonapartism, in sum, was a good thing and Russian socialists would
be wise to do what they could to assist in its realization.
But for most Russian socialists the prospect of a Napoleonic dénouement to
the February Revolution, whether in the form of a military dictatorship like
Napoleon Bonaparte’s or a civilian-led regime resembling Louis Napoleon’s, was
perhaps the worst possible outcome. Like their French precursors, such a ruler in
Russia would mouth progressive rhetoric to mask policies that were mostly or
uniformly reactionary. The element of trickery that for Lenin was an essential
element of Bonapartism was present in how many others on the left conceived it.
V. I. Talin, writing in June in Rabochaia gazeta, warned his readers that aspiring
dictators in Russia might claim to represent ordinary people, but should they do so,
they would be no more truthful and honest than Louis Napoleon had been before
becoming the emperor of France.⁴⁴ Other than Kerensky and General Alexei
Brusilov, who briefly was feared to be the Russian Bonaparte in the weeks preceding
the October Revolution, only General Lavr Kornilov, who lacked the political
intelligence necessary to play the role successfully, came to mind after his army’s
marching northward from Ukraine to Petrograd in August seemed the first step
towards supplanting the Provisional Government; as it happened, his army was
quickly disarmed by forces loyal to the government in the beginning of September.⁴⁵
It remains unclear what his intentions were: he might have ordered his army to
Petrograd not to overthrow the civilian government, but to assist it in defending the
capital against an anticipated German offensive, the fear of which caused Kerensky
to request assistance from Kornilov (and to permit the Bolsheviks to form the semi-
military detachments that would eventually overthrow him) in the first place.
What this not-so-humorous comedy of errors revealed, as far as Russian
Bonapartism was concerned, was how minimal a threat it actually posed to the

⁴² Chernov, The Great Russian Revolution, p. 336. ⁴³ Ibid.

⁴⁴ V. I. Talin, ‘Ulitsy’, Rabochaia gazeta, no. 80 (14 June 1917): p. 2.
⁴⁵ Shlapentokh, Counter-Revolution in Revolution, p. 77; Beatty, Red Heart of Russia, p. 148.
Whether Lenin, who at times showed discernment in his evaluation of people, considered Kornilov a
potential Napoleon, is not known. Stefan T. Possony, Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary (Chicago
IL, 1964), p. 237.
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Provisional Government and to the February Revolution. One is struck by Ker-

ensky’s political ineptitude in 1917, exaggerating the threat the army posed to his
government, while minimizing the threat posed by the Bolsheviks, and through all
of this acting and speaking in ways that caused himself to be considered, in the
guise of the Russian Bonaparte, the most likely gravedigger of the revolution. That
the prime minister never actually harboured any desire or intention to carry out a
Russian equivalent of 18 Brumaire was beside the point in light of the political
situation that existed in Russia in 1917. Kerensky was perceived as willing and able
to do precisely that, and when Lenin, despite his repeated denigrations of the
prime minister as ‘a tiny Bonaparte’, vowed publicly in late September ‘to drive
out the Bonapartist gang’ of Kerensky with its fake ‘pre-parliament’, the threat
Lenin was referring to seemed to many Russians, especially those on the political
left, a credible one.⁴⁶ That Tsereteli, in September, felt compelled to defend
Kerensky in the pages of Izvestiia against Trotsky’s charge that the prime minister
was ‘the mathematical centre of Russian Bonapartism’ attests to the fear of a coup
engineered with the support of the military that, despite the absence of empirical
evidence to sustain it, was pervasive in the Russian capital.⁴⁷ The result was that an
exaggerated threat, namely that of a Russian 18 Brumaire, to the February
Revolution and the Provisional Government caused many to minimize or ignore
a very real threat, namely that from the Bolsheviks. Among those who did so was
Kerensky himself. Cognizant of his own intentions, which precluded any illusions
that he was somehow a Bonaparte in waiting, he nonetheless considered very
seriously the likelihood of someone else in Russia emerging to play that particular
role. By doing so, he rendered himself virtually oblivious to Lenin’s public threats
to overthrow him.
The role the fear of Bonapartism played in the Russian Revolutions of 1917 was
not inconsiderable. For some, such as Kerensky, it affected their political judgement,
specifically their calculations about which of the real dangers to the February
Revolution and the Provisional Government threatened them the most. That the
fear afflicting Kerensky and those who shared his trepidation might prove debili-
tating, and work to the advantage of their political enemies, only increased its
potential in causing the Provisional Government itself to unravel. Lenin, for one,
was well aware of how much the spectre of Russian Bonapartism haunted the non-
Bolshevik left—mainly liberals, Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Mensheviks—in
1917. Always the political opportunist, he knew exactly how to take advantage of
it. The result was that a year that began with a liberal revolution ended with a

⁴⁶ Quoted in Chernov, The Great Russian Revolution, p. 305; quoted in Leon Trotsky, History of the
Russian Revolution, unabridged edition (Chicago IL, 1932), p. 607.
⁴⁷ ‘Rech’ Tsereteli’, Izvestiia, no. 176 (20 September 1917): p. 3. In May 1917 Trotsky had implied
that this description of Kerensky, while ‘superficial’, was nonetheless accurate; there is no reason to
believe he changed his mind in the months that followed. Leon Trotsky, ‘The Revolution in Crisis’, in
Lenin and Trotsky, Proletarian Revolution in Russia, p. 249.
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regime in power in Russia led by illiberal Marxist ideologues committed to the

establishment of communism not only in Russia but everywhere, and irrespective
of the cost in human life.

* * *
One should not assume that Lenin’s understanding of Bonapartism, as a means of
seizing power, emerged ex nihilo in 1917. Nor should one infer that the events of
that year had no effect on it. Lenin’s notion of what Bonapartism was—and what it
was not—was dynamic. It evolved in response to the ever-changing political
realities in Russia in that year, with the result that by autumn he could propose
an insurrection reasonably confident there was no one in Russia capable of acting
as a Russian Bonaparte and suppressing it. Lenin’s first attempt, albeit brief, to
explain what the term suggested and whether it was applicable to Russia in 1917
was in May, when, in an article in Pravda entitled ‘In Search of Napoleon’, he
pointed to Kerensky’s recent call for ‘iron discipline’ in the army as evidence that
either he or an unnamed general might ‘take upon himself the role of a Napoleon,
the role of a strangler of freedom, the role of an executioner of the workers’.⁴⁸ On
whether that was likely or not, Lenin was silent. But it is notable that his
conception of a Russian Bonaparte was capacious enough to include both a
civilian (like Louis Napoleon) and a general or military officer (like Napoleon
Bonaparte) taking power against little or no opposition and then betraying the
lower classes who supported them.
In considering Lenin’s evolving views on Bonapartism, one must bear in mind
that many articles of his predicting the course of events in Russia did not include
the word itself, which might plausibly be considered evidence that he did not
consider a Bonapartist regime a possibility in Russia before the Bolsheviks seized
power themselves. Another explanation, less plausible than the first, is that he
thought an attempt to establish such a regime so obviously inevitable that he felt
no need to use the term to inform his readers of this. Yet another explanation is
that he refrained from using the term because he was not entirely sure in his own
mind what was meant by it.
But when Lenin did use the term, it was always in derision, not just of the
individual playing the role of the Russian Napoleon, who was almost always
Kerensky, but of those who foolishly supported him. That was certainly the case
in an article Lenin wrote at the end of July, in which he denigrated Kerensky as a
Bonapartist but directed most of his rhetorical fusillades at the liberals, the SRs,
and the Mensheviks supporting him.⁴⁹ The only politically sophisticated and
perspicacious individuals or group of individuals in Russia who were doing so,
according to Lenin, were the capitalists, who recognized that while Kerensky’s

⁴⁸ V. I. Lenin, ‘Ishchut Napoleona’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXII, p. 61.

⁴⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Uroki revoliutsii’, ibid., vol. XXXIV, pp. 55–69.
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Bonapartism required him to proclaim mendaciously his intention to benefit all

classes in Russia, it also ensured that only the capitalists would benefit from his
actual policies. Accordingly, Kerensky’s recent establishment of a coalition gov-
ernment, which presumably precluded its advancing the interests of a particular
class, was actually a subterfuge concealing his commitment to the interests and
welfare of the bourgeoisie. Since 1848 the capitalists had shown themselves adept
at ‘fooling, dividing, and weakening the workers’ in this particular way whenever
they realized that ruling the workers directly would be counterproductive and
even conducive of a proletarian revolution that would destroy them.⁵⁰ In that
respect, Bonapartism, was effective in delaying—but not preventing indefinitely—
its own demise.
The title of another article written at the end of July—‘The Beginning of
Bonapartism’—was all one needed to know that Lenin believed an effort to
establish Bonapartism in Russia was already underway.⁵¹ Kerensky, of course,
was leading it, and Lenin specified the actions the prime minister was taking with
the approval of his cabinet that warranted the application of the term: ‘the
manoeuvring of state power, relying on a military clique (that is, on the worst
elements of the army) for support, between two hostile classes and forces [here
one presumes Lenin means the bourgeoisie and the proletariat] which more or less
balance each other out’.⁵² The recent July Days, during which Lenin, on the spur of
the moment, tried unsuccessfully to transform street demonstrations in Petrograd
into a coordinated seizure of power were surely what prompted his disquisition. In
Lenin’s scenario, the leader of a Russian 18 Brumaire need not have been an army
officer; a civilian supported by the army was sufficient to warrant the application
of Bonapartist terminology.
What distinguished the article from earlier ones was Lenin’s statement that
‘Bonapartism in Russia is no accident but a natural product of the development of
class struggle in a petit-bourgeois country with capitalism considerably developed
and also a revolutionary proletariat’.⁵³ This, it would seem, was Lenin’s way of
expressing his pessimism about the Bolsheviks’ prospects after the fiasco earlier in
the month, which required him to seek refuge in Finland, the semi-independence
of which within the Russian empire afforded him a measure of protection after the
extent of his collaboration with Germany, which had enabled his return to Russia
several months earlier, became known. But once having acknowledged that
Bonapartism was a natural concomitant of capitalism, rather than the aberration
Marx and Engels had considered it, Lenin felt compelled—perhaps to restore his
own peace of mind even more than that of his readers’—to predict that any
incipient Bonapartism in Russia was likely to disappear; all that was needed for
that to happen was for ‘the working class and the people as a whole . . . to wage a

⁵⁰ Ibid., vol. XXXIV, p. 63. ⁵¹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Nachalo Bonapartizma’, ibid., vol. XXXIV, pp. 48–52.
⁵² Ibid., vol. XXXIV, p. 49. ⁵³ Ibid., vol. XXXIV, p. 50.
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struggle on a large political scale and based on far-reaching class interests’.⁵⁴ The
very fact that ‘the Russian Bonapartism of 1917 differed in several respects from
the beginnings of French Bonapartism in 1799 and 1849’ was for Lenin reason
enough to conclude that the former would last not nearly as long as the latter.⁵⁵
Because Bonapartism in France had emerged, in Lenin’s conception of the French
Revolution, five years after the revolution ended (on 9 Thermidor), it was
strengthened by the reforms the revolution had put in place. Bonapartism in
Russia, by contrast, emerged barely months after Russia’s revolution had begun,
and thus had no real achievements it could point to or promise to continue in
gaining the political support it needed to succeed.
In the articles mentioning Bonapartism written closer to the October Revolu-
tion, Lenin made clear his growing confidence in the Bolsheviks taking power—
thereby ending quickly and decisively the incipient or proto-Bonapartism that, in
the person of Kerensky, was the political instrument of the Russian bourgeoisie,
and supported ‘objectively’ by ersatz socialists like the SRs and the Mensheviks. In
an article written for Rabochii put’ near the end of September, Lenin noted that
Kerensky was ‘revealing himself more and more as a Bonapartist’.⁵⁶ But his
policies by now were indistinguishable from those of the Kadets. Even worse—
but advantageous to the Bolsheviks because their essence as faux revolutionaries
was now apparent—was that ‘the Plekhanovs, the Breshkovskaias, and the Potresovs’
had finally revealed, by the identity of their views with Kerensky’s and those of the
Kadets, the full extent of their own ideological degeneration.⁵⁷ The ultimate result
of this kind of Bonapartism in Russia, Lenin seemed to be saying, was an
ideological cesspool containing the refuse of an illiberal liberalism and the putrid
remains of socialists who, by not supporting the Bolsheviks, had shown them-
selves not to be socialists at all.
After the October Revolution, the question Lenin had to address was not
whether the Bolsheviks’ opponents manifested evidence of Bonapartism, but
whether the government he was establishing did so. This elevated the stakes in
the debate. Marx and Engels had made clear they considered Bonapartism a
phenomenon existing only under capitalism; acknowledging that it could appear
under socialism, or even during the proletarian dictatorship that preceded it, was
to provide the proletariat’s enemies an easy way of questioning the legitimacy of
its revolution and the interim arrangements immediately following it. Moreover,
the appearance of Bonapartism after the demise of capitalism would be proof that
Marx and Engels had been wrong—that their description of history as linear and
progressive was deficient. It was one thing for the Bolsheviks to call Kerensky the

⁵⁴ Ibid., vol. XXXIV, p. 51. ⁵⁵ Ibid., vol. XXXIV, p. 51.

⁵⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘O geroiakh podloga i ob oshibkakh Bol’shevikov’, ibid., vol. XXXIV, p. 250.
⁵⁷ Ibid., vol. XXXIV, p. 250.
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Russian Bonaparte. For non-Bolshevik socialists to call Lenin the Russian

Bonaparte and his regime a form of Bonapartism was something else entirely.
Lenin was well aware of this, and his naturally combative nature did not fail
him in rejecting the charge whenever it was levelled in the aftermath of the
October Revolution. In fact, he had sufficient confidence that the new regime he
was stablishing bore no resemblance to a Bonapartist one that he freely indulged
in comparisons with the original Bonaparte when he considered them conducive
to optimism about the new Soviet state. In his report to the Seventh Congress,
barely days after the Bolsheviks had signed the treaty at Brest-Litovsk ending
hostilities with Germany, in which they lost large amounts of territory rich in
natural resources, Lenin analogized the treaty to that which Napoleon and
Alexander I had agreed to at Tilsit in 1809.⁵⁸ The Bolsheviks, he freely admitted,
would violate the treaty with the Germans just as Alexander did the agreement he
signed with Napoleon. The difference was that while Napoleon became aware very
quickly of the tsar’s mendacity, Lenin would make sure that, in the case of Brest-
Litovsk, the Germans would be unaware, at least for a while, of the Bolsheviks’
violations of it. Lenin’s confidence in his ability to outwit his enemies was not,
however, unlimited. In the same report, Lenin acknowledged that the survival of
the new Soviet regime was by no means certain, and that the Germans, if
sufficiently provoked, could ‘reduce the Soviet people to slavery’.⁵⁹
By April 1918, Lenin’s confidence that the Bolsheviks would not be overthrown
militarily, in a coup d’état or in any other fashion, had returned. At a session of the
Executive Committee of the Communist Party, he angrily rejected as ‘verbal
trickery’ the charge levelled against him by Martov from outside the party, and
by Bukharin and the Left Communists inside it, that a dictatorship like Louis
Napoleon’s or Julius Caesar’s was possible.⁶⁰ In a subtle portent of the prosecutor
demonizing defendants in the Show Trials of the 1930s, Lenin insinuated that
Martov and the Bolsheviks supporting Bukharin might be coordinating their
actions for maximum effect, namely by ‘providing materials for a hundred
historical issues that no one will read’.⁶¹ Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks loyal to
Lenin had to be especially vigilant. In ‘ “Left-Wing” Childishness’, published in
Pravda and as a pamphlet in May 1918, the Soviet leader cautioned readers—
without using the term itself—that the threat of Bonapartism, in the form of either
a military dictatorship or a civilian dictatorship supported primarily by the
military, should not be taken lightly. Potential Napoleons, he wrote, might
find support from ‘petty-proprietors’ like those in France that supported Louis
Napoleon and General Cavaignac, the latter of whom by that time having replaced

⁵⁸ V. I. Lenin, ‘Politicheskii otchet tsentral’nogo komiteta 7 marta’, ibid., vol. XXXVI, pp. 22–3.
⁵⁹ Ibid., vol. XXXVI, p. 23.
⁶⁰ V. I. Lenin, ‘Zakliuchitel’noe slovo po dokadu ob ocherednykh zadachakh sovetskoi vlasti’, ibid.,
vol. XXXVI, p. 270.
⁶¹ Ibid., vol. XXXVI, p. 271.
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Julius Caesar in Lenin’s mind as an antecedent whose successful ascent to power

might inspire the nefarious forces currently threatening the Bolsheviks.⁶² In 1918
Lenin’s animus towards French imperialism and capitalism descended to even
lower depths of rhetorical vituperation. In an article in July Lenin included
twenty-two calumnious references in what was nineteen pages of text when the
article was republished in the fifth edition of his Complete Collected Works.⁶³
In the article, Lenin identified France, after the treaty the Bolsheviks had signed at
Brest-Litovsk, as their most dangerous external enemy, and after the civil war
began a few months later, as the Whites’ most reliable and helpful supporter. The
iniquity implicit in this was, to Lenin, especially reprehensible because the country
responsible for it had previously generated an entire tradition of revolution, the
mere existence of which presaged the day when the capitalism and imperialism
causing wars like the First World War and the Russian Civil War were a thing of
the past.
During the civil war, Lenin’s fears of a Bonapartist coup or insurrection were to
some extent a function of the Bolsheviks’ fortunes. By March 1919, when the
Eighth Party Congress convened in Petrograd, these had deteriorated consider-
ably. In the theses the congress adopted, which could not have been approved had
they not replicated Lenin’s opinions, what henceforth will be referred to as Soviet
Bonapartism was the object of some attention and cause for considerable concern:
The agitation carried on from the camp of the bourgeois democrats (the SRs and
Mensheviks) against the Red Army, as a manifestation of ‘militarism’ and the
basis for creeping Bonapartism, is only an expression of political ignorance or
charlatanism, or a mixture of both. Bonapartism is not a product of military
organization as such, but a product of particular social relations. The political
rule of the petit-bourgeoisie, standing between the reactionary big-bourgeois
elements and the revolutionary proletarian lower orders, are not yet capable of
playing an independent political role or of exercising political rule, provided the
necessary prerequisite for the rise of Bonapartism, which found its bulwark in the
prosperous peasantry and rose about the class contradictions which had not been
solved by the revolutionary programme of petit-bourgeois democracy.⁶⁴

But while the threat Bonapartism posed to the Soviet regime was real, there was
reason to believe it could be neutralized and then eliminated entirely:
In so far as the foundation of Bonapartism is the kulaks [the stratum of slightly
more affluent peasants adept at capitalist practices], to that extent the very social

⁶² V. I. Lenin, ‘O “levom” rebiachestve i o melkoburzhuaznosti’, ibid., vol. XXXVI, p. 298.

⁶³ V. I. Lenin, ‘Rech’ na ob”edinennom zasedanii VTsIK, Moskovskogo Soveta, fabrichno-
zavodskikh komitetov i professional’nykh soiuzov Moskvy 29 Iulia 1918 g.’, ibid., vol. XXXVII,
pp. 1–19.
⁶⁴ L. Trotsky, ‘Our Policy in Creating the Army’, in The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon
Trotsky (Moscow, 1979), vol. I, pp. 252–3.
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composition of our army, from which the kulaks are excluded and have been
driven out, furnishes a very effective guarantee against Bonapartist tendencies.
The Russian parodies of Bonapartism, in the form of the Krasnov movement, the
Kolchak movement, and so on, emerged not from within the Red Army but in
direct and open struggle against it.⁶⁵

In light of how both the Bolsheviks and their ideological and political enemies
on the left, most notably the Mensheviks, would define and describe Soviet
Bonapartism in the 1920s and thereafter, it is worth noting that Lenin clearly
considered Bonapartism not just a reactionary phase within the life-cycle of a
socialist country, from which it could easily recover, but in certain circumstances a
form of counter-revolution requiring for its elimination a revolution like that in
Russia in 1917. While for Lenin Bonapartism could be avoided if the Bolsheviks
listened to him and followed his counsel, the consequences of their not doing so
would be severe, and remediable only with great difficulty and at considerable cost.

* * *
Any analysis of Lenin’s views on Bonapartism after the October Revolution must
take into account the fact that non-Bolshevik socialists in both Russia and
Western Europe were already attacking the regime he was establishing on pre-
cisely the grounds that it was, in one way or another, Bonapartist. Of course these
socialists did not agree on what Bonapartism was any more than they did on the
institutional arrangements a Bonapartist state would adopt. But for all of them
the term was a pejorative, usually invoked to explain or corroborate their assertion
that the Bolsheviks had betrayed the goal that as socialists they presumably
aspired to, namely the creation of a society in which authoritarianism of any
kind, not just that resembling the dictatorships the two Napoleons had estab-
lished, was absent. Where they differed was in ascertaining the causes and
consequences of this particular form of authoritarianism. More specifically,
these non-Bolshevik socialists considered it especially necessary to ascertain if
Bonapartism, as they defined it, advanced the interests of one class, several classes,
or no classes. And when it came to determining what should be done to halt or
reverse the Bonapartism that might exist or be imminent in the Soviet Union,
there was no more agreement than there was on why it would appear in the Soviet
Union in the first place. Nevertheless, in what these critics wrote about Bonapart-
ism one could find insights into what they thought of the Soviet Union itself—
which, in turn, often prompted angry rebuttals and denunciations from the
Bolsheviks themselves.
In January 1918 the Bolsheviks, after only one day’s deliberations, disbanded
the Constituent Assembly—in the elections for which the year before, they

⁶⁵ Ibid., p. 253.
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finished second, behind the SRs, who won a plurality. Several SRs thought that
that would cause the new Bolshevik government to fall—thereby precluding any
need to overthrow it—and that they would form the government that followed it.
But others in the SR party were not so optimistic. Some thought a form of
Bonapartism, with its leadership drawn from the military, would emerge instead.
Others feared that the hypertrophied state the Bolsheviks were constructing would
enable it to survive the dissolution of the assembly and might even cause the
Bolsheviks to become, to all intents and purposes, Bonapartists themselves. In
assessing which of these two forms of Bonapartism was the lesser evil, some SRs
preferred non-Bolshevik Bonapartism because they believed it would be less
effective than Bolshevik Bonapartism in suppressing what the SRs considered
the peasants’ innate predisposition to socialism. But others disagreed. In fact,
some of the SRs in Samara stopped opposing the Bolsheviks because they believed
that ‘a right-wing dictatorship’ would be worse.⁶⁶
Other critics of the Bolsheviks, who offered different alternatives to the nascent
Soviet state, had no difficulty concluding it was Bonapartist or would likely
become so in the future. Nikolai Ustrialov predicted flatly that once the Soviet
Union had degenerated into a form of Jacobinism, it would degenerate further
into ‘Napoleonism’, which he said would carry out what in Smena vekh he called
‘an economic Brest-Litovsk’ to underscore the degree to which Bonapartism
entailed a betrayal of Bolshevism.⁶⁷ Karl Kautsky, in 1918, thought that what
Ustrialov predicted was already happening: because the Bolsheviks represented
only a portion of the proletariat—the Mensheviks and the SRs enjoyed the
allegiance of the remainder of it—they had no choice but to rule through a one-
party dictatorship that might eventuate in a Bonapartist form of government
because, like the Jacobins in 1793, it was centralizing political power in Russia
to the requisite degree.⁶⁸ In his words, ‘the dictatorship of the lower classes gives
way to the dictatorship of the sword’.⁶⁹ Three years later he stated flatly that this
process was complete, and that the Soviet Union was de facto a Bonapartist
regime. The coercive institutions of the Soviet state, most obviously the Cheka,
were now even more powerful than they were at the height of the Civil War, and
had so insinuated themselves into every aspect of personal life in the Soviet Union
that they were deciding the kinds of food and how much of it people ate. But they
still bore a striking resemblance to the police Napoleon had used to root out

⁶⁶ Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet
State—First Phase 1917–1922 (Cambridge MA, 1977), p. 355. Shlapentokh, Counter-Revolution in
Revolution, p. 110.
⁶⁷ Quoted in Peter J. S. Duncan, ‘Changing Landmarks? Anti-Westernism in National Bolshevik and
Russian Revolutionary Thought’, in Russian Nationalism Past and Present, edited by Geoffrey Hosking
and Robert Service (London, 1998), p. 57; Ustrialov, ‘Patriotika’, p. 63.
⁶⁸ The other outcome Kautsky considered possible was a government like Cromwell’s in England.
Kautsky, Dictatorship of the Proletariat, p. 58.
⁶⁹ Ibid.
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traitors and crush political dissent.⁷⁰ In 1930, Kautsky reaffirmed his earlier
analogy between Bolshevism and Bonapartism, claiming now that ‘if one wants
to establish parallels between the last Russian Revolution and the first French one,
then the Bolsheviks should be compared not to the Jacobins, but to the Bonapart-
ists.’⁷¹ In 1931, Kautsky went further, proclaiming that Bolshevism and Bonapart-
ism were not morally comparable. Bolshevism was worse. Whereas Bonapartism
in France had defended and maintained the economic status quo it inherited from
the Directory, in the Soviet Union the Bolsheviks not only have destroyed ‘the
political conquests of the revolution’, but by subjugating the trade unions and
factory councils, they have ‘enveloped the entire apparatus of production within
the straitjacket of a bureaucracy as incompetent as it was corrupt and arbitrary. As
a result the economy is condemned to complete ruin.’⁷²
But the critics to whom the Bolsheviks responded most vehemently whenever
the issue of their ostensible Bonapartism was raised were the Mensheviks, many of
whom had known Lenin for many years, even decades in the case of Martov and
Pavel Axelrod. For that reason their criticisms, however ineffectual in turning
public opinion in the Soviet Union against the Bolsheviks, stung them sufficiently
to warrant rhetorical reprisals, and after the suppression of the Kronstadt Revolt
in 1921, the formal suppression of their political party. The Mensheviks were also
among the first to attack the Bolsheviks for their ostensible Bonapartism. In a
letter to Axelrod in June 1918, V. O. Levitskii proclaimed the new Bolshevik state
‘a genuinely Bonapartist regime’.⁷³ In the same month B. Gorev asked in an article
in Novaia zaria if the Bolsheviks intended ‘socialism or Bonapartism?’⁷⁴ His
answer was that Lenin resembled Napoleon in caricature because the Bonapartism
he intended was a parody of socialism, and the separate peace he signed with the
Germans a parody of Bonapartism.⁷⁵ Also in 1918 Fëdor Dan attacked Lenin for a
very different reason, but his conclusion was essentially the same. Lenin, Dan
wrote, was establishing a hypertrophied state, oblivious to the material interests of
the Russian people, that ruled through a ‘bureaucratised police apparatus’ intent
on preserving its own working class, which required for their satisfaction the
continuation of the Bolsheviks in power.⁷⁶ The result was a form of ‘Bolshevik
Bonapartism [of which] the proletariat was its principal enemy’.⁷⁷

⁷⁰ Karl Kautsky, Georgien, eine sozialdemokratische Bauernrepublik (Vienna, 1921), p. 68; Karl
Kautsky, Von der Demokratie zur Staats-Sklaverei. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Trotzki (Berlin,
1921), pp. 42–3.
⁷¹ Quoted in Salvadori Massino, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880–1938 (London,
1979), p. 287.
⁷² Quoted in ibid., p. 288.
⁷³ ‘Pis’mo Akselrodu (16 June 1918)’, in Martov i ego blizkie: sbornik (New York, 1959), p. 64.
⁷⁴ B. Gorev, ‘Sotsializm ili Bonapartizm?’ Novaia zaria, no. 5–6 (10 June 1918): pp. 14–19.
⁷⁵ Ibid., p. 15.
⁷⁶ Fëdor Dan, ‘Bol’shevistskii Bonapartizm’, Novaia zaria, no. 3–4 (20 May 1918): p. 16.
⁷⁷ Ibid., p. 17.
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Finally, in 1922, in one of the most incisive critiques any Menshevik directed at
the nascent Soviet state, Martov accused its Bolshevik rulers of establishing a
government antithetical to the interests and the welfare of the proletariat. What-
ever commitment to socialism the Bolsheviks might have retained after the NEP
was established had now dissipated because the NEP had shown itself to be, in
fact, a latter-day Thermidor, which necessitated a political dictatorship increas-
ingly resembling Napoleon Bonaparte’s—but sustained by a police more powerful
than anyone could have imagined, much less created, in France in the beginning
of the nineteenth century. From a regime that, in its ideological aspirations, was
‘utopian and communist’, Lenin had caused it to degenerate into one that Martov
termed ‘Thermidorian-Bonapartist’ because he believed the principal attributes of
both of these phases in the history of France informed the present-day anomaly
that was the Soviet Union. Where the latter differed from these two stages in the
history of France was in its compressing them to the point of simultaneity.⁷⁸
To reproach the Bolsheviks for their Bonapartism, incipient or otherwise, was
to call into question the moral, political, and ideological legitimacy of the Soviet
state. This of course was the reason the Mensheviks did so—and also the reason
the Bolsheviks took such pains to refute them. Where the Mensheviks disagreed
among themselves was on what exactly had triggered the degeneration of the
Soviet state so soon after its creation. In 1922 Martov made the perfectly plausible
argument that the civil war in Russia after the October Revolution—even more
than the NEP—was what started the Soviet Union on its path to Bonapartism; its
leader, should Bonapartism be its final destination, would be either Trotsky, the
Red Army’s founder and still the Commissar of War, or someone else, probably in
the Communist Party, succeeding Lenin and acting in a fashion reminiscent of
Napoleon.⁷⁹ Pëtr Garvi, by contrast, located the roots of Soviet Bonapartism not
just in the Civil War, which had thoroughly militarized the Communist Party, but
also in the NEP, which, by permitting the limited application of capitalism and
free market principles in the economy, made necessary the suppression not only
of opposition parties like the Mensheviks but also, by the prohibition on factions
in 1921, on dissenting opinions within the party itself. What made the Soviet
Union resemble a Bonapartist regime, rather than just a generically authoritarian
one, according to Garvi, was that it concealed its baseness beneath a veneer of
humanitarian rhetoric about its concern for the welfare of its people.⁸⁰

⁷⁸ Iu. O. Martov, ‘Problema “edinogo fronta” v Rossii’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 13/14 (20 July
1922): p. 4.
⁷⁹ Ibid., pp. 4–6. The principal émigré Menshevik newspaper, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, was pub-
lished in Berlin until the Nazis came to power in 1933 and forced its relocation to Paris, from which it
moved to New York in 1940 shortly before France surrendered to Nazi Germany.
⁸⁰ P. Garvi, ‘Bonapartizm ili demokratiia’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 23–4 (17 December 1923):
pp. 2–7. In the article Garvi used the term as a verb (‘to Bonapartise’) and as a participle (‘to be
Bonapartised’). He was the only Russian socialist I am aware of having done that. In 1927 Garvi made
clear that the transformation of the Soviet regime into a Bonapartist one was ‘irrepressible’, even as the
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For all of that, however, Lenin was probably angered most of all by Pavel
Axelrod’s fulminations. After Plekhanov’s death in 1918 Axelrod became the
senior and most respected non-Bolshevik Marxist in Russia. His first condemna-
tion of Lenin as a Russian Napoleon appeared in Iskra in 1904, just months after
the schism at the Second Party Congress had revealed the tactical and tempera-
mental differences separating the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.⁸¹ In 1919, cogni-
zant that recapitulating his earlier disputes with Lenin would strengthen his
current argument that by taking power in 1917 the Bolsheviks had perverted
both the spirit and the letter of Marxism, Axelrod did so with considerable élan,
which may have been what prompted Pëtr Garvi in 1925 to credit him with
identifying Lenin’s ‘Bonapartist habits’ earlier, and denouncing them more
emphatically, than any other non-Bolshevik socialist.⁸² According to Axelrod,
Lenin’s political personality informed the government he headed and for that
reason the latter was just as much a manifestation of Bonapartism as the former;
for the same reason, the Soviet Union was not merely a perversion of socialism but
its antithesis.
For the Mensheviks, Stalin’s rise to power and the policies he pursued once it
was complete made the question of whether the Soviet Union was a Bonapartist
state or in the process of becoming one more pressing. While the NEP existed,
Rafael Abramovich thought the Soviet Union was Bonapartist because it had
restored a measure of capitalism while perpetuating itself politically. But by
1929, after the NEP ended, he had changed his mind: the Soviet Union was not,
as yet, a Bonapartist state—although its having become Thermidorian as a result
of the NEP made its evolving eventually into Bonapartism very likely.⁸³ In 1930,
however, Abramovich altered his definition of the phenomenon so he could argue
that Stalin’s economic policies were actually making Bonapartism in the Soviet
Union less likely rather than more so. Bonapartism, in the context of the
Soviet Union, he now defined as the replacement of a workers’ state by classes
that had recovered not only any property their members had lost in the preceding
revolution, but the political power they had once exercised by virtue of their
economic supremacy. But collectivization and industrialization in the Soviet
Union, far from strengthening these classes, were currently destroying them,

base of the Soviet economy remained ‘genuinely socialist’. He did not make clear if the latter would later
degenerate into something else and, more broadly, if Bonapartism included a particular set of economic
policies to accompany its fairly clear desiderata on how the state itself should be organized. Garvi, ‘Pod
znakom termidora’, p. 5.

⁸¹ P. B. Axelrod, ‘K voprosu ob istochnike i znachenii nashikh organizatsionnykh raznoglasii. Iz

perepiska s Kautskim’, Iskra, no. 68 (15 June 1904): p. 3.
⁸² P. B. Axelrod, Kto izmenil sotsializmu? (Bol’shevizm i sotsial’naia demokratiia v Rossii) (New
York, 1919), especially pp. 21–2; Garvi, ‘P. B. Aksel’rod i Men’shevizm’, pp. 11–12.
⁸³ Sergei Melgunov, Kak Bolsheviki zakhvatili vlast’; oktiabr’skii perevorot 1917 goda (Paris, 1953),
p. 185; Abramovich, ‘Termidor i krestianstvo’, p. 5.
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with the result that the Soviet Union under Stalin was actually more socialist—and
therefore less Bonapartist—than it had been under Lenin.⁸⁴ Also in 1930, Abra-
movich seemed to abandon entirely the task of determining whether the Soviet
Union was already Bonapartist, tending towards Bonapartism, or tending away
from it. Having now determined that because analogies with earlier manifest-
ations of the phenomenon were necessarily superficial, the term itself, if not the
larger questions about the Soviet Union it raised, should be avoided in explaining
the Soviet Union’s evolution.⁸⁵ For Abramovich, and for the Bolsheviks and
Mensheviks generally, Bonapartism—like much of the other terminology they
all adopted from France’s tradition of revolutions—was like the element mercury,
capable of expanding or contracting its outer limits to conform to the require-
ments of whoever happened to be observing it, and in the process eluding all
efforts to ascribe to it a fixed meaning.
To be sure, some Mensheviks could keep their categories straight and stick
to one definition of the phenomenon. In contrast to Abramovich, Fëdor Dan
maintained for most of his life a consistent view of Bonapartism—of what it was
and whether the Soviet Union embodied it. In 1918, he argued that the ‘petit-
bourgeois property relations [leading to] beastly interpersonal conflicts in the
[Russian] countryside’ worked decisively to the disadvantage of the proletariat,
not least because they made the restoration of capitalism in the country as a whole
more likely.⁸⁶ Those policies, moreover, emanated from a political dictatorship
that, by denying not just the proletariat but everyone in Russia political rights and
civil liberties, transcended class. For that reason, and because Dan believed a
regime attentive to the needs of the proletariat and intent on establishing socialism
could never be Bonapartist, he concluded that the Soviet regime, which did not
really care about the working class, was in fact a Bonapartist one. But Bonapartist
regimes were not stable, and those that like the Soviet one thought themselves
impervious to internal opposition were especially vulnerable.⁸⁷
Despite the dramatic changes Stalin mandated in the Soviet Union in the early
1930s—principally the collectivization of agriculture and crash industrialization
under the auspices of a planned economy—Dan did not alter his views on Soviet
Bonapartism. Nor did he do so during the Terror later in the same decade. But in
1940 he did. He now believed Bonapartism could emerge in the Soviet Union even

⁸⁴ Lieblich, From the Other Shore, pp. 192–3.

⁸⁵ R. Abramovich, ‘Bol’shevizm v tupike. O knige Kautskogo togo zhe naznaniia’, Sotsialisticheskii
vestnik, no. 20 (25 October 1930): pp. 4–5. His counsel in 1930 notwithstanding, Abramovich returned
to the analogy in 1943, this time delineating three types of Bonapartism—the first being that of
Napoleon himself, the second like that which existed when the Soviet Union had become Thermidorian
in the 1920s, and the third a military dictatorship or an ostensibly civilian dictatorship that was actually
controlled by the military. Ultra-nationalism, he wrote, was also a component of Bonapartism.
Although the Soviet Union was Bonapartist without its being ultra-nationalist, he predicted that its
anticipated victory over Nazi Germany would make it so. R. Abramovich, ‘Bonapartizm i russkaia
revoliutsiia’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 523–4 (8 July 1943): pp. 145–7.
⁸⁶ Dan, ‘Bol’shevistskii bonapartizm’, p. 15. ⁸⁷ Ibid., pp. 15–17.
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after the bourgeoisie (and the intelligentsia along with it) had been destroyed. In
fact, he now called the Soviet Union fascist as well as Bonapartist, though without
distinguishing these two types of political leadership and organization.⁸⁸ Perhaps
Dan refrained from doing so because he considered it more important to stress
that the Soviet Union was not socialist, and that one of the reasons it was not
socialist was because it was not democratic. Although capitalism no longer
existed—on this Dan agreed with Stalin—the Soviet Union, because it was ruled
by a ruthless dictatorship, had not yet advanced into socialism. This would seem
to preclude Dan, or any other democratic socialist, from supporting it. But in 1940
he came very close to doing precisely that, and the reason was not that he
considered the Soviet Union, compared to Nazi Germany, the lesser of two
evils. Because the two countries, at that time, were not at war, comparing them
for the purpose of distinguishing Bonapartism from fascism, or for any other
reason, might not even have occurred to him. His argument—which was only
implied rather than stated explicitly—was different. From his assumption that any
democratic regime that succeeded Stalin’s would probably be capitalist (because
Stalin had discredited socialism in the minds of most Russians), he concluded that
democratic socialists should support Stalin’s regime because capitalism was worse.
In other words, the Soviet Union was the lesser of two evils not because the only
alternative to it was Nazism but because the only alternative to it was capitalism.⁸⁹
It was left to Boris Nikolaevskii and the little-known Iu. Denike to argue that the
Soviet Union in the 1940s was actually a totalitarian dictatorship (and thus
demonstrably more powerful than the regimes of the Bonapartes in the nineteenth
century), and thus unlikely to be replaced anytime soon, or possibly forever. For
that reason, arguments about whether its successor would be capitalist or socialist
or base its politics and economy on some other ideology were just an intellectual
exercise and a waste of valuable time.⁹⁰
However opaque the reasoning that buttressed them, the Mensheviks’ attacks
hit the Bolsheviks where they were vulnerable. As ideologues themselves, the
Bolsheviks were susceptible to ideological challenge, especially when it came
from persons claiming to be socialist. Even more dangerous were criticisms inside
the Soviet Union and from within the Communist Party that concerned issues of
Marxist–Leninist ideology. For this reason, invoking the spectre of Bonapartism,
even when the reason was purely political, was a double-edged sword. This of
course was also true for Thermidor. Both terms, while effective when used purely

⁸⁸ In the mid-1930s Dan had begun calling the Soviet Union ‘totalitarian’ even though the term,
taken literally, implies that regimes to which the term applies will never retreat to the democratic
socialism Dan favoured, or to any other system in which the government does not enjoy total power.
Dan, ‘Puti vozrozhdeniia’, p. 7. Absent defeat in war, totalitarian regimes, by definition, last forever.
⁸⁹ Dan, ‘Dva puti’, cited in Kondratieva, Bol’sheviki-iakobintsy, p. 186.
⁹⁰ Nikolaevskii, ‘ “Termidor” russkoi revoliutsii’, pp. 171–5; Iu Denike, ‘Revoliutsiia bez termidora’,
Novyi zhurnal, vol. 7 (1943): pp. 202–19.
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to defame other Bolsheviks politically, inevitably raised the larger issue of the
Soviet Union’s ideological legitimacy—or the lack of it. But since many Bolsheviks
considered Thermidorianism reversible, condemning another Bolshevik for pre-
dicting it was not nearly as destructive of his ideological bona fides as it was to
accuse him of Bonapartism, which, because it was stronger and had more ‘staying-
power’ than any Thermidorian reaction or counter-revolution, conjured a scen-
ario in which the Soviet Union itself was destroyed totally and permanently.
The Soviet leader against whom the charge of Bonapartism was most effective
was Trotsky. His role in creating the Red Army and then leading it to victory in
the Civil War, along with an ego and sense of self-importance he hardly bothered
to conceal, made Trotsky virtually the personification of Russian Bonapartism: his
military exploits were reminiscent of the first Napoleon, his personal vanity of the
second. Nevertheless, when Lenin, in December 1922, suffered the first of several
strokes that would end his life thirteen months later, Trotsky’s enemies, who
considered him Lenin’s most likely successor, began a whispering campaign that
reached a fever-pitch at the Twelfth Party Congress in December 1923.⁹¹ Alfred
Rosmer reports in his memoirs that the typical complaint was that Trotsky ‘thinks
he is Bonaparte [and] wants to play at being Bonaparte’.⁹² Because the charge of
Bonapartism implied that Trotsky had forsaken socialism or had never truly
believed in it, it resonated among Bolsheviks who recalled his not joining the
party until the summer of 1917; coupled with other defects Trotsky suffered from
in the context of Soviet politics, such as his Jewish heritage, it had the potential to
end his political career entirely. To render the accusation nugatory, Trotsky
resigned as Commissar of War in 1925, but by that time the damage it had already
inflicted on his credentials as a loyal Bolshevik and Communist was irreversible.⁹³
After assisting in Trotsky’s political destruction, Bonapartism played only a
minor role in the struggle to succeed Lenin that ended with Stalin’s ascendancy.
Moreover, if one looked to French revolutions for analogies that might be useful in
explaining the NEP and alerting the party to the dangers of continuing it, it made
more sense—both politically and as a matter of simple logic—to raise an analogy
with Thermidor than to conjure the whole conundrum of Bonapartism. Neither
the Bolsheviks nor the Mensheviks really knew what Bonapartism might consist
of in the context of a presumptively socialist society, or even how it would
come about in the first place; Marx and Engels offered no guidance because to
them, such an outcome was impossible. For that reason, from 1924 to 1929 the
Bolsheviks spoke of Bonapartism infrequently, and when they did, it was in the
context of explaining what might follow a Soviet Thermidor rather than what
might appear instead of it.

⁹¹ Kotkin, Stalin, p. 825, n. 182.

⁹² Alfred Rosmer, Lenin’s Moscow (New York and London, 1971), p. 207.
⁹³ Deutscher, Stalin, p. 297; Trotsky, My Life, p. 518.
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One of the few Bolsheviks who during these years endeavoured to describe how
Bonapartism might come about in the Soviet Union, and how precisely it would
transform it, was Alexander Slepkov, a supporter of Bukharin and a member of
the so-called Right Opposition. In 1927, Slepkov attacked the Left Opposition not
for claiming that Bonapartism was a threat to the Soviet Union (which in fact was
what certain members of the Left Opposition had alleged), but for claiming that it
was close to becoming a reality in the Soviet Union (a claim that no one in the Left
Opposition had made). In his indictment, Slepkov stressed that, according to the
Left Opposition, the Red Army was the instrument by which Soviet Bonapartism
would be established.⁹⁴ In reality, the Left Opposition, and Trotsky in particular,
described the current threat to the Soviet Union as Thermidorian rather than
Bonapartist, and that the two stages in the French Revolution, were they both to be
replicated in the Soviet Union, would be sequential rather than simultaneous—as
they were in France. Bonapartism could not exist in the Soviet Union, or anywhere
else for that matter, until Thermidor existed. Moreover, Trotsky’s notion of the
Soviet Thermidor in the 1920s was that it was a species of counter-revolution that,
regardless of its origins—either in elements within the party that had betrayed it,
or in bourgeois states external to the Soviet Union itself—would mean the end of
the union and the entire enterprise of creating socialism and communism. Thus
there was no reason, according to Trotsky, to worry much about Soviet Bona-
partism, even when acknowledging the danger of a Soviet Thermidor.
But such distinctions meant nothing to Slepkov, who was engaged in political
defamation, not historical analysis. What made his accusation significant in the
evolution of the Bolsheviks’ conception of Bonapartism was that it considered it
an exclusively military phenomenon, in which the military determined which
civilians would rule, or ruled itself. It is true that the Bolsheviks earlier had been
among those attacking Kerensky and Kornilov as potential Russian Bonapartes.
But it was also the case that the Bolsheviks—along with the Mensheviks and the
various other elements comprising the anti-Bolshevik left in Russia both before
and after the October Revolution—considered Bonapartism through the mid-
1920s a particular type of authoritarianism, rather than as a form of governance
absolutely requiring the military’s involvement. Indeed, nearly all of the Bolsheviks
who addressed the issue knew that the French precursor both Marx and Engels and
they themselves usually had in mind was Louis Napoleon rather than Napoleon
Bonaparte.⁹⁵
In the late 1920s this changed. Thereafter, the consensus in the Soviet Com-
munist Party was that Bonapartism, if it emerged, would be the result of the

⁹⁴ Slepkov, A. Oppozitsionnyi neomen’shevizm. O novoi platforme (Moscow, 1927), p. 33.

⁹⁵ It bears repeating that Louis Napoleon, who, while donning military garb for political purposes as
Emperor of the French, never served at any rank in the French army (although he did attain the rank of
captain in the Swiss army). F. A. Simpson, The Rise of Louis Napoleon (London, 1968), p. 90.
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intervention of the Red Army in civilian politics, either by providing critical

support for a civilian aspirant to power or by taking power directly. The only
aspect of this consensus that changed in the 1930s was that it narrowed consid-
erably. Since all putative Bonapartists had been ousted from the entirely civilian
Soviet leadership, Bonapartism could only mean the Red Army ruling Russia. The
threat it posed to the Communist Party, in other words, was external to it. And
while it is true that, in the Gorbachev era, Bonapartism regained a good deal of its
original meaning as a generic category of dictatorships that betrayed the noble
intentions of the political system it replaced, this cannot change the fact that for
most of the time the Soviet Union existed—specifically from the Stalin era to the
advent of Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika—the term signified nothing more nor
less than a military dictatorship.⁹⁶
Explaining why the Soviets were so fearful of a military coup requires consid-
eration of the circumstances in which Bolshevism emerged. For the original
Bolsheviks, and for those who preceded them in the revolutionary movement,
the Russian military was an abstraction. Most engaged in radical politics from an
early age, so few actually served in the military, and even fewer were acquainted
with its upper echelons, from which any Russian or Soviet Bonaparte would
presumably emerge. For this reason the Bolsheviks were prone to exaggerating
the cohesiveness and political acumen of the Russian officer corps, and under-
standably developed an exaggerated fear of it. This would explain the need after
the October Revolution to keep a close eye on the army, and on its officers and
generals in particular—which the Bolsheviks believed could best be done through
the institution of the political commissars; these were essentially loyal party
apparatchiki sent to spy on the leaders of the Red Army. Another factor gener-
ating this fear was the NEP, which by providing a measure of economic freedom
in the Soviet Union, made demands for political freedom more likely. Not
surprisingly, the Bolsheviks, having come to power without the support of a
majority, or even a plurality, of the Russian people, could never permit such
freedom unless they somehow lost entirely their well-honed instinct for political
survival. Revolutionaries who take power in a coup d’état do not relinquish it
voluntarily. Moreover, because the conscripts in the Red Army were largely
peasants, the depredations they and their families endured in the collectivization

⁹⁶ The term was also useful in the Soviet system in advancing one’s own career—and in destroying
others. On one occasion it was even reduced to an ineffectual style of administration inconsistent with
Bolshevik governance. Marshal Tukhachevskii, whom some thought harboured Bonapartist aspirations
himself, once derided the chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces, Boris Shaposhnikov, as ‘an office
Napoleon’. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (New York, 2017), p. 995, n. 206. To
be sure, the two men disagreed on how the Red Army should fight future wars—Tukhachevskii’s
emphasis on tanks and armoured warfare required a much larger force than Shaposhnikov thought
economically feasible. Sally W. Stoecker, Forging Stalin’s Army: Marshal Tukhachevsky and the Politics
of Military Innovation (New York, 2018), p. 44.
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of agriculture—in which, according to some estimates, more than fourteen million

Soviet citizens, most of them peasants, were killed or died of starvation—made the
Red Army, as an institution, especially dangerous.⁹⁷ Hence the fear, after the
1920s, of a military dictatorship, rather than of dictatorship generically.
The centrality the original Napoleon henceforth enjoyed in the Soviet leader-
ship’s discussions of Bonapartism caused Soviet historians to explore his rule
more intensively, usually for the purpose of determining whether Napoleon’s rule
was progressive or not, and in the Stalin era whether over the long run it helped
Russia or harmed it. In the 1920s, the prevailing opinion was M. N. Pokrovskii’s,
namely that Napoleon’s regime was the political expression in France of incipient
industrial capitalism. As such, his regime advanced the course of history in both
France and Russia. Because the latter had not yet experienced a bourgeois
revolution when Napoleon attacked it in 1812, his campaign, despite the death
and devastation it caused, would have been a good thing for the country had it
succeeded and caused the replacement of the Russian monarchy by a bourgeois
regime.⁹⁸ As additional justification, Pokrovskii cited Russia’s serial violations of
Napoleon’s Continental System.⁹⁹
Pokrovskii’s dominance of the historical profession in the Soviet Union ended
with the government denouncing him three years after his death in 1932, for a
variety of ideological deviations, among them an excessively schematized (i.e.
class-based) view of history. Nevertheless, at least one Soviet historian persisted
in writing about Napoleon. S. A. Piontkovskii, in 1935, even went so far as to
justify Napoleon’s Russian campaign as morally justified in a war for which the
Russian nobility, who were increasingly intent on producing for profit, were
responsible. As landed capitalists, they needed to sell their grain and any timber
they could salvage to England, but Napoleon’s Continental System precluded it.
Moreover, Russian peasants in territory occupied by Napoleon in 1812 were as
hostile to the Russian nobility—to which, as serfs, they had performed labour or
had made payments in kind or in money—as they were to the French.¹⁰⁰
But Piontkovskii was put on notice in 1936 that history like his, where it
concerned Napoleon, was no longer acceptable. That he was liquidated in 1937
underscored the seriousness of his deviation. Perhaps appropriately, the new line
was announced by the publication of a biography of Napoleon felicitously edited
by Karl Radek, whose ability to conform to whatever the prevailing orthodoxy
happened to be at any particular time was considerable. Radek’s principal
target, as it happened, was not Piontkovskii but rather Tarlé, virtually all of

⁹⁷ Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New
York, 1986), p. 306.
⁹⁸ Leo Yaresh, ‘The Campaign of 1812’, in Black, Rewriting Russian History, pp. 264–5.
⁹⁹ M. N. Pokrovskii, Diplomatiia i voiny tsarskoi Rossii v xix stoletiia (Moscow, 1923), p. 33.
¹⁰⁰ S. A. Piontkovskii, Ocherki istorii SSSR xix i xx vv. (Moscow, 1935), pp. 13–15.
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whose opinions on Napoleon’s Russian campaign Radek not only rejected, but
condemned.¹⁰¹ With the publication of books like Radek’s, discussion of Napoleon’s
rule, and of Bonapartism in general, was limited, with one very significant exception,
to the Mensheviks in exile. The exception was Trotsky himself, who was able
to continue his ruminations about the French Revolution, Thermidor, and
Bonapartism, and to publish them without being arrested or losing his life,
because after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in February 1929, he was,
and would remain until his assassination in 1940, a political exile, forced to flee
from one country to another whenever political pressure on the host country
caused it to expel him. But throughout his peregrinations, Trotsky was free to
continue his intensive study of the French Revolution and its nineteenth-century
successors not only to help him understand why Stalin had defeated him, but
also for any optimism these revolutions might provide about the chances of
Stalin’s regime collapsing, and one headed by Trotsky replacing it.

* * *
Trotsky, more than any other Russian Marxist, Bolshevik or Menshevik, enlarged
the notion of Bonapartism from a particular kind of bourgeois or petit-bourgeois
dictatorship, with its political base predominantly in the peasantry, into one that
transcended parties, classes, and even the state itself. But he did not define the
phenomenon this way until the events of 1917 prompted him to do so. Immedi-
ately following his emergence as a Marxist revolutionary in the early 1900s,
Trotsky’s interest in French revolutions was mostly limited to the Jacobins and
ascertaining whether Lenin resembled them. On the rare occasions when he
mentioned Bonapartism, it was in polemics to score debating points, rather than
to explain what he meant by the term in a calm and reasonable fashion. For
example, in the fall of 1905 he attacked the Russian bourgeoisie, personified by the
onetime Marxist-turned-liberal Pëtr Struve, for espousing a ‘gold-plated liberal-
ism’ that made it an implacable enemy of the peasantry and the proletariat.¹⁰²
Even worse was its susceptibility to ‘the lure of Bonapartism’, which he described
simply as ‘a bloody and iron order’ no less hostile to the masses than the
monarchy; what made Russian liberals like Struve so contemptible was true also
of Sergei Witte, the minister of finance under Alexander III and Nicholas II.¹⁰³
Not until 1914 did he even use the term as an adjective descriptive of Louis
Napoleon’s regime.¹⁰⁴ For Trotsky, Bonapartism was more a figure of speech than

¹⁰¹ K. Radek, ed., Napoleon (Moscow 1936), pp. 378, 419, 420. Radek would be arrested in the same
year the book was published, and killed three years later either in prison or in a labour camp, possibly
by ordinary criminals. Warren Lerner, Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist (Stanford CA, 1970),
pp. 170–1.
¹⁰² L. Trotskii, ‘Toskuiut po Bonapartu’, in Trotsky, Sochineniia, vol. II, part 1, p. 322.
¹⁰³ Ibid., p. 323.
¹⁰⁴ Trotsky first used the term in The War and the International 1915 (n.p. 1971), pp. iii, 34, 37,
which he wrote in 1914 after the outbreak of the First World War.
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a generic term for a particular kind of authoritarianism possessing any explanatory

or predictive value.
In 1917, however, allegations that Kerensky and Kornilov were putative Bona-
partists were too widespread for Trotsky to ignore the term or to use it merely as
an epithet. He now sought to ascertain its deeper meaning. But the task was harder
than he anticipated. In an essay, entitled, ‘Elements of Bonapartism’, he could not
decide if Bonapartism was the political instrument of the petit-bourgeoisie or a
term descriptive of a government that, by representing all classes, transcended
it.¹⁰⁵ After denigrating Kerensky as bearing only a superficial resemblance to the
original Napoleon, and his government as the embodiment of ‘sophomoric
Bonapartism’—presumably to distinguish it from a genuinely Bonapartist
regime—Trotsky went on to describe Kerensky’s government as if there was really
no difference between the two.¹⁰⁶ Kerensky’s government, in other words, was not
a parody of a Bonapartist regime—in the way Marx and Engels considered Louis
Napoleon’s government a parody of Napoleon Bonaparte’s—but the genuine
article. This was how Trotsky, at the critical point in his essay, described it:
The Kerensky government, exercising no control, is in its very nature a govern-
ment without a social foundation. It was consciously constructed between two
possible foundations: the working masses and the imperialist classes. In that lies
its Bonapartism.¹⁰⁷

But having achieved, finally, a measure of clarity, Trotsky followed this succinct
description with speculation about the degree to which ‘the new czarism’—
Trotsky’s new epithet for the Provisional Government now that it was headed
by Kerensky—would have to rely on ‘the passive inertia’ of a single class, the
peasantry, for its survival.¹⁰⁸ Confusing his readers further, Trotsky went on to
state that the principal instrument of Bonapartism was a trained and disciplined
army.¹⁰⁹ But since, in Trotsky’s opinion, the Russian army currently failed to fit
this description, and also because class antagonisms in Russia were too intense for
any ruler to transcend them in the guise of a personal dictatorship, the reader
could only conclude that Russia was not currently Bonapartist under any reason-
able definition of the term.
Looking back on Kerensky’s government in his history of the Russian Revolu-
tion, written fifteen years after the events it described, Trotsky seemed at last
to have contrived a definition he could live with. Bonapartism, he wrote, was

¹⁰⁵ Leon Trotsky, ‘Elements of Bonapartism’, in Lenin and Trotsky, Proletarian Revolution in Russia,
pp. 247–54.
¹⁰⁶ Ibid., p. 252. ¹⁰⁷ Ibid., p. 253. ¹⁰⁸ Ibid., p. 254.
¹⁰⁹ Ibid., p. 254. In a separate article, written at the same time as ‘Elements of Bonapartism’, Trotsky
characterized the Provisional Government as ‘socialist Bonapartist’ without explaining what kind of
hybrid he meant by this apparent confluence of socialism and Bonapartism. Leon Trotsky, ‘What
Next?’, in Lenin and Trotsky, Proletarian Revolution in Russia, p. 263.
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‘the idea of a master of destiny rising above all classes’.¹¹⁰ Kerensky, he now
maintained, aspired to the role of the Russian Bonaparte, but could not rise above
the possessing classes on whose support the Provisional Government depended to
survive, and in transcending these classes become as much of a Bonaparte as the
two Bonapartes in France. The reason he could not do this was because his
support was too dependent on the petit-bourgeoisie—just the way Kornilov
could not be a genuine Bonaparte because his support was too dependent on
the haute-bourgeoisie.¹¹¹ In Trotsky’s analysis, this ‘structural’ impediment to
Kerensky’s becoming a Bonaparte, and thereby surviving the Bolsheviks’ attempts
to overthrow him, was the first of three reasons Trotsky offered for his failure in
1917. The other two were Kerensky’s deficiencies as a political leader, and the
equilibrium that existed in the fall of 1917, after both he and Kornilov had
discredited themselves personally and politically—the latter by his futile attempt
to seize power in a military coup d’état, the former by his pathetic response to it.
The result was a political vacuum that the Bolsheviks, led by Trotsky, found easy
to fill.¹¹²
Trotsky’s open contempt for Kerensky, fully shared by Lenin, was especially
pronounced because of Trotsky’s equally obvious admiration, despite the ideo-
logical abyss between them, of Napoleon Bonaparte. Trotsky may have modelled
the Red Army on the democratic armies Napoleon inherited from the French
Revolution when he came to power in 1799, and Napoleon’s modest origins in
Corsica precluded Trotsky’s condemning him as a typical representative of an
increasingly affluent bourgeoisie. In a speech in 1918, Trotsky quoted the well-
known dictum, often ascribed to Napoleon, that in the knapsack of every recruit
there is a marshal’s baton.¹¹³ That he did so approvingly was consistent with his
subsequent statement that effectively justified coups like Napoleon’s in 1799: ‘In a
revolutionary country, every energetic and steadfast soldier may and must, in
a moment of danger, take over the post of command, however high’.¹¹⁴ What is
more, Napoleon was right to draw from all classes, not just the upper ones, for his
officers and generals. Several of his greatest commanders—Trotsky felt no need to
name them—were so low-born that they could not even write their own names. In
an exegesis on military doctrine published as a pamphlet in 1921, Trotsky judged
‘the Bonapartist military tradition of the bold offensive’ precisely that which
revolutionary armies should adopt, and in the same year he rejected Kautsky’s
charge that the Bolsheviks’ recent conquest of Georgia and its reabsorption into
Russia were somehow evidence of Bonapartism.¹¹⁵

¹¹⁰ Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, unabridged edition, p. 469. ¹¹¹ Ibid., p. 472.
¹¹² Ibid., pp. 456–73.
¹¹³ Leon Trotsky, ‘The Non-Commissioned Officers’, in Trotsky, Military Writings, vol. I, p. 233.
¹¹⁴ Ibid., vol. I, p. 233.
¹¹⁵ Leon Trotsky, ‘Military Doctrine or Pseudo-Military Doctrinairism’, ibid., vol. V, p. 321; Trotsky,
Between Red and White, pp. 19–30.
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Prior to the mid-1930s, Trotsky’s view replicated Marx’s. Bonapartism was

something to which only capitalist countries, like France in the nineteenth cen-
tury, were vulnerable. But by having nationalized the means of production, the
Soviet Union could never degenerate into Bonapartism, and anyone who claimed
the opposite—that the Soviet Union was becoming Bonapartist, was already
Bonapartist, or might become Bonapartist in the future—was wrong. In 1933,
when the German Communist Hugo Urbahns called the Soviet Union Bonapart-
ist, Trotsky strongly objected, reminding his readers that Bonapartism existed
only when private property remained in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and since in
the Soviet Union private property was already nationalized and the means of
production in the hands of the proletariat, Bonapartism was not a viable option.
The Soviet Union was not Bonapartist because it could not be Bonapartist.¹¹⁶
With this conviction firmly in mind, Trotsky could press for the adoption of
specific policies Napoleon followed without worrying that this increased the
chances of the Soviet system succumbing to Bonapartism. In fact, having excluded
the Soviet Union from the regimes in his Marxist-based taxonomy that might
degenerate into Bonapartism, Trotsky could use the term and its variants as
epithets in condemning anyone or anything he found objectionable. In 1920 he
disparaged the Pilsudskii regime in Poland for its ‘third-rate Bonapartism’, and in
1923 he dismissed Pilsudskii himself as ‘a Polish Kerensky, only made up to look
like Napoleon’.¹¹⁷
In 1935, however, Trotsky changed his mind on the whole question of Thermi-
dor. This caused him to refine what he believed Bonapartism to be, and to
reconsider the chances of it emerging organically in the Soviet Union from within
the Communist Party itself. In the 1920s Trotsky had defined Thermidor as a
form of counter-revolution and acknowledged that its appearance in the Soviet
Union would mean the end of the entire enterprise of establishing communism
and creating the New Soviet Man. But when Trotsky and his supporters regained
power—about the inevitability of which Trotsky almost never doubted—a Soviet
Thermidor would be precluded; should it exist, it would be extinguished quickly.
But the persistence of Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union, coupled with his own
powerlessness and inability to alleviate its most pernicious effects, caused Trotsky
to reverse each of his conclusions concerning a Soviet Thermidor: what it was and
what its presence in the Soviet Union would signify, and whether it existed already
in the Soviet Union or might emerge there in the future.¹¹⁸

¹¹⁶ Leon Trotsky, ‘The Class Nature of the Soviet State (1 October 1933)’, in WLT (1933–4) (New
York, 1975), pp. 107–8.
¹¹⁷ Leon Trotsky, ‘The Polish Front’, in Trotsky, Military Writings, vol. III, p. 141; Leon Trotsky,
‘From a Report’, ibid., vol. V. p. 145.
¹¹⁸ Leon Trotsky, ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor, and Bonapartism (April 1935)’, in WLT (1934–5)
(New York, 1971), pp. 166–84.
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In short, Trotsky now admitted that Thermidor was a reality in the Soviet
Union, but, in mitigation of the dire conclusions that seemed to follow his
admission, redefined the term to signify merely a reactionary phase in an ongoing
revolution, as it was in the French Revolution, rather than a counter-revolution,
which of course would be more difficult to reverse. In France, he wrote, the years
from 1794 to 1799 had been a time in which political power changed hands from
the radical Jacobins to ‘the more moderate and conservative [ones], the better-to-
do elements of bourgeois society’.¹¹⁹ The coup that deposed Robespierre and his
followers in the summer of 1794 was only a political revolution, and thus left
intact the social and economic reforms of the French Revolution. But Trotsky’s
new definition of Thermidor allowed for the possibility of an even more salubrious
outcome, namely that a reactionary phase within a progressive revolution, unlike a
counter-revolution, might disappear on its own, without any internal revolution
or foreign intervention. The reason for Trotsky’s optimism was obvious. If
Thermidor, as a generic phenomenon, was deleterious but nevertheless imper-
manent, then its presence in the Soviet Union made it possible for Trotsky to
continue to call the Soviet Union a workers’ state—or to argue that if it was no
longer a workers’ state it might easily become a workers’ state again—and to
believe that the possibility, even the likelihood, of creating socialism and com-
munism there remained real.
Trotsky, however, was not willing to predict that this Soviet Thermidor would
soon disappear and that it would do so on its own—despite the fact that his new
definition permitted it. In fact, he wrote in this same article that the Soviet Union
was not only Thermidorian in some of its economic and social arrangements, but
simultaneously Bonapartist in its political ones.¹²⁰ Notwithstanding his earlier
statements reassuring his followers that Bonapartism was a concomitant of
capitalism and that socialist states were immune to it, in 1935 he affirmed that,
as an essential attribute of Stalinism, it existed in Russia. In fact, after condemning
as ‘banal pedantry’ the attempt to analogize the different stages of the Russian
Revolution to those in the French Revolution, Trotsky characterized Stalin’s
regime in the Soviet Union as analogous to Bonaparte’s at the end of the
Consulate; so obvious was this analogy he was ‘hit between the eyes by it’.¹²¹
While in the five years that remained before his assassination in Mexico in 1940
Trotsky would claim that the Soviet Union resembled other phases of the original
Bonapartist regime in France, he never retracted his initial claim that in the way
political power was exercised and in the relationship between the political lead-
ership and Soviet society, the Soviet Union, in its totality, was Bonapartist.¹²²

¹¹⁹ Ibid., p. 174. ¹²⁰ Ibid., p. 178. ¹²¹ Ibid., p. 175.

¹²² Trotsky even contradicted himself in the 1935 article, claiming at the end of it that the current
Soviet regime, in the terminology used to distinguish the various phases of Napoleon’s dictatorship, was
‘closer in type to the Empire than the Consulate’. Ibid., p. 182.
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What, then, according to Trotsky, did Bonapartism in the Soviet Union consist
of? As he explained it, Bonapartism was an expedient the Soviet bureaucracy
employed to perpetuate itself and to perpetuate the political power it exercised
through the person of Stalin, whose political supremacy was buttressed by the
police and the military. Stalin’s rule, moreover, transcended the class structure of
the Soviet Union, and for that reason the bureaucracy of which Stalin was its
political instrument could more easily dominate the country and thwart any
attempt by the proletariat to regain control of the party and the government. By
essentially ‘separating’ politics from society, Bonapartism was able to pulverize
Soviet society to such an extent that the Soviet bureaucracy could continue to
embezzle from the proletariat the rewards of what remained a proletarian econ-
omy. This separation, in other words, worked both ways: while it ensured the
continued supremacy of the bureaucracy, of whom Stalin was its principal polit-
ical instrument, it also afforded a measure of protection to the Soviet economy,
which, thanks to Lenin and Trotsky, remained proletarian in the absence of a
capitalist bourgeoisie owning the means of production. In Trotsky’s words:
Stalin guards the conquests of the October Revolution not only against the
feudal-bourgeois counterrevolution but also against the claims of the toilers,
their impatience and their dissatisfaction; he crushes the left wing that expresses
the ordered historical and progressive tendencies of the unprivileged working
masses; he creates a new aristocracy by means of an extreme differentiation in
wages, privileges, ranks etc. Leaning for support on the topmost layer of the new
social hierarchy against the lowest—sometimes vice versa—Stalin has attained
the complete concentration of power in his own hands. What else should this
regime be called if not Soviet Bonapartism?¹²³

The conclusion Trotsky drew from the separation of politics and economics he
believed existed in the Soviet Union, and constituted irrefutable proof of its
Bonapartism, was, again, a cautiously optimistic one. Bonapartism, as he defined
it, was powerful but unstable. Soviet Bonapartism, in fact, was like a sphere
balanced on the point of a pyramid, ready to fall—at this point Trotsky’s meta-
phor loses its value—either in the direction of a regime whose polity was genuinely
and unalterably proletarian, or in the direction of a regime, probably a fascist one,
that openly restored bourgeois property.¹²⁴ Indeed, Trotsky acknowledged that

¹²³ Ibid., p. 181. This passage also reveals that Trotsky on occasion described Stalin not as a mere
tool of the bureaucracy but as a more or less independent and self-contained political actor wielding
power that derived from no one else and from no particular class or stratum in Soviet society, not even
a hypertrophied bureaucracy that, in its size, bore no relation to the one the Bolsheviks inherited
in 1917.
¹²⁴ Ibid., pp. 181–2. Complicating matters was Trotsky’s multiple descriptions of the Soviet Union
under Stalin as ‘totalitarian’, which would seem to preclude the possibility of its reversion, presumably
after Stalin’s overthrow, to a genuinely proletarian state. See, for example, Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed,
pp. 100, 108, 183, 276, 279. Trotsky, who was familiar with what the Mensheviks wrote in emigration
after their expulsion from the Soviet Union (which Trotsky supported), probably knew that his views
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fascism and Soviet Bonapartism were similar in that both were ‘crisis regimes’,
with fascism protecting the conquests of ‘finance capital’, and Bonapartism those
of a ‘permanent bureaucracy’.¹²⁵ But both regimes were condemned by the
perseverations of the Marxist dialectic to collapse, and the result would be an
incipient workers’ state in the case of fascism, and a revived and resurgent
workers’ state in the case of Soviet Bonapartism.¹²⁶
Over the next several years Trotsky tinkered with his views on Soviet Bona-
partism without significantly revising them, though in 1939 he speculated briefly
that the Soviet Union could degenerate further into a ‘bureaucratic collectivism’
unlike any previous despotism in history, a possibility he rejected almost imme-
diately after raising it.¹²⁷ When, in 1936, Stalin allowed (rigged) elections and
promulgated a new Soviet constitution, Trotsky took these developments to mean
that Soviet Bonapartism was now ‘plebiscitary’, and thus dependent for its legit-
imacy (though not its power) on the results of balloting and on the clauses of a
document that were both meaningless.¹²⁸ As for the show trials and the terror that
began in the same year, Trotsky saw them as further proof of the instability of
Soviet Bonapartism: threatened by the proletariat, the ruling bureaucracy was
responding with terror. This view of the Terror, however, grossly minimized
Stalin’s role in it, and Trotsky never explained why the Soviet government should
have cannibalized itself instead of limiting the terror it inflicted to the classes that
ostensibly threatened it. Trotsky failed to explain, in other words, why the victims
of Stalin’s Terror included loyal Stalinists, who were presumably just as much a
product of Soviet bureaucracy as Stalin himself, as well as enemies of Stalin and
the Soviet bureaucracy who were genuine advocates of the proletariat and social-
ism, among whom Trotsky’s supporters (and until his assassination, Trotsky
himself) were the most ardent and articulate. The only conceivable and logically
consistent explanation for such obvious irrationality is that Stalin, or more
meaningfully those who constituted the ruling bureaucracy and presumably
made clear to Stalin what exactly he should do, were clinically insane. But Trotsky

on totalitarianism in the Soviet Union closely resembled Fëdor Dan’s, as expressed in ‘Puti vozrozhde-
niia’. Of course Trotsky would never acknowledge the similarity publicly.

¹²⁵ Ibid., pp. 169, 180–3; Leon Trotsky, ‘Bonapartism and Fascism (15 July 1934)’, ibid., pp. 53–4.
Ironically, Trotsky’s notion of fascism was also Stalin’s. Indeed, the prevailing orthodoxy in the Soviet
Union in the Stalin era and afterwards—excluding only the twenty-two months between the Non-
Aggression Pact in 1939 and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941—was that fascism was ‘the
open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of
finance capital’. Georgii Dimitrov at the Seventh Comintern Congress in 1935, quoted in Robert
O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York, 2005), p. 8.
¹²⁶ Trotsky, ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor, and Bonapartism’, pp. 170–1; Trotsky, ‘Bonapartism
and Fascism’, p. 57.
¹²⁷ Leon Trotsky, ‘The USSR in War (25 September 1939)’, in Leon Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism
(New York, 1973), pp. 13–15.
¹²⁸ Leon Trotsky, ‘The New Constitution of the USSR (16 April 1936)’, in WLT (1935–6) (New
York, 1977), p. 311.
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could not even entertain this possibility. For one thing, it contradicted Marxism’s
dogma on the material origins of everything ideational. For another, it might be
considered obviation of Stalin’s responsibility for the Terror.
As the Terror intensified and it became increasingly clear that Trotsky’s death
would be its logical culmination and climax, Trotsky, quite understandably, used
the word Bonapartism and its adjectival derivative as a convenient pejorative for
everything from Stalin’s egomania to his personal sadism and abuse of power. His
last writings are filled with references, none of them particularly illuminating, to
‘Bonapartist gangsterism’ and ‘Bonapartist riff-raff ’.¹²⁹ But in more reflective
moments he regained the serenity that enabled him to predict the eventual demise
of Soviet Bonapartism. In March 1939 he speculated that civil war in Russia might
follow the conclusion of the Eighteenth Party Congress, and that war with Japan
would result in the collapse of the entire regime.¹³⁰
All of this, however, was far in the future when Trotsky first proclaimed his
views on Soviet Bonapartism in 1935. Far more important than speculating on
when and how it might be destroyed was clarifying the circumstances that had
allowed it to emerge. This required his clarifying the relationship between Soviet
Bonapartism and the Soviet Thermidor, which he had conveniently redefined to
preclude the conclusion that the October Revolution had been betrayed and that
socialism in the Soviet Union was no longer possible, at least not in the foreseeable
future. If, as Trotsky now argued, the development of the Russian Revolution was
roughly analogous to that of the French, and if, as Trotsky also argued, the Soviet
Union was currently at a stage in its development corresponding to that of the first
Napoleonic dictatorship in France, claiming now that the Soviet Thermidor was
real but that it only signified a phase in a revolutionary process suggested that the
same was true for the Soviet Bonapartism that had succeeded it, namely that it,
too, only signified a phase in a revolutionary process. But while the successor to
Soviet Thermidor was something worse, namely Soviet Bonapartism, the succes-
sor to Soviet Bonapartism might be something better, namely the Soviet Union’s
reversion to the path to socialism it had been following before Trotsky’s political
demise, which he believed was triggered by Lenin’s final illness and death. What
was new in Trotsky’s analysis of his own demise was that he now made it
coterminous with both Lenin’s death and the beginning of the Soviet Thermidor.
In the same article in which he proclaimed the existence of Soviet Bonpartism, he
also stated that the Soviet Thermidor that preceded it had begun in 1924.¹³¹ By
doing that, Trotsky shielded Lenin’s actions, most notably the suppression of the

¹²⁹ Leon Trotsky, ‘The Bonapartist Philosophy of the State (1 May 1939)’, in WLT (1938–9) (New
York, 1974), p. 325; Leon Trotsky, ‘Again and Once More Again on the Nature of the USSR (18
October 1939)’, in In Defence of Marxism, p. 24.
¹³⁰ Leon Trotsky, ‘Stalin’s Capitulation (11 March 1939)’, in WLT (1938–9), p. 218; Leon Trotsky,
‘Only Revolution Can End War (18 March 1939)’, ibid., p. 235.
¹³¹ Trotsky, ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor, and Bonapartism’, p. 174.
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Kronstadt Revolt, the inauguration of the NEP, and the elimination of political
parties like the Mensheviks that had criticized and condemned the Bolsheviks,
from the stigma attached to the Thermidorian analogy. And by proclaiming the
Soviet Union Bonapartist, he could explain—at least to his own satisfaction—why
Stalin had defeated him (because he had the full weight of the Soviet bureaucracy
behind him), but still hold out hope for Stalin’s eventual defeat and his own
victory and vindication. However powerful Soviet Bonapartism, in the person of
Stalin, might be at the present time, it had yet to wrest from the Soviet proletariat
control over the means of production. In fact, it might never do so, and for that
reason remained vulnerable to a proletarian revolution against it.
This, at any rate, was what Trotsky understood by Soviet Bonapartism. His
analysis helps to explain why he considered it a cause for great concern, but it also
enabled him to remain at least cautiously optimistic about the future. Neverthe-
less, there were serious problems in Trotsky’s entire post-1934 analysis of the
Soviet Union. By characterizing it specifically as Bonapartist, he was effectively
elevating Stalin—whom he always considered a mediocrity—to the level of a
historical actor as significant as Napoleon. Trotsky seemed aware that his readers
might draw such a conclusion, which was almost certainly why he explicitly
rejected any personal comparison between Napoleon and Stalin, blithely remark-
ing in one of his writings on the subject that ‘whenever the social conditions
demand it, Bonapartism can consolidate itself around axes of the most diverse
calibre’.¹³² But even without explicitly analogizing Stalin to Napoleon, applying to
the Soviet Union under Stalin a term that inevitably evoked the image of the
French revolutionary emperor would always work to Stalin’s advantage. Trotsky,
however, was so eager to categorize the events that had been unfolding in the
Soviet Union since 1917—partly because for Marxists categorizing something was
tantamount to explaining it—that he could not refrain from doing so in the case of
Stalin. And because of his near-obsession that the Bolsheviks might recapitulate in
their own history the history of the French Revolution, the analogue he chose for
Stalin’s regime was, understandably, Napoleon’s.
Another problem with his calling the Soviet Union Bonapartist was that he
followed it by proclaiming little more than a year later, in a chapter in The
Revolution Betrayed, that the Soviet Union was still in its Thermidorian phase,
leaving any reader cognizant of Trotsky’s earlier designation to wonder if it was
still applicable.¹³³ In that regard one should note Trotsky’s speculation in the early
1930s that somehow Thermidor and Bonapartism might merge in the Soviet
Union, and more broadly that there need not be in the Soviet Union a literal
repetition of the phases of the French Revolution. Thermidor and Bonapartism,
after all, were both expressions, the former economic and the latter political, of the

¹³² Ibid., p. 181. ¹³³ Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, pp. 86–114.

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same reactionary impulses. But there were other flaws and failings in Trotsky’s
analysis that could not be explained away so easily. Trotsky seems to have
assumed that a state whose means of production were nationalized was ipso
facto a workers’ state. This, however, was theoretically dubious and historically
false. Max Shachtman, a supporter of Trotsky who later rejected him, noted in the
early 1940s that after nationalizing private property and the means of production,
the proletariat, unlike the bourgeoisie under capitalism, could not exercise eco-
nomic ownership without having political power, and since, according to Trotsky,
the Soviet proletariat after 1934 had no political power (because it was wielded
exclusively by the Soviet bureaucracy through Stalin himself), it could not own the
means of production.¹³⁴ The Soviet Union, in other words, could not be a workers’
state, and the long list of governments that since the 1930s have nationalized (or
‘socialized’) their economies without transferring power to their working class, or
to any other class, provides corroboration of a sort for Shachtman’s argument.
In assessing Trotsky’s argument that after 1935 the Soviet Union manifested the
essential attributes of Bonapartism, one must bear in mind that the Soviet Union
was not the only regime, or even the first regime, that Trotsky identified as
Bonapartist. In the early 1930s he had viewed with alarm the growing menace
of fascism in Europe, and endeavoured to explain the transition to it with
terminology borrowed from the history of France. In articles written at the time,
Trotsky proclaimed that the Papen and Schleicher governments in Germany, the
Doumergue government in France, and the Dolfuss regime in Austria were all
Bonapartist to one degree or another. All were extraordinary governments
brought into existence by the forces of finance capital for the purpose of protecting
the bourgeoisie from the proletariat. Ruling through the police and the military,
these regimes created and perpetuated a stalemate, if only a temporary one,
between the two classes.¹³⁵ The following description of the Dolfuss government
in 1933 can be taken as applicable to the other Bonapartist governments he
identified:
[The Dolfuss government] veers between two irreconcilable camps; [it is] forced
to an ever-increasing degree to substitute the military-police apparatus for
the social support that is ebbing away from under its feet. Expressed in the
tendency towards Bonapartism are the urge of the possessing classes, by means of

¹³⁴ McNeal, ‘Trotskyist Interpretations of Stalinism’, p. 45.

¹³⁵ For example, Leon Trotsky, ‘The German Puzzle (November 1932)’, in Leon Trotsky, The
Struggle against Fascism in Germany (New York, 1971), pp. 268–9; Leon Trotsky, The Only Road
(New York, 1933); Trotsky, ‘Bonapartism and Fascism’, pp. 51–7. Until 1935 Trotsky did not imagine
that a similar stalemate could exist after a proletarian revolution as well as before it, and that that would
be reason enough to consider the result a form of Bonapartism. The stalemate in this case would not be
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but between a ruling bureaucracy and the proletariat. In
The Revolution Betrayed and in other writings of his describing this bureaucracy, Trotsky always called
it a ‘stratum’ or a ‘caste’ rather than a class to preserve the notion—to many it was actually a fiction—
that the Soviet Union, in its economic arrangements, remained a workers’ state.
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military-police measures that are kept under cover, in the reserve paragraphs of
democratic institutions, to avoid an open break with legality; a long period of
civil war; and a bloody fascist dictatorship.¹³⁶

But such regimes, because their social base was so precarious, could not prevent
the inevitable: either they would succumb to proletarian revolution (the outcome
Trotsky obviously preferred) or they could seek the support of the petit-
bourgeoisie and become fascist. In the latter instance the Bonapartist regime
would acquire a social base, and in its fascist incarnation would be blessed with
‘a degree of social and political stability’.¹³⁷ But Bonapartism and fascism were
both the result of the failures and the decline of capitalism, and to distinguish this
kind of Bonapartism from its French original, Trotsky coupled his explanation
with periodic reminders that the Bonapartism of Napoleon was an expression of
capitalism in Europe when it was just emerging.¹³⁸
But Trotsky, having discerned what he was now calling ‘a Bonapartism of
capitalist decay’, seemed not to be satisfied with it.¹³⁹ In 1933 he muddied the
taxonomical waters considerably by allowing that the governments of Poland,
Yugoslavia, and Austria were actually ‘quasi-Bonapartist,’ without indicating what
distinguished this ersatz Bonapartism from the genuine Bonapartism of Napoleon
and Stalin.¹⁴⁰ On other occasions Trotsky complicated his taxonomy even more
by predicting that fascist regimes, while more stable than their Bonapartist
precursors, would likely revert to a form of Bonapartism before the proletariat
had the opportunity to destroy them once and for all. As Trotsky explained
in 1934:
Just as Bonapartism begins by combining the parliamentary regime with fascism,
so triumphant fascism finds itself forced not only to enter into a bloc with the
Bonapartists but, what is more, to draw closer internally to the Bonapartist
system. The prolonged domination of finance capital by means of reactionary
social demagoguery and petit-bourgeois terror is impossible. Having arrived
in power, the fascist chiefs are forced to muzzle the masses who follow them
by means of the state apparatus. By the same token, they lose the support of
broad masses of the petit-bourgeoisie. A small part of it is assimilated by the
bureaucratic apparatus. Another sinks into indifference. A third, under various
banners, passes into opposition. But while losing its social mass base, by resting

¹³⁶ Leon Trotsky, ‘Austria’s Turn Next (23 March 1933)’, in WLT (1932–3), (New York, 1972), p. 148.
¹³⁷ Trotsky, ‘Bonapartism and Fascism’, pp. 54–5.
¹³⁸ Leon Trotsky, ‘German Bonapartism (30 October 1932)’, in Struggle Against Fascism, pp. 330,
333; Leon Trotsky, ‘Class Nature of the Soviet State’, p. 107.
¹³⁹ Trotsky, ‘Class Nature of the Soviet State’, p. 107.
¹⁴⁰ Leon Trotsky, ‘An Interview by Georges Simenon (6 June 1933)’, in WLT (1932–3), p. 263. As
already noted, Trotsky in 1920 had called Poland, then ruled by Pilsudski, an example of ‘third-rate
Bonapartism’. But that did not prompt any effort to define Bonapartism or to explain its emergence in
Poland.
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upon the bureaucratic apparatus and oscillating between the classes, fascism is
regenerated into Bonapartism.¹⁴¹

Trotsky used the same argument to explain the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in Nazi
Germany in 1934, as a result of which, according to Trotsky, the Nazi regime could
be considered Bonapartist.¹⁴² But this ‘Bonapartism of fascist origin’, he added, was
distinguished from the pre-fascist variety by its much ‘greater stability’.¹⁴³
Trotsky’s typology thus came to consist of six, and possibly seven, kinds of
Bonapartism: the Napoleonic original, pre-fascist Bonapartism, fascist Bonapart-
ism, post-fascist Bonapartism, the Bonapartism of the Soviet Union under Stalin,
and the quasi-Bonapartism of Yugoslavia and Poland. (The seventh variety, if one
chose to include it, was the ‘senile Bonapartism’, that in 1940, shortly before his
death, Trotsky believed to be the essence of Vichy France, its ‘senility’ reflecting
what Trotsky considered the greater ease with which it could be overthrown.)¹⁴⁴
Faced with so many varieties of the same phenomenon, each of them different
from one another and from the prototype that gave them all their name, one could
reasonably question whether a single term could properly be used to define them.
By invoking the spectre of Bonapartism so promiscuously and carelessly, Trotsky
robbed it of its analytical value. Moreover, the Bonapartist regime of Napoleon
lasted for nearly sixteen years, much longer than the brief duration Trotsky
predicted for most of its modern analogues. More broadly, there was something
seriously amiss in an analogy that depended for its validity on similarities between
an essentially pre-industrial society and industrial ones. Napoleon’s Russia may
have been analogous in certain ways to Papen’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and
Dolfuss’ Austria, but the similarities implicit in these analogies were minimal in
comparison to what distinguished the three regimes from Napoleon’s, and one
from the others.
Similar objections could be raised about Trotsky’s claim for an analogy with
Thermidor. Even a cursory comparison of the French and Soviet Thermidors
(accepting that the latter existed as a form of reaction rather than of counter-
revolution) suggests that while there were aspects of both that could be considered
‘reactionary’, the forms this reaction assumed in the two situations were radically
different. In the case of France, the decentralization of power, the petty corrup-
tion, and the looser morality that prevailed in the late 1790s might be fairly

¹⁴¹ Trotsky, ‘Bonapartism and Fascism’, p. 55.

¹⁴² Ibid. Although, as Timothy Mason pointed out, there was some truth to the argument, which was
Trotsky’s, that the Nazis to some degree separated politics from the German economy, it hardly
followed logically—nor is there empirical evidence to support the contention—that Hitler and the
Nazis, as both Trotsky and Stalin believed, were the unwitting instruments of German big business.
T. W. Mason, ‘The Primacy of Politics—Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany’, in The
Nature of Fascism, edited by S. J. Woolf (New York, 1965), pp. 165–95; Henry A. Turner, Jr, German
Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York, 1985).
¹⁴³ Trotsky, ‘Bonapartism and Fascism’, pp. 55–6.
¹⁴⁴ Leon Trotsky, ‘Bonapartism, Fascism, and War (August 1940)’, in WLT (1939–40), p. 417.
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considered a reaction to the austerity and the centralization of political authority

under the Jacobins.¹⁴⁵ So, too, could the social and cultural conservatism in the
Soviet Union in the Stalin era be considered a reaction to the experimentation in
the 1920s in the arts and in a wide variety of sexual and social mores.¹⁴⁶ But surely
a society characterized by opulence, corruption, and the gratification of private
impulses is significantly different from one that officially sanctifies the family,
productivity, and the subordination of the individual to collective entities like a
political party and the state. Perhaps a more appropriate counterpart to Thermi-
dor in Soviet history was the NEP, but even here the analogy is inexact, inasmuch
as the NEP led to economic growth in a nation at peace, while the original
Thermidor depressed the economy of a country at war.¹⁴⁷
There were other differences, several of them critically important, between the
two societies. One was that Stalin altered the tone and substance of Soviet foreign
policy far more than the Directory altered the foreign policy of the Jacobins.¹⁴⁸
Another was that the Directory faced genuine challenges from both royalists and
counter-revolutionaries, some domestic but others foreign, that assumed the form
of actual conspiracies and rebellions, while the threats to Stalin were either trivial
(Trotsky’s Fourth International) or more potential than real (perhaps from Sergei
Kirov) or entirely imagined.¹⁴⁹ Yet another was that the Soviets, because of their
more advanced technology, could impose a degree of cultural and political
homogeneity that the Thermidorians, with more primitive means of control at
their disposal, could not.¹⁵⁰
Finally, one is struck by how much of the history of the Soviet Union had no
real analogue or equivalent in the French Revolution—or, for that matter, in 1830,
1848, and 1871. One looks in vain for any French Comintern, or for anything
comparable to Lenin’s Twenty-One Conditions binding foreign communist

¹⁴⁵ See, for example, Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime, pp. xx, 1–10, 38–9, 64–7.
¹⁴⁶ Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, especially pp. 225–41; Nicholas Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The
Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York, 1946); Fitzpatrick, Russian Revolution,
pp. 158–63. Of course this cultural conservatism in no way vitiated the radicalism that was evident
simultaneously in the economy.
¹⁴⁷ Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime, pp. 113–16.
¹⁴⁸ Adam Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1967 (New
York, 1968), pp. 183–208; J. Godechot, La Grande Nation: expansion révolutionnaire de la France dans
le monde de 1789 à 1799 (Paris, 1956). That the Directory enlarged the objectives of Jacobin foreign
policy, instead of reversing them, is the conclusion Martyn Lyons draws in France under the Directory
(Cambridge, 1975), pp. 204–14.
¹⁴⁹ That there was a conspiracy in 1934 to replace Stalin with Kirov was Robert Conquest’s
conclusion in Stalin and the Kirov Murder (New York, 1989). More recently, in The Kirov Murder
and Soviet History (New Haven CT, 2010), Matthew Lenoe has argued that no such conspiracy existed
and that Kirov was killed by a lone, mentally unbalanced assassin. That Stalin used Kirov’s murder for
his own purposes, irrespective of his possible complicity in the matter, has never been seriously
disputed.
¹⁵⁰ Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime, pp. 118–42; Gail Warshovsky Lapidus, ‘Educational Strategies
and Cultural Revolution: The Politics of Soviet Development’, in Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution,
pp. 78–104.
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parties to the Soviet. Indeed, there was nothing in how the Soviet Union domin-
ated Eastern Europe during the Cold War comparable to the Sister Republics in
Europe in the 1790s, which retained a degree of autonomy that enabled French
generals like Napoleon to develop the political skills needed to take power in
France.¹⁵¹ Also, there was missing in the French Revolution a Promethean vision
of the state transforming nature through violence and coercion that found its
fullest expression in the Soviet Union in industrialization and the collectivization
of agriculture. The closest the French came in that regard was in the Jacobins’
short-lived attempt to create a Republic of Virtue by changing external aspects of
daily life such as the calendar, and holding the much-noted fêtes for the purpose of
generating political consciousness.¹⁵²
For purely political reasons, Trotsky would have been better off writing nothing
about the French Revolution or Bonapartism. His treatment of these phenomena
was marred by factual inaccuracies and a tendency to misread historical evidence,
such as his erroneous assertions, all in his History of the Russian Revolution, that
Danton was the leader of the insurrection of 10 August 1792—when in fact his
role was no greater than that of others—and that the diary of Louis XVI could be
considered evidence of ‘spiritual emptiness’—when in fact Louis considered his
diary a record of his prowess as a hunter, rather than a vehicle for stating privately
his version of political events.¹⁵³ But even if one accepts the validity of everything
Trotsky wrote about the French Revolution and Bonapartism, and acknowledges
that the analogies he drew between the French and the Russian Revolutions were
completely accurate, the fact remains that all of this was extraneous to his defence
of the Soviet Union under Stalin as ‘a degenerated workers’ state’.¹⁵⁴ In other
words, Trotsky could have characterised the Soviet Union as reactionary or
counter-revolutionary, or in the throes of a ‘plebiscitary dictatorship’ without
employing the vocabulary and the categories of another revolution and another
revolutionary tradition. Instead, by explaining one revolution in the terms of
others, Trotsky seriously underestimated the factors peculiar to each
revolution—and to the history and national culture of the countries where they
occurred—that help to explain the different path each of them followed. As a
result, Trotsky’s career-long meditation on the relationship of the Russian Revo-
lution to the French Revolution and to the revolutionary tradition it inaugurated,

¹⁵¹ R. R. Palmer, The World of the French Revolution (New York, 1971), pp. 149–62; Lyons, France
under the Directory, pp. 146–58, 189–203; Roberts, Napoleon, pp. 74–104.
¹⁵² In the case of the latter, one could say that the Bolsheviks got the idea of using them as political
propaganda from the French Revolution, but infused those they sponsored with content that was sui
generis.
¹⁵³ Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, unabridged edition, pp. 69, 881. These and other
instances where Trotsky got his facts wrong are enumerated and discussed in Louis Gottschalk, ‘Leon
Trotsky and the Natural History of Revolution’, American Journal of Sociology 44 (1938): pp. 339–54.
¹⁵⁴ Trotsky, ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor, and Bonapartism’, pp. 172–3.
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marred as it was by factual errors, abrupt reversals, and imprecision of language,

sheds more darkness than light.
Trotsky, who did not lack intelligence (though he seemed constitutionally
incapable of introspection), was oblivious to all of this. In fact, he seemed so
impressed by the intellectual gymnastics required to articulate the analogies he
proffered that they eventually lost their original purpose. If, in the beginning,
Trotsky intended the analogies he drew to illustrate, clarify, or corroborate a
conclusion he had already arrived at, very soon they became more real in his
mind than the phenomena they were intended to explain. From a tool of political
analysis, Trotsky’s analogies became a substitute for it. In fact, by the mid-1930s
Trotsky had transformed Thermidor and Bonapartism into universal historical
categories, descriptive not just of the French Revolution and the Russian Revolu-
tion, but of a pattern of degeneration, albeit a reversible one, to which no
revolution in the future could be considered immune, not even (or perhaps
especially not) socialist and proletarian ones.
Why Trotsky did this remains a matter of speculation. Apart from infatuation
with his own intellectual and rhetorical pyrotechnics, there was also, perhaps, the
unstated, but nonetheless undeniable fact that Marxist ideology could not explain
the October Revolution, which by its lights was an aberration, and thus of no help
when the Soviet Union after Lenin developed in ways that Trotsky could not have
predicted and of which he wholeheartedly disapproved. In Trotsky’s expectations
of what the October Revolution would generate in Russia, Stalin and Stalinism
were not among them. Finally, one might suggest that the misuse of historical
analogies (and of history generally) is certainly not limited to revolutionaries,
though the tendency of revolutionaries like Trotsky to justify their actions by
appealing to history in the form of analogies with earlier revolutions may make
them more prone than others to underestimate the singularity and the uniqueness
of historical events. It may even be the case that the misuse of historical analogies
is a consequence, unfortunate but unavoidable, of the tendency in Western
civilization, traceable to its origins in Judaism and Christianity, to view history
as linear and progressive, and thus an ongoing process in which the past was
always a prelude to the future.
Whatever the reasons causing Trotsky to make such a mess of things when he
looked to history for guidance, the fact remains that he continued to do so long
after someone in his position less enamoured of his own powers of cerebration
might have stopped and considered other ways of achieving the clarity about the
Soviet Union’s evolution he clearly needed and desired. Trotsky certainly knew
the pitfalls of drawing analogies. In 1919, in a new introduction he wrote for
Results and Prospects, he argued that most analogies, especially those by his
political opponents, were the result of ‘thoroughgoing [intellectual] superficiality’;
the obvious inference he wanted his readers to draw from his comment was that
they themselves should eschew historical analogies entirely, because the insights
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they provided were in almost every instance illusory.¹⁵⁵ But Trotsky seemed
constitutionally incapable of taking his own advice in this regard, and as a result
made the same mistakes he criticized his personal and political enemies for
committing.

* * *
When Stalin drew historical analogies, in contrast to Trotsky he always seemed
cognizant of the limits of their explanatory and predictive capability. When he
used them, his motives were always political—usually to defame an enemy or
some impersonal entity he considered hostile and dangerous either presently or in
the future. Moreover, he could evaluate historical issues and the individuals
involved in them without referencing the Marxist ideology that purported to
explain them. This was true of what he wrote about Thermidor in the 1920s,
and it was true of what he wrote about Bonapartism in the late 1920s and 1930s.
Stalin first invoked the spectre of Soviet Bonapartism in September 1927 in a
speech to the Executive Committee of the Comintern. He began by stating that it
was the opposition led by Trotsky that raised the whole issue. As Stalin continued,
it became clear that what he objected to was not Bonapartism itself, but rather the
opposition’s ascription of it to the Soviet Union, a charge the general secretary
indignantly rejected. In so doing, he provided a definition of the term, and
thereafter never rejected his definition or altered it in any discernible way. For
Stalin, Bonapartism was ‘the forcible seizure of power in a party, or in a country,
by a minority in opposition to the majority’.¹⁵⁶ But since ‘an overwhelming
majority in both the Communist Party and the Soviets’ did not harbour Bona-
partist tendencies, much less any inclination to transform them into deliberate
and immediate action, the danger Bonapartism posed was practically nil.¹⁵⁷ In
fact, the idea that it could do so was absurd: ‘Has there ever been a case in history
when the majority has imposed its own will upon itself by the use of force? Who
but lunatics could believe that something so inconceivable [was] possible’.¹⁵⁸ The
only circumstance, according to Stalin, in which the Soviet system would succumb
to a Bonapartist dictatorship was if the opposition somehow imposed it over the
objections of the Communist Party and the Soviet proletariat. It is true that Stalin
did not address the possibility of Bonapartism, or something closely approximat-
ing it, succeeding a Soviet Thermidor should it ever exist. But by minimizing the
danger of a Soviet Thermidor, which he said was advocated by ‘degenerate
opportunist elements’ comprising only a small minority within the party,
he effectively reduced to a nullity the chance of the Soviet Union becoming
Bonapartist. In Stalin’s mind, historical stages repeated themselves only in the

¹⁵⁵ Trotsky, Itogi i perspektivy, p. 3.

¹⁵⁶ J. V. Stalin, ‘Politicheskaia fizionomiia russkoi oppozitsii’, in Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. X, p. 164.
¹⁵⁷ Ibid., vol. X, p. 164. ¹⁵⁸ Ibid., vol. X, pp. 164–5.
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order in which they originally occurred: because Bonapartism had followed

Thermidor in France, it would do the same—were it to appear at all—in the
Soviet Union. But in reality the issue was moot. Since Stalin and his supporters
would prevent a Soviet Thermidor, Soviet Bonapartism would never exist.
In the same speech, which marked the only time Stalin ever explained what
Bonapartism was (in contrast to minimizing its prospects in the Soviet Union), he
did not ascribe to it any military dimension; nowhere did he indicate or imply that
the dictatorship it entailed would either be supported by the military or led by it.
Nor did he mention Napoleon himself, who, for anyone whose definition of
Bonapartism included a military component, would be the quintessential Bona-
partist ruler. Stalin’s refusal to do so, one might suggest, was because he had a high
opinion of Napoleon both as a ruler and military strategist, and would have no
need to alter it as long as his notion of Bonapartism did not require its political
manifestation to be a military dictatorship like Napoleon’s.
In Marxist terms, Napoleon, as the political instrument of an incipient indus-
trial bourgeoisie, was progressive and reactionary simultaneously, to be praised for
advancing capitalism at the expense of feudalism, but also condemned as an enemy
of the proletariat and socialism. Stalin had no reason to reject this particular aspect
of Marxist orthodoxy, and nothing in his writings and speeches suggests that he
did. But for all his military prowess and political acumen, Napoleon, in Stalin’s
estimation, would always bear the onus of attacking Russia in 1812 and nearly
defeating it. In some sense, Stalin’s ambivalence about the French emperor
reflected the admixture, in his own mind, of Marxist ideology and the Russian
nationalism he espoused, possibly in compensation for his non-Russian origins in
Georgia. If, at certain times, Stalin could think well of Napoleon for his indubitably
impressive political skills and military achievements, which were put to good use
eliminating the last remnants of feudalism in France, at other times Stalin seemed
to shrink from his conviction, as if remembering that the emperor also put his
formidable abilities at the disposal, so to speak, of a bourgeoisie that intended for
both the proletariat and the country of Russia nothing but harm.
In 1934, in an article on Engels written originally as a letter to the Politburo of
the Communist Party, Stalin seemed intent on resolving his ambivalence and
making sure his readers knew his real opinion of Napoleon. While certainly
‘loathsome and filthy’, his conquests, Stalin noted, were nonetheless no worse
ethically than those of other rulers, including the tsars.¹⁵⁹ Moreover, ‘the intrigue,
deceit, treachery, flattery, brutality, bribery, murder, and incendiary politics’
Napoleon brought to the political and military struggles he engaged in were
absolutely essential to his success.¹⁶⁰ In the article, Stalin chastised Engels for
criticizing the tsars excessively: by doing so, Marx’s collaborator, according to

¹⁵⁹ J. V. Stalin, ‘O stat’e Engel’sa “Vneshniaia politika russkogo tsarizma” ’, ibid., vol. XIV, p. 20.
¹⁶⁰ Ibid., vol. XIV, p. 20.
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Stalin, ignored the role imperialism played in causing Napoleon to wage war on
Russia in 1812. For that reason, Napoleon’s campaign was a forerunner of the
wars of the twentieth century, which, according to Stalin, were the result of
imperialism. But a reader might be forgiven for concluding that, for all of Stalin’s
criticisms, Napoleon was really not so bad, and in light of his heroics on the
battlefield, was actually, at least by Stalinist standards, quite impressive.
Even when nefarious comparisons to Napoleon were appropriate, Stalin
stopped short of condemning him for everything he did. In a speech in 1941, on
the eve of the anniversary of the October Revolution, when the danger to Moscow
was so palpable that soldiers marching in Red Square the next day would continue
directly to the frontlines mere miles beyond the city limits, Stalin managed to
analogize Napoleon to Hitler so that the former seemed the antithesis of the latter,
even though both were guilty of attacking Russia. In Stalin’s comparison, ‘Hitler
resembled Napoleon no more than a kitten resembled a lion’.¹⁶¹ And if Stalin’s
choice of animals worked to Napoleon’s advantage in the personal qualities it
suggested each man possessed, Stalin enlarged the comparison to include the
respective historical forces the two rulers personified. Here, too, Stalin made his
preferences clear: ‘Napoleon fought against the forces of reaction while relying on
progressive ones, whereas Hitler, by contrast, relied on the forces of reaction while
fighting against progressive ones.’¹⁶² For that reason, Hitler’s defeat was inevitable.
Stalin referenced Napoleon next in a speech in 1942, when he simply noted the
disparity in the number of troops Napoleon and Hitler ordered into Russia, which
for Stalin was a way of demonstrating the enormity of the task the Red Army still
faced even after inflicting on the Wehrmacht its first defeat in the battle for
Moscow in December 1941. But Stalin said nothing more about Napoleon until
1947, when he intervened in the aforementioned dispute involving Tarlé. By
praising the tactics Kutuzov employed against Napoleon, Stalin, for the first
time, seemed intent on diminishing the latter’s ability as a military strategist.¹⁶³
As a result, Bonapartism, in its Stalinist incarnation, acquired an explicitly mili-
tary connotation. No longer a mere expedient concocted by the bourgeoisie to
ensure its continued economic supremacy, it had become, by the late 1940s, a real
danger to the future health, and possibly even the survival, of the Soviet Union,
which, according to Stalin, had become completely socialist in 1936. In 1950
Bonapartism was defined formally in The Large Soviet Encyclopedia as:
one of the forms of the counterrevolutionary dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie,
relying on the militarists, and manoeuvring in the conditions of an unstable

¹⁶¹ Stalin, ‘Doklad na torzhestvennom zasedanii Moskovskogo Sovet’, ibid., vol. XV, p. 80. In a
printed edition of Stalin’s speech, one reads that this particular comment evoked ‘laughter and loud
applause’. While these reactions were often entirely fabricated for political purposes, in this instance
one can easily imagine Stalin’s audience reacting in exactly that way.
¹⁶² Ibid., vol. XV, p. 80. ¹⁶³ ‘Otvet tov. Stalina na pis’mo tov. Razina’, pp. 7–8.
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equilibrium of class forces. [Bonapartism] appears when the class struggle is

reaching its limits . . . when the bourgeoisie is unable to cope with the revolutionary
movement, while the proletariat is still weak and cannot win the struggle [with the
bourgeoisie].¹⁶⁴

Bonapartism, in other words, could only emerge under capitalism, and while this
revised definition explicitly cited ‘militarists’ as its principal bulwark, left unsaid
was the identity of whoever exercised political power once Bonapartism existed.
About this, one can only speculate that Stalin thought silence was best: saying
nothing about Bonapartism in a purportedly socialist society might reduce,
perhaps to a nullity, the chances of it actually emerging. Stalin’s fear of Bonpart-
ism was real, as his demotion of Marshal Zhukov and reassignment to a provincial
command after the conclusion of the Second World War amply demonstrated.¹⁶⁵
That his fear was unwarranted, or at least greatly exaggerated, was evidenced by
the fact that, over the twenty-four years of Stalin’s rule, no one in the upper
echelons of the Soviet armed forces, as far as one can tell, ever questioned its
legitimacy, much less tried to remove Stalin from power, even though the Soviet
generals and marshals who dealt personally with him had good reason to murder
him, especially after Stalin decimated the Red Army’s High Command in 1937.
They also had the means and the opportunity to do so. But there were sound
reasons for doing nothing. An unsuccessful attempt on Stalin’s life would of
course have guaranteed immediate execution, while a successful attempt, if it
ushered in a regime hostile to the conspirators, might have produced the same
lethal result. The irony in all of this is that, whatever the outcome of any
hypothetical Soviet 18 Brumaire, Stalin, by purging the upper echelons of the
Soviet armed forces, effectively precluded its actual occurrence.
But the fear of a Bonapartist coup d’état engineered by the military did not
disappear after Stalin’s death, and in 1957 it re-emerged in public discourse.¹⁶⁶ In
October of that year Bonapartism was among the reasons stated publicly for
Nikita Khrushchev’s removal of Marshal Georgii Zhukov as Minister of Defence.
Despite his having approved Zhukov’s appointment two years earlier, Khrushchev

¹⁶⁴ Bol’shaia sovetskaia entstiklopediia (Moscow, 1950), vol. V, p. 556.

¹⁶⁵ On 10 March 1952, Pravda printed a photograph, taken in February 1950, of Stalin, Mao, and
Georgii Malenkov, a Politburo member and thought by many to be Stalin’s chosen successor. Because
Malenkov, in the photograph, had affected the iconic Napoleonic pose—one of his hands was behind
the opposite side of the suit he was wearing—he was strongly criticized by various members of the
Central Committee, who would not have done so without Stalin’s approval. There is also good reason to
believe that Malenkov’s unfortunate pose served as a convenient excuse for his rivals to attack him in
the struggle for power that followed Stalin’s death in 1953. Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the
Alchemy of Power (New Haven CT, 2012), p. 84.
¹⁶⁶ The term itself remained a useful political epithet. At a Central Committee Plenum in July 1953,
V. M. Andrianov joined with others in justifying Beria’s prior arrest and prospective trial and
execution, describing the former police chief as ‘a Bonaparte, ready to climb to power over mountains
of bodies and rivers of blood’. ‘The Beria Affair: Plenum of the Central Committee CPSU: The Fourth
Session—July 4, 1953’, in Political Archives of Russia 3, no. 2/3 (1992), p. 145.
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had come to consider the Soviet general a potential threat, and acted decisively to
neutralize it. After the Second World War Zhukov was the closest equivalent in
the Soviet Union to a war hero; like his American counterpart, Dwight Eisen-
hower, he received much of the credit for the operational decisions enabling the
Red Army to drive the Wehrmacht out of Russia and, in May 1945, to force
Germany to surrender. Like Stalin, Khrushchev was jealous of Zhukov, but unlike
Stalin he had reason to fear him. Zhukov’s willingness during the war to speak to
Stalin with none of the deference to which the Soviet dictator was accustomed
seemed to Khrushchev sufficient proof of Zhukov’s political ambitions, which
might include, by 1957, his gaining power at Khrushchev’s expense, and then
possibly overturning the entire Soviet system.¹⁶⁷ In 1955, however, Khrushchev’s
fear was not yet sufficient to deter him from approving Zhukov’s appointment. In
fact, his doing so made political sense: with Zhukov in Moscow, the new Soviet
leader could keep an eye on him. Moreover, Zhukov might prove to be politically
useful. This was certainly the case in June 1957, when he provided the military
transport planes needed to fly Khrushchev’s supporters in the Central Committee
to Moscow to meet in an emergency session after Presidium members hostile to
Khrushchev and his policy of partial de-Stalinization had secured a majority
favouring his dismissal.¹⁶⁸
The Central Committee, as Khrushchev expected, overruled the Politburo,
thereby ensuring his continuation in power—and also vindicating his original
decision to appoint Zhukov defence minister. But once that happened, Zhukov
became expendable, and in the context of Soviet politics, a potential enemy. That
Khrushchev could not have overcome his rivals (condemned publicly as ‘the Anti-
Party Group’) without Zhukov’s support and assistance revealed a degree of
dependence that the first party secretary, lacking Stalin’s enormous power,
could not endure—hence Zhukov’s dismissal. But unlike Stalin’s victims in the
1930s who were liquidated immediately or consigned to labour camps, where
most of them died, Zhukov, in the more relaxed atmosphere of the Khrushchev
era, was allowed to live, his lenient punishment of forced retirement eerily similar
to Khrushchev’s after the coup deposing him in 1964.
What made Zhukov’s dismissal noteworthy was the accusation of Bonapartism
that served to justify it. The charge did not emerge ex nihilo. Even when Zhukov
was appointed defence minister, figures in the uppermost echelons of Soviet
politics and the military warned of his ostensibly Bonapartist aspirations. In
1955, at a dinner in Khabarovsk, in the Soviet Far East, with Khrushchev present,

¹⁶⁷ Montefiore, Stalin, pp. 373, 394. One of Zhukov’s biographers, however, claims that Zhukov was
always ‘in awe’ of Stalin. Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (New York,
2012), p. 86.
¹⁶⁸ In 1952 the Politburo was renamed the Presidium and would be called that until 1966. From
1953 to 1966 the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party, previously held by Stalin, was
officially renamed First Party Secretary, and would also be called that until 1966.
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Marshal Rodion Malinovskii, who would be Zhukov’s successor at the Ministry of

Defence, described the one-time war hero as ‘an incipient Bonaparte’ and ‘a
dangerous man who must be stopped’.¹⁶⁹ At the same dinner, Malinovskii warned
Khrushchev and everyone else in attendance to ‘watch out for Zhukov’, and gave
as his reason the marshal’s Bonapartist ambitions.¹⁷⁰
It was only natural, then, that the same charge be levelled afterwards. Publicly
Zhukov was condemned after his dismissal for ‘adventurism’ and for violating the
Leninist principle requiring the party’s control of the military. Both were formal
deviations—there were twenty-nine in all—from party orthodoxy. In ordinary
language, this meant that Zhukov was guilty of conspiring to establish a military
dictatorship in the Soviet Union, with himself as the dictator. This of course was
the essence of Bonapartism, as the Soviets since the Lenin era had defined it, and
one can be certain that Khrushchev and the other Presidium members who
wanted Zhukov gone were aware of this. In his memoirs, written many years
later, Khrushchev claimed that Zhukov had articulated his ‘Bonapartist ambitions’
in conversations with Soviet army officers, presumably in the course of enlisting
them in a plot to overthrow the civilian leadership; whether Khrushchev believed
this was the case remains problematic and, in terms of the politics of the matter,
irrelevant.¹⁷¹ The public campaign to defame Zhukov immediately following
his dismissal was approved at the highest levels of the Soviet leadership, and
reaffirmed at subsequent party congresses. While largely confined to Moscow, it
also required party leaders and government officials elsewhere in the country to
denounce him—which they did. For example, on 31 October 1957, N. G. Ignatova,
the party secretary of the Gorkii obkom (region), claimed in a speech delivered to
party activists that Zhukov had sought to establish ‘a personal dictatorship’ and
for the Bonapartism that that entailed was justly condemned. In fact, in his
enormously inflated self-regard, Zhukov, according to Ignatov, was even worse
than Napoleon.¹⁷²
By the end of the decade, Bonapartism had become a formal deviation from
party doctrine in everything but name. Zhukov, of course, was its personification.

¹⁶⁹ V. Naumov, ed., Georgii Zhukov: Stenogramma oktiabr’skogo (1957g.) plenuma Tsk KPSS i drugie
dokumenty (Moscow, 2001), p. 637.
¹⁷⁰ Ibid., p. 539. Because no date for the dinner is provided in the stenographic account of it that was
published two years later, it is possible that Malinovskii’s comments were delivered at two separate
dinners. But it is unlikely that Presidium members—according to one account Nikolai Bulganin was
present along with Khrushchev and Georgii Malenkov—would gather at a location so far from Moscow
twice in the same year absent a crisis or a sudden emergency. Ibid., p. 637.
¹⁷¹ Nikita S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (New York, 1976), p. 14.
Several generals and at least one marshal in the army opposed Zhukov’s dismissal. Timothy J. Colton,
Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority: The Structure of Soviet Military Politics (Cambridge
MA, 1979), p. 181. But that, by itself, was hardly evidence of Bonapartism, which in the Soviet sense of
the phenomenon implied that those guilty of it form an actual conspiracy to seize the government in a
coup d’état, which none of these military officials intended.
¹⁷² Naumov, Stenogramma obkiabr’skogo (1957g.) plenuma, p. 455.
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In 1959, at the Twenty-First Party Congress, Malinovskii called Zhukov ‘a latter-

day Bonaparte’ whose intention to ‘separate the army from the Communist Party’
was sharply rebuffed, and at the Twenty-Second Party Congress two years later,
Khrushchev himself cited as evidence of the Soviet general’s Bonapartism his
ostensible ‘aspirations to seize power personally’.¹⁷³ Also at the congress, Marshal
F. I. Golikov cited Zhukov’s ‘Bonapartist course’ among the reasons for his
dismissal.¹⁷⁴ Understandably, none of this sat well with Zhukov himself. In a
letter he sent in February 1964 to Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan, he angrily
denied any intention of becoming ‘a new Napoleon’, among the other ‘fables’ that
had been repeated about him in memoirs, journals, and other published mater-
ial.¹⁷⁵ Eight months later Khrushchev himself lost power in a coup not dissimilar
to that which he claimed Zhukov had earlier plotted against him; the result, as far
as Zhukov was concerned, was that his public rehabilitation was now a real
possibility. In March 1965, he formally applied for it, and two months later, on
the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in
Europe, received a standing ovation after entering the hall where Leonid Brezhnev
would shortly deliver a speech praising him explicitly.¹⁷⁶ The following day he
joined Brezhnev and the other Soviet leaders reviewing the Victory Parade on top
of the Lenin Mausoleum.¹⁷⁷
Zhukov’s ostensible Bonapartism was the public face of the concept when both
Khrushchev and Brezhnev ruled the Soviet Union. Limiting the term to an
exclusively military affair confirmed the Stalinist view of the phenomenon; for
that reason Louis Napoleon, in the way he came to power and how he ruled the
Second Empire, still did not figure in it at all. Moreover, there was nothing in the
public condemnations of Zhukov to suggest any desire to transcend classes once
he had overthrown the Soviet system and installed a military dictatorship; after
1936 it was official dogma that the country was socialist and that only one class,
the working class, existed. Nor was anything said or written about Zhukov’s
ostensible intention to deceive the Soviet people by claiming disingenuously—as
Louis Napoleon had in France a century earlier—that the material benefits he
would dispense reflected a desire to improve their material welfare. Under Stalin,
Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, Bonapartism was something to which only errant
generals and marshals were susceptible, and power for its own sake was its only
reward. As a result, Zhukov was not stigmatized as a budding capitalist, much less

¹⁷³ Quoted in Vneocherednoi XXI s”ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovietskogo Soiuza: Stenografi-
cheskii otchet (Moscow 1959), vol. II, p. 127; quoted in Vneocherednoi XXII s”ezd Kommunisticheskoi
Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza: Stengraficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1961), vol. II, p. 120.
¹⁷⁴ ‘Rech’ tovarishcha F. I. Golikova’, Pravda, no. 304(15794) (31 October 1961): p. 3.
¹⁷⁵ ‘Pis’mo G. K. Zhukov N. S. Khrushchevu i A. I. Mikoianu (27 February 1964)’, in Naumov,
Stenogramma obkiabr’skogo (1957 g.) plenuma, p. 496.
¹⁷⁶ Roberts, Stalin’s General, p. 294. At the first mention of Zhukov’s name, the audience applauded.
¹⁷⁷ Ibid.
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or a proto-fascist. Nor was he condemned—as one might malign Napoleon

Bonaparte—for seeking continental domination.
To be sure, Soviet historians in both the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras
continued their serious study of the phenomenon, secure in the knowledge that
they would not be shot or sent to a labour camp for drawing conclusions
unpalatable to either Soviet leader, neither of whom likely cared much about
whether the policies of the two Napoleons were expressive of an entire category of
deviant regimes. In the matter of Bonapartism, Soviet historians could say what
they wished. As a result, much was said about it between the Stalin era and
Gorbachev’s rise to power in the mid-1980s. In 1959 V. P. Volgin came close to
blaming Louis Blanc for Louis Napoleon, arguing that the duplicity of the former
accustomed the proletariat in 1848 to demagogues from the petit-bourgeoisie like
the latter.¹⁷⁸ In 1975 Iu. A. Krasin went so far as to claim that there were aspects of
Stalinism that could plausibly be considered evidence of Bonapartism: a single
ruler and his public exaltation, the supremacy of the state over society, and a
rough equality in the strength of the two largest and most antagonistic classes. But
Krasin followed his assertion with the disclaimer that Stalinism and Bonapartism
were not the same thing, and that any resemblance was largely obviated by the fact
of Stalin’s taking power after the bourgeoisie in Russia had been destroyed, rather
than before it. But this did not mean that Stalin’s power was absolute. Not only
could he not destroy everything in the Soviet Union Lenin had established, but he
also could not physically eliminate everyone who sought to continue ‘the Leninist
tradition’.¹⁷⁹
For his part, V. G. Revunenkov extended his investigations of the French
Revolution into its Napoleonic coda—which culminated in the assertion in 1989
that Napoleon pioneered a new type of monarchy, which Revunnenkov called,
seemingly oxymoronically, a ‘bourgeois monarchy’.¹⁸⁰ By this, Revunnenkov—
who was always more inclined than other Soviet historians of his generation to test
the limits of Marxist concepts and categories—meant a system in which the
institution (monarchy) that under feudalism had served as the principal instru-
ment of the aristocracy had somehow survived a bourgeois revolution intent on
destroying it and lived on to serve the bourgeoisie under capitalism.
But idiosyncratic interpretations like Revunnenkov’s would not be widely
known or discussed until the Gorbachev era, when the freedom of expression
Gorbachev allowed made possible public discussion of virtually all matters of
opinion, even those concerning the prospects for Bonapartism in the Soviet
Union, which, in and of itself, suggested the impermanence, even the fragility,

¹⁷⁸ Volgin, ‘Lenin i revoliutsionnye traditsii frantsuzskogo naroda’, pp. 13–14.

¹⁷⁹ Iu. A. Krasin, Revoliutsiei ustrashennye. Kriticheskii ocherk burzhuaznykh kontseptsii sotsial’noi
revoliutsii (Moscow, 1975), pp. 122–3.
¹⁸⁰ Revunenkov, Ocherki po istorii Velikoi frantsuzskoi revoliutsii, p. 116.
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of the Soviet system as a whole. Dmitrii Zatonskii, writing in 1988, compared

Stalin to Napoleon, and concluded that the two rulers and the regimes they
created were different politically and morally.¹⁸¹ Perhaps the most obvious con-
trast he drew was in how each took power and consolidated it. Stalin inherited a
political system Lenin had previously established and remoulded it to serve his
own interests and objectives. Napoleon, by contrast, simply disbanded the Direc-
tory, and after an interregnum in which he ruled essentially as a military dictator,
created a seemingly new and different kind of polity based on his own unique
status as imperator—a concept Napoleon resurrected from the old Roman Empire
in keeping with the fascination of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution
with everything traceable to ancient Greece and Rome. Only considerably later in
his rule did Napoleon, out of political necessity, revive certain practices of the
(more recent) ancien régime.¹⁸²
But Zatonskii also acknowledged similarities. Both Stalin and Napoleon were
pragmatic, even cynical, in their political and ideological commitments. Stalin, in
particular, thought nothing of altering Marxism-Leninism while simultaneously
pledging fealty to Lenin. But Zatonskii’s article was more concerned with explain-
ing why the Soviet system under Stalin was not, strictly speaking, a species of
Bonapartism if, by the term, one meant an actual military dictatorship—as
opposed to a militarist system enforcing discipline and obedience within a rigid
hierarchy based on a strict compartmentalization of functions. But even if the
system Stalin created in the Soviet Union was truly militarized, a better, more
descriptive term for it, in Zatonskii’s considered opinion, was ‘barracks socialism’,
a common term for the Soviet system, usually used derisively, during the Gorba-
chev era. In short, the barracks socialism Stalin caused to exist in the Soviet Union
was not the same thing as Bonapartism. Indeed, for Zatonskii the more pressing
question requiring historians’ attention was why the Soviet Union, even under
Stalin, never succumbed to a military dictatorship. His explanation was that
civilians like Bukharin and Rykov, because they had helped Lenin establish the
Soviet system, never tried to overthrow it either alone or in collaboration with the
military. The same was true, he said, of Red Army generals, who for their own
reasons might have preferred a military dictatorship to Stalin’s, but took no action
to create one.¹⁸³
The fear of Bonapartism that existed among the Bolsheviks, and which achieved
its fullest public expression in Zhukov’s dismissal, was not limited, in the Gorbachev
era, to historians. Even one of the Soviet dissidents—in the minds of many the
most prominent and the most morally virtuous—publicly warned of the danger of
Bonapartism in the form of a military dictatorship. When, in 1989, it seemed that
Gorbachev had repudiated perestroika after appointing opponents of it to key

¹⁸¹ Dmitrii Zatonskii, ‘Pochemu oni ogovarivali sebia i drugikh’, Nedelia, no. 28 (1988): pp. 6–7.
¹⁸² Ibid., pp. 6–7. ¹⁸³ Ibid., p. 7.
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positions in the government and the police, Andrei Sakharov thought that that
might prompt army generals to seek power themselves.¹⁸⁴ Sakharov’s invocation
of the danger reflected his fear—however unfounded it turned out to be—that a
Bonapartist coup d’état was a real possibility.
But others less ethical than Sakharov, and with a more personal stake in the
vicissitudes of high Soviet politics, used the threat of a Soviet 18 Brumaire for their
own purposes, and with the same vigour and disregard for the actual chances of its
occurring when it was used to discredit Kerensky in 1917, Trotsky in the early
1920s, and Zhukov in the late 1950s. In 1986 and 1987, after Boris Yeltsin had
begun to criticize Gorbachev for not reforming the Soviet system sufficiently,
Bonapartism was among the charges the general secretary levelled against his new
rival. At a meeting of party functionaries in 1986, the specific charge was that
Yeltsin harboured ‘Napoleonic plans’.¹⁸⁵ In November 1987, at a meeting of the
Moscow Party Committee, he was forced, in the manner of defendants in the show
trials of the 1930s, to confess publicly to multiple violations of party discipline,
decorum, and regulations; in the same venue, an obscure Moscow party member
accused him of possessing ‘elements of Bonapartism’.¹⁸⁶ Proof that Gorbachev
approved of the latter accusation, irrespective of its empirical absurdity, was its
inclusion in the article in Pravda describing the meeting two days later.¹⁸⁷ No less
absurd was the accusation at a session of the Congress of People’s Deputies in
1989 that Gorbachev resembled Napoleon just as much as Yeltsin did, the reason
being that both men were susceptible to flattery; in the case of the general
secretary, there was the lamentable fact that he usually did what his wife wanted
him to do.¹⁸⁸

* * *
On such an unedifying note, the debate about Bonapartism in the Soviet Union
ended.¹⁸⁹ But for most of the union’s existence, the chance of its emerging was
considered seriously, even when the term was used as a pejorative to discredit
political and personal enemies. The fear of Bonapartism was real. Not having first-
hand experience in the military, Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev knew

¹⁸⁴ Andrei Sakharov, ‘Stepen’ svobody: Aktual’noe intrev’iu’, Ogonëk (July 1989): p. 28.
¹⁸⁵ Quoted in ‘Can Moscow Believe in Yeltsin?’, Détente (Autumn, 1986): p. 4.
¹⁸⁶ At the meeting, twenty-three speakers denounced Yeltsin for one transgression or another or for
many of them. Louis Sell, From Washington to Moscow: U.S-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the
USSR (Durham NC, 2016), p. 190.
¹⁸⁷ ‘Energichno vesti perestroiku’, Pravda, no. 317(25304) (13 November 1987): p. 2.
¹⁸⁸ Schoenfeld, ‘Uses of the Past’ (PhD dissertation), p. 229.
¹⁸⁹ Charges of Bonapartism continued in Russia after the Soviet Union’s collapse. In the infighting
around Yeltsin during his campaign for the Russian presidency in 1996, the Prime Minister, Viktor
Chernomyrdin, called General Alexander Lebed, then Yeltsin’s national security advisor, ‘a little
Napoleon’. Steven Lee Myers, The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (New York,
2016), p. 111. Whether the appellation contributed to Yeltsin’s subsequent decision to fire Lebed is
not clear.
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little of its intimate workings. Trotsky, in that respect, was the exception, and it
afforded him an advantage over his rivals. But the fear of military dictatorship was
so pervasive among the Bolsheviks that Trotsky’s military service and connections
were actually more of a hindrance than a help, and the perception that he
resembled Napoleon and might betray the October Revolution the way the
emperor, in his last years in power, had betrayed the French, helped to seal
Trotsky’s political fate and, as it turned out, virtually guaranteed his physical
destruction. Bonapartism was not the only reason Trotsky lost out to Stalin, but it
was certainly one of them.
As a general whose achievements during the Second World War were real,
Zhukov conformed more closely than Trotsky to the Bonapartist paradigm. But
Zhukov’s very involvement in military matters, seemingly to the exclusion of
everything else, made him, in reality, less of a threat to the Soviet civilian
leadership than a general or marshal who once had a career in politics and
retained the instincts and abilities of a politician. Indeed, one is left with the
conclusion that the Soviets’ obsession with Bonapartism had less to do with
the Trotskys and the Zhukovs who triggered it, and more to do with the two
Napoleons, each of whose betrayal of an earlier and mostly virtuous revolution,
from which they each had benefitted politically, encapsulated the very real fear
among the Bolsheviks that their success in 1917 was an ideological anomaly, and
that the regime that followed it was vulnerable to enemies at home and abroad.
What is more, the whole notion of Bonapartism, in the context in which the
Bolsheviks tried to deal with it, seemed to transcend the conceptual limits of their
Marxist-Leninist ideology. For Marx and Engels, Bonapartism could only exist
under capitalism. For that reason its emergence in a socialist society could
plausibly be construed to mean that the society’s socialism was fraudulent, that
its socialist exterior concealed a core that was more capitalist than socialist, and
with the passage of time might shed its socialist aspects entirely. Considered the
way the Bolsheviks saw it, Bonapartism was the result of the Marxist dialectic
reversing itself, so that history ran backwards instead of forward. This was truly
the spectre that made Bonapartism, for the Bolsheviks, so fearsome.
Whether Bonapartism was ever a real possibility in the Soviet Union was
irrelevant.¹⁹⁰ Most of the Bolsheviks believed that it was, and their fear that it
existed or would soon come to exist was genuine. What they were unable to deal
with was the reason for their fear, because by doing so they would be calling into
question the very legitimacy of the whole Soviet Experiment. Conjuring phantoms
such as Bonapartism was emblematic of what happens when revolutionaries
wedded to a rigid ideology that tells them any revolution they make would be

¹⁹⁰ Also irrelevant in this context is whether Bonapartism even constitutes a discrete political system
and form of politics worthy of inclusion in any taxonomy or classificatory schemata that is empirically
accurate and analytically useful.
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premature and destined to fail nonetheless throw caution to the winds, as the
Bolsheviks did in 1917 despite their knowing precious little about what the
consequences of their own actions would be. The result, for the Bolsheviks, were
new and unfamiliar realities that their ideology left them ill-equipped to under-
stand, much less harness for their own political and ideological purposes. Because
so much of what the Bolsheviks did after 1917 was improvised, they had no choice
but to look to history, and to the tradition of revolutions in France in particular,
for at least a modicum of the confidence that comes from relying on useful and
relevant precedents. The trouble with the particular precedent, or series of prece-
dents, personified historically in the two Napoleons, was that it was an unexpected
aberration from a virtuous norm, a kind of coda that detracted from the progres-
sive phenomena preceding it that, for the lack of a more descriptive term, was
called Bonapartism.
In sum, Bonapartism was a very real potential impediment on the road to
communism that should be avoided not just because it implied a regression
delaying, or even obviating entirely, the triumphal march of history from capit-
alism and communism. By its instantaneous invocation of the Bonapartes them-
selves, it also personalized this regression, which might result in the very
destruction of the Soviet state, in a way that only heightened the danger the
term itself was meant to evoke. Both Napoleons gave a human face to a particular
scenario resulting ultimately, perhaps, in the destruction of the Soviet Union and
the demise of the entire enterprise of constructing socialism and communism.
Each ended his political career, and his life, as a loser—Bonaparte a lonely exile on
St Helena in the South Atlantic, Louis Napoleon in England three years after the
humiliation of being captured by the Prussians at Sedan. This effectively disquali-
fied them both from retroactive martyrdom. There was nothing terribly gallant or
heroic or inspiring about Louis Napoleon’s capture, deposition, and demise.
About that of his uncle one could, to be sure, conceptualize a legend, namely
that of the resplendent emperor and general who was the victim, after countless
victories, of the sheer magnitude of the forces arrayed against him, first at Leipzig
in 1813, and then at Waterloo in 1815. Viewed in this way, the first of the two
Napoleons could qualify for martyrdom. But for the French, at least, it has been far
more profitable, after the establishment of the Third Republic made a Napoleonic
Restoration impossible, to memorialize and celebrate in a spirit of nationalism his
many victories rather than to mourn ostentatiously his few defeats. In somewhat
the same way, the Bolsheviks grudgingly admired Napoleon Bonaparte for his
military prowess, and in any event never considered him or his nephew martyrs
who had sacrificed their lives for their ideals. In fact, the Bolsheviks seemed to
believe, perhaps correctly, perhaps not, that neither man had any ideals or
permanent principles to begin with. Both Napoleons were defeated by superior
military and political power, and neither ideology nor morality had anything to do
with it.
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Fortunately for the Bolsheviks, there occurred, after 1848, yet another revolu-
tion in France—as it happened, the last one in its Revolutionary Tradition—that
was conducive of the martyrdom lacking in the lives—or more precisely the
deaths—of the two Napoleons; indeed the depths of the martyrdom implicit in
this last revolution far exceeded that produced by any of its predecessors. What
this martyrdom clearly suggested was that defeats are often only temporary, that
in defeat are often embedded the seeds of future triumphs, and that the nobility of
character martyrdom demonstrates post mortem may even be transferable gener-
ationally from revolutionaries who try and fail to make a revolution to those of
later generations, whose efforts are likely to be more successful precisely because
they have absorbed the moral virtues of their predecessors; in addition, these later
revolutionaries can avoid the mistakes to which earlier generations were under-
standably susceptible. In this way this last of the four revolutions in this tradition
of revolutions, coming as it did after the partial success in 1830 and the abject
failure in 1848, was truly a deus ex machina—atheists like the Bolsheviks preferred
to consider it the result of impersonal forces driven by the dialectic—that would
enable the Bolsheviks to end their lives neither as losers nor as martyrs but as the
custodians of the most ethical and materially productive country in the world.
Louis Napoleon’s deposition and the collapse of the Second Empire triggered a
series of events, played out against a backdrop of chaos and uncertainty, from
which emerged the Paris Commune in March 1871. The heroism and courage the
Communards showed in defending it, and the suffering they endured when their
efforts failed, soon became the absolute epitome of revolutionary virtue, and the
basis for a mythology, to which the Bolsheviks would contribute significantly, that
would not be nearly as powerful and appealing and inspiring if the Commune had
somehow survived. It is this last manifestation of the French Revolutionary
Tradition, ennobled by a martyrdom to which neither of the Napoleons could
lay any plausible claim, that now commands our attention.
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PART IV
1871
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15
Revolution as Martyrdom

The Paris Commune was the stuff of genuine tragedy. Those who died defending
it could easily be apotheosized for their martyrdom. Far from disqualifying the
Commune as an object of veneration, its defeat had the paradoxical effect of
making it more attractive, especially to revolutionaries like the Bolsheviks, who,
prior to the October Revolution, were failures themselves, relegated by their
powerlessness to the margins of Russian political life and saved from permanent
oblivion only by the remarkable confluence of circumstances in 1917 that made
the October Revolution possible. Because the Commune’s defeat was so costly in
human lives, one could plausibly compare the Communards to the earliest
Christians in the Roman Empire—even though the Bolsheviks, as self-professed
atheists could not do so themselves. That the Communards resisted their oppres-
sors and killers instead of merely defying them, as the Christians did the Romans,
in no way detracted from their moral virtue, and to hardened revolutionaries like
the Bolsheviks it enhanced it.
At the same time, the Bolsheviks never romanticized the Communards in the
way other lost causes in history, such as the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in
England in the eighteenth century, have been extolled.¹ The Jacobites professed no
ideology that claimed to guarantee success; nor did they inspire future generations
of monarchists to consider their actions a harbinger of better things to come.² For
the Bolsheviks, the Paris Commune was very different. Far from being a defeat from
which no future rebirth or rejuvenation was possible, the failure of the Commune
was bound, in dialectical fashion, to generate its antithesis: a glorious victory enabling
the Bolsheviks to finish the task the Communards had begun of constructing a just
and humane society in which all workers would be compensated fully and fairly for
their labour. Even the Communards’ mistakes served the useful purpose of showing
the Bolsheviks what not to do. Indeed, the more mistakes the Communards made,
the more relevant and useful their experiences became.
To be sure, the Commune included many non-Marxists among its leaders. But
this did not preclude the Bolsheviks admiring them and, in certain ways,

¹ Moray McLaren, Bonnie Prince Charlie (New York, 1972); Carolly Erickson, Bonnie Prince Charlie
(New York, 1989).
² George Hilton Jones notes in The Mainstream of Jacobitism (Cambridge MA, 1954), p. 246, that
‘every factor influenced England and Scotland to forget the (Jacobite) cause’.
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attempting to emulate them. In addition to the martyrdom that could fairly be

imputed to the Commune’s defenders, there was another aspect of the Commune
that distinguished it from its predecessors in the French Revolutionary Tradition:
in Marx’s terminology, which the Bolsheviks used to explain virtually everything,
the Paris Commune was the first revolution in France in which the haute-
bourgeoisie did not participate; in fact it was the enemy of the revolution from
the outset. For that reason, and notwithstanding numerous internal disagree-
ments, no one betrayed the Paris Commune from within. In contrast to the
Jacobins succumbing to Thermidorians who had once supported them but
increasingly found their radicalism intolerable, and unlike the lower classes in
the June Days in 1848 who were massacred by elements of the bourgeoisie that
just four months earlier had been their allies, the Communards were never the
remnant of any revolutionary coalition.³ The Commune did not last long enough
to generate any Thermidorian Reaction, and the Versaillais in uniform who
destroyed it had never supported it. While the Commune was led by ‘petit-
bourgeois’ professionals—journalists, lawyers, and teachers—who were promin-
ent in earlier French revolutions, the remainder of the bourgeoisie stayed away. As
a result, the Commune retained an ideological radicalism and a degree of socio-
logical homogeneity, absent in earlier French revolutions, that enhanced its
reputation among Marxists in Russia and elsewhere who believed their mission
as revolutionaries was to continue what the Paris Commune began. The Paris
Commune was the last revolution in the French Revolutionary Tradition, but it
was also the first revolution in a new tradition that was predominantly the work of
the lower classes; that these still were craftsmen and artisans like those of the
French Revolution, rather than a modern, industrial proletariat, was a reality the
Bolsheviks ignored.⁴

* * *
The Bolsheviks were not the first Russians to find meaning in the Commune.
Several who did so before them had been Communards themselves; others, mostly
émigrés, witnessed it as residents of Paris. Among the former were two women:
Anna Krukovskaia and Elizaveta Dmitrieva. Krukovskaia, whose father was a
general in the Russian army, rejected a proposal of marriage from Dostoevsky

³ One might say that, in 1830, there was no betrayal because, in Marxist terms, the lower classes
never held power long enough for the bourgeoisie or any part of it to betray them.
⁴ The Commune could be considered a proletarian institution only if one defined the word
proletarian so loosely that it loses its implication of workers performing unskilled labour in factories.
That it was not is exemplified in the fact that there was not a single unskilled worker on the Commune’s
governing council. Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune (New York, 1999), p. 114. Tombs’ larger
conclusion that the Commune was the work of revolutionaries from the middle class and supported
by a pre-industrial working class is reiterated in David Thomson, Democracy in France since 1870 (New
York, 1964), pp. 24–5; Edward S. Mason, The Paris Commune: An Episode in the History of the Socialist
Movement (New York, 1967), p. 119; and Jacques Rougerie, Procès des Communards (Paris, 1964),
p. 206.
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before marrying a French Blanquist; Dostoevsky was so infatuated with her even
after she rejected him that a character of uncommon beauty in his novel, The Idiot,
was modelled on her.⁵ Dmitrieva, who in March 1871 helped organize the
Commune, was the only Russian to serve on the Union des Femmes, established
in April, that helped doctors treat the wounded after the Versaillais attacked the
Commune at the end of May. With a felt hat on her head and a scarf draped
diagonally across her chest, Dmitrieva looked vaguely like the heroine in Dela-
croix’s iconic painting ‘Liberty on the Barricades’. Sentenced to hard labour for life
after the Commune was suppressed, Dmitrieva escaped Paris before she could be
arrested, and eventually found refuge in Switzerland.⁶
Among the Russian revolutionaries in Paris when the Commune began was
Pëtr Lavrov, who was so infatuated by its emergence that it confirmed in his mind
his longstanding belief, central to the populism he professed, that, if given power,
the masses in Russia would govern responsibly and humanely.⁷ Where the
Communards were deficient, he believed, was in refusing to transform Parisian
society after proclaiming that that was their intention. But this deficiency Lavrov
ascribed entirely to the temperament of the Communards; with their principles
and objectives he was in complete agreement. Nevertheless, it was not for any
deficiency in temperament or personality that the Commune would have failed
even if the assault of the Versaillais had somehow been repulsed. Rather, the
Commune failed for lack of support from the French peasantry—an assertion
consistent with Lavrov’s belief that socialism was virtuous precisely in its fusion of
the urban and the rural, in its vision of workers and peasants living harmoniously
with one another in similar, if not exactly identical, ways.⁸ Soviet historians, while
praising Lavrov’s assertion that the Commune was created in a proletarian
revolution, also berated him for not considering the proletariat a class.⁹ Never-
theless, they saw Lavrov’s populism as a precursor, however imperfect, of Soviet
Communism, and for that reason his lengthy analysis of the Commune, Parizhs-
kaia Kommuna 18 marta 1871 goda, was published in several editions in the

⁵ Edith Thomas, The Women Incendiaries (New York, 1966), pp. 89–90; Kenneth Lantz, The
Dostoevsky Encyclopedia (Westport CT, 2004), p. 220. Dostoevsky did not let his feelings for
Krukovskaia diminish his strong dislike of the Commune; he was especially distressed by the many
fires that were set when the Commune was established, and slightly more than two months later when
it was suppressed. This may be the reason he included in his novel The Possessed, which explores the
corruptibility and criminality of revolutions, an act of arson that affected the plot. Ibid.
⁶ Thomas, Women Incendiaries, pp. 67–75, 209–11; I. Knizhnik-Vetrov, Russkie deiatel’nitsy Per-
vogo Internationala i Parizhskoi kommuny (Moscow/Leningrad, 1964), pp. 74–101, 185–90.
⁷ Philip Pomper, Peter Lavrov and the Russian Revolutionary Movement (Chicago IL, 1972), p. 120;
Theodore Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism (New York, 1970), p. 63.
⁸ P. L. Lavrov, ‘Parizhskaia kommuna 1871 goda (1875)’, in Lavrov, Izbrannye sochineniia no
sotsial’no-politicheskie temy, vol. IV, pp. 24–5; ‘Pis’mo P. L. Lavrov k E. A. Shtakenshneider (1871)’,
in Golos minuvshago, edited by S. P. Mel’gunov and V. I. Semevskii (The Hague, 1971), p. 125;
McCellan, Revolutionary Exiles, p. 162.
⁹ Lavrov, ‘Parizhskaia kommuna’, p. 25; B. S. Itenberg, Rossiia i Parizhskaia kommuna (Moscow,
1971), p. 149.
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Soviet Union, and its author praised as second only to Marx and Engels in the
perspicacity of his views on the Commune.¹⁰
For Mikhail Bakunin, the virtue of the Commune was bound up in its failure—
an outcome Bakunin considered inevitable despite the bravery and heroism of its
defenders.¹¹ In keeping with his comment in 1842 that ‘destruction is a creative
passion’, Bakunin thought it would be a good thing if the Commune brought
down with it the ‘half of Paris’ that was bourgeois: the more completely the
corrupt society of the bourgeoisie was destroyed, the more morally pure its
replacement would be.¹² The Commune, he wrote, was ‘a bold and outspoken
negation of the state’—even though he never described the Commune explicitly as
an anarchist institution.¹³ But looking back on the Commune late in life and with
the benefit of hindsight, Bakunin acknowledged that the Communards had made
mistakes, most notably relinquishing power to the ‘Jacobins’ among them, who
were deluded by their ‘the cult of unity and authority’ and accordingly betrayed
the noble aspirations of its mostly anarchist-minded creators.¹⁴
In Bakunin’s writings on the Commune one senses a reluctance to acknowledge
unpleasant truths, the most obvious of which was that the Communards were
patriots and therefore hated the Prussians for trouncing French forces and
controlling much of northern France as a result. The Commune, he affirmed in
clear defiance of the facts, ‘destroyed patriotism [and] inaugurated the new era,
that of the final and complete emancipation of the masses of the people and their
solidarity . . . across state frontiers’.¹⁵ But affirmations such as these did little to
diminish his unhappiness after the Commune’s suppression. Eventually, Bakunin
made the best of a bad situation, claiming—several decades before the Bolsheviks
existed—that the memory of the Commune, ‘soaked in the blood of its most
generous-hearted children’, would inspire future revolutionaries to pick up the
bloodstained banner the Communards had been forced to relinquish.¹⁶
Pëtr Kropotkin was not in Paris in 1871. But he met several Communards in
Switzerland in the years that followed, and read avidly about their activities.¹⁷
Like Bakunin, Kropotkin admired the Communards for the ad hoc manner in
which they governed. But he also recognized that the spontaneity that made the
Commune so appealing also had its limits. For example, instead of eliminating
municipal government entirely, which is what Kropotkin’s anarchism required the

¹⁰ Lavrov’s book was published in Petrograd/Leningrad twice in 1919, and in 1922 and 1925.
McClellan, Revolutionary Exiles, p. 170, n. 42; I. Stepanov, Parizhskaia kommuna 1871 goda i voprosy
taktiki v proletarskoi revoliutsii (Moscow, 1921), p. 114.
¹¹ E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (New York, 1975), p. 433.
¹² Mendel, Michael Bakunin, p. 370; Mikhail Bakunin, ‘The Reaction in Germany’, in Michael
Bakunin: Selected Writings, edited by Arthur Lehning (London, 1973), p. 58.
¹³ Michael Bakunin, The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State (London, 1971), p. 2.
¹⁴ Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, pp. 19–20; Bakunin, Paris Commune, p. 3.
¹⁵ Bakunin, Paris Commune, p. 2. ¹⁶ Ibid.
¹⁷ N. K. Lebedev, Kropotkin (Moscow, 1925), pp. 34, 38–9.
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Communards to do, they replaced it with one of their own, which ‘neither boldly
declared itself socialist nor proceeded to the expropriation of capital’.¹⁸ This
meant, as he finally admitted in 1913, that the Paris Commune was not a
revolutionary entity at all. Indeed, because the influence of the Jacobins and
Blanquists who organized it was far greater than that of the Proudhonists,
whose anarchism was quickly marginalized and had little influence on actual
policy, it could never have become one. The Commune, in short, was too
centralized. The elections it held, irrespective of their fairness, perpetuated the
apparatus of governance instead of eliminating it—a state of affairs Kropotkin
believed made Paris somehow less able to withstand the Versaillais when they
attacked in the third week in May.¹⁹ In addition, Kropotkin pronounced the wage
differentials between officials on the Commune Council and the so-called fédérés
manning the barricades that protected it incompatible with anarchism.²⁰
Nevertheless, Kropotkin considered the Commune a signal moment in the
larger teleology he believed would culminate in the triumph of anarchism every-
where. For anarchists like Kropotkin, the Commune was valuable more for the
possibilities it adumbrated than for the unpleasant, if perhaps unavoidable,
realities of its actual existence.²¹ For all its failings, the Paris Commune showed
that ‘the free commune’, as Kropotkin called the generic category of polities to
which the Commune belonged, was the most appropriate vehicle for providing the
happiness, enlightenment, prosperity, and justice that would exist once central-
ized political authority had disappeared.²² While the Commune itself was just a
first attempt at the radical transformation of humanity, the revolutions Kropotkin
was convinced would follow it ‘would take up the work of the Paris Commune
where it was interrupted by the massacres of the Versailles soldiery’.²³
One might think that Marx, as an advocate of urban revolutions, would have
praised the Commune more lavishly and consistently than did populists like
Lavrov and anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin, of whose opinions Marx
was well aware. But that was not the case. His view of the Commune was very
much a function of circumstance: Marx argued against the idea of a commune
before it existed, praised it fulsomely while it existed, and then mostly criticized it
years later, when his memories had faded and his emotions had long since calmed.
Incorporating Marx’s views of the Commune in their own mythology was there-
fore no easy task for the Bolsheviks.
Prior to the Commune, Marx considered France unready for a proletarian
revolution. For that reason any insurrection intent on establishing an institution
that addressed workers’ needs while also serving as a prototype for a socialist state

¹⁸ P. A. Kropotkin, The Paris Commune (London, 1896), pp. 3–4, 6.

¹⁹ Peter Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchism (1913), in Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets,
pp. 163, 239–41.
²⁰ Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p. 151. ²¹ Kropotkin, Paris Commune, pp. 7–8.
²² Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p. 8. ²³ Kropotkin, Paris Commune, pp. 6–7.
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was bound to fail. The Second Empire was too strong and the French working
class not yet radical enough to challenge it successfully.²⁴ In April 1870 Marx
stated in a private letter that England was ‘the most important country for the
workers’ revolution, and moreover the only country in which the material condi-
tions for this revolution have developed up to a certain point of maturity’.²⁵ By
1870 Marx had long since acknowledged that the French proletariat had shown its
unreadiness for revolution in 1848, and in a letter to Engels in September of that
year made clear that nothing that had happened since then had caused him to
change his opinion.²⁶ In addition, Marx was fearful that the Prussians, whom he
deemed incorrigible imperialists, would achieve an even more overwhelming
victory over France in the event that the newly established Third Republic,
which was still committed to resisting them, lost control of Paris. Any attempt
to overthrow the new republic, in short, would be ‘a desperate folly’.²⁷
When the Commune was proclaimed, however, Marx realized the political
necessity of blessing it publicly and supporting it wholeheartedly; whatever its
deficiencies, it was the only revolution in Europe at the time, and the only one
even remotely resembling the proletarian revolution Marx envisaged and still
believed to be inevitable. As such, its mere existence was a form of vindication.
What is more, the audacity of what the Communards were attempting appealed to
his intuitive sense (well-developed despite the determinism in his ideology) of the
role of contingency and individual will in history. Finally, one must remember
that in 1871 Marx was fifty-three, an age then considered old, and perhaps for
that reason likely to grasp at any straw in the wind, no matter how ephemeral, that
seemed to prove his predictions about capitalism’s collapse firmly grounded
in reality.
While the Commune existed, Marx read the Parisian newspaper, the Journal
Officiel, for information. He also corresponded with several Communards and
members of the International in Paris who were assisting them.²⁸ Nonetheless, his
descriptions of the Commune and the meanings he ascribed to it were largely self-
generated, a reflection more of Marx’s hopes and aspirations than of the empirical
evidence he possessed. In his mind the Commune was a proletarian dictatorship—
even though he never applied that appellation to it; rather, it was Engels, writing in
1891, who made the identification explicit, stating flatly in his introduction to
Marx’s pamphlet on the Commune, The Civil War in France, that anyone who

²⁴ K. Marx, ‘Second Address of the General Council on the Franco-Prussian War (9 September
1870)’, in Marx and Lenin, Civil War in France, p. 34. The General Council oversaw the activities of the
(First) International, established in 1864.
²⁵ ‘Letter, Marx to S. Meyer and A. Vogt (9 April 1870)’, in Marx and Engels, Selected Correspond-
ence, p. 290.
²⁶ Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (New York, 1963), pp. 187–8; ‘Letter, K. Marx
to F. Engels (6 September 1870)’, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. XLIV, pp. 64–5.
²⁷ Marx, ‘Second Address’, p. 34. ²⁸ Mason, Paris Commune, p. 305.
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‘wants to know what a [proletarian] dictatorship looks like [should] look at the
Paris Commune’.²⁹
For Marx the Commune was ‘the most glorious deed of our party since the June
[1848] insurrection in France’.³⁰ The Communards, he stressed, were not content
with inheriting the institutions the bourgeoisie had established. Instead, they
would ‘smash [the] bureaucratic-military machine’ and the other institutions
now at their disposal and replace them with new ones once the enemies that
threatened them had been defeated.³¹ Although Marx refrained in his contem-
poraneous analyses of the Commune from terming its ultimate objectives ‘social-
ist’, it was clear that this was what he considered them to be. Of course the
premature destruction of the Commune rendered these objectives moot, and
turned its defenders into martyrs. Nevertheless, The Civil War in France was as
much a call for future revolutions as it was an elegy to a revolution that had failed.
In Marx’s estimation, the Commune will be ‘forever celebrated as the glorious
harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the
working class.’³²
Nevertheless, Marx was aware that many leaders of the Commune did not share
his views. The Blanquists and Proudhonists were too numerous among the
Communards to ignore. But that knowledge melted away in the excitement caused
by the Commune’s creation. It was a measure of Marx’s emotional commitment
that he supported the Commune even though his doing so lent credence to the
sobriquet applied to him in reactionary circles in Europe as ‘the Red Terrorist
Doctor’.³³ If the only way Marx could claim paternity of the Commune was by
distorting what it was and what it intended, that seemed a small price to pay for
the psychological benefits it conferred.

²⁹ Frederick Engels, ‘London, on the 20th Anniversary of the Paris Commune, 18 March 1891’, in
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. XXVII, p. 191. Engels’ words are also reprinted on the page
preceding the first page of text of A. Slutskii, Parizhskaia kommuna 1871 goda (Moscow, 1925). Marx’s
essay was originally intended as an address to the American and European members of the General
Council of the International. On his reluctance to term the Commune a proletarian dictatorship, see
M. Johnstone, ‘The Commune and Marx’s Conception of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the
Role of the Party’, in Images of the Commune, edited by John A. Leith (Montreal, 1978), p. 204.
³⁰ K. Marx, ‘Letter to Dr. Kugelmann on the Paris Commune (12 April 1871)’, in Marx and Lenin,
Civil War in France, p. 86.
³¹ Ibid. Marx in this instance was paraphrasing his prediction in The Eighteenth Brumaire of what
‘the next attempt of the French revolution’ will involve. His phraseology suggested that the 1848
Revolution and the Paris Commune were really one revolution separated by twenty-three years or,
more precisely, were part of a larger revolutionary tradition to which the original French Revolution,
and probably also the Revolution of 1830, belonged. While the Paris Commune still existed, he would
have rejected the fact, admittedly ascertainable only with the benefit of hindsight, that from 1789 to
1871 revolutions in France became not only shorter but less and less successful, because ‘the civil
society of property owners’ that succeeded ‘the society of orders’ in the original French Revolution
proved stronger as the nineteenth century progressed, rather than weaker, as revolutionaries like Marx
imagined. Sperber, Revolutionary Europe, pp. 424, 431.
³² Marx, ‘Second Address’, p. 81.
³³ P. Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London, 1980), p. 333.
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Even so, Marx was not uncritical of the Commune. In his opinion it suffered
from an excess of caution, which he ascribed, albeit reluctantly, to its prematurity.
Had the Parisian proletariat it represented been more advanced economically, and
therefore more radical politically, the Commune, in his estimation, would not
have allowed forces loyal to Thiers—whom Marx described with sadistic relish as
‘that monstrous gnome’—to evacuate Paris and find safety at Versailles.³⁴ Instead,
the Commune should have ordered its military arm, the National Guard, to
pursue these forces, which Marx believed could easily have led to their destruction.
Had that been done, the whole history of the Commune might have been
different.³⁵
Above and beyond these specific mistakes, the Commune, in Marx’s contem-
poraneous analysis, failed ultimately because it tried to reason with its enemies,
appealing to what it considered to be their self-interest, instead of destroying
them. Even worse, the Communards suffered from the mistaken belief that ‘the
political instrument of the proletariat’s enslavement—by which Marx meant the
governing institutions the Communards had inherited when they took power—
could serve as ‘the political instruments of their emancipation’.³⁶ Nonetheless,
he believed that the legacy the Commune left behind transcended its failings. Its
defeat, far from delaying the ultimate victory of socialism and the proletariat,
would accelerate it. Indeed, by supporting the Commune so emphatically and
enthusiastically, Marx was helping to make his prediction come true. In reality, he
so transmogrified the Commune into something larger and more portentous than
it was that nearly every Marxist of any significance in Europe in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries felt compelled to pronounce judgement on it.
But as the passage of time caused the Commune to recede from his conscious-
ness, Marx’s opinion changed yet again. He did not even mention the Commune
in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, his next major work following the demise
of the Commune, which he finished writing in the spring of 1875. In 1881, in a
letter to the Dutch socialist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, Marx denigrated the
Commune as ‘merely the rising of a town under exceptional conditions’, and the
majority of the Communards as ‘in no sense socialist’.³⁷ Moreover, were it not for
their lack of common sense, they could have reached a compromise with the
Versaillais.³⁸ What caused this inversion of Marx’s opinion of the Commune was a
recognition not merely of its failure in Paris and in France but also of its inability
to inspire insurrections elsewhere in Europe. By the time he was writing to
Nieuwenhuis, Marx had fastened his hopes on a very different object, namely

³⁴ Marx and Lenin, Civil War in France, pp. 39, 51. ³⁵ Ibid., pp. 50–1.
³⁶ K. Marx, ‘Vtoroi nabrosok ‘Grazhdanskoi voiny vo Frantsii’, in Arkhiv Marksa i Engel’sa
(Moscow, 1934), vol. III, p. 415.
³⁷ ‘Letter, K. Marx to Domela Nieuwenhuis (22 February1881)’, in Marx and Engels, Selected
Correspondence, pp. 387.
³⁸ Ibid.
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the peasant commune in Russia, which he had come to believe could be the
instrument enabling that country, and possibly others, to skip the capitalist
stage of history and progress directly from feudalism to socialism.³⁹ That the
Russian terrorists in Narodnaia volia, who shared Marx’s newfound belief in the
possibilities of the peasant commune, were the only revolutionaries in Europe
acting to bring about the socialism he favoured only heightened his commitment
to their cause.

* * *
Marx’s animadversions on the Commune had no utility for Lenin, who always
valued the Commune for the lessons it taught, the legitimacy it conferred, and the
fortitude and perseverance inherent in its existence, and even more so in its defeat.
In 1924, after Lenin’s death, Zinoviev described his commitment to the Commune
as follows:
On not one of the movements of the foreign proletariat did Vladimir Ilich lavish
such attention as he did on the Paris Commune. Of not one of the movements of
the foreign proletariat did Vladimir Ilich speak with such respect as he did of the
movement of the Paris Workers [i.e. the Commune].⁴⁰

In reality, Lenin’s view of the Commune was more complicated than Zinoviev
suggested. In nearly everything Lenin wrote and said about the Commune one
finds an unresolved contradiction between straightforward assertions that the
Commune—as Marx had insisted—was the first proletarian polity in history,
and grudging acknowledgement that members of the petit-bourgeoisie—which
was how Lenin characterized pejoratively the Blanquists, Jacobins, and
Proudhonists—were nonetheless an integral part of it. Rather than denying this
contradiction, Lenin turned it to his advantage. He considered the Marxist
socialists in the Commune to have been responsible for its achievements, and
blamed the non-Marxists in the Commune for its shortcomings. To be sure, Lenin
coupled his attacks on these non-Marxists with ritualistic reiterations of Marx’s
arguments that the principal reason for the Commune’s failure was its prematur-
ity, by which he meant its emergence before class relations under capitalism had
deteriorated in France to the point where institutions like the Commune would
have a social base in the French proletariat large enough for it to endure. But one
senses that, for Lenin, these underlying factors were less important than the fact of
the Commune’s existence and the opportunity it provided to attack his ideological
opponents. As a result, Lenin praised the Commune for what it was, even as he
criticized it for much of what it did. In short, Lenin tried to have it both ways.

³⁹ ‘Letter, K. Marx to V. Zasulich (1 March 1881)’, in Deich, Gruppa ‘Osvobozhdenie Truda’, vol. II,
pp. 223–4.
⁴⁰ Quoted in A. Gambarov, Parizhskaia Kommuna (Moscow, 1925), p. 331.
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Before 1908 Lenin did not evaluate the Commune comprehensively. He

devoted no work to it exclusively—not even an article—and his comments on it
were sporadic and merely supportive of arguments on other matters. Nevertheless,
they adumbrated fairly well the conclusions he fleshed out when conditions in
Russia in 1917 gave the Commune a tactical relevance it had not had before.
Lenin’s first reference to the Commune was in a private letter of 1901, in which he
criticized Plekhanov for denigrating the Commune as ‘ancient history’.⁴¹ One year
later, Lenin wondered ‘where we would be now without the gigantic impulse given
especially by the Paris Commune’.⁴² By his comment Lenin was effectively
situating the Commune within the larger revolutionary teleology that he believed
had begun in France with the French Revolution and would culminate in a
successful revolution in Russia. In 1904, in notes prepared for a talk delivered to
Russian émigrés in Geneva, he even called the Commune ‘the greatest working-
class uprising of the nineteenth century’ and thus a forerunner of ‘the world
republic’ that would exist once socialists had come to power everywhere.⁴³ In this
instance, however, he also listed what he considered the most consequential mis-
takes and failings of the Commune. These included, most prominently, not taking
over the Bank of France and its assets, which were in Paris when the Commune was
declared, and not pursuing the Republican army loyal to Thiers after it had
withdrawn from Paris, which ensured the survival of the newly established Repub-
lican government in Versailles; this in turn prevented the Commune from extend-
ing its sovereignty to other parts of France. Lenin ascribed the Commune’s failure to
take these actions to an insufficiency of political consciousness on the one hand, and
an excess of nationalism on the other. But the Commune also warranted praise for
its separation of Church and state; for the deference it showed to the National
Guard, which for Lenin was nearly the equivalent of a people’s militia; for its ending
of workers’ fines and night work in bakeries; and for its policy of placing empty
factories under its own jurisdiction.⁴⁴
By 1905 Lenin had read not only what Marx and Engels had written about the
Commune, but also the memoirs of several Communards.⁴⁵ Moreover, by July of
that year he had had time to reflect on the revolution in Russia that had begun in
January, and without retracting his earlier statement in another talk to Russian
émigrés in Geneva that ‘we all stand on the shoulders of the Commune’, he now
made clear that a commune was precisely what socialists should not attempt to

⁴¹ Quoted in V. A. Eremina, ‘V. I. Lenin kak istorik Parizhskoi Kommuny’, Voprosy istorii, no. 2
(1971), p. 36.
⁴² Lenin, What is to be Done?, p. 28.
⁴³ V. I. Lenin, ‘Tri konspektov doklada o parizhskoi kommune (9 March 1904)’, in Lenin, PSS,
vol. VIII, p. 487.
⁴⁴ Ibid., pp. 490–1.
⁴⁵ Among them were those of Gustave Paul Clusert, who had served as a general in the Union army
in the American Civil War before becoming a Communard. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men,
p. 357.
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replicate in Russia.⁴⁶ In a paragraph he appended to an article, written by someone

else, that he was editing for publication, the future Soviet leader explained why he
agreed with the author’s views on the Commune:
This article teaches us, most of all, that the participation of the socialist prole-
tariat in a revolutionary government that includes the petit-bourgeoisie’ is
entirely permissible in principle, and in certain conditions is obligatory. It
shows us further that the real task the Commune had to perform was primarily
the achievement of the democratic (but not the socialist) dictatorship, which is to
say the implementation of our ‘minimum programme’. Finally, the article
reminds us that when we study the lessons of the Paris Commune we should
not imitate the mistakes it made (not seizing the Bank of France, not launching
an offensive against Versailles, the lack of a clear programme, and so on) but its
successful practical measures, which indicate the correct route. It is not the word
‘Commune’ that we must adopt from the great figures of 1871; we should not
blindly repeat each of their slogans. What we must do is point out those
programmatic and practical slogans that are relevant to the state of affairs in
Russia and can be formulated in the words ‘a revolutionary democratic dictator-
ship of the proletariat and the peasant dictatorship’.⁴⁷

What Lenin appeared to be arguing was that while the relative moderation of the
Commune was appropriate given the capitalist epoch in which it existed, its failure
to defend itself economically and militarily made its emulation in Russia pro-
foundly unwise. Nonetheless, Lenin strongly criticized Plekhanov in 1917 for
citing the Commune’s destruction as proof that it should never have been
established: if the Commune had never existed, revolutionaries of later gener-
ations would not learn from its mistakes.⁴⁸ In addition, the Commune had
inspirational value, which Lenin ascribed to its defeat. There were moments in
history, he said, ‘when a desperate struggle of the masses, even for a hopeless
cause, is necessary for the future schooling of these masses and their preparations
for the next struggle’.⁴⁹

⁴⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘Plan chteniia o kommune’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. IX, p. 330; V. I. Lenin, Dve taktiki, ibid.,
vol. IX, p. 70.
⁴⁷ V. I. Lenin, ‘Zakliuchitel’naia chast’ k stat’e “Parizhskaia Kommuna i zadachi demokraticheskoi
diktatury” ’, Proletarii, no. 2 (17 July 1905), ibid., vol. XI, p. 132.
⁴⁸ V. I. Lenin, Predislovie k russkom perevodu pisem K. Marksa k L. Kugel’manu (1907), ibid.,
vol. XIV, pp. 375–6, 378–9. What made Lenin’s attack on Plekhanov ironic, and perhaps unfair, was
that in March 1903 Plekhanov had written an article for Iskra that uncannily adumbrated the view of
the Commune Lenin advanced later. Plekhanov criticized the Commune for its lack of toughness and
ruthlessness. But he also qualified his criticisms by pointing out that by studying failed revolutions one
learned how to carry out successful ones. And far from denigrating the Communards for their mistakes,
Plekhanov stated that ‘they covered themselves in everlasting glory’. G. V. Plekhanov,’Martovskiie idy’,
Iskra, no. 36 (March 15, 1903), in Plekhanov, Sochineniia, vol. XII, pp. 334–41.
⁴⁹ Lenin, Predislovie, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XIV, p. 379.
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In 1908 Lenin delivered a public lecture on the Commune that in its tone, if not
in its content, reflected the absence of any additional revolution in Russia since
1905. Indeed, the text of Lenin’s lecture reads in places like a eulogy for a beloved
comrade struck down at the height of his powers by a fatal and unavoidable
disease.⁵⁰ By that time it was de rigueur for Marxist socialists to describe the
Commune as a proletarian institution, and in that respect Lenin’s lecture did not
disappoint. The Commune, he said, was ‘a superb example of the great proletarian
movement of the nineteenth century’.⁵¹ At the same time, Lenin acknowledged
ruefully that in 1871 French capitalism was insufficiently advanced for the prole-
tariat in France to be fully aware of its historical obligations; this was identical to
what he had written in What is to be Done? in 1902 about Russian capitalism and
its failure to radicalize the Russian proletariat sufficiently for it to lead a Russian
socialist party, much less to carry out a proletarian revolution. While in Lenin’s
opinion the Communards had demonstrated unwavering courage in the face of
overwhelming opposition, their patriotic hatred of the Prussians, which he now
said was what caused them to refrain from taking over the Bank of France, had
made the promulgation of socialist measures impossible.⁵² Although the Com-
mune, as such, had carried out ‘democratic tasks’ of which Lenin believed the
bourgeoisie to be incapable, the Commune, as was evident by its many failings, left
much to be desired. But it was the best Marxist revolutionaries could have hoped
for given the stage history had reached when the Commune began.⁵³ Two years
later, in 1910, Lenin made explicit his perception of the Commune as an integral
component of a larger revolutionary tradition, arguing that it marked the end of
‘the democratic revolution’ in Europe that had begun in France in 1789.⁵⁴
In 1911 Lenin again situated the Commune historically, this time in terms of
the development of French capitalism.⁵⁵ But the conclusion he drew was the same:
that the Commune, for all its undeniable achievements, was destined to fail. The
specific catalyst for its failure was that the petit-bourgeoisie withdrew its support
from the Commune when it realized it was doomed to defeat. Without a political
party of the type Lenin favoured—a highly centralized one in which the lower
echelons executed the directives of the party’s leaders loyally and obediently—
there was no means of compensating for the petit-bourgeoisie’s defection. Given
the absence of such a party, it was not at all surprising that the Communards
lacked the necessary toughness and ruthlessness.⁵⁶ In the same article, however,
Lenin cited approvingly a new generation of Marxist revolutionaries, both in
France and elsewhere in Europe, who were not disillusioned by the Commune’s

⁵⁰ V. I. Lenin, ‘Uroki kommuny’, Zagranichnaia gazeta, no 2 (23 March 1908), ibid., vol. XVI,
pp. 451–4.
⁵¹ Ibid., vol. XVI, p. 453. ⁵² Ibid., vol. XVI, p. 451. ⁵³ Ibid., vol. XVI, p. 452.
⁵⁴ V. I. Lenin, ‘Zametki publitsista’, Diskussionyi listok, no. 1 (6 March 1910), ibid., vol. IXX, p. 247.
⁵⁵ V. I. Lenin, ‘Pamiati kommuny’, Rabochaia gazeta, no. 4–5 (April 1911), ibid., vol. XX, p. 219.
⁵⁶ Ibid., vol. XX, pp. 218–19.
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failure and were intent on renewing the struggle the Commune had begun.⁵⁷ In
1913, Lenin went a step further, arguing now that the Commune marked not just
the end of one stage of history, but the beginning of another, which would
supersede all previous ones by prompting urban insurrections. The ultimate result
would be the destruction of capitalism and the emergence of socialism.⁵⁸ Still,
there was something formulaic in Lenin’s statements prior to the First World War
about the Commune as a proletarian state, and thus the first step in the emanci-
pation of the proletariat everywhere. His praise, especially after 1905, seems forced
and ritualistic, and the reader could easily conclude that behind his litany of the
Communards’ mistakes and personal failings—especially a lack of toughness that
precluded the harsh measures Lenin believed to be essential to the Commune’s
survival—the Bolshevik leader was harbouring a deeper, if unacknowledged
pessimism about the imminence of future revolutions not only in France but
also, more importantly, in Russia.
All this changed, however, with the outbreak of the First World War. Because
the Commune had emerged in the aftermath of a war (albeit one on a much
smaller scale that also ended quickly), it was now, suddenly, relevant again. In an
article written in the autumn of 1914, Lenin castigated European socialists who,
instead of opposing the war in the name of ‘proletarian internationalism’, not only
supported it rhetorically, but in some cases even enlisted in their own country’s
army.⁵⁹ In the article, Lenin again reserved his sharpest rhetorical fusillades for
those French socialists, who, by supporting their country in 1914, were com-
pounding their original betrayal of the working class in 1900 when they ‘accepted
ministerial posts in the government of that very bourgeoisie which [in 1871] had
betrayed its country and joined with Bismarck to crush the Commune’.⁶⁰ What
made Lenin’s article remarkable was that at the end of it he prefigured what would
be one of his most powerful arguments in 1917 for taking power in Russia:
The transformation of the present imperialist war into a civil war is the only
correct proletarian slogan, one that follows from the experience of the [Paris]
Commune and, as outlined in the Basle resolution of 1912, from the conditions
of an imperialist war between highly developed bourgeois countries.⁶¹

⁵⁷ Ibid., vol. XX, pp. 221–2.

⁵⁸ V. I. Lenin, ‘Istoricheskie sud’by ucheniia Karla Marksa’, Pravda, no. 50 (1 March 1913), ibid.,
vol. XXIII, p. 2.
⁵⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Voina i rossiiskaia sotsial-demokratiia’, Sotsial-demokrat, no. 33 (1 November 1914),
ibid., vol. XXVI, pp. 15–23.
⁶⁰ Ibid., vol. XXVI, p. 18.
⁶¹ Ibid., vol. XXVI, p. 22. That France’s government in 1871 was located somewhere other than in its
longtime capital, thereby making the Commune’s emergence a historical accident unlikely to occur
again in Russia or France or in any other country, Lenin conveniently ignored. This unusual circum-
stance also helps to explain why the people who ran the Commune previously had no interest in
governance, or even in politics, and very little idea of how they would use power should they ever
possess it. All revolutions entail improvisation, but the Paris Commune seems to have generated more
of it than others.
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In 1915, in a pamphlet written with Zinoviev’s assistance, Lenin described the

Commune as marking the end of the epoch in human history that began with the
French Revolution, when wars were fought mostly by the bourgeoisie for national
liberation. He also reiterated his earlier argument that the Commune signified the
beginning of a more progressive phase, in which war would be an instrument for
the liberation of the proletariat, and ultimately of humanity itself. What was
new—and a forerunner of one of the April Theses he would formulate in 1917
and use to considerable political advantage—was his praising the Commune for
having established a precedent European workers should follow of converting
wars between governments into civil wars that would give political power to the
workers.⁶² Two years later, in an article written just one month before the Russian
monarchy collapsed, Lenin noted that the Paris Commune showed that ‘militar-
ism can never be eliminated’ as long as ‘one part of a people’s army is waging a
victorious struggle against another part of it’.⁶³ In the context of the Commune,
Lenin was alluding here to the split in the French army in 1871 that caused
recruits from the lower classes to leave their units and fight for the Commune
while their officers, drawn mainly from the upper classes, led the Versaillais
against them. The result was the Commune’s demise. But Lenin also suggested
in his article that while such an outcome was unavoidable in 1871, the First World
War had altered the balance of power between social classes irreversibly: now that
a far larger proportion of European armies consisted of conscripts, most of them
workers and peasants, any mutinies that broke out were likely to escalate into full-
scale revolutions that the bourgeoisie would be powerless to defeat.⁶⁴
After the Russian monarchy collapsed, and taking power became a real, if still
remote, possibility, the Paris Commune played a significant role in Lenin’s
estimation of the kind of state he hoped to establish in Russia, and of the
ideological adaptations his doing so would require. In March 1917, when Lenin
was conceptualizing the ideas he would encapsulate a month later in his so-called
April Thesis—the serial exhortations, in the form of slogans, that enabled the
Bolsheviks to come to power in October—‘the thought of the Paris Commune, of
utilising its experience . . . and avoiding its errors, occupied [his] mind a good
deal’.⁶⁵ Also in March, in one of the ‘Letters from Afar’ written just prior to his
return to Russia, Lenin stated that Russian workers could learn what to do from

⁶² V. I. Lenin, Sotsializm i voina (Geneva, 1915), ibid., vol. XXVI, pp. 311–12, 325.
⁶³ V. I. Lenin, ‘Doklad o revoliutsii 1905 goda (9 January 1917)’, reprinted in Pravda, no. 18
(22 January 1925), ibid., vol. XXX, p. 319.
⁶⁴ Lenin stated in the article that in the 1905 Revolution in Russia the mutinies that occurred were a
harbinger of those in the First World War. But while the mutinies in 1905 were the result of a
revolution that failed, those in 1917 would spark a revolution that succeeded. Ibid., vol. XXX,
pp. 317–18.
⁶⁵ N. K. Krupskaia, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York, 1970), p. 337.
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the experiences of the Commune.⁶⁶ Their first task should be to arm themselves,
which would enable them ‘to take the organs of state power directly into their own
hands’.⁶⁷ At first glance, this seems to suggest that the proletariat should take
power immediately. But Lenin also included the crucial caveat that the process he
was advocating had only just begun: the workers were organizing themselves in
soviets and thereby creating the conditions for taking power at some point in the
future. To clarify the relationship between the Commune and the soviets, Lenin
declared on 4 April that the former was the only exception to his assertion that the
latter were unprecedented.⁶⁸ To make certain the other Bolsheviks understood
what he was calling for, in the letter of 11 March Lenin stated that only anarchists
wanted to destroy the state before the state took the necessary steps, as prescribed
by the socialists who presumably controlled it, to destroy itself.⁶⁹
On 9 April Lenin came close to calling for polities similar to the Paris Commune
to be established everywhere in Russia.⁷⁰ The communes he envisioned would
resemble the soviets; at several points in the article he even described the two
institutions as if they were identical. But the soviets, he admitted, were not yet
ready to take power from the Provisional Government: not only did Marxists not
yet comprise a majority in them; there was also the simple fact, according to Lenin,
that the Bolsheviks, unlike the Parisian Blanquists who had provided the impetus to
establishing the Commune, would never seize power without the support of the
general population, or at least of the workers and peasants.⁷¹ One must bear in mind
that Lenin’s admiration of the Commune was always selective. For every decision it
made of which he was critical, there was another he found praiseworthy. Among the
most laudable of the latter were the replacement of the army and the police by a
militia, and the substitution of a self-contained and hidebound bureaucracy by ‘direct
rule by the people’—by which Lenin meant a government the leaders of which were
subject to recall if the people found their performance unsatisfactory.⁷² To prevent
extravagances like those that occurred under capitalism, Lenin also stated that these
leaders would not receive a salary higher than that of the highest-paid worker.⁷³
In his April Theses Lenin did not merely call for a state of which the Paris
Commune was a precursor; he now envisaged in Russia during its ongoing
transition from capitalism to socialism nothing less than ‘a state of the Paris
Commune type’.⁷⁴ Moreover, by including his call for a commune state in the

⁶⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘Pis’ma izdaleka: o proletarskoi militsii (11 March 1917)’, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXI,
p. 38.
⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 40.
⁶⁸ V. I. Lenin, ‘Doklad na sobranii Bol’shevikov—uchastnikov v vserossiiskogo soveshchaniia
sovetov rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov (4 April 1917)’, ibid., p. 108.
⁶⁹ Lenin, ‘Pis’ma izdaleka’, ibid., pp. 162–3.
⁷⁰ V. I. Lenin, ‘O dvoevlastii’, Pravda, no.28 (9 April 1917), ibid., pp. 145–7.
⁷¹ Ibid., pp. 146–7. ⁷² Ibid., p. 146. ⁷³ Ibid., p. 146.
⁷⁴ V. I. Lenin, ‘Zadachi proletariata v nashei revoliutsii (proekt platforma proletarskoi partii)’,
Pravda, no. 26 (17 April 1917), ibid., pp. 162–3.
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changes he proposed in the Bolsheviks’ declared objectives, Lenin indicated how

central a role it played in the scenario for seizing power that was germinating in
his mind. This, of course, implied that Russia was ready for a proletarian revolu-
tion, and thus in violation of the conviction, to which Marx had been faithful until
the last years of his life, that such a revolution would be premature and therefore
destined to fail. Other Bolsheviks, not surprisingly, found the ideological impli-
cations of Lenin’s vision unacceptable, and in the summer of 1917 Zinoviev
invoked the Commune in explaining his opposition. Like Lenin, Zinoviev believed
that the political vacuum that existed in Petrograd resembled that in Paris just prior
to the establishment of the Commune. But whereas for Lenin this similarity served
to sanction seizing power, for Zinoviev it suggested that such an undertaking would
fail; the best the Bolsheviks could hope for was to take power and then lose it, which
seemed an argument for the Bolsheviks doing nothing instead.⁷⁵
More than any of the French revolutions that preceded it, that of 1871 helped
Lenin to legitimize the ideological heresies he knew his fellow Bolsheviks would
have to accept before any revolution they attempted could succeed.⁷⁶ This, of
course, required a determined policy of adaptation. The defeatism implicit in
Lenin’s call in the April Thesis for the imperialist war (i.e. the First World War) to
be transformed into a civil war meant that the patriotism of the Communards,
who with few exceptions had been willing to resume war with the Prussians, had
to be played down or ignored.⁷⁷ Similarly, in his Letters on Tactics, written in
response to Lev Kamenev’s charge, which Plekhanov happily repeated, that Lenin
was intent on merging the bourgeois and socialist revolutions, the future Soviet
leader rejected Kamenev’s criticism that the Commune had been wrong to make
programmatic changes immediately, and that that was the principal reason it had
failed. Rather, the Communards were too slow in putting their socialism into
practice, and as a result the Commune had been destroyed quickly.⁷⁸ Both Lenin
and Kamenev, in what they wrote about the Commune in 1917, were dealing with
what to Marxists in Russia was a question none of them had considered relevant
just a few months earlier: whether circumstances in Petrograd and in Russia could
be conducive of a seizure of power that would be followed immediately by a
counter-revolution in which the Bolsheviks lost not only power but also, very
possibly, their lives. That Kamenev and Lenin both invoked the Commune
in defending their answer indicates that they did so not just to score debating
points, but to gain some inkling about what the future would bring should the

⁷⁵ G. Zinoviev, ‘Chego ne delat’, Rabochii, no. 8 (30 August 1917): p. 8.

⁷⁶ Geoffrey Hosking argues plausibly in The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from
Within (Cambridge MA, 1985), p. 46, that Lenin’s vision of the commune state in 1917 was what gave
him the confidence to take power when his chances of doing so seemed minimal.
⁷⁷ Lenin, ‘Zadachi proletariata’, p. 162.
⁷⁸ V. I. Lenin, Pis’ma o taktike (Petrograd, 1917), in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXI: pp. 138–42.
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Bolsheviks cross the ideological and psychological Rubicon and do what Lenin
was recommending they do.
Lenin’s task in 1917 was not an easy one, and it was complicated by the need
to describe in some detail what a Bolshevik state would look like should the
Bolsheviks take power and hold onto it. He did this most thoroughly in State and
Revolution, a first draft of which he finished in January, even before the monarchy
collapsed, but which he revised considerably while in Finland in the year later, after
the Provisional Government had published evidence of his earlier collaboration
with Germany, making him, to all intents and purposes, a traitor. That one of the
two books he took with him into his semi-exile was Marx’s Civil War in France was
consistent with the prominent role the Commune assumed in shaping, explaining,
and justifying his evolving views on seizing power in Petrograd.⁷⁹ What Lenin
seemed most intent on demonstrating in the essay was that the proletariat, after
taking power, had to do what the Communards had been unable to do: not only to
replace: the existing institutions of coercion with a people’s militia, but also, more
broadly, to create a genuinely proletarian state out of the remnants of the bour-
geoisie state it had overthrown.⁸⁰ The Communards, he wrote, had started to do
this, but they lost power before they could finish. Lenin explained his objective, and
invoked the Commune to underscore how essential it was to the ultimate construc-
tion of socialism and communism, as follows:
To destroy officialdom immediately, everywhere, completely—this cannot be
thought of. That is a Utopia. But to break up at once the old bureaucratic
machine and to start immediately the construction of a new one, which will
enable us gradually to reduce all officialdom to naught—this is no Utopia. It is
the experience of the Commune. It is the direct and urgent task of the revolu-
tionary proletariat.⁸¹

At another point in the essay Lenin stated flatly that the practical measures the
Communards had carried out enabled them ‘to start building a new proletarian
state machinery’ within a few weeks.⁸² Had it not been for their subsequent
overthrow, they would have finished the task.
In State and Revolution, Lenin subtly changed what he considered the message
and the legacy of the Commune. Whereas prior to the summer of 1917 Lenin

⁷⁹ Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 43; M. Sawer, ‘The Soviet Image of the Commune: Lenin and
Beyond’, in Images of the Commune, edited by J. A. Leith (Montreal, 1978), p. 246.
⁸⁰ Lenin, State and Revolution, pp. 10–11, 26, 83.
⁸¹ Ibid., p. 42. Lenin wrote more or less the same thing in an article written just three weeks before
the October Revolution. V. I. Lenin, ‘Uderzhat li bol’sheviki gosudarstvennuiu vlast’, Prosveshchenie,
no. 1–2 (October 1917), in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXIV, pp. 302–3. Lenin’s argument, with its reference to
the Commune, was an adumbration by several months of his well-known suggestion to Trotsky that
the latter employ former tsarist officers in the Red Army because the new order the Bolsheviks were
constructing could be built with bricks left over from the old one. Trotsky, My Life, p. 447.
⁸² Lenin, State and Revolution, p. 98.
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considered the Commune valuable in clarifying how to carry out a proletarian

revolution, from that time onward, it was useful mostly for what its actions while
in power revealed about creating a proletarian state. This did not mean that Lenin
stopped criticizing the Communards’ mistakes, only that his criticisms were
different. Among the most relevant, given the practical and ideological dilemmas
Lenin had to resolve if the Bolsheviks were to establish socialism in a predomin-
antly agrarian society, was the Commune’s failure, in his estimation, to achieve a
‘free union’ of the proletariat and the poor peasantry.⁸³ Another was that the
Communards had acted prematurely, which Lenin now considered the principal
reason for their failure—more significant even than their overwhelming inferiority
in numbers and generalship when Thiers ordered the Republican army he com-
manded to attack the Commune and retake control of Paris.⁸⁴ This would seem to
suggest that a Bolshevik revolution would fail for the same reason the Commune
had failed. But Lenin quickly nullified the parallel he suggested by stressing what
he saw as the critical difference between France in 1871 and Russia in 1917: while
the former was not ready for even a proto-proletarian revolution, the latter was
ready for a genuinely proletarian revolution as long as the bulk of the peasantry
supported it. Moreover, this proletarian revolution in Russia would succeed
because the Bolsheviks possessed all of the laudable personal characteristics of
the Communards—most notably their heroism, perseverance, and courage—but
none of their failings and inadequacies, as these related to politics.⁸⁵

* * *
The successful seizure of power in 1917 did not diminish the relevance of the
Commune. In January 1918 Lenin made a point of noting exactly when the
Bolsheviks held power longer than the Communards were able to do, and in
July 1920 he led representatives of the foreign communist parties attending the
Second Comintern Congress in Petrograd to Palace Square, where they commem-
orated the Commune and praised the Communards lavishly.⁸⁶ But whereas before
the October Revolution Lenin did not hesitate to criticize the Commune for its
deficiencies, once the revolution ended, he did his utmost to minimize them. The
only criticism he mustered in a report to the Seventh Congress of the Communist
Party in March 1918 was that it did what it did without understanding its

⁸³ Ibid., p. 35.
⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 42. The reader will note that just a few weeks earlier, Lenin, in his response to Kamenev,
had written the opposite—that the Commune failed because its leaders had not acted quickly enough.
⁸⁵ Ibid., p. 42.
⁸⁶ V. I. Lenin, ‘Doklad o deiatel’nosti soveta narodnykh komissarov 11 (24) janvaria’, Tretii
vserossiiskii s”ezd sovetov rabochikh soldatskikh i krest’ianskikh deputatov 10–18 (23–31) ianvaria
1918 g., in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXV, p. 261; Eremina, ‘V. I. Lenin kak istorik’, p. 31. According to
Zinoviev, Lenin devoted more attention to the Commune than to any other proletarian movement.
Mason, Paris Commune, pp. viii–ix. Zinoviev was correct as long as one did not consider the Jacobins—
about whom Lenin wrote much more than he did about the Communards—proletarian.
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historical significance.⁸⁷ Instead Lenin focused on what he said were its virtues,
which in an article in December 1917 he expanded to include its adoption of a
form of democratic centralism, which in the Soviet lexicon was a euphemism for
party dictatorship.⁸⁸ In January 1919, in a letter in Pravda addressed to the
workers of Europe and America, he stated unambiguously that the Commune
‘created a new type of state, a proletarian state, [which is] a machine for the
suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat’.⁸⁹ Two months later, in a report
to the First Comintern Congress in Moscow, Lenin denied that the Commune was
ever ‘a parliamentary institution’, which seemed to call into question his assurance
prior to the October Revolution that the ‘commune state’ he envisaged would be
akin to the original Commune in basing its legitimacy on majority rule.⁹⁰
In the way that Lenin now described it, the Commune, while hardly a blueprint
for establishing socialism, had much in common with the political system he was
seeking to bring about in Russia. His promise in 1917 to eliminate the army and
the police, which he claimed was inspired by the error the Communards made by
not doing so, was forgotten after the Civil War began in Russia in 1918. The only
instance after 1917 of Lenin distinguishing his regime from the Commune was his
elliptical admission in April 1918 that paying ‘bourgeois experts’ wages higher
than those of workers (as the Commune had done) was inconsistent with its
principles.⁹¹
Lenin was not the only Bolshevik to pronounce judgement on the Commune.
In April 1918 Stepan Shaumian modelled the commune he established in Baku on
what he understood to have been the agenda and the aspirations of the earlier
Parisian one.⁹² For Kamenev, by contrast, the Commune foreshadowed dangers
the Bolsheviks should avoid: in the context of criticizing Lenin’s April Theses,
Kamenev argued that both the French Revolution and the Revolution of 1848
were more relevant than the Commune, presumably because the earlier revolu-
tions had involved the entire country of France rather than merely its capital.⁹³
A decade later Nikolai Bukharin was criticized for seeming to argue in 1928—in
contrast to what many Bolsheviks believed—that proletarian revolutions were
possible only after a war. In the course of defending his position, Bukharin argued
that evoking the Commune—which of course had come into existence in the

⁸⁷ V. I. Lenin, ‘Doklad o peresmotre programmy i izmenenii nazvaniia partii (8 March 1918)’, in

Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXVI, p. 50.
⁸⁸ V. I. Lenin, ‘Kak organizovat’ sorevnovanie (December 1917)’? Pravda, no. 17 (20 January 1929),
ibid., vol. XXXV, p. 203.
⁸⁹ V. I. Lenin, ‘Pis’mo k rabochim evropy i ameriki’, Pravda, no. 16 (24 January 1919), ibid.,
vol. XXXVII, p. 457.
⁹⁰ V. I. Lenin, ‘Tezisy i doklad o burzhuaznoi demokratii i diktature proletariata’, ibid., vol. XXXVII,
p. 493; Lenin, State and Revolution, p. 55.
⁹¹ V. I. Lenin, Ocherednye zadachi sovetskoi vlasti (Petrograd, 1917), in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXVI,
pp. 179–90.
⁹² A. E. Kadishev, Interventsiia i grazhdanskaia voina v Zakavkaz’e (Moscow, 1960), p. 96.
⁹³ Lenin, Pis’mo o taktike’, p. 42; Keep, Contemporary History in the Soviet Mirror, p. 204.
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immediate aftermath of a war—had no bearing, one way or another, on the

relationship between revolutions and war. In fact, he insisted that his critics had
misconstrued his position: revolutions could occur before wars as well as after
them, and in the absence of military conflict altogether. Thus the Paris Commune,
while worthy of praise, could not be used as evidence of any universal law of
revolutions.⁹⁴
In contrast to Bukharin, who seemed to believe there were limits to what the
Commune could teach the Bolsheviks, Zinoviev and Trotsky claimed to have
learned much from it, and that in addition to providing inspiration, it contained
insights that would contribute to the success of any revolutionary enterprise.
Zinoviev, as has been shown already, drew the conclusion from the similarities
he saw between Paris in 1871 and Petrograd in 1917 that a Bolshevik insurrection
would be premature and fail. But that did not stop him, in a speech to the Third
Congress of Soviets in January 1918, from criticizing the Communards for not
taking over the Bank of France, which he ascribed to a lack of discipline and
ruthlessness comparable to the weakness in 1917 and earlier of Iulii Martov and
the Mensheviks.⁹⁵ During the Kronstadt Revolt, when the very survival of the
Bolshevik regime was at stake, Zinoviev again ascribed the Commune’s demise to
the personal deficiencies of its leaders, principally their unwillingness to treat their
enemies with the requisite harshness. He then went on to claim that that was what
had caused the Communards to refrain from organizing their own political party,
the existence of which, in his opinion, would have saved them. This, of course, was
to echo Lenin’s well-known belief in a political party that was both conspiratorial
and tightly organized.⁹⁶ It is difficult, in this instance, to suppress the suspicion
that Zinoviev, who was a notorious sycophant, criticized the Communards as he
did because he hoped to repair his relationship with Lenin after having nearly
ended it in the early autumn of 1917 by arguing against Lenin’s call for the
Bolsheviks to stage an insurrection.
For Trotsky, the Paris Commune—like the other revolutions in France with
which he had more than just a passing familiarity—was a useful vehicle for
defending the choices and decisions he made at various junctures in his political
career, and for confirming the emendations of Marxist ideology he made to justify
them. The Commune, in short, confirmed Trotsky’s belief that he was never
wrong. In March 1917, for example, he wrote that, just as war had triggered the
emergence of the Commune, so, too, would it eliminate among Russian workers
the submissiveness often characteristic of the working class before it undertook

⁹⁴ Stenograficheskii otchet: VI kongressa Kominterna (Moscow and Leningrad, 1929), pp. 598–9.
⁹⁵ Mason, Paris Commune, p. 350.
⁹⁶ ‘Iz stenograficheskogo otcheta o zasedanii Ispolnitel’nogo Komiteta Petrogradskogo Gubernskogo
Soveta—informatsiia G. E. Zinov’eva o Kronshtadskikh sobytiakh i polozhenii Petrograda’, in Kronsh-
tadskia tragediia 1921 goda: dokumenty v drukh knigakh (Moscow, 1999), vol. I, p. 638.
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the task of destroying its oppressors.⁹⁷ Russia, he wrote, was much like Paris in
1870–1: on the precipice of a revolutionary conflagration—but one that would
yield more favourable results because the working class was more powerful in
Russia than it was in France a half-century earlier. The link he drew between the
two revolutions—the first one a failure, the second one destined to succeed—
suggested a larger teleology, an inexorable sequence of historically progressive
developments culminating in communism prevailing everywhere in the world,
one that permeated his writings on all four French revolutions.⁹⁸
In 1921 Trotsky analysed the Commune in greater detail. In his preface to a
study of the Commune by Charles Talès that was published in Paris, Trotsky
pronounced a mixed verdict on the Commune.⁹⁹ To its everlasting credit, the
Commune was ‘a harbinger of a universal proletarian revolution’.¹⁰⁰ But after
lavishly praising the Communards for their heroism and capacity for self-sacrifice,
he reproached them for ‘their indecision in the direction of their movement [and]
their fatal tendency to stop after initial success’.¹⁰¹ This of course was consistent
with the stated views of Lenin and other Bolsheviks. But Trotsky then went on to
argue—in contrast not only to Zinoviev and Kamenev, but also to Lenin—that an
infusion of Leninism, in the form of an ‘action party’ that eschewed elections,
might have enabled the Commune to survive.¹⁰² In stressing this, Trotsky was
more of a Leninist than Lenin.
In the 1930s, after losing whatever chance he had of succeeding Lenin, Trotsky
returned to the Commune. Like his evaluation of earlier French revolutions,
Trotsky evaluated the Commune in ways that served both to justify retroactively
choices others considered harmful both to himself and to the Soviet Union, and to
clarify his diagnosis of what now ailed the Soviet Union under Stalin. In his
History of the Russian Revolution, published in 1932, Trotsky insisted again that
the Commune had failed for the lack of a Leninist party. Now, however, he
included among the broader reasons for its failure the role of the French peasantry
as a bulwark of the bourgeois order. In contrast to Russian peasants in 1917, who
according to Trotsky had supported the proletarian revolution of the Bolsheviks,
French peasants had opposed the no less proletarian revolution of the Commu-
nards, leaving the latter incapable of fashioning in France the synthesis of the
hammer and the sickle, of the proletariat and the peasantry, that Lenin and
Trotsky achieved (or believed they had achieved) in Russia a half-century later.¹⁰³

⁹⁷ L. Trotsky, ‘Pod znamenem Kommuny’, Novyi mir (17 March 1917), in L. Trotsky, Voina i
revoliutsiia: krushenie vtorogo internationala i podgotovka tret’ego (Moscow, 1923), vol. II, p. 412.
⁹⁸ Ibid., p. 414.
⁹⁹ ‘Préface de Leon Trotsky’, C. Talès, La Commune de 1871 (Paris, 1921), pp. vii–xxii.
¹⁰⁰ Ibid., p. vii. ¹⁰¹ Ibid., p. vii.
¹⁰² Ibid., pp. xi, xx. Also noteworthy in the preface was Trotsky’s overt hostility to the election of
military officers serving in the National Guard. This was consistent with the strict discipline Trotsky
instilled in the Red Army while serving as its commander.
¹⁰³ Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, unabridged edition, pp. 38, 746.
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Three years later, in The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky evoked the Commune as
a way of clarifying—for himself as well as for his readers—the unusual hybrid he
believed the Soviet Union had become, namely a regime that was socialist in its
forms of property but bourgeois in its norms of distribution. In purely ethical
terms, the Soviet Union had become retrograde in its politics and political
institutions while remaining progressive in its economy and class relations.¹⁰⁴
What this meant, as far as the Commune was concerned, was that it was more
different from Stalin’s Soviet Union than from Lenin’s. But in one very significant
way the Commune and the Soviet Union were similar: both regimes were ‘experi-
ments in proletarian dictatorship’ that never advanced beyond creating socialism
in a self-contained entity—a city in the case of the Commune, an entire country in
the case of the Soviet Union.¹⁰⁵ As such, both the Commune and the Soviet Union
had the potential to evolve in more than one direction: either forwards towards
socialism or backwards to a full restoration of capitalism. The Commune might
have lasted longer and introduced socialism, but its failure to produce someone
like Lenin to lead it, Trotsky implied, prevented it from doing so. The Soviet
Union, by contrast, had once been socialist, but had since deteriorated into
something less than that. Nevertheless, the Stalinist dictatorship that accounted
for this degeneration was not necessarily permanent. To be sure, it could be
replaced by a military dictatorship. But it could also be replaced by a regime
that would make Russia once again the beacon of hope for humanity it had been
when he and Lenin held power. And when that happened, the causal link between
the Paris Commune and the October Revolution—which for Trotsky meant that
without the Commune the October Revolution would not have happened—would
be restored.¹⁰⁶
The Bolsheviks claim to be the sole legitimate legatee of the Paris Commune did
not go unchallenged. Especially after the October Revolution, the Mensheviks
emphatically denied it, claiming that they, not the Bolsheviks, were its rightful
successor, and that the latter were distorting for their own political purposes what
the Commune was, what it did, and what it stood for. Responding to Lenin’s claim
at the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918 that the new state he was creating
was based on the Commune, Martov replied on behalf of the Mensheviks, arguing
that because the Communards, in contrast to the Bolsheviks, upheld civil liberties,
did not practise terror, and allowed all political parties to exist and to participate in
elections irrespective of their particular objectives, the Commune and the Soviet
state were morally and politically dichotomous.¹⁰⁷ In short, Martov used the
Commune to draw larger distinctions between Menshevism and Bolshevism.

¹⁰⁴ Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, pp. 86–114, 234–56, 273–90. ¹⁰⁵ Ibid., p. 297.
¹⁰⁶ Ibid., p. 303. The theme, very common among the Bolsheviks, that the Paris Commune had to
fail for the October Revolution to succeed, is repeated by non-Marxist historians such as Alistair Horne,
in The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune, 1870–71 (New York, 2007), p. 15.
¹⁰⁷ Getzler, Martov, p. 174.
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Two months later, he acknowledged that the Commune had been a proletarian
dictatorship—on this he agreed with Lenin and Trotsky—but quickly qualified his
assertion by stating, somewhat confusingly, that it had been also a democracy.¹⁰⁸
The reason for this paradox was that the Commune, while exercising power
without institutional restraints, nonetheless represented the working class, which
in Paris comprised a majority of the population or something close to it; whatever
the case, no other political party or organization commanded as much popular
support. Martov acknowledged that some of the Communards were like the
Jacobins in the French Revolution in seeking to centralize political power. Fortu-
nately, however, they were not strong enough to achieve their objective, which
Martov of course strongly opposed. Democracy, all things considered, was always
preferable to the Jacobins’ and the Bolsheviks’ authoritarianism; its only drawback
was the occasional inability of those practising it to act decisively.¹⁰⁹
In 1921, in several articles published after the suppression of the Kronstadt
Revolt, Martov elaborated on the tendency he saw among many of the Commu-
nards to temporize and to limit themselves, in military terms, to defensive
measures; the Kronstadt rebels had shared these characteristics, and that was
one reason for their defeat.¹¹⁰ But however detrimental they were to the Com-
mune’s survival, these same attributes showed the institution to have been ‘genu-
inely and consistently democratic [and] based entirely on popular sovereignty’.¹¹¹
Statements such as this showed how completely Martov’s view of the Commune
differed from Lenin’s. While both men claimed to be perpetuating the legacy of
the Commune, they differed starkly on its political utility: in Lenin’s case the
Commune helped to legitimize the repressive measures the Soviet state was taking
to preserve itself, while in Martov’s it justified the democratic socialism to which
the Menshevik was increasingly inclined now that he found himself in opposition
to the new regime and with no real hope of gaining power. Moreover, while the
two men saw the Commune very differently, as Marxists they felt obliged to claim
that their view was the only one of which Marx would have approved. According
to Martov, Marx saw in the Commune ‘the principles of popular rule and
universal suffrage’.¹¹² Indeed, in Martov’s formulation the Commune was not
the Soviet Union in embryo; rather it was a precursor, however imprecise and
imperfect, of a genuine workers’ democracy. As such, it had international and
even universal significance.¹¹³

¹⁰⁸ Iu.O. Martov, ‘Marks i problema diktatury proletariata’, Rabochii internatsional, no. 3–4 (1918):
pp. 66–76.
¹⁰⁹ Ibid. ¹¹⁰ Iu. O. Martov, ‘Kronshtadt’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 5 (5 April 1921): p. 5.
¹¹¹ Iu. O. Martov, ‘Razlozhenie gosudarstva ili ego zavoevanie’, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 11
(8 July 1921): p. 4.
¹¹² Ibid., p. 7.
¹¹³ Iu. O. Martov, ‘Kommuna 1871 goda’, in Martov, Mirovoi bol’shevizm, pp. 74–6.
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In Germany Karl Kautsky weighed in on the debate concerning the Commune,

and because his ostensible betrayal of socialism in 1914 still loomed large among
the Bolsheviks, they could not ignore his contributions to it, any more than they
could his opinions on Bonapartism and on the other revolutions in France since
1789. In 1918 Kautsky argued that the Commune, while ‘the work of the whole
proletariat’, was nonetheless not monolithic ideologically.¹¹⁴ Socialists of all ten-
dencies had belonged to it. For this reason the Commune was superior to the new
Bolshevik regime, which represented only a portion of the proletariat, and sur-
vived only by excluding non-Bolshevik socialists.¹¹⁵ In 1920 he explicitly rejected
any analogy between the Paris Commune and the October Revolution. The latter
was fundamentally an urban insurrection, and while it garnered support from
peasants, which to Kautsky was what enabled the Bolsheviks to extend their rule
beyond Russia’s major cities, this support corrupted it. The Commune, by con-
trast, had little or no support from peasants, which ensured it remained a
proletarian enterprise, and thus from Kautsky’s perspective a laudable one.¹¹⁶
Also, the Commune was democratic, certainly more so than the regime the
Bolsheviks established, and to its credit it never practised mass terror, as the
Bolsheviks did; in its moral virtue, it was infused with ‘a spirit of humanity’.¹¹⁷ Not
even pressure from the proletariat to resume hostilities with the Prussians after the
emergence of a unified Germany diminished Kautsky’s admiration. A decision to
that effect, he strongly implied, would have won his approval.¹¹⁸
By extolling the Commune as he did, Kautsky was effectively rejecting not only
the Soviet state but also the mythology the Bolsheviks were then creating to
legitimize it. Even more damaging, from the Bolsheviks’ perspective, was his
insistence on defending the Commune for precisely one of the reasons the
Bolsheviks gave for criticizing it. For Kautsky the democracy to which the
Commune was committed was not a shortcoming to be avoided, as it was for
the Bolsheviks, but a virtue to be emulated. The same was true of the personal
attributes the Communards required of their leaders, in particular a willingness to
compromise that was utterly antithetical to the toughness and penchant for
conspiratorial tactics that Trotsky, no less than Lenin, admired once he no longer
condemned the latter as a Russian Robespierre, as he had in the early 1900s.
Behind these arguments about the Commune lay a much broader challenge by
Kautsky to the legitimacy of the October Revolution. For this reason Lenin and
Trotsky responded to Kautsky’s strictures on the Commune with the same
ferocity with which they countered his imputations of their Jacobinism. In his
1918 polemic denouncing the German socialist, Lenin described as foolish the
Commune’s decision, while it was effectively deciding France’s fate, not to

¹¹⁴ Kautsky, Dictatorship of the Proletariat, p. 1. ¹¹⁵ Ibid.

¹¹⁶ Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, p. 66. ¹¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 73–4, 120.
¹¹⁸ Ibid., p. 54.
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disenfranchise the bourgeoisie; even better, in his opinion, would have been
suspending the democratic process entirely.¹¹⁹ That Kautsky supported the Com-
mune’s decision was just another manifestation of the same covert sympathy for
the bourgeoisie that in Lenin’s opinion explained his supporting Germany’s
participation in what to Lenin was always a war of imperialism. But there was a
substantive reason for Lenin’s ad hominem attack. By 1918 Lenin had realized that
the centralization of political power in Russia was not merely a temporary
necessity to be ended once the civil war was won. Rather, this was a permanent
requirement in a country too large and diverse to be ruled in any other way. But
Russia’s size did not render the Commune, the jurisdiction of which was by
comparison miniscule, totally irrelevant. Lenin argued that the Commune came
to power and held on to it for as long as it did because its leaders were mostly
immune to the democratic scruples he saw as the essence of Kautsky’s cowardice.
In fact, it was precisely the German socialist’s personal qualities—his moderation,
his softness, his aversion to violence no matter how necessary it might be—that in
Lenin’s jaundiced opinion made him not really a socialist at all. The role the
Commune played in Lenin’s evisceration was as Kautsky’s antithesis: the Com-
munards were not at all squeamish about using force, rather than polite persua-
sion or the cumbersome paraphernalia of elections, to achieve their objectives.¹²⁰
For that reason it was the Bolsheviks, not faux socialists like Kautsky, who were
acting in a fashion consistent with the Commune and on behalf of objectives the
Communards would surely have adopted had they taken power a half-century
later than they did.
In his 1920 essay attacking practically everything Kautsky had written about the
French Revolution, Trotsky was similarly forthright in denouncing Kautsky’s
ideas on the Commune. To Trotsky, Kautsky was not just factually inaccurate;
his words were an unconscionable slur on both the Soviet state and the Commu-
nards, whom Trotsky now dubbed ‘the heroic elder brother’ of the Petrograd
proletariat.¹²¹ Infuriated by the German socialist’s condemnation of the execu-
tions he had ordered during the Civil War, Trotsky justified the Commune’s
executions of hostages as a way of rebutting it. Similarly, he defended the political
repression Lenin ordered by pointing to the Commune’s denial of free speech to
royalists and others intent on overthrowing it.¹²² Trotsky was not uncritical of the
Commune. He called attention to what he considered the Communards’ passivity
and softness—although he stopped short of ascribing these inadequacies to the
historical prematurity of the Commune. To have done so would have called into
question, by analogy, his own recommendation in 1905, adopted by Lenin in 1917,
that by merging the bourgeois and socialist revolutions—Trotsky’s so-called

¹¹⁹ V. I. Lenin, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i renegat Kautskii, in Lenin, PSS, vol. XXXVII, p. 248.
¹²⁰ Ibid., pp. 240–50. ¹²¹ Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, pp. 79, 86.
¹²² Ibid., pp. 53–4, 74–5.
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Theory of Permanent Revolution—Marxist revolutionaries could come to power

before the objective conditions conducive to their doing so existed. Moreover,
whatever their political shortcomings, the Communards proved capable of learn-
ing from their mistakes; from this he concluded—with more conviction than is
evident in the appraisals of the Communards in his earlier writings—that they did
not entirely lack revolutionary consciousness. In fact, towards the end of the
Commune’s existence, the Communards rectified many of their mistakes by
creating a Committee of Public Safety, deliberately modelled on the original
institution in the French Revolution, to exercise power for the duration of the
existing emergency. Not surprisingly, Trotsky also had nothing but praise for the
Committee’s policy of shooting three Versaillais it had in custody for every
Communard or supporter of the Commune murdered by the Versaillais.¹²³
Like Lenin, Trotsky condemned in the Commune what Kautsky had praised,
and praised what Kautsky had condemned. But his polemic, like Lenin’s, served a
purpose larger than that of simply besmirching the reputation of a figure whom
Trotsky had once admired but now detested. Implicit in the ad hominem attacks
was justification of specific actions Trotsky had taken himself, and of policies he
had carried out, in 1917 and afterwards. That was why, in his diatribe against
Kautsky, Trotsky, yet again, vilified Miliukov, Tsereteli, and Chernov, whose
criticisms of the Soviet regime he traced to the same moral depravity he ascribed
to the executioner of the Commune, Adolph Thiers.¹²⁴

* * *
Given the relevance the Commune was thought to possess for contemporary
events, it made sense for the new leaders of the Soviet Union to inform the Soviet
people of its most salubrious attributes in the expectation that the Soviet people
would express their own admiration for the Commune, albeit in ways that were
very different from how the intelligentsia and the educated elite customarily
expressed themselves. For example, it was not uncommon for infants born in
the early years of the Soviet Union to be named ‘Parizhkommuna’.¹²⁵ Of course
the regime’s formal praise and numerous commemorations of the Commune,
designed as they were for a mass audience, were not issued and performed in a
vacuum; these were clearly a companion to the fêtes and other public events
associated with the French Revolution the Bolsheviks staged to legitimize their
own revolution and the state to which it had given birth. The various honoraria
the Bolsheviks bestowed on the Commune after 1917 were also meant to under-
score the notion central to the French Revolution that, like all revolutions,
including and especially the October Revolution, it expressed a universal aspir-
ation to social justice. The Commune, in fact, occupied something like a pride of
place, second only to the Revolution of 1789, in this new-found Soviet mythology

¹²³ Ibid., pp. 75–6. ¹²⁴ Ibid., pp. 71–2. ¹²⁵ Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 111.
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linking the October Revolution and the revolutionary tradition in France that
preceded it. Although the Internationale—which remained the official anthem of
the Soviet Union until 1944—was not put to music until 1888, its lyrics had been
written by a Communard, Eugène Pottier, not long after the Commune was
destroyed, in order to honour the Communards’ bravery and to express his belief
that the principles they stood for would one day be triumphant.¹²⁶ After the
October Revolution, the Bolsheviks changed parts of the first Russian translation
in 1902 from the future tense to the present tense to show that they were
now continuing what the Communards had begun.¹²⁷ A large number of histories
of the Commune were published in the 1920s, not all of them works of
government-inspired propaganda.¹²⁸ Much the same was true of the poetry that
was produced.¹²⁹
The Bolsheviks did not scant film and theatre as vehicles for the transmission
of propaganda about the Commune. By far the most extravagant was a play,
‘K Mirovoi Kommune’ (‘To the Global Commune’), which was performed only
once, when the Second Comintern Congress was meeting in Petrograd in July
1920, to an audience of some 45,000, including Lenin, on the site of the former
Stock Exchange. With a cast of 4,000, many of them soldiers, the play re-enacted
the events of the Commune in such a way as to suggest that it had failed for lack of
international support, and that in the future the entire world would be a
single Commune, identical to the original one in Paris.¹³⁰ Another production
eliciting admiration of the Commune was the Soviet film, Novyi Vavilon (The New
Babylon), the musical score for which was supplied by Dmitrii Shostakovich. The
negative reviews the film received following its premiere in 1929 may have been
the consequence of the projectionist speeding up the film while the music con-
tinued at its original tempo.¹³¹ Nevertheless, the film captured the Manichean
polarities the Bolsheviks thought inherent in the struggle between the Commune
and its enemies—a conflict the film personalized by the romance it depicted
between Louise, a sales clerk, and Jean, a soldier, who is killed by members of
the unrelievedly malevolent bourgeoisie. At the end, after digging Jean’s grave,
Louise herself is shot by bloodthirsty and vengeful Versaillais.

¹²⁶ Tombs, Paris Commune, p. 193; Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, p. 363.
¹²⁷ Russkaia literatura i fol’klor, http://feb-web.ru/feb/litenc/encyclop/le4/le4-5401.htm?cmd=p&
istext=1.
¹²⁸ In addition to Slutskii, Parizhskaia Kommuna, see Stepanov, Parizhskaia kommuna 1871. Large
sections of M. Voimolovskii, ed., Geroizm revoliutsii (Moscow, 1925) are devoted to the Commune.
¹²⁹ B. Murin, V. Aronov, and N. N. Masienikov, Parizhskaia kommuna: posobie dlia massovoi raboty
v klube (Moscow, 1921), p. 62.
¹³⁰ Corney, Telling October, pp. 74–5; Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 96; Von Geldern, Bolshevik
Festivals, pp. 185–6. For details of the performance, see Istoriia sovetskogo teatra: Petrogradskie teatry
na poroge Oktiabria i v epokhu voennogo kommunizma, 1917–1921 (Moscow, 1933), pp. 272–5.
¹³¹ Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (New York, 2000), pp. 49–50.
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The new Soviet government honoured the Commune in more formal ways. The
day on which the Commune was proclaimed in 1871, 18 March, was marked
throughout the 1920s by solemn commemorations in the Soviet press. A typical
example was an article in 1926 that lauded the suicidal courage of Communards
gunned down brutally by ‘Theirs’s mercenaries’.¹³² Because martyrdom was a
central element of the Commune’s mythology, it was given tangible expression in
posters displayed in cities and towns across the Soviet Union. That the Bolsheviks
were self-professed atheists did not preclude their using Christian concepts to
emphasize what they saw as their own unique relationship to the Commune:
the caption of one poster stated that ‘the martyrs of the Paris Commune
were resurrected under the red banner of the Soviets’.¹³³ Renaming city streets
‘18 March’; assigning readings on the Commune at clubs formed in factories to
bind workers to the regime; including 18 March among the prazdniki that were set
aside for rest and reflection—these were just a few of the means by which the
Bolsheviks used the Commune to enhance their legitimacy and increase their
support.¹³⁴ For the same reason, the battleship Sevastapol, which had been taken
over by rebellious sailors during the Kronstadt Revolt, was renamed Parizhskaia
Kommuna shortly after the revolt was suppressed.¹³⁵ By far the most poignant
expression of how much the Bolsheviks valued the Commune and considered its
tragic conclusion, even more than its triumphant creation, a central element in their
foundational mythology was demonstrated by their use, in 1924, of a red flag of
the Commune that had been given to the Soviet Union by a visiting delegation of the
French Communist Party. By placing the flag on Lenin’s body after it was laid to rest,
hermetically sealed in a glass case, in the first of what would be several mausoleums in
Red Square in Moscow, the new Soviet leadership gave the flag iconic status as one of
the enduring symbols of the Soviet state.¹³⁶ Zinoviev once referred to the flag as
‘a holy relic’, and for anyone viewing the flag with knowledge of where it came from,
the implications of martyrdom were inescapable.¹³⁷ Lenin, one was meant to con-
clude, was a martyr to the cause of socialism whose premature death had been
prefigured by the collective martyrdom of the Communards.

* * *

¹³² ‘Pamiati parizhskikh kommunarov’, Krasnaia panorama, no. 12 (March 19, 1926): p. 1.
¹³³ Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, p. 178 and figure 14.
¹³⁴ Mason, Paris Commune, pp. ix, 362. The other days of the year so designated were New Year’s
Day; 9 January (Bloody Sunday); 12 March (on which day in 1917 the monarchy was formally
abolished); May Day; and 7 November (on which the anniversary of the October Revolution was
celebrated after the Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1918). P. V. Gidulianov, Tserkov’ i gosudarstvo
po zakonodatel’stvu R.S.F.S.R. (Moscow, 1923), pp. 13–14.
¹³⁵ Avrich, Kronstadt, p. 213.
¹³⁶ Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, p. 346; Tombs, Paris Commune, p. 202; ‘Prazdnovanie dnia
konstitutsii v Moskve i peredachi znameni Parizhskikh kommunarov’, Leningradskaia Pravda, no. 8
(July 1924): p. 2.
¹³⁷ ‘Prazdnovanie dnia konstitutsii’, p. 2.
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With Lenin’s death and Stalin’s rise to power, the relevance of the Commune
diminished: after 1928, 18 March was no longer a day of rest.¹³⁸ Stalin’s belief in the self-
sufficiency of the October Revolution lessened the need for prior revolutions to
legitimize it. In addition, Stalin’s burgeoning ‘cult of personality’ allowed no other
cults, not even Lenin’s, to compete with it. Nevertheless, the Commune remained useful
in other ways, as Stalin’s comments on the institution and its leadership make clear.
From his earliest pronouncements on the Commune, Stalin emphasized the
need for brute force to save it. In an article in January 1917, he pronounced a
mixed verdict on the Commune: while the Communards had not been averse to
using violence in taking power, their reluctance once in power to pursue Thiers’s
army when it was retreating from Paris to Versailles was the principal cause of
their downfall. The bourgeoisie, he wrote, would never relinquish power when it
considered itself politically dominant, and nothing less than the application of
overwhelming counterforce would destroy it.¹³⁹ Nonetheless, the Commune, in
his opinion, conformed sufficiently to Marx’s expectations for him to paraphrase
Engels’s remark that the Paris Commune was the epitome of a proletarian
dictatorship.¹⁴⁰ In November 1927, no longer a hunted revolutionary but now
the virtual leader of a sovereign state, Stalin appended to his earlier comments on
the Communards’ aversion to violence that the lack of ruthlessness it implied was
directly relevant to the current predicament of the Soviet Union:
Comrades, we do not want to repeat the mistakes of the Paris Communards. The
Paris Communards were too lenient in dealing with the Versaillais, for which
Marx at the time rightly reproved them. They had to pay for their leniency by
tens of thousands of workers being shot by the Versaillais when Thiers entered
Paris. Do our comrades think that the Russian bourgeoisie and landlords are less
bloodthirsty than the Versaillais were in France? . . . No, comrades, we do not
want to repeat the mistakes of the Paris Communards. The revolution needs the
GPU [the new abbreviation, as of 1922, for the secret police established in 1917];
and the GPU will continue to be the terror of the enemies of the proletariat.¹⁴¹

Also in 1927, just one day before the Soviet state celebrated its tenth anniversary,
Stalin made clear he considered the Commune, in comparison to earlier revolu-
tions in France, England, and Germany, primus inter pares. The Commune, he
declared, was the result of the only revolution that did not merely substitute one
form of exploitation for another.¹⁴² In 1939, in the so-called Short Course

¹³⁸ I. Shilova, ‘Building the Bolshevik Calendar through Pravda and Isvestiia’, Toronto Slavic
Quarterly, no. 19 (Winter 2007), http;//sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/19/shilova19.shtml.
¹³⁹ J. V. Stalin, ‘Anarkhizm ili sotsializm’, in Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. I, pp. 345, 363.
¹⁴⁰ Ibid., vol. I, pp. 345, 363.
¹⁴¹ J. V. Stalin, ‘Beseda inostrannymi rabochimi delegatsii (5 November 1927)’, ibid., vol. X,
pp. 236–7.
¹⁴² J. V. Stalin, ‘Mezhdunarodnyi kharakter Oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii: k desiatiletiiu Oktiabria
(6 November 1927)’, ibid., vol. X, pp. 238–9.
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recounting the history of the Soviet Communist Party, the Commune was
described as the only workers’ revolution to have gained power prior to the
October Revolution.¹⁴³ Taken together, these statements suggest that, of all the
revolutions predating the Soviet Union, the Commune, in Stalin’s opinion, was
its most proximate precursor. But because, as stated in the Short Course, the
Commune did not ‘smash the fetters of capitalism’, which was ascribed to the
Communards’ lack of time, rather than to any timidity or weakness, its resem-
blance to the Soviet Union was imperfect.¹⁴⁴ Only by destroying its enemies once
and for all could a revolution committed to creating socialism and communism
devote all of its energy and resources to creating ‘the material conditions of a
prosperous life for the people’.¹⁴⁵
Soviet historians followed Stalin’s lead. A. I. Molok, in a history of the Com-
mune that appeared in 1927, criticized it for not centralizing power sufficiently—a
claim more Leninist than Stalinist—and argued that that was the principal reason
it had failed.¹⁴⁶ But by 1952, his perspective had become entirely Stalinist. After
praising the Commune while simultaneously enumerating its failings, Molek
linked Stalin’s views on the Commune to ‘the history of the struggle of our
party against . . . the traitors, the Trotskyites and the Bukharinists, these agents
of the fascist espionage services’.¹⁴⁷ In less bombastic language, P. M. Kerzhentsev,
in his own history of the Commune, like Molek reiterated what by then had
ossified into Party orthodoxy: the Commune had been the first proletarian
revolution, the first ‘heroic, glorious attempt by the proletariat to turn history
against capitalism’.¹⁴⁸ In this respect the Commune resembled the Soviet Union
more than it did any of the governments of the French Revolution. But it also
made mistakes: it failed to pursue Thiers’s forces when it might have destroyed
them; it did not seize the Bank of France; it refrained from seeking support from
the peasantry; and it welcomed into its ranks nefarious elements of the petit-
bourgeoisie committed to the perversion of its ideals and objectives. Without a
dictator (presumably like Stalin) exercising power ruthlessly through a centralized
party, these mistakes proved fatal.¹⁴⁹
What made Kerzhentsev’s analysis distinctively Stalinist was his argument that
the threats to the Commune had been internal as well as external, and that they
were inextricably intertwined: like the defendants in the show trials, who were
alleged to be agents of foreign intelligence services, Thiers’s spies in Paris

¹⁴³ J. V. Stalin, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course (New
York, 1939), p. 341. Although Stalin’s claim to have written the history was false—in fact he merely
edited it—it reiterated his views accurately.
¹⁴⁴ Ibid. ¹⁴⁵ Ibid.
¹⁴⁶ A. I. Molok, Parizhskaia Kommuna 1871 g. (Leningrad, 1927), p. 120.
¹⁴⁷ A. I. Molok, ‘Staline et la Commune de Paris’, Cahiers du Communisme, no. 3 (1952): p. 308.
¹⁴⁸ P. M. Kerzhentsev, Istoriia Parizhskoi Kommuny 1871 (Moscow, 1959), p. 4. The book was first
published in 1940.
¹⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 189–91, 218, 356, 482.
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transmitted sensitive information to the Versaillais—but, in contrast to Stalin, the

Communards had showed insufficient vigilance in apprehending them.¹⁵⁰ Simi-
larly, Kerzhentsev harshly criticized the generals commanding the Commune’s
military forces in their last stand against the Versaillais for not shooting all
deserters and any others who had violated military discipline.¹⁵¹
After Stalin’s death, the Soviet government continued to extoll the Commune
for what it prefigured about the proletariat and the virtues of socialism. In 1959 it
authorized publication of the formal protocols of the Commune’s proceedings,
and in 1964 the three cosmonauts on the Voskhod spacecraft that orbited the
earth brought with them pictures of Marx and Lenin and a fragment from a
banner of the Commune.¹⁵² In 1970, on the occasion of the Commune’s anniver-
sary, Leonid Brezhnev made clear that he considered the Commune an inspiration
for the Russian proletariat, without which it could not have brought the October
Revolution to its triumphal consummation in the creation of a true workers’ state:
In 1871 the first proletarian revolution lit up our planet like a lightning bolt; the
red flag of the Paris Commune was its banner. The Communards suffered defeat.
But the cause for which they fought could not be defeated. The ranks of the
proletariat multiplied; its consciousness and its organisational abilities increased;
its hatred of its oppressors was magnified.¹⁵³

On the centenary of the Commune in 1971, Pravda marked the occasion by

including on the first page a declaration, in large letters, that ‘the Soviet people
and all progressive socialists in the world note the centenary of the Paris Com-
mune’.¹⁵⁴ Directly below the declaration was a photograph of Brezhnev and other
Soviet leaders literally applauding the occasion.
Not surprisingly, the Cold War imposed its own requirements. The liberation
of Paris in 1944 was ascribed by one Soviet historian not to patriotism or hatred of
the Nazis but to Charles de Gaulle’s desire to prevent the establishment in the city
of another Commune.¹⁵⁵ But the growing threat from Communist China in the
1960s and 1970s came to play an even larger role than the Cold War in the way
the Soviets now conceptualized the institution. In China’s claim to be the sole
legitimate communist superpower in the world was implicit the notion that its
revolution in 1949 was the culmination of the entire socialist tradition originating
in Marx and Engels. By contrast—or so the Chinese Communists asserted—the
Soviet Union, after Stalin, betrayed this noble tradition, and the result was its
degeneration into fascism and a particularly disreputable form of state capitalism.
For this reason, the Chinese Communists could claim sole proprietary rights to

¹⁵⁰ Ibid., pp. 143, 363–70. ¹⁵¹ Ibid., p. 257.

¹⁵² Shleev, Revoliutsiia i izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, p. 6; Horne, Fall of Paris, p. 433.
¹⁵³ L. I. Brezhnev, Delo Lenina zhivet i pobezhdaet (Moscow, 1970), p. 12.
¹⁵⁴ ‘Fotografiia’, Pravda, no 77(192220) (18 March 1971), p. 1.
¹⁵⁵ A. I. Korolev, Parizhskaia Kommuna i sovremennost’ (Moscow, 1971), p. 175.
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the Commune, and that as far as the larger teleology of revolutions of which the
Commune was an early expression was concerned, this teleology’s alighting on
Petrograd in 1917 was a regrettable, but remediable diversion.¹⁵⁶
The Soviets contested the Chinese claim to the Commune differently from the
way they did Kautsky’s and Martov’s in the 1920s. Then, they had stressed that
rival claimants to the Commune were not real socialists. Now, however, they
focused on the Commune itself, stressing its identity as the harbinger of a
movement with universal aspirations—which mirrored nicely the concurrent
argument the Soviets were making that they, not the Chinese, were the rightful
leaders of the international communist movement.¹⁵⁷ The aforementioned claim
to a kind of socialist universalism in the tribute in Pravda on the centenary of the
Commune was one expression of this. Another was an article in Izvestiia com-
memorating the same occasion by noting the Commune’s commitment to ‘pro-
letarian internationalism’.¹⁵⁸ An unsigned article in Kommunist in January of the
same year claimed that while the Commune’s leadership had not included a single
Marxist, its lessons were nevertheless applicable, not just in France or in Europe,
but everywhere.¹⁵⁹ Also in Kommunist, V. Chkhikvadze measured the trans-
national relevance of the Commune by the degree to which the ideological
miscreants who either misunderstood it or maligned it unfairly were themselves
of various nationalities, such as Germans like Kautsky and Bernstein and French-
men like Raymond Aron, whose anti-communism and contempt for Marx almost
surely were what generated Chkhikvadze’s scorn and condescension.¹⁶⁰
During the Cold War, the Chinese were not the only ones the Soviets sought to
discredit by invoking the Paris Commune. F. Ryzhenko began his article in Pravda
in 1971 by arguing that both the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, which he termed
‘counterrevolutionary’, and the Prague Spring in 1968, which he deemed ‘quietly
counterrevolutionary’, were the polar opposites of the Commune, which to its
eternal credit ‘dreamt about the new world, and about the just society’ that ‘free
people’ in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were now creating.¹⁶¹ Among the
bourgeois enemies of socialism he included in his litany were the Israelis and the
Americans, whose aggression in the Middle East and Vietnam respectively made
both of them successors of the Versaillais.¹⁶²

¹⁵⁶ John Bryan Starr, ‘The Commune in Chinese Communist Thought’, in Leith, Images of the
Commune, pp. 291–311; Maurice Meisner, ‘Images of the Paris Commune in Contemporary Marxist
Thought’, in Revolution and Reaction: The Paris Commune, 1871, edited by John Hicks and Robert
Tucker (Amherst MA, 1973), pp. 112–29.
¹⁵⁷ Fëdor Konstantinov and Inna Krylova, Harbingers of a New Society: Centennary of the Paris
Commune (Moscow, 1971), p. 114.
¹⁵⁸ P. Pospelov, ‘Predvestnik Oktiabria: k 100-letiu parizhskoi kommuny’, Izvestiia, no. 64(16682)
(18 March 1871): p. 4.
¹⁵⁹ ‘Parizhskaia kommuna i sovremennost’, Kommunist, no. 2 (January 1971), pp. 28–9.
¹⁶⁰ V. Chkhikvadze, in ‘Parizhskaia kommuna—pervyi opyt proletarskoi diktatory’, Kommunist,
no. 1 (1971): pp. 98–100.
¹⁶¹ F. Ryzhenko, ‘Parizhskaia kommuna i sovremennost’, Pravda, no. 7(19214) (12 March 1971): p. 4.
¹⁶² Ibid.
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After the Cold War ended, and as the new Gorbachev regime proclaimed its
desire to co-exist peacefully in what Gorbachev himself called ‘our common
European home’, the Commune retained its place of honour in Soviet myth-
ology.¹⁶³ In September 1989, on the same occasion at which he told a visiting
delegation from France that the roots of perestroika were traceable to the French
Revolution, he also cited the Commune as a precursor.¹⁶⁴

* * *
Because they believed the future was prefigured in the present, and the present
prefigured in the past, the Bolsheviks always viewed the Communards as facing
forwards. In that way the institution they had established served as a model for
later generations of revolutionaries intent on establishing a new form of gov-
ernment and ultimately a new way of life, of which the Communards were only
dimly and imperfectly aware. But to those less enamoured of this rather self-
serving teleology, the Communards can also be considered the final personifi-
cation of a self-contained tradition of revolutions in France that began in 1789
and ended in 1871. It is perfectly legitimate to view the Commune in this way,
and many French historians have done so, arguing that the Communards, in
their social origins, their ideology, and their actions while in power, were
actually looking backwards to an epoch in the West that was ending, rather
than forward to an epoch in the East—or at least east of Western Europe—that
was about to begin. Most of the workers supporting the Commune were artisans
and craftsmen, much like the so-called plebeians of the original French Revolu-
tion; in fact, Robert Tombs makes the argument that the workers in Paris in 1871
who most resembled a modern, industrial working class rejected the Commune
and its policies when given the opportunity, in referenda and elections, to do so.
What is more, the Commune Council, which exercised executive authority,
was dominated not by unskilled workers—who were what a proletariat
implied—but by skilled workers and persons in ‘white collar’ professions, such
as law, journalism, and publishing, from which had come many of the leaders of
the French Revolution and of the revolutions that followed it in 1830 and 1848.
And what was true of the Council was also true of the Commune: both could be
considered proletarian only if one considered everyone who worked for a wage a
worker.¹⁶⁵
To the extent that the artisans and craftsmen who supported the Commune or
served on its Council had a coherent and definable vision of the future, it was of
workers’ cooperatives, rather than of a proletarian dictatorship.¹⁶⁶ In this respect
the Commune was economically (and, one might also say ideologically and

¹⁶³ Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika (London, 1987), p. 195.

¹⁶⁴ ‘Vstrecha M. S. Gorbacheva s predstaviteliami frantsuzskoi obshchestvennosti’, p. 1.
¹⁶⁵ Tombs, Paris Commune, pp. 110–11, 114, 120–1. ¹⁶⁶ Lichtheim, Marxism, p. 114.
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politically) retrograde, looking backward to a period in France’s history (and also

Europe’s) that, with industrialization accelerating in the Second Empire, was
rapidly receding and would soon be irretrievable.¹⁶⁷ It was no coincidence that
the Communards, in the middle of May, adopted the old Jacobin calendar, and
called the institution they established to deal harshly with internal enemies by the
same name the Jacobins had used nearly eight decades earlier.¹⁶⁸ In short, the
Commune was the last revolution in an age of revolutions in France and in Europe
that began in 1789, rather than a harbinger of the industrialized and highly
centralized states, many of them dictatorships, of the twentieth century.
That the Bolsheviks nonetheless incorporated the Commune into their revolu-
tionary mythology testifies both to the emotive power of the Commune—the
exhilaration its creation engendered no less than the despair that resulted from its
destruction—and to the desire the Bolsheviks always harboured for antecedents in
Europe’s history to compensate for their absence in Russia’s. That the Commune,
like the other French revolutions that preceded it, was primarily an urban affair
made it preferable—at least for Marxists like the Bolsheviks—to the peasantry in
either France or Russia as an antecedent to honour and memorialize. For all
the Bolsheviks’ inducements in 1917 to the Russian peasants to support them,
the proletariat was always the principal instrument of history’s inexorable advance
to the point at which communism is achieved, the dialectic magically stops, and
all of humanity enjoys perpetual peace. While Soviet Communism had much
in common with the tsarist autocracy it succeeded—certainly more than the
Bolsheviks themselves were ever willing to acknowledge—it nonetheless relied
for its mythology on analogies with revolutions in Europe, and specifically with
revolutions in France.¹⁶⁹
What were the larger lessons of these analogies is the last question in a study
such as this one that needs to be answered.

¹⁶⁷ Wright, France in Modern Times, p. 212; François Caron, An Economic History of Modern France
(New York, 1979), pp. 135–62.
¹⁶⁸ Horne, Fall of Paris, pp. 345–6.
¹⁶⁹ For some of the specific resemblances between tsarist and Soviet Russia, see Pipes, Russia under
the Old Regime, which stresses how Russian rulers combined sovereignty and proprietary claims to the
people and the natural resources of Russia, and used the coercive institutions of the state to enforce
them. To comprehend the role that universal ethical principles, traceable ultimately to the Enlighten-
ment, played in fuelling opposition to both the tsars and the Soviets—that of the intelligentsia in the
case of the former and of the so-called Soviet dissidents in the case of the latter—see Shatz, Soviet
Dissent, which shows how similar ideologically and sociologically the intelligentsia and the dissidents
actually were.
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PART V
CONCLUSION
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Conclusion

Even if they had wanted to, the Bolsheviks could not have ignored the revolutions
in France that collectively comprised a tradition of revolution. Too many within
their political and ideological milieu had pronounced judgement on these revolu-
tions for the Bolsheviks not to do the same. It mattered not at all that the
judgements were favourable or unfavourable, or that they were offered by allies
of the Bolsheviks or by their enemies. Nor did it make much difference whether
those offering their opinions were contemporaries of the Bolsheviks or precursors
of them. One must bear in mind that Bolshevism emerged in the early twentieth
century out of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, which from its inception in the
early nineteenth century considered the four French revolutions from 1789 to
1871 part of its own intellectual heritage; this was partly because Russia had
nothing comparable in its own history. Radishchev, Herzen, Chernyshevskii,
Lavrov, and Tkachev were just the most prominent of the intelligenty who
considered the French revolutions they were familiar with sufficiently relevant
to their own lives to draw lessons from them that bore directly on their political
convictions. No less committed to doing this were Plekhanov and Axelrod and
younger Mensheviks such as Martov, whose radicalism, moral absolutism, and
alienation from the status quo—the essential attributes of the intelligentsia—were
also informed by Marxist ideology.
The Bolsheviks, of course, considered themselves the rightful heirs of the
intelligentsia, and formed strong opinions on matters on which the intelligentsia
had previously rendered judgement. They did the same thing, albeit to a lesser
extent, in the case of non-Russian socialists, whose views the Bolsheviks could not
ignore as long as they remained part of the larger movement of international
socialism; even after renouncing it in 1914 for the cowardice and opportunism its
leaders showed in supporting their own country’s declaration of war, Lenin and
his followers felt compelled to respond to criticism from the likes of Karl Kautsky
and Eduard Bernstein, whose apostasy preceded not only Kautsky’s in 1914, but
even the emergence of Bolshevism in 1903. Having unmasked such figures as
‘renegades’ was hardly a reason for the Bolsheviks to ignore them on the grounds
that their views were unworthy of rebuttal. For secular theocrats like the Bol-
sheviks, heretics were more dangerous than non-believers. And so when non-
Russian socialists like Kautsky invoked one or two or all four French revolutions
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in their indictment of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks had no choice but
to respond, and in doing so counter their critics’ assessment of these French
revolutions with assessments of their own.
Of course there were other, even more compelling reasons why the Bolsheviks
expended so much energy and so much ink speaking and writing about these four
French revolutions. Events in Russia in 1917 did not conform to the Bolsheviks’
expectations; the downfall of the monarchy in February was as surprising as the
relative ease with which they themselves’ took power in October. In these
instances their Marxism failed them. But this did not cause them to repudiate it.
Instead, the Bolsheviks could not help but believe, after 1917, that their Marxism
would guide them through any unexpected impediments encountered either in
consolidating power or in the furtherance of their ultimate objective of establish-
ing socialism and communism. But when necessary expedients like the NEP
rendered their Marxism, once again and at least for the foreseeable future,
irrelevant, they had no choice but to look elsewhere for guidance.
The Bolsheviks found what they were looking for in the French Revolutionary
Tradition. Earlier, when the Bolsheviks had no power and were far from home in
Western Europe and Siberia, it provided inspiration and legitimacy. And in the
fever pitch of 1917, when Lenin had to stiffen the spines of his recalcitrant
colleagues, and convince them they could replicate the heroics of the Jacobins
and the Communards and all the other courageous instigators of radical trans-
formation in France, it did exactly the same thing. Serendipitously, the French
Revolutionary Tradition left behind a legacy that Lenin importuned his fellow
Bolsheviks to continue.
Once the October Revolution had succeeded, however, the Bolsheviks looked to
the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871 more for guidance than for
the psychological benefits inspiration and legitimacy had previously conferred.
With their Marxism largely useless in providing a road map enabling the Bolsheviks
to navigate their arduous journey to socialism, they had no other way of making
sense of the course of events that followed in the 1920s, as the NEP, at the
beginning of the decade, discombobulated expectations about the Soviet economy;
by the end of it the Bolsheviks were genuinely frightened by the spectre the NEP
had raised of a Soviet Thermidor. But the Bolsheviks could not openly and
explicitly admit this, for to do so was tantamount to acknowledging either that
their Marxism was deficient or that they had taken power in 1917 in defiance of it.
For that reason—and also because the dictatorship they established disallowed
dissent in 1921 by banning any ‘factions’ that might coalesce in the course of
expressing it—they had no choice but to conclude that the difficulties they
experienced were the result either of opposition from enemies outside the Com-
munist Party or of betrayals by renegade communists inside it. ‘The revolution
betrayed’ was more than the title of a book by Trotsky. It was also a convenient
mantra of Bolshevism and Soviet Communism as a whole.
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Indeed, it was in supplying analogies for these betrayals that the revolutions in
France were perhaps most useful. The litany of Frenchmen who well before
Bolshevism emerged had caused a noble enterprise to turn morally dubious, or
simply rendered it ineffectual, was a long one. The Jacobins when they betrayed
the Hébertists and their supporters among the sans-culottes; the Thermidorians
after the Jacobins’ demise; Georges Grisel, the member of Babeuf ’s conspiracy
who betrayed it to the police; Napoleon Bonaparte after the coup of 18 Brumaire;
the petit-bourgeoisie supporting Cavaignac during the June Days; Louis Napoleon
after his replication of his uncle’s rise to power; the duplicity of the Communards
supposedly transmitting sensitive information to the Versaillais—in the minds of
the Bolsheviks these were all instances in which a virtuous cause was betrayed by
persons lacking virtue themselves.¹ Quite apart from the human drama entailed in
these events, the betrayals they encapsulated proved supremely attractive to
Marxist revolutionaries in Russia like the Bolsheviks, who could never acknowledge
that the reason their own revolution did not turn out as they expected it would was
because the socialist principles to which they were committed were incapable of
organizing humanity in a way that ensured material security while also enabling
every individual to achieve his full potential as a human being. Paraphrasing Martin
Malia’s summation of the seventy-four-year Soviet Experiment he believed to be
doomed from the outset, ‘socialism is impossible and yet the Soviets tried to build
it’.² But rather than acknowledging the unworkability of their objectives, the
Bolsheviks stressed their objectives’ betrayal by internal and external enemies—
while simultaneously scrambling to find temporary expedients to steady an unstable
ship they were unable to admit was destined to sink on its own accord.
The Bolsheviks, in short, almost always had to improvise, and their improvisa-
tions depended for their plausibility on their finding precedents in the modern
history of France. Why the French should have created a revolutionary tradition
when other peoples with similar grievances failed to do so is a question beyond the
purview of this study.³ But that this tradition existed is undeniable. The French
Revolution set forth fundamental principles on the basis of which politics and
society should be organized, and the revolutions that followed it in the nineteenth
century were arguably a lengthy commentary on these principles, sometimes, as in
1830, arguing for their sufficiency, other times for their radicalization, particularly
in 1848 and 1871 by socialists who thought the French Revolution laudable but
insufficient because it failed to nationalize private property; without it, the egali-
tarianism they favoured was impossible. Of course this tradition was perpetuated

¹ It is unclear if Grisel was acting in this instance as a government informer or had simply soured on
Babeuf ’s communism and betrayed the conspiracy voluntarily. Birchall, Spectre of Babeuf, p. 70.
² Malia, Soviet Tragedy, p. 498.
³ Robert Tombs has suggested that this was because the French Revolution politicized public life to
the point where politics and governance assumed outsized importance. Tombs, France 1814–1914,
pp. 1–3.
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after the French Revolution had long ended for reasons other than a desire to
bring to fruition the original revolutionary triad of liberté (that the French people
should be free), egalité (that the French people should enjoy social justice), and
fraternité (that all Frenchmen should live under the same government as members
of the same nationality). There were also more prosaic reasons. This tradition was
also a transgenerational phenomenon, its revolutions linked chronologically by
the ties of family: Cavaignac’s father had been a regicide in the French Revolution;
Blanqui’s had been elected to the Convention; Delescluze’s had been a republican
soldier and a commissioner under Napoleon.⁴ What is more, many of the insti-
tutions and much of the functional vocabulary of the French Revolution were
replicated in the revolutions that followed it: there was a Mountain in the 1848
Revolution, just as there was a Committee of Public Safety in the Paris Commune.
Even in less tumultuous times, the images and symbols of the French Revolution
were commemorated and perpetuated artistically: a statue of a typical sans-culotte
with the indispensable Phrygian cap on his head was erected in Paris in 1883;
elsewhere in the country were representations of Marianne, the iconic feminine
personification of the revolution, sometimes adorned with the bonnet rouge,
sometimes with ‘the more bucolic and peaceable whitesheaf crown’.⁵ And surely
the establishment of an endowed chair for the study of the French Revolution at
the Sorbonne in Paris in 1889 ensured that its message would be an ongoing
influence on French politics and intellectual life.⁶
In short, a revolutionary tradition already existed in France when the Bol-
sheviks had to look for one outside Russia because none existed within their own
history and culture. Neither the Decembrist revolt in 1825 nor the exploits of the
narodovol’tsy later in the nineteenth century were sufficient to sustain a tradition
of revolution, and in any case the Bolsheviks did not consider either phenomenon
a precedent worth continuing. The former was a failed coup, not a revolution, and
the latter, while heroic in personal terms, were counter-productive and destined to
fail. But all was not lost. As the preceding chapters have shown, the Bolsheviks
found what they needed in what this study has termed the French Revolutionary
Tradition. The result was a Bolshevik tradition of its own, a mythology about the
October Revolution and what followed it in the Soviet Union that based much of
its legitimacy on analogies the Bolsheviks themselves had drawn with the four
French revolutions—in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871—that preceded their own.
Some of the analogies the Bolsheviks drew were meant to illustrate similarities

⁴ Gildea, Children of the Revolution, p. 52.

⁵ Christopher Prendergast, The Fourteenth of July (London, 2008), p. 136.
⁶ The first incumbent of the chair was Alphonse Aulard. His successors included George Lefebvre
and Albert Soboul. The prestige they enjoyed—according to one French historian, it made whoever
held the chair ‘the dean of French Revolutionary studies’—increased the likelihood of their works being
known in Russia. Gary Kates, Introduction to The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New
Controversies, edited by Gary Kates (New York, 1998), p. 1.
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 495

between Russia and France; others were intended to illuminate differences. But all
were drawn because they were thought to be a source of wisdom, or at least of
insights making the task of building socialism in Russia easier. In sum, the
Bolsheviks drew analogies with French revolutions to make understandable
everything about their own revolution and its aftermath that they found perplex-
ing. Indeed, their puzzlement continued for the duration of the Soviet Union’s
existence because the task of constructing socialism and communism proved
considerably harder than originally anticipated.
In his study of perception and misperception in international affairs, Robert
Jervis has argued that analogies people make involving events they have lived
through are more powerful in their minds than analogies that are temporally or
geographically distant.⁷ This may be true as a general rule, but for the Bolsheviks
the opposite was the case. The very distance of the French Revolutionary
Tradition—geographically, temporally, and ideologically—from the Bolsheviks
increased its utility as a source of inspiration, moral legitimacy, fodder for political
polemics, and specific lessons in what they should replicate on the one hand and
avoid on the other. Being far away made these French revolutions more elastic,
more flexible, more easily moulded than historical events in Russia or in countries
more proximate to it geographically; and any analogies that might be drawn from
the latter could be more easily refuted because much more was known about their
factual basis. As a result, the Bolsheviks could easily change what they claimed to
see in these revolutions to conform to their particular needs (as Trotsky did
regarding Thermidor in 1935). Moreover, the fact that France experienced mul-
tiple revolutions, rather than only one revolution, was an additional attraction: if
one French revolution did not provide what the Bolsheviks were looking for, there
were always others that serve the same purpose.
What this study has been concerned with, in other words, is not the French
revolutions themselves, but how they were perceived, misperceived, and at
times distorted, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, in accordance with the
Bolsheviks’ needs and objectives both prior to the October Revolution and after it.
And if any of the Bolsheviks doubted their ability to comprehend events so distant
from their own experiences—which prior to 1917 consisted mostly of engaging in
interminable debates in unwanted solitude hundreds of miles from their homes—
their Marxist ideology, which like its creator they considered universally valid,
helped considerably—or so they said—in reassuring them. Lenin, for example,
never admitted to disregarding Marxism, to which he always ascribed omniscience
even when finding in French revolutions what he needed at any particularly
moment in his career. Nor did he question his Marxism when he was actually
revising it. The same was true, not surprisingly, for Trotsky, who never thought he

⁷ Jervis, Perception and Misperception, pp. 239–40.

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was revising Marxism when he grafted onto it his so-called Theory of Permanent
Revolution. The only instance of his consciously questioning the ideology he
professed for the entirely of his adult life was in 1939, when, in a single article,
he speculated that the Soviet Union might currently be degenerating from the
Bonapartism he thought descriptive of Stalinism into a form of bureaucratic
collectivism more intractable than Bonapartism and even further removed from
socialism.⁸
Thus armed with an ideology admitting neither error nor exceptions that
nonetheless was unable to explain a proletarian revolution in a country that was
as yet unready for it, the Bolsheviks vicariously transported themselves to France
in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871 (with detours to visit Napoleon Bonaparte and
Louis Napoleon), confident they would find there a veritable treasure trove of
prospective wisdom that compensated for their ideology’s deficiencies. And by
their own reckoning, they found what they were looking for. But in the French
Revolution, and in the Jacobin Terror in particular, the Bolsheviks discovered
something else, which would be especially useful in justifying any bloodletting that
enabled them to remain in power long enough to achieve their objectives. This was
a moral calculus that did not sanction evil means to achieve virtuous ends. Rather
what it held was that the moral virtue of an objective rendered morally virtuous
the means that were used to achieve it. In short, the Machiavellian distinction
between means and ends was an artificial one. Certainly it had no relevance to any
revolutionary enterprise like that of the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks that, in their
own considered opinion, was morally justified; the only imperative was the purely
practical one that the methods they use should be the most efficient ones available.
What the Bolsheviks learned from the Jacobins, in other words, was that in
achieving their goals, killing one person or a thousand persons was permissible,
and no different in ethical terms from using non-violent methods and killing no
one at all, because, in the Latin phrase Plekhanov cited in his ‘neo-Jacobin’ phase
to legitimize the harsh measures he would inflict once he possessed the power to
do so, salus revolutiae supreme lex.⁹ In rough translation, this means that whatever
the revolution demands is justified. But surely Plekhanov’s maxim—which of
course the Bolsheviks not only shared but made the basis of policy—is really nothing
more a recipe for a particularly disquieting form of ethical nihilism: if in certain
circumstances everything is permitted, then nothing is forbidden, and if nothing is
forbidden, moral principles do not exist because they cannot exist.
This moral calculus might have been reason enough to avoid drawing analogies
with the Jacobins and the French Revolution itself. Because the same calculus was
evident in the three revolutions in France that followed it (albeit to a much lesser

⁸ Leon Trotsky, ‘The USSR in War’, pp. 13–15.

⁹ Rossiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia, Vtoroi ocherednoi s”ezd. Polnyi tekst
protokolov (Geneva, 1903), p. 169.
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 497

degree because these revolutions lasted not nearly as long as the first one), the
same prohibition would seem to apply. But even if one leaves aside the ethical
dimension, which seems to suggest that all revolutions are corruptible, and
perhaps for that reason should not be attempted under any circumstances, there
were other reasons the Bolsheviks would have been better off ignoring the French
Revolutionary Tradition. Instead of helping them in deciding what to do, the
analogies it triggered in their minds had the opposite effect of immobilizing them
until they came to a consensus on how the terms of these analogies, such as
Jacobinism, Thermidor, and Bonapartism, should be defined. The Bolsheviks
wasted an inordinate amount of time discussing all three concepts, straining to
ascertain their meaning as if they were as real and as relevant as the conundrums
they were intended to resolve.
The result was that the Bolsheviks distorted the history of France the way
concave and convex mirrors in a funhouse distort the images of the persons
looking at them; the results were insights, impressions, and ostensible antecedents
that were misleading at best, and inaccurate and even counterproductive at
worst. And because their Marxist mindset told them that to categorise something
was to understand it, the Bolsheviks returned from their excursions into
French history laden down with concepts—specifically Jacobinism, Thermidor,
and Bonapartism—that proved incapable of explaining what more than anything
else they wanted and needed to know, namely how to make a successful revolution
in Russia and then to establish there a society that was just.
What ensued was not clarity but confusion. The debates on whether Jacobinism
was a good thing or a bad thing, and whether its adoption and application would
make a revolution easier or harder to achieve; on what Thermidor was and
whether it existed in the Soviet Union or might emerge there in the future; on
what Bonapartism implied as a form of governance and whether the Soviet Union
was already showing signs of it—all of these debates, without exception, were
never resolved, and the effect of this was that the Bolsheviks had no choice, really,
but to improvise some more. The result was a duality between the short term and
the long term that continued for the entirety of the Soviet Union’s existence: in the
short term its leaders devised policy consistent with Napoleon’s famous maxim
about acting without having at least some idea of what the consequences of one’s
actions will be, while in the long term remaining true to what they understood to
be Marxist ideology. This, too, produced its own confusion, particularly in the last
years of the Soviet Union, as perestroika became a series of frantic improvisations
for the purpose of reforming it before the system itself imploded under the weight
of its own contradictions.
In the case of the Bolsheviks, the cure for the uncertainty and indecision
fostered by the irrelevance of their ideology was even worse than the disease itself.
Analogies with the French Revolutionary Tradition were supposed to enable the
Bolsheviks to act decisively and in ways that were politically useful. But this was
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498    

almost always not the case. If the analogies the Bolsheviks drew between their own
revolution and the four revolutions in France that predating it had generated a
usable template for governance—instead of rhetorical fodder for intra-party
polemics and attacks on ideological enemies outside the party such as Kautsky
and the Mensheviks—the need to make policy ‘on the fly’ might not have been
so pronounced. Then again, historical analogies may simply be incapable of
providing the specific guidance the Bolsheviks needed. The history involved in
them may be so complex, so multifarious in the variables that are inherent in even
a single historical event, as to render analogies of any kind, not just those involving
separate countries with very different cultures and national histories, a fool’s gold
the inauthenticity of which cannot be concealed indefinitely. James Bryce may
well have been correct in claiming that ‘the chief practical use of history is to
deliver us from plausible historical analogies’.¹⁰
The Bolsheviks, in short, would have been better off had they known nothing of
the French Revolution, and of the revolutions in France in 1830, 1848, and 1871
that followed it. If analogies still seemed necessary, confining them to Russian
history would have had at least a chance of providing genuine assistance. For all
their rhetoric about proletarian internationalism, the Bolsheviks were always a
product of Russian national culture and knew more about their own country’s
history than they did about any other’s. Whether such analogies would have saved
the Soviet Union from collapse will forever remain an open question. But if this
study has relevance beyond its specific subject matter, of one thing one can be
certain. However alluring they might be for their ostensible powers of prognos-
tication, historical analogies more often than not will confound expectations
instead of confirming them, leaving those who look to them to bring the future
into focus in most cases worse off than if they had ignored them entirely.

¹⁰ James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London, 1888), vol. I, p. 11.

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(Petrograd, 1917).
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Index

ABC of Communism (Bukharin and Avrutis, X. A. (‘Cycle of the Great French

Preobrazhenskii) 187–8 Revolution’) 302–3
Abramovich, Rafael 237n11, 286, 418–19 Axelrod, Pavel 44, 81, 83, 90, 96, 100, 103,
Adler, Victor 76 119–20, 198, 201–2, 416–18
Ado, A. V. 218n169, 308, 312–16, 334 condemnation of Lenin as a ‘Russian
Afanasiev, Iurii N. 316, 328, 329nn43–4 Napoleon’ 418
Age of Revolution 37 conversion to Marxism 361
Agulhon, Maurice 212n143, 339n2 denounces Lenin in Iskra 98–9
Akimov, Vladimir 89–90, 100 on Lenin’s authoritarianism and centralism 96
Aksakov, Ivan 15 sees French Revolution as vehicle of urban
Alexander I 12–13, 16, 19, 21, 73, 174, 412 bourgeoisie 36
Alexander II 14–15, 32, 41–2, 74–5, 360
assassination of 74–5 Babeuf, François-Noël 23–4, 40, 44, 53, 80, 89,
Alexander III 15, 425 102, 226, 275, 289, 312, 493
Alexander, John T. 9n16 Babouvists 102, 118, 269, 275, 289, 294–6,
Alexandrovskii Garden 221 307, 312
Alexeev-Popov, V. S. 307–9, 315, 388 bust displayed in headquarters of Belorussian
Alliluyeva, Svetlana 285n39 Communist Party 298
Amann, Peter 357 Conspiracy of Equals 20, 153, 494
American Revolution 37, 325 more extreme version of Robespierre,
Amnuel, Anton (play, Marat) 227 according to A. E. Manfred 312
anarchism 29, 38, 72, 101, 158, 209, 459 Bagration, Pyotr 291
ancien régime 49, 122, 126, 150, 153, 247, 257, Bakunin, Mikhail 28, 31, 38, 50, 72, 73n70,
265, 296, 309, 333, 448 360–1, 394
Andreev, N. A. 221–2 condemns Jacobins for authoritarianism 28
Andrianov, V. M. 443n166 expresses admiration for Russian autocracy 28
Andropov, Iurii 300–2 on French Revolution of 1830 342
Annenkov, P. V. 5 praises Blanqui and the Blanquists in
Antonov, N. 203n117, 219 France 29
April Theses, Lenin’s 166–9, 468, 470–3 runs the World Revolutionary Alliance 29
Aptekman, O. V. 35 sees French Revolution as virtuous until
Arkhiv Vorontsova 19n67 betrayed by Jacobins 28
art, monumental 220 speaks of French government under Gambetta
Asafiev, Boris (Plamia Parizha) 226 as ‘Bonapartist’ 393
Ascher, Abraham 36n27, 99n62, 112n10, 199n101 writings on Paris Commune 458
Aulard, Alphonse 111, 139, 197–8 Baldwin, Roger S. 40n47
Aurora (battleship) 224n201 Banerji, Arup 381n82
Austria 61, 76, 147, 187, 252, 283, 340, 434–6 Bank of France 464–6, 474, 484
authoritarianism Barère, Bertrand 166, 294
Bolshevik 197, 414, 477 Barnave, Antoine 34
Bonapartist 422, 426 Baron, Samuel H. 98n55, 155n84,
Jacobin 28–9, 38, 42, 90, 155 368n43
Lenin’s 88n26, 89–99, 196, 477 ‘barracks communism’ 329
autocracy 28, 31, 41, 49, 73–4, 81, 99–100, 104, ‘barracks socialism’ 448
153n72, 207, 404, 488 Baskin, Iu. Ia. 307–9, 316n54, 388
Avrich, Paul 9n19, 32n3, 218n167, 482n135 Bastille, ‘Russian’ 34, 97, 115, 147–8
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526 

Bastille, storming of 115–17, 126, 141, 143n25, claim to be sole legitimate legatee of Paris
224, 215–16, 231, 279, 301, 340, 390 Commune 476
Baturin, N. N. 209–11 consider themselves rightful heirs of the
Bauer, Bruno 55n21, 56 intelligentsia 491
Beatty, Bessie 171n2, 405n38, 407n45 dictatorship 154–6
Bednyi, Demian (poem, ‘Kommunisticheskaia distort the history of France 497
Marsel’eza’) 225 emergence as faction within RSDLP 207
Belinskii, Vissarion 14, 21–2 fear of Bonapartism 448
Bergman, Jay 75n77, 214n150 inspired by French Revolutionary
Berlin, Isaiah 5n5, 31n1, 460n26 Tradition 492
Bernstein, Eduard 85–8, 97, 100, 123, 205, lack of passion regarding French Revolution of
486, 491 1830 340–1
Bestuzhev, A. A. 19 mass spectacles, expedient of 228–32
Bezymenskii, A. I. (poem, ‘The mythology 213–15, 224, 228, 459, 494
Sans-Culottes’) 225 National Bolshevism 236
Billington, James 65n45, 357, 363n26, 464n45, never romanticize the Communards 455
481n126, 482n136 on Jacobins and Girondins 110–38
Binns, Christopher A. P. 228n225, 232n235 order biographies of Danton, Robespierre, and
Birchall, Ian H. 198n96, 493n1 Marat 219
Bismarck, Otto von, 347–9, 384, 393n1, 399, 467 propaganda 215, 438n152, 481
passes anti-socialist laws 349 rank and file find the ‘Marseillaise’
Black Hundreds 153 inspiring 145
Blanc, Louis 35, 139, 361n19, 364n30, 378–9, rename tsarist ministries ‘commissariats’ 219
388–9 see Revolution of 1830 as a success 353
Blanqui, Louis-August 29, 47–8, 206, 221 use of the Arts to achieve objectives
Blanquism, Lenin charged with 123–5 228–32
Blanquists 48, 76, 80, 83, 89, 96, 123, 163–4, Bolshevism
301, 461 analogy with Bonapartism 416
Blok, Alexander 227 and creation of New Soviet Man 219
Bloody Sunday 106, 116 and nationalism 234n4
Blumenau, S. F. 328, 329nn43–4 as embodiment or expression of
Boffa, Giuseppe 328n42 Jacobinism 78
Bogdanov, Alexander 402 as universal revolutionary party 160
Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia 301 Aulard’s objections to 198
Bolkhovitinov, H. H. 332 authoritarianism of 197
Bolshakov, B. 325 betrayal of 415
Bolshevik, -s 40–1, 45, 48–50, 64, 78, 88, 93, 109, ‘Bible’ of 33
115, 127, 133, 143, 148, 151, 181, 209–10, causes revolution to end in failure, according
221, 347, 354, 371, 381, 386, 391, 411–15, to Chernov 153
427, 470–5 distinct from Menshevism 476
and Marx’s views on 1848 Revolution in doomed, according to Martov 238
France 363 emergence of 136, 491
and Mensheviks, schism separating 418 historical provenance of 207
art, monuments and statuary 220–3 ideology 290
authoritarianism of 197, 414, 477 Kautsky’s denunciation of 190, 191n75
belief that progress requires struggle 215 Martov’s condemnation of 202
believe Thermidor ended French Revolution origins of 208
prematurely 257 Promethean imperative in 254
call revolution of 1789 the ‘Great French red star symbol of 230
Revolution’ 375 relationship with Jacobinism 276
Central Committee 164 role Blanqui and Blanquists play in history
centralization of political authority 162 of 29n122
charge that revolution is going seriously synonymous with Blanquism, according to
wrong 170 Stalin 130
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transformational imperatives inherent in 250 overthrow of 339

Ustrialov’s oppostion to 235–6, 255 Restoration of 348
Bonaparte, Napoleon 73, 150, 174, 233, 243, 248, bourgeoisie
293–4, 304, 325, 343, 362, 369, 380, 391–2, betrays French Revolution according to
395, 405–6, 412, 417, 424, 451, 493, 496 Marx 56–60
abdication 3 French 62n40, 64, 132, 180–1, 188, 279, 285,
admired by Lenin and Trotsky 427 365, 374–5, 385, 395
Continental System 424 German 55, 64, 372, 375
coup d’état 3, 407 haute-bourgeoisie 68n52, 132, 175, 178, 182,
defeat at Leipzig 451 203, 204n123, 257, 260, 265–71, 282–4, 288,
defeat at Waterloo 73, 404, 451 308, 311, 344, 348, 388, 427, 456
destruction of the French republic 331 liberal 65, 123, 129, 284, 344, 348, 374, 383
dictatorship 32, 236–7 petit-bourgeoisie 27n115, 62, 68n52, 104,
failure of his Russian campaign gnaws at Marx 123, 126, 178, 182, 190, 194n83, 204, 210,
and Engels 73 257, 260, 265, 267n121, 272, 282, 289, 344,
Grand Armée 73, 292 365, 371, 378, 388, 413, 426–7, 435, 447,
On s’engage et puis on voit 370 463, 466, 493
perfects France’s state machinery 70 role in French Revolution, Marx’s assessment
Russian campaign 73, 424–5 of 51–78
Stalin’s ambivalence about 441 Bouvier, Beatrix 369n46
Bonaparte, ‘Russian’ 393–452 Bowlt, John E. 220n182, 221n186
Bonapartism 69, 73, 156, 232, 345, 387, 391–2, Braudel, Fernand 329
400–5, 410, 415–17, 425–6, 429–30, 496–7 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of 174, 234, 412–15
and Bolshevism, analogy between 416 Brezhnev, Leonid 300–17, 387, 446, 485
as deviation from Soviet doctrine 445 Brinton, Crane 46n69, 137n85
as integral aspect of French Revolutionary Brissot, Jacques-Pierre 8, 142
Tradition 392 Bryant, Louise 151, 165
Bolshevik fear of 448 Bryce, James 498
Bonapartist dictatorship 3n1, 33, 235, 246 Buchanan, Meriel 141n16
concept introduced to Bolsheviks by Marx Budenny, Semyon 246
and Engels 393 Bukharin, Nikolai 108, 111, 167–8, 239, 241, 249,
defined in The Large Soviet 255–7, 260, 270, 412, 422, 448, 473–4
Encyclopedia 442–3 ABC of Communism 187–8
Lenin’s fear of 413 and Stalin determine party orthodoxy in
Lenin’s views on 409–10, 413 matters of history 264
Marx and Engels on 394–400, 411 believes Bolsheviks could learn from French
one of reasons Trotsky lost out to Stalin 450 Revolution 187
potential impediment on road to condemns mere mention of Soviet
communism 451 Thermidor 259
Russian parodies of 414 role of Thermidor analyst 262
‘senile’ 436 sees French Revolution as morality play 188
Soviet 407–8, 420–2, 432 views events in Russia from global
Soviets’ obsession with 450 perspective 187
Stalin’s fear of 443 Bundists, the 88, 106
synonym for military dictatorship 3n1 Buonarroti, Filippo Michele 23–4, 31
threat posed to Communist Party 423 Burbank, Jane 199n104
Trotsky charged with 421 bureaucratism 244, 255, 261, 305
Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir 40, 172, euphemism for Soviet Thermidor 261
222nn191,194 Burgunker, E. O. 296–7
Bonnell, Victoria 112n12 Burke, Edmund 52, 322
Botkin, Vasilii 21–2
Bourbons 118, 153, 262, 341, 344, 348, 353, 395 Campanella, Tomas 303
ancien régime 49 capitalism 25, 34–6, 45, 48, 51–9, 62–4, 68–75,
monarchy 115, 248 82, 87–9, 102, 107, 118, 122, 126, 134, 155,
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171, 177–81, 188, 191, 201, 204, 210–12, Committee of Public Safety 13, 20, 27, 36,
233–4, 237, 240, 251–6, 261, 301, 306, 43–7, 91, 141, 143n25, 166, 177, 192n78,
320, 330, 345, 351–3, 358, 364, 372, 376, 248, 253, 330, 339, 480, 494
382, 385, 397–400, 410–13, 417–20, 424, Communards, the 339–40, 455–6, 461, 472–7,
429, 431, 434–5, 441–3, 447, 450–2, 483, 487
463–9, 476 aversion to violence commented on by
Carnot, Lazare 140, 150, 165, 184, 294 Stalin 483
Carr, Edward Hallett 235n8, 458n11 perceive similarities with Jacobins 477
Castro, Fidel (‘loved comparisons to the French viewed as facing forwards by Bolsheviks 487
Revolution’) 302n7 Communist League 48, 67, 365
Catherine the Great 7–13, 19, 29 Communist Manifesto 58, 73
Catholic Church, the 281, 325 Communist Party
Cavaignac, General Louis-Eugène 60, 70, 360, Belorussian 298
369, 379–80, 412, 493 French 302n7, 482
Cézanne, Paul 221 German 261
Chaikovskii, Nicholas 35 Italian 261
Champs de Mars 143n25 Soviet 205, 224, 232–3, 240, 245–7, 256–9,
Charles I 219 262–4, 267n122, 269, 272, 280, 290, 317–18,
Charles X, overthrow of 340 326, 349, 412, 417, 420–3, 428, 440–1,
Chartists, the 5, 349 444n168, 446, 472, 484, 492
Chaussinand-Nogaret, Guy 58n27 communist, -s 41, 62n40, 65, 224, 242, 246n45,
Cheka, the 171n2, 180, 213, 253, 415 247, 250, 256, 268n128, 269n130, 279, 324,
Chelishchev, P. I. 9 328, 333, 492
Chernenko, Konstantin 301–2 ‘barracks’ 329
Chernenko, Viktor 300 Chinese 485–6
Cherniak, E. B. 333 foreign 261
Chernier, André 17 French 261, 286n43
chernoperedel’tsy 41, 74, 210 German 244
Chernov, Viktor 5n6, 149–54, 165, 173, 197, Italian 244n33
369nn45–6, 379, 406–7 primitive 274
Chernyi Peredel (organization of populists) 36, Conquest, Robert 424n97, 437n149
74, 210 conservatism and paternalism, Russian 7
Chernyshevskii, Nicholas 14, 33, 102, 221, Constant, Benjamin 20
342–3, 351, 361, 393, 491 Constituent Assembly 162, 195–200
Chicherin, Boris 17 Consulate, the 429
Chinese Communists 485–6 Continental System, Napoleonic 73, 424
Chkheidze, Nicholas 154 Convention, the 27, 31, 43, 61, 248, 313–14
Chkhikvadze, V. 486 Corbesero, Susan M. 217n163,
Chopin, Frédéric 221, 230 228n224
Christianity 7, 24, 179, 277, 325, 439 Corday, Charlotte 215, 284
Chudinov, A. V. 204n123, 332nn59–61, Corney, Frederick C. 140n11, 224n202
334nn71–2 Council of the Land 35
Civil War, Russian 170, 175–6, 179–80, Cromwell, Oliver 275, 415n68
181, 185, 192–3, 197, 213, 242, 380, Cubism 219–21
385, 413–15, 421, 473 cult of personality, Stalin’s 483
Cloots, Anacharsis 26, 119 Cult of the Supreme Being 227
Clusert, Gustav Paul 464n45
Cobb, Richard 313 Dalin, V. M. 40n48, 271n142, 315, 353, 361n17
Cobban, Alfred 58n27 Dallin, David 238–9
Coker, Adam Nathaniel 4n2 Dan, Fëdor 198, 201, 239, 286–7, 416–20
Cold War 320, 438, 485–7 attacks Trotsky as ‘home-bred
collectivization 246, 254, 272, 277, 418, Robespierre’ 198–9
423, 438 concludes Soviet regime is fascist and
Cologne 60, 364 Bonapartist 419–20
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Dan, Lydia 240–1 Eisenstein, Sergei 215n151, 216, 224n201,

Daniels, Robert Vincent 256n75 227n218
Danielson, Nikolai 73 Elizabeth, Empress 4, 6
Danilevskii, Nikolai 15 Engels, Friedrich 4–5, 50–1, 55, 67, 74, 93, 123,
Danton (play by M. E. Levberg) 227 163, 221, 232, 308, 313, 324, 328, 364n30
Danton, Georges Jacques 35, 41, 62, 89, 106, 142, ‘Address to the Central Committee of the
183, 197, 203–4, 221, 225, 294, 298, 303 Communist League’ 65
Dantonists 106, 269 analogizes Russia to France in 1789 76
David, Jacques-Louis 139, 143n25, 215, 229 attends celebration of Robespierre’s
Oath of the Montagnards 215 birthday 65
David-Fox, Michael 217n165 believes peasants could play role in proletarian
Decembrist Revolt 3, 7, 13, 19–21, 385, 494 revolutions 366
Declaration of the Rights of Man 54, 184, 224, comes to admire Blanqui 76
325, 329 Class Struggles in France 366
Deich, Lev 75n76, 80, 463n39 Communist Manifesto 58
Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Eugène contradicts own ideology 75
Liberty on the Barricades 340, 457 describes Jacobins as ‘little philistines’ 71
monumental art of 220 establishes Universal League of Revolutionary
Delo 197 Communists 64–5
Delo Naroda 197 French Revolution marked ‘beginning of
Denike, Iu. 420 democracy in Europe’ 53
Desmoulins, Camille 25, 35, 89, 141, 229, 303 is hostile to Russian revolutionaries 72
Deutscher, Isaac 244n34, 249, 381n84, 421n93 justifies Jacobins’ guillotining the
Diakov, V. A. 20n77 Hébertists 76
Dimitrov, Georgii 431n125 repeatedly lauds Russian terrorists for
Directory, the 77, 80, 149–50, 168, 192, 197–9, audacity 75
238n13, 248n50, 271, 416, 437, 448 revises denigration of the Jacobins 72
Dmitrieva, Elizaveta 456–7 Revolution and Counter-Revolution in
Dobroliubov, N. A. 351 Germany in 1848 69n56
Dobroliubskii, K. P. 269 Russian edition of the Manifesto 75
Dolfuss, Engelbert 434–6 views on Louis Napoleon 395–8
Dolgorukov, P. V. 14 views on Napoleon Bonaparte 72–3, 395–8
Doriot, Jacques 261 writes manifesto of the Communist League 60
Doroshenko, A. 43n56 English Revolution 52, 275
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 15, 18, 456–7 Enlightenment, the 3–12, 16, 19, 51, 126, 148,
Doumergue, Gaston 434 304–5, 321, 332–3, 448
Doyle, William 9n22, 46n70, 269n129 enragés, les 38, 41, 62, 227, 260, 264, 268n128,
Druzhinin, N. M. 20n74 269, 294, 314
Dukes, Paul 9n18, 10nn23–5, 13n36, 16n55 Enteen, George M. 209n135, 265n118, 290n62
Duma 112, 131, 139n1, 142, 153, 351, 372, 404 Eremina, V. A. 464n41, 472n86
prorogued by the tsar in 1906 112 Erenburg, Ilia 225
repression of 404 Erickson, Ann. K. 290nn60,62, 293n73
Dumouriez, Charles 283 Estates General 8n13, 15, 17, 46, 141, 178
Duncan, Peter J. S. 415n67 European socialism 66, 157, 381
Dvinov, B. 287n48 European socialists 87, 167, 190, 467
Dzerzhinskii, Felix 172, 187, 213, 257, 301, Evans, Michael 364n29
332n60 evolutionary socialism 97, 114, 205
Dzhedzhula, K. E. 4nn2–3, 10n22, 11n30,
13n37, 16n56, 19n70, 53n7, 308 fascism 198, 280–1, 287, 293, 352, 420, 430–6,
447, 484–5
Eastman, Max 41n50, 184n53 February Revolution 133n76, 146–8, 151–5, 165,
economism 97, 114 180, 197, 406–8
Eisenhower, Dwight 444 fédérés 459
Eisenstein, Elizabeth 24n96, 58n27 Fedorov, Nicholas 15
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Femelidi, Vladimir 226 multifarious meanings imprinted into Russian

Fervacque, Pierre 184n52 public consciousness 212
feudalism 24, 34–40, 56–62, 67, 70, 93–4, 107, mythology of 213–14, 224, 354
116–21, 126, 133, 161–2, 178, 181, 189, 195, of 1830 339–54
212, 247, 253, 265–7, 275, 280–2, 295, of 1848 357–452
312–14, 331, 345, 353, 368, 376, 383, 404, of 1871 455–88
441, 447, 463 orchestral overtures about 226
Fichte, Johann 21 originally an ‘anarchist’ revolution 29
Figes, Orlando 5n6, 6nn9–11, 11n31, 112n13, part of collective memory of educated
140n9, 142n21, 144nn31–2, 145n36, Russians 139
146nn41–2, 149n55, 150nn57–8, personalized in the figure of Robespierre 297
156n87, 219n180 polarizes opinion in Europe 19
Figner, Vera 42–3 provides vocabulary of politics for
Finland 144–6, 162, 287, 378–9, 410, 471 Lenin 79
Winter War with Soviet Union 287 reactionary enemies of 62
First World War 98, 117, 133–6, 163, 182, 187, reflected in Stalin-era arts and popular
250, 375–8, 413, 467, 470 culture 296
Fischer, Ruth 244 reinterpreted by Soviet historians 294
Fitzpatrick, Sheila 273n143, 278 relationship to perestroika 321
Five Year Plan 217 significant role in formulating theory of
Florinsky, Michael T. 4n3 scientific communism 53
Forrest, Alan I. 219n179 teleology of 63
Fouché, Joseph 304 tradition 165, 354, 392, 456, 492, 497
France, Anatole 139 Frenkin, M. S. 151n62
France, Bank of 464–6, 474, 484 Fridliand, Ts. 205n124, 268–70, 271n140
Franco-Prussian War 71, 376, 460n24 Fritzsche, Peter 212n144
Frankel, Jonathan 90, 90nn35–6 Fueloep-Miller, René 225nn206–7,
Franklin, Benjamin 327 230n233
freedom icons (liberté, égalité, fraternité) 140 Funck-Brentano, Frantz 299n94
freedom trees 218 Fundamental Laws in Russia, issuance of 372
Freiberg, N. P. 269 Furet, François 53–5, 56n22, 65nn46–7, 313,
French Revolution 327–9, 341, 345nn29–30
adjusts political balance of power in France 51 Futurism 219, 221
ambivalence of Marx and Engels 77
analogies to its Thermidorian phase 254 Gambarov, A. 463n40
and Soviet cinema 226 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 221
as subjective idea 31 Garvi, Pëtr 99n59, 239–41, 418
bicentennial prompts re-evaluation 323 locates roots of Soviet Bonapartism in the
‘destroy[s] freedom’ 23 NEP 417
ends feudalism while inaugurating industrial Gaulle, Charles de 485
capitalism 212 Gavrilichev, V. A. 14n44, 24n95, 389
grounded in the Enlightenment 51, 321 Gefter, Mikhail 328
helps Lenin formulate plan for taking power in Geldern, James Von 147nn43–4
Russia 79 George VI, coronation of 218
in the Russian Revolutionary Ger’e, Vladimir 14
Movement 31–50 German, -y
informs mythology Bolsheviks created about bourgeoisie in 1848, passivity of 64
their own revolution 224 Communists 244, 261
initial reception of 3–30 invasion of USSR 218, 276–7, 290n59, 292–3,
inspires naming and renaming of babies and 431n125
inanimate objects 218 Nazi 129n65, 146, 281n23, 290, 352n53,
Marx’s view of 52 417n79, 419n85, 420, 436
Marxist inheritance of 51–78 radicals 61
Marxist–Leninist historians of 204 Social Democratic Party 96, 120, 381
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unification of 376, 384 Heenan, Louise Erwin 150n56

Papen and Schleicher governments in Heine, Heinrich 393
434, 436 Helphand, Alexander (adopted revolutionary
Getzler, Israel 89n29, 184n50, 199nn102–3, pseudonym ‘Parvus’) 381–2
476n107 Helsinki Accords 329
Gidulianov, P. V. 482n134 Helvétius, Claude Adrien 19, 320–1
Gildea, Robert 212n143, 358n6, 396n17, 494n4 Herzen, Alexander 23, 23n94, 29, 31,
Girondins, the 39, 62–3, 84–9, 106, 119, 132–3, 72, 89, 221, 343, 358–61, 389,
268, 289, 295, 309, 314, 331–3, 368, 388 394, 491
glasnost 300, 318, 322–4 admiration of the revolution 24–6
Globa, Andrei 225 arrival in Paris 25
Glorious Revolution 5, 20n72, 52, 326 berates Parisians for bourgeois corruption 25
Gogol, Nikolai 221 calls into question moral legitimacy of French
Goldman, Emma 40n46 Revolution 27
Golikov, Marshal F. I. 446 criticizes Molodaia Rossia 27
Golitsyn, Alexander 10 French Revolution became a cautionary
Golitsyn, Dmitrii 10 tale 27
Golubeva, M. P. 32n7 on Jacobin Terror 26–7
Goncharov, A. D. 299 reads works of Michelet, Thiers, Blanc,
Gorbachev, Mikhail 302, 317–20, 320–9, 333, Lamartine, Tocqueville, Guizot 24
387, 401, 449 thoughts shaped by emotions 28
comments on French Revolution 319–20 tutor is a former Jacobin 24
era of 62n39, 203, 204n123, 301, 304, uses term ‘Bonapartist’ pejoratively
316–35, 330–1, 349, 389, 447 393–4
need for additional revolutions 219 Hibbert, Christopher 212n143
October Revolution rightful successor of Higonnet, Patrice 46n72
French Revolution 318 Hilton, George 455n2
policy of glasnost 300, 318, 322–4 historians, Soviet 290, 306–16, 327–31, 389
policy of perestroika 423 attacked by Stalin 274
regime of 487 consensus on Jacobins 309–10
Gordon, A. V. 333 in Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras 447
Gorev, B. I. 80n3, 205–6, 416 on 1848 Revolutions in France and
Gorky, Maxim 141, 173, 214, 227, 291 Germany 387–90
Gossek, François-Joseph 299 on Jacobins 266, 295–6
GPU; see Cheka on Paris Commune 484
Grand Armée 73, 292 on Revolution of 1830 351–3
Granovskii, Timofei 21–2 specializing in the French Revolution 314
Great Depression 217 support Baturin and denounce
Great Patriotic War, the 279 Mitskevich 211
Grisel, Georges 493 Hitler, Adolf 129n65, 276, 292, 352, 423,
Gruppa Osvobozhednie Truda (Group for the 436n142, 442
Emancipation of Labour) 81 Ho Chi Minh 302n7
Guesde, Jules 121n43, 136 Hoffman, Stanley 47n75
Guizot, François 24, 33, 53, 354, 361 Holy Family (book by Marx and Engels) 56–7
Gukovskii, A. I. 112 Holy Synod 15
Guseinov, Ye. E. 332 Hosking, Geoffrey 470n76
Gusev, S. I. 402 Houghteling, James L. 142n23
Hughes, Lindsey 6n12
Harbut, Vladimir 225 Hugo, Victor 89, 127, 226, 302, 304, 340
Hardman, John 222n189 Les Misérables 340
Heald, Edward T. 143nn26,28 Ninety-Three 127
Hébert, Jacques 40, 89, 106, 203, 275 Hungarian Revolution 72, 486
Hébertists 61–2, 106, 118, 178, 260, 264–6, 269, Hungary 187
275, 289, 296, 493 Hutton, Patrick H. 48nn79–81
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Iaseneva, M. I. 80 more progressive than the Girondins,

Ignatova, N. G. 445 according to Lenin 282
Ilina, G. I. 111n7, 139nn3,5, 222n188, 229n227 Narochnitskii’s views on 294–5
imperialism 21, 104, 134, 376, 385, 400, 413, perceived similarities with Communards 477
442, 479 provide Marx with model for taking power and
industrial capitalism 34–6, 48, 51–2, 58n27, 59, using it 60
62–4, 68, 73–5, 82, 89, 118, 126, 155, 179, Revunenkov’s views on 330, 314
212, 276, 280–1, 301, 345, 358, 372, 392, 398, Russian 139–69, 210
400, 424 socialists 37
in England 52 Soviet historians on 266, 295–6, 309–10
in France 51, 301, 424 Stalin impressed by 278–9
Industrial Revolution 343, 357, 369 Terror 7, 15, 20, 26, 42, 47, 61, 141, 157–9,
industrialization 58n27, 217, 227, 246, 250, 254, 180, 200, 213, 235, 314, 323–7, 496
272, 286, 341, 358, 390, 418–19, 438, 488 Jacobites 455
Institute of Red Professors 208, 265 Jaurès, Jean 58n27, 111, 136, 173, 221,
‘Internationale’, the 145–6, 230–1, 481 308, 313, 328n40
lyrics written by a Communard, Eugène Jewish Bund 88
Pottier 481 Jews 54
official anthem of the Second Johnson, Christopher H. 341n8
International 145 Journal Officiel 460
replaces ‘Marseillaise’ as anthem of Soviet Judaism 439
Union 146 Julius Caesar 412–13
Iskra 85–98, 198, 418 July Days 341–4, 410
Iskusstvo (The Arts) 220 July Monarchy 344
Israel, Jonathan 137n85 June Days 358–74, 382, 389, 456, 493
Istorik marksist 287, 290
Istpart 224 Kadets, the 129, 172, 183–4, 197, 218,
Italian Communist Party 261 373–4, 411
Itenberg, B. S. 9n17, 14n42, 15nn49–50, 18n65, Kaganovich, Lazar 258, 285–6
32n9, 35n21, 36n26, 43n60, 327–8, 389 Kalpashnikov, Andrew 213
Ivan III 12 Kamenev, Lev 166, 222, 243, 470–5
Izvestiia 141, 220, 235, 326, 408, 486 Karamzin, Nicholas 11, 17, 29
Kareev, N. I. 14, 73, 140n6, 224, 225n204,
Jackson, George 80n2 265n119, 351–2
Jacobin, -s 22, 31–42, 49, 76, 82, 89, 96, 108, 120, Kariakin, Iu. F. 315n49
127, 143n25, 169, 209, 229, 268, 368, 388, Karp, S. Ia. 332
415, 429, 493 Karpovich, Michael 48n78
accept principle of popular sovereignty 47 Katorga i Ssylka (Prison and Exile) 209–11
adoption of Red Flag in 1792 112 Kautsky, Karl 120–2, 129, 194, 202, 308, 372–3,
as proto-Stalinists 274–300 377, 385, 415, 486, 491, 498
attempt to create a Republic of Virtue 438 analogy between Bolshevism and
Bolsheviks’ ritualized idealization of 332 Bonapartism 416
centralism of 133, 437 argues Bolsheviks took power
Club 16, 43, 46, 102, 169 prematurely 192
considered ‘progressive’ patriots by Stalin 296 challenges legitimacy of October
described by Lukin as ‘petit-bourgeois’ 288 Revolution 478
dictatorship 49 considers Terror morally wrong 192
helped cause Stalin’s Terror, according to critique of October Revolution 190
V. Sergeev 334 Dictatorship of the Proletariat 190–1
Jacobin–Girondin dichotomy 282, 332 on Paris Commune debate 478–9
Jacobinism 13, 43, 84, 90–5, 103, 109, 115, rejects analogy between Paris Commune and
165, 206–8, 497 October Revolution 478
leaders 221–3 sees October Revolution as hoax 191
Marx’s view of 56–64, 67, 71–2 target of ad hominem attack by Lenin 479
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target of ad hominem attack by Trotsky 480 Kolokolin, V. 267

Terrorism and Communism 190–2 Kolonitskii, Boris 112n13, 140n9, 142n21,
Kazakov, N. I. 10n27 144nn31–2, 145n36, 146nn41–2, 150n57,
Kedrov, Iu. 346n32 219n180
Keep, John L. 6n11, 80n4, 111n4, 153n75, Kommunist 486
183nn45–6 Kondratieva, Tamara 14n48, 18n63, 20n75,
Kenafick, K. J. 393n3 41n51, 140, 234nn4–5, 244n32, 259n89,
Kenez, Peter 226n214 267nn123,125, 269n131, 270n135,
Kerensky, Alexander 5n6, 141n16, 144–9, 157, 271nn139,141, 274n1, 288n53
379, 406–11, 422, 427, 449 Kornilov, General Lavr 151, 369, 407,
accused of ‘Bonapartism’ 150n56 422, 426–7
admires Napoleon Bonaparte 150n58 Korolev, A. I. 485n155
allegations of Bonapartism 426 Kotkin, Stephen 127n57, 150n58, 218n175,
argues for military offensive in the summer of 292n68, 421n91, 423n96
1917 149 Kovalenko, Iurii 326
as Russian Louis Blanc 378 Kozhokin, Evgenii 324–5
comparison to major figures of the French Kozhukov, S. 293n77
Revolution 150 Krasin, Iu. A. 447
fear of a military dictatorship 163 Krasnoe Koleso (The Red Wheel) 140
fears coup like Napoleon’s 151 Krasso, Nicolas 184n54
political ineptitude 408 Kravchinskii, Sergei 43
sees French Revolution as primarily a political Kronstadt Revolt 161, 180–2, 218, 234, 241, 247,
revolution 151 433, 474, 477, 482
states he would never be the ‘Marat of the Kropotkin, Pëtr 36n25, 38–41, 183n44, 268n128,
Russian Revolution’ 151 313n41, 343, 362, 348–9
states watchwords were liberté, égalité, and minimizes September Massacres of
fraternité 149 1792 39
support for continued involvement in the First on Paris Commune 458–9
World War 156 sees French Revolution as a peasant
warns Lenin not to take power via Jacobin insurrection 38
‘dictatorship’ 152 sees Paris Commune as urban equivalent of
Kerzhentsev, P. M. 484–5 peasant commune in Russia 39
Ketscher, Nikolai 24n97 Krukovskaia, Anna 456
KGB 301 Krupskaia, N. K. 468n65
Khalturin, Stepan 221 Krylenko, N. V. 213
Kheifets, F. 281–3 Kubikov, Ivan (disdain for Lenin and the
Khmer Rouge 302n7 Bolsheviks) 156
Khoros, V. G. 33n13 Kugelmann, Ludwig 72nn64–5
Khrushchev, Nikita 240, 300–17, 324, 387, 443–7 kulaks, the 185, 245, 263, 288, 414
and Brezhnev 300–17, 324, 328, 387, 447 Kuleshov, V. 14n43
descent into Thermidorian reaction 240 Kumanev, G. A. 285n41
loses power in coup 446 Kuomintang 253n67
policy of partial de-Stalinization 444 Kutuzov, Mikhail 291–4, 442
removal of Zhukov 443–6 Kuznetsov, F. F. 14n45
Kibalchich, N. I. 42
Kirov, Sergei 437 Lafargue, Paul 48, 397
Kirpotin, V. Ia. 274 Lafayette, Marquis de 34, 119, 220n181, 227, 284,
Kiselev, E. V. 333 298, 324–5, 331, 339, 346
Kliuchevskii, Vasilii 14 laissez-faire economics 269, 283
Kluchert, Gerhard 363n28 Lamartine, Alphonse de 24, 32, 388–9
Kobiakov, Sergei 213 Lang, David Marshall 11n32
Kochubei, Viktor 16 Larin, Iurii 124, 199
Kogan, E. I. 298 Larin, Mikhail 219
Kolchak, Admiral 234 Lassalle, Ferdinand 221, 397
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Lavrov, Pëtr 37–8, 144, 351, 457, 491 on the ‘Internationale’ and ‘Marseillaise’ 145
analysis of Paris Commune, Parizhskaia on the Paris Commune 378, 463–73
Kommuna 18 marta 1871 goda 457 on the proletariat and peasantry 121, 132, 164
sees French Revolution as incapable of on the Revolution of 1830 347–8
achieving the social justice 37 on the Revolution of 1848 372, 380
Law of Suspects 278 One Step Forward, Two Steps Back 99
League of Nations 286 State and Revolution 162–3, 379, 471
Lebedev, N. K. 458n17 terror policy 114, 180–3
Lefebvre, Georges 58n27, 316, 494n6 Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the
Legislative Assembly 115, 248 Democratic Revolution 106
Legitimists 345–7, 395 What is to be Done? 466
Lehning, Arthur 29n122 Leningradskaia Pravda 259
Leipzig, Battle of 451 Lenoe, Matthew 278n17
Lemke, M. K. 25nn100,102, 361n20 Leontiev, Konstantin 15
Lenin, V. I. 23, 33n11, 38, 40, 45, 48, 64–5, 79, 88, Leroux, Pierre 361n19
91–7, 108–9, 110n1, 116, 119, 122–3, 127, Lesnodorski, B. 9n21
132, 143, 202, 208, 221–2, 232, 270n136, Levberg, M. E. (play, Danton) 227
323, 328, 334, 347, 352, 378–81, 390, 401–5, Levitskii, V. O. 416
418, 421, 425, 463, 473–5 Liberman, Simon 102n67, 219n176
and Blanquism 123–5, 158, 205 Lichtheim, George 487n165
and Bonapartism 402–14, 418 Lieblich, André 239n15
April Theses 166–9, 468, 470–3 Limonov, Iu. A. 141n14, 217n161,
as Russian Robespierre 79–109, 173 229nn229,231
attacks French socialists 136, 173 Linton, Marisa 8n14
attacks Martynov as Russian Girondin 105 Lithuanian Castle in Petrograd, destruction
attacks on Kautsky 193, 479 of 147
authoritarianism 89 Litolff, Henri 226
Complete Collected Works 413 Liubatovich, Olga 43n58
Decree on Peace 164 Lobanov-Rostovsky, Andrei 149n53
dictatorial proclivities of 96 Lockhart, R. H. Bruce 142n22, 151n65
essay, ‘The Class Origins of Present-Day and Lodder, Christina 220nn182–3
“Future” Cavaignacs’ 379 Loi Le Chapelier 71, 266
European revolutions of 1848 373–4 Lopatin, German 75
exile in Finland 144, 378–9, 410 Loris-Melikov 15
expresses fear of a Russian Cavaignac 380 Lotte, S. A. 271
formulates views on French Revolution 79, Louis Napoleon 3n1, 26–8, 59, 68–73, 81,
85–6, 102, 131 291n63, 348, 352–4, 362, 366, 387–9,
Leninism 301–35, 352, 387, 475 391–3, 399, 403–7, 412, 426, 447,
Leninist orthodoxy 130, 287, 205n125, 451–2, 493–6
261n99, 282, 301, 306, 314, 328, 331, 387 Louis Philippe 195, 340–1, 344, 352, 361, 367
Letters on Tactics 470 Louis XVI 9–10, 14, 24, 32, 151, 185, 219, 283,
on 1848 Revolution 371–2 324, 352, 438
on Axelrod 100–1 Louis XVIII 279
on centralization 479 Loukomsky, General 218n170
on Girondins 114 Lucas, Colin 58n27
on Hébertists 131 Luddites 5
on Jacobins and Jacobinism 89, 101–7, Lukin, N. M. 58n27, 202–3, 222, 266–8, 271,
114–15, 159–61, 175–8, 271, 289 288–90, 294
on Marx and Marxism 79–80, 87, 97, 101, 124, article, ‘Lenin and the Problem of the Jacobin
372, 471 Dictatorship’ 287–8
on revolutionary tradition 375 emphasizes role of military in protecting
on Russian Girondins 101 French Revolution 289
on the Convention 176 French and Russian Revolutions are different
on the First World War 134–6, 457 in fundamental ways 202
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‘How the Proletariat Perpetuates Martov, Iulii 81, 100, 120, 125, 132, 198,
Remembrance’ 219 199, 202–3, 238, 266, 315, 346, 369,
on Robespierre 203–5 412, 416, 486
Lunacharskii, Anatolii 125–7, 208, 216, accuses Bolshevik government of being
220–3, 229 ‘Thermidorian-Bonapartist’ 417
Luxemburg, Rosa 96–7, 194–5, 368n44 ambivalence on French Revolution 200
accuses Lenin and Trotsky of dictatorship 196 analysis of French Revolution 200–1
believes moderate revolution was an argues Russian socialists should not support
oxymoron 195 First World War 134
defends Lenin 124 argument that civil war started Soviet Union
denounces Lenin’s authoritarianism 96 on path to Bonapartism 417
doubts political legitimacy of October criticisms of Jacobins 199
Revolution 196 quotes Marx regarding Paris Commune 477
fears of Lenin’s authoritarianism 196 sees Lenin’s authoritarian inclinations as
‘Jacobin’ 155–6
Machism 108 views on Jacobinism 90
MacMillan, Margaret 111n8 views on Paris Commune 476–7
Magna Carta 325–6 warns of Russian Thermidor 200–1
Mainov, I. I. 35 Martynov, Alexander 90, 370
Mainz, Valerie 283n27 argues Lenin was trying to fuse Marxism and
Makhnovets, V. P. 89nn27–8 Jacobinism 103
Malenkov, Georgii 443n165 Martynovites 106
Maletskii, A. 198n99 questions Lenin’s credentials as socialist and
Malia, Martin 23n93, 25, 27n111, 45n66, 51, revolutionary 104
52n2, 358n5, 493 sees Lenin as no different from Jacobins 104
Manfred, A. Z. 17nn58,61, 22, thinks nothing good can come from any party
62nn40–1, 71n60, 73n70, 203, Lenin leads 103–4
311–12, 353, 388–9 Two Dictators 103
Marat, Jean-Paul 21, 221, 331–2, 39–41 martyrdom, revolution as 455–88
chocolate factory and street in Leningrad Marx and Engels 363, 391, 394, 403–5, 426
named after him 302 ambivalence regarding French Revolution 77
Marat (play by Anton Amnuel) 227 and terrorism 400
Marat (Soviet battleship) 218 Bonapartism 393–9, 411, 450
Marat Street, Moscow, renamed from Holy Family 56
Nikolaevskii Street 218 Marx–Engels Institute 206n128, 349, 380
Maratism 213 on Louis Napoleon 394
murder of 42n52, 215, 225 on Paris Commune 464
praised by Molok 284 Revolution of 1830, lessons from 343, 346
Marcosson, Isaac Frederick 142n20 Marx, -ism, -ist 36, 50–2, 108, 206–9, 221, 282,
Maretskii, Dmitrii 262, 263nn110–11 306, 347, 367, 381, 492
‘Marseillaise’ 225, 229, 231, 343 and Napoleon Bonaparte 441
acquires multiple meanings 144 determinism 94
becomes de facto national anthem of dialectic 133
Russia 142 Historians, Pan-Russian Conference of 264
customary in major cities of Russia 143 Historians, Society of 270
given Russian lyrics by Pëtr Lavrov 144 ideology 55, 66, 79, 82, 85, 108, 123,
informs aspects of daily life in Petrograd 143 160, 186, 211, 295, 353, 368, 439,
inspires Bolshevik rank and file 145 441, 450, 491, 497
most obvious symbol of French Revolution in inheritance of the French Revolution 51–78
Russia 111–12 orthodox, -y 58n27, 66, 85, 93, 97, 114–15,
replaced by the ‘Internationale’ as anthem of 157–8, 163, 166, 208, 261n99, 321–6, 366,
Soviet Union 146 402, 441
‘Russian Song of Liberty’ 213 Russian 41, 82, 208, 347, 366–7, 375
sung in Tiananmen Square 302n7 socialists 198
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Marx, Karl 48, 50, 55, 65, 72–4, 93, 123, 155, 221, obsessed with French Revolution 154
232, 308, 313, 324, 328, 363–5, 375, 460, 470 promise Nicholas II will not suffer the fate of
admiration for Blanqui 76 Louis XVI 141
Arnold Ruge, letter to 54–5 think danger to Revolution comes from Right
Bakunin, hatred of 72 via military dictatorship 155
Capital 72–3 viewed as political cowards by Lenin 374
Civil War in France 53, 398, 345, 460–1, views on Paris Commune 476–7
462n34, 471 Metternich, Klemens von 340
Class Struggles in France 53, 65, 68, Meyerhold, Vsevolod 216
344nn26–7, 345n31, 364n30, 365n32, 366 Mgebrov, A. A. 216
Communist Manifesto 58, 73–5 Michelet, Jules 24, 104n74, 139
dalliance with Russian terrorism 372 Mikhailov, Alexander 42
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Mikhailovskii, Nikolai 36
Bonaparte 68–70, 335n76, 368, 394–7, Mikoyan, Anastas 446
461n31 Miliukov, Pavel 18, 116
essay, ‘Jewish Question’ 54 Miliukov, Pavel 5n6, 149n51, 150n56, 156–9,
Holy Family 55–7, 80n7, 344 182, 234, 258
Neue Rheinische Zeitung 60, 371 Miller, Martin A. 5n7, 110n1
on 1848 Revolution 59, 70, 377 Millerand, Alexandre 86–7, 121n43, 136
on French Revolution 51–7, 61–3, 71 Mirabeau (Soviet battleship) 218
on Jacobins 56–62, 67, 71–2 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti 34–5, 89, 142,
on Louis Napoleon 395–8 150, 298, 331
on Napoleon Bonaparte 72–3 Mirkin-Getsevich, M. V. 234
on Revolution of 1830 344–6 Mirskii, B. 234n2
on the Paris Commune 459–63 Mirsky, D. S. 17n59
Permanent Revolution 66 Mitskevich, S. I. 207–11
praises Narodnaia Volia 211 Molchanov, N. 327
Russophobia 72–3 Molodaia Rossiia 208, 361
Universal League of Revolutionary Molok, A. I. 283–4, 293nn75–6, 484
Communists 64–5 Monosov, S. 267
Maslow, Arkadi 244 Montagnards, the 86
Mason, Edward S. 456n4, 460n28, 472n86, Montefiore, Simon 285
474n95, 482n134 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat 320–1
Mason, Timothy 436n142 monuments and statuary, Bolshevik 220–3
Mathiez, Albert 8n15, 58n27, 264, 286, 312–16 More, Thomas 303
Mayer, Robert 80n6 Morozov, Nicholas 34n20, 43
Mazour, Anatole 13n41 Moscow State University 202, 313
McConnell, Allen 12n33 Moscow, uprising in December 1905 372
McLaren, Moray 455n1 Muraviev, Nikita 20n72
McNeal, Robert 249 mythology
Medvedev, Roy 304 Bolshevik 224, 228, 299, 459, 494
Mendel, Arthur P. 28n120, 458nn12–13 revolutionary 213–14
Menshevik, -s 88, 103, 106, 114, 120, 124–5, Soviet 317–19, 480
128, 134, 148, 181–2, 198, 201, 209, 215,
218, 247, 255, 258, 373, 381, 400–2, Naarden, Bruno 71n61
409–13, 419, 474, 498 Nabokov, Vladimir 6
believe Bolshevik coup d’état will be a Namier, Lewis 149n54
catastrophe for Russia 156 Napoleon; see Bonaparte, Napoleon
debate Soviet Thermidor 286 Narochnitskii, A. L. 294–5
decision not to support the October Narodnaia Volia (The People’s Will) 41–3, 74,
Revolution 239 120, 206–9, 221, 361, 372, 463
Marxism as sacred doctrine 367 terrorism of 46, 205n125, 206–7
misunderstand Stalin 239–40 narodovol’tsy 42, 49, 80, 102, 120, 207–8
never warm to the ‘Marseillaise’ 145n39 assassination of Alexander II 74
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perceive similarities with Jacobins 44 Oshanina, Maria 43

practise terrorism 41–2 Osinskii, V. V. 185
Nash put’ 202 Osvobozhdenie 105
Natanson, Mark 152 Ozouf, Mona 148
National Assembly in France 31–5, 46–8,
53, 71, 248, 364 Paine, Thomas 322
National Bolshevism 236 Palmer, R. R. 33n15, 297n86, 438n151
Naumov, V. 445nn169–70,172 Paris Commune 39, 53, 124, 133,
Nazi, -s 240 165, 342, 350–3, 378, 389, 452–9,
Germany 129n65, 146, 281n23, 290, 352n53, 468–76
417n79, 419n85, 420, 436 and October Revolution, analogy
invasion of USSR 218, 276–7, 290n59, 292–3, between 476–8
431n125 as proletarian dictatorship 477, 483
Nazism 280, 420 Bolshevik claim to be sole legitimate legatee
Nazi–Soviet Pact 287 of 476
Nechaev, Sergei 29, 31, 73n70 Bolshevik propaganda regarding 481
Necker, Jacques 284 destruction of 75, 345
Nekrasov, Nikolai 149 establishment of 72
Neue Rheinische Zeitung 60, 63, 364, 388 extolled and honoured by Soviet
Neue Zeit 96 government 482–5
New Economic Policy (NEP) 170, 180, 232–3, last revolution in an age of revolutions 488
238–44, 254–5, 263–4, 249–50, 417–18, led by ‘petitbourgeois’ professionals 456
421–3, 433, 437, 492 martyrdom 340
New Soviet Man 214, 219, 277 suppression of 136, 385
Nicholas I 13–14, 17, 21 Pasternak, Boris 216
Nicholas II 15–17, 72, 84, 115, 151, 184–5, 219, patriotism, revolutionary 168, 278
404, 425 Paul I 13
Nieuwenhuis, Ferdinand Domela 462 Paxton, Robert O. 431n125
Nikitenko, A. V. 32 peasants’ commune (obshchina) 72
Nikitenko, Dnevnik 32n4 Péchoux, P. 28n121
Nikolaevskii, Boris 240, 380, 420 Pelshe, P. A. 224n203
Nilsson, Nils Ake 141n19, 223n198 perestroika 300, 318–24, 423, 449
Novaia zhizn’ 122 Permanent Revolution, Theory of 94,
Novoe vremia 323 480, 496
Novyi luch 199 Perovskaia, Sofiia 221
Novyi Vavilon (film, The New Babylon) 481 Pestel, Pavel 21, 47
Peter III 4
Obozrenie teatrov (Survey of Theatres) 141 Peter the Great 7, 12, 53
obshchina (peasants’ commune) 72 Peter-Paul Fortress 147, 213, 230
October Revolution 28, 40, 79, 108, 127, 145–8, Peters, Iakov 171n2
152, 165–71, 184–6, 199, 213, 221–3, 250, Petrograd Soviet 153
323–4, 353, 375, 380, 411–12, 432, 439 Petropavlovsk (Soviet battleship
and Paris Commune, analogy between renamed Marat) 218
476–8 Petrovskii, P. G. 258
as Bolshevik myth 214–15 philosophical idealism, German,
emigration after 110n1 influence of 4
legitimacy of 233, 478 Pilsudskii, Józef Klemens (Trotsky’s
resembles coup d’état 212 comments on) 428
Ogarev, Nikolai 22–3 Pimenova, L. A. 137n85, 333
Ol’minskii, M. S. 125 Pinckney, David H. 339n1, 341nn9–12
Orléanist, -s 341–7, 352–3, 361–2, 367, Piontkovskii, S. A. 424
372, 387, 395 Pipes, Richard 5n6, 80n5, 297n87
d’Orléans, Duc 339 Pisarev, Dmitrii 14, 34
Orthodox Church 7, 10 Plavinskii, N. Iu. 333
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Plekhanov, G. V. 64n44, 85–9, 96, 102n67, 103, Preobrazhenskii, Evgenii (ABC of

120–4, 158–9, 201, 205n125, 208, 308, 315, Communism) 187
346–7, 377–8, 381, 411, 418, 465, 470, 496 Price, Philip M. 139n2
analysis of 1848 Revolution 368 Prolekult 220
argues that Jacobin Terror had mass proletarian consciousness, creation of 219
support 97 proletarian internationalism 390
argues that Jacobins were patriots 98 proletariat, oppression of 75
argues that Russian socialists should not take proletariat, Russian 379–85
power prematurely 82 Proletarii 115–16, 124
article in Iskra 85–6 Proletarskaia revoliutstiia 209–11
attacks Lenin after Second Congress 97 propaganda
aware of Lenin’s authoritarian and revolutionary mythology 214
inclinations 155 Bolshevik 214–15, 438n152, 481
calls Lenin ‘Robespierre’ 90 Marxist 361
compares himself to Danton 154 mass 37, 74, 210, 223
conversion to Marxism 361 monumental 220nn182–3
equivocal regarding French Revolution 81, 84 Soviet 291, 481
latter-day Girondin according to Stalinist 278
Bukharin 187–8 Protestant Reformation 19
Marxism as sacred doctrine 367 proto-Stalinists 274–300
on Jacobinism 82–4 Proudhonists 124, 459–63
on ramifications of Bonapartism 400 Provisional Government 140–2, 147–51, 156,
on Revolution of 1848 367–8 161–4, 224, 247, 406–8, 427, 469–71
pamphlet, Centralism or Bonapartism 400 Prussian Anti-Combination Law 71
posits dichotomy between centralism and Pugachev Revolt 9–10
Bonapartism 401 Pushkin, Alexander 16–17
praises and criticizes Jacobins
simultaneously 83 Rabinowitch, Alexander 145n34
remains committed to Marxist ideology 368 Rabochaia mysl’ (The Worker’s Thought) 156
Plimak, E. G. 33n13, 315n49 Rabochee delo 86–8
Pobedonostsev, Alexander 15 Rabochii put’ 163–4
Pogodin, Mikhail 14 Radek, Karl 189–90, 263, 424–5
Pokrovskii, M. N. 20n78, 111, 208–9, Proletarian Dictatorship and
265, 290, 424 Terrorism 189–90
Poland Radishchev, Alexander 7–11, 221, 491
independence 358n5 admiration for French Revolution in its
partition of 9 earliest stages 12
suppression of Revolt in 1863 72 driven to suicide 12
Polonskii, Viacheslav 29n123 likens Robespierre to Sulla and Caligula 12
Pomper, Philip 457n7 Radkey, Oliver 145n35, 152n70, 153n73
Poole, Ernest 140n7 Raeff, Marc 5n6, 13n40, 110n1
populists, Russian 34–6 Ralli-Arbore, Zemfir 32n3
Porshnev, B. F. 308, 387–8 Ransome, Arthur 143n27
Pospelov, P. 486n157 Rapport, Mike 339n2, 340n3, 358n4, 363n26,
Possony, Stefan T. 407n45 378n71
Potemkin (battleship) 215n151 Raskolnikov, F. F. (play, Robespierre) 227
Pototskii, S. I. 226 Ratner, Evgeniia 153
Potresov, Alexander 81, 375–6 Razin, Stenka 229
Pottier, Eugène 481 Rech’ (liberal newspaper) 156
Power, Rhoda D. 213n148 Red Army 413–14, 417, 422, 427, 442–4
Prague Spring 486 intervention in civilian politics 423
Pravda 160, 173–4, 199, 235, 250–4, 258, 262, latter-day reincarnation of French
279, 281, 325, 486 revolutionary armies 193
Prendergast, Christopher 494nn5–6 Stalin decimates High Command 443
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Red Flag 112 Rosmer, Alfred 421n92

Red Guards 145, 163, 224, 231 Rostislavlev, D. A. 332
Reed, John 143, 145n38 Rostophchin, F. V. 19
Reformation, Protestant 19 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 47, 103, 320, 331, 334
Republic of Virtue 438 Roux, Jacques 39, 189
revolution as martyrdom 455–88 Rubel, Maximilien 52n3, 53n5, 344n25
Revolution of 1830 339–54 Rublev, Andrei 221
Revolution of 1848 357–92 Rudakov, K. I. 299
Revolution of 1871 455–88 Rudé, George 313
Revolution of 1905 186, 215, 387 Rudnitskaia, E. L. 22n89
Revolution, Age of 37 Ruge, Arnold 54–5
revolutionaries, Russian 34, 41–2, 46–7 Rusanov, N. S. 32nn7–8
revolutionary nationalism 98 Russia, -n
revolutionary patriotism 168, 278 anarchism 38
Revunenkov, V. G. 12n34, 41n50, 58n27, autocracy 7, 13
137n85, 194n83, 313–16, 330–1, 447 capitalism 122
on Jacobins 314–15, 330 conservatism and paternalism 7
Riasanovsky, Nicholas 21n80 Empire 133
Riazanov, David 189, 206n128, 349, 380 intelligentsia 359
Rimskii-Korsakov, Nikolai 221 Marxists and Marxism 82, 208, 347,
Roberts, Andrew 406n41 366–7, 375
Robespierre, Maximilien 8, 21–2, 31–6, 41–5, monarchy 378, 404
84–9, 142, 143n25, 165, 183, 200, 221, 225, nationalism 6, 131, 235, 441
229, 269, 279, 294, 302, 331–2, 429 populists 83, 358
admired by Khmer Rouge 302n7 proletariat 379–85
Bolsheviks unveil statue of 223 role as Gendarme of Europe 73
called ‘sentimental tiger’ by Pushkin 17 ‘Russian Bonaparte’ 393–452
combines idealism with practicality 24 ‘Russian Jacobinism’ 37–8, 208–10, 265
depicted by B. A. Tolbert 303 socialists 101, 148, 371
depicted by X. A. Avrutis 303 suppresses Polish Revolt in 1863 72
esteemed by Stalin 278 terrorists 76, 83, 372
fall on 9 Thermidor 24 Time of Troubles 9
Lukin’s biography of 203–5 Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
no official monument in France 223n196 (RSDLP) 78, 85–93, 96–7, 100, 106,
praised by Molok 284 113–14, 122–4, 127–8, 132, 136, 207,
Robesp’erchiki (‘adherents of Robespierre’) 90 347, 371, 374, 401–2
Robespierre, play by F. F. Raskolnikov 227 Unity Congress 122, 347, 402
Robespierrism 21 Rykov, Alexei 180–1, 239, 258, 448
singled out by Tarlé for special Ryzhenko, F. 486
commendation 285
viewed as hypocrite and opportunist by Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre 327
V. Sergeev 331–4 Saint-Just, Louis Antoine de 22, 32, 35, 84, 142,
Rodichev, F. I. 151n62 150, 200, 279, 294, 302, 329, 332
Rodzianko, Mikhail 153 Sakharov, Andrei 305, 449
Roland, Madame 105, 142 Salmin, Alexei 325
Rolf, Malte 228n223, 277n10 Saltykov, A. M. 19
Rolland, Romain 111, 216–17, 226, 298–9 Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail 6
Théâtre de La Révolution 111, 299 Sandomirskaia, Beatrise 221
Vziatie Bastilii (The Storming of the sans-culottes 7–11, 25–6, 38, 58n27, 104, 118,
Bastille) 216–17, 226 126, 154, 194n83, 203, 212n143, 216, 225,
Western apologist for Soviet Union 217 229–30, 238n13, 247, 268, 283, 294,
Roman Empire 305, 448, 455 299, 309, 313–14, 316n54, 332, 354,
Romanov dynasty 35, 142, 404 375, 386–8, 493–4
Rosenfeld, Oreste 240 Schama, Simon 58n27, 137n85, 143n25
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Schapiro, Leonard 259n88, 415n66 evolutionary 97, 114, 205

Schlusselberg Fortress in St Petersburg French 4, 173
(‘Russian Bastille’) 34, 147 humane 320
Schoenfeld, Gabriel 302n5, 315n53, 320n5 moral and practical superiority of 320
Schwarz, Solomon M. 75n77 peasant 47
scientific communism 53 Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) 141, 145, 148,
scientific socialism 52, 365 152–4, 182, 187, 197–8, 213–15, 218,
Scriabin, Alexander 221 242n29, 247, 379–80, 406–15
Second Empire 71, 352, 354, 366, 387, 391, 452, admiration of the French Revolution 152–3
460, 488 support involvement in First World War 145
Second Republic 339, 352, 358n5, 359, 383, 391 promise Nicholas II will not suffer fate of
Second World War 240, 276–7, 294, 443–4, 450 Louis XVI 141
Sedan, Battle of 71, 404, 451 socialists
Sedov, Leon 5n6 European 87, 167, 190, 467
Ségur, Count 19n68 Russian 371
Semenova, A. V. 19n71 Society of Marxist Historians 290
September Massacres of 1792 39 Sogomonov, Alexander 324
serfdom, abolition of 360 Sokolov, M. K. 220n181, 298
Sergeev, V. 331–4 Soloviev, Vladimir 15
Sevastapol (battleship renamed Parizhskaia Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 140, 304–5
Kommuna) 482 Sorge, F. A. 74
Shachtman, Max 434 Sorokin, Pitirim 139n4, 140n8, 153, 197
Shaposhnikov, Boris 423n96 Soviet
Shatz, Marshall 5n5, 11n32, 31n1, 39n41, Babouvists 296
305n17, 488n168 Bonaparte 393–452
Shaumian, Stepan 132, 133n75, 473 Bonapartism 417, 422, 430–3
Shchegolev, P. P. 269–71 Communist Party 205, 224, 232–3, 240,
Shchipanov, I. 21n79 245–7, 256–9, 262–4, 267n122, 269,
Shelgunov, D. F. 32 272, 280, 290, 317–18, 326, 349, 412,
Shelgunov, N. V. 31–2 417, 420–3, 428, 440–1, 444n168, 446,
Shevardnadze, Eduard 320 472, 484, 492
Shilova, I. 483n138 Constitution 133, 431
Shlapentokh, Dmitry 15n51, 16n53, 18n64, dissidents 304
33n12, 139n1, 140n13, 149n52, 153n72, films 226
156nn86–7, 165nn111,113, 184nn51,55, government and Paris Commune 482–5
185nn56–7, 197n94, 199n100, 201n111, historians 211, 266, 274, 290, 295–6, 306–16,
290n61, 407n45 327–31, 351–3, 387–90, 447, 484
Shleev, V. V. 220n182, 485n152 Jacobins 296
Shmelov, Nikolai 326 mass festivals 228–32
Shostakovich, Dmitrii 481 mythology 170–233, 317–19, 333–5, 480
show trials, Stalinist 279, 287, 412 patriotism 316
Sieyès, Abbé de 7, 92, 220, 298 political police 172
Simpson, F. A. 422n95 propaganda 291, 481
Sisson, Edgar 183n44 regime, mythologizing 170–233
Skariatina, Irina 143n24 theatre 227–8
Skobolev, Matvei 154 Thermidor 170, 234–73, 241–6, 250, 261, 274,
Slepkov, Alexander 262, 263n109, 422 286, 428–9, 432, 492
Smirnov, V. P. 329–34 Sovnarkom (Council of People’s
Soboul, Albert 58n27, 313, 316, 494n6 Commissars) 172
‘social chauvinists’ 167 Spartacus 221, 229
Social Darwinists 215 Speranskii, Mikhail 13
socialism Sperber, Jonathan 46n71, 52n3, 61n33, 73n70,
‘barracks’ 448 340n5, 344n22, 363n26
European 66, 157, 381 Spiridonova, Maria 152
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St Petersburg 13, 19, 46, 74, 89–90, 98, 106, statuary, Bolshevik 221–3
114, 118 Stebling, E. P. 140n10
fires raging in 32 Steinberg, Isaak 197
general strike in 112 Steiner, George 21n81
Schlusselberg Fortress 34 Stites, Richard 34n20, 147n47, 218n174,
Soviet of Workers’ Deputies 93 226n213, 229n226, 230n232, 437n146,
Stalin, Joseph 110n1, 127, 203, 211, 215, 239, 471n79
274–302, 326, 334, 418, 421, 430, 475 Stoecker, Sally W. 423n96
ad hominem attack on Martynov 129 Stolypin, Pëtr 403–5
adopts Lenin’s revolutionary scenario 129–30 Stone, Bailey 311n36
and Soviet historians 274, 290, 352 Strakhov, Nicholas 15
bans play, The Conspiracy of Equals 275 Strigalev, Anatolii 147n46
compared to Napoleon and Fouché by Roy Stroganov, Pavel 16
Medvedev 304 Struve, Pëtr 105n83, 196–8
death of 301 Stuart monarchy 455
economic policies of 418–19 Stukov, I. N. 261
Economic Problems of Socialism 277 Sukhanov, Nikolai Nikolaevich 143n25, 154,
era 208, 296–7, 299, 352, 424, 437, 447 406n39
espousal of nationalism and patriotism Suong Sikoeun 302n7
131, 279 Supreme Being, Cult of the 143n25, 227
fear of Bonapartism 443 Suspects, Law of 278
Foundations of Leninism 252 Suvorov, Alexander 13
jealous of Zhukov 444 Sverdlov, Ia. M. 145n37
likened to Caesar by Volkogonov 305
on Trotskyism 251 Taine, Hippolyte 15, 111
on Blanquism 130 Talès, Charles 475
on collectivization and industrialization Talin, V. I. 407
250, 272 Tarasov-Rodionov, A. 156n88
on French Revolution 127–8, 131, 186, Tarlé, Evgenii 284–6, 290, 352, 424, 442
274–5, 279 analysis of Kutuzov’s abilities as a military
on Jacobins 130, 278–9, 296 strategist 293
on Napoleon Bonaparte 376, 441–2 arrest and exile in Kazakhstan 291
on October Revolution 253 biography of Talleyrand 293
on Paris Commune 483–4 compares Napoleon’s generalship
on Robespierre 278 unfavourably with Kutuzov 294
on Soviet Bonapartism 440–1 falsely blames Napoleon for fires in
on Soviet Thermidor 250–2, 262, 440–1 Moscow 294
personality cult 483 on Napoleon Bonaparte 291–3
praises Kutuzov 293 singles out Robespierre for special
purges Red Army 443 commendation 285
revolutionary patriotism 168, 278 Taylor, George V. 58n27
rigs elections 431 Tchaikovsky, Peter (‘1812 Overture’) 111
rise to power 242–3 Tchoudinov, Alexander 289n55, 353
Short Course, the 483–4 Teodorovich, I. A. 211n140
show trials 279, 287, 412 Tereshchenko, Mikhail 149
silence on the 1848 revolutions 387 terror
Stalinism 304, 330, 334, 387 Jacobin 7, 15, 20, 26, 42, 47, 61, 141, 157–9,
Terror 284, 431–2 180, 200, 213, 235, 314, 323–7, 496
theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’ 292 Leninist 323, 334
warns of threat from Trotsky and Left Stalinist 384, 323, 334, 431–2
Opposition 250–1 terrorism, Russian 41–2, 46–7, 72, 205n125,
Stanford, Doreen 141n17 206–7, 372, 400
Starr, John Bryan 486n156 Thälmann, Ernst 261
Stasova, E. 144n33, 146n40 theatrical productions, Soviet 227–8
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Thermidor 182, 391, 422, 425, 437, 497 compared to Danton, Carnot, Saint-Just, and
debate over nature and relevance of 233 Robespierre 165
economic 240 denounces Lenin’s ‘Jacobinism’ 90–3
political 240 essay, ‘Between Red and White’ 185
Soviet 170–1, 234–73, 241–6, 250, 261, 274, expelled from Communist Party 264
286, 428–9, 432, 492 History of the Russian Revolution 438, 475
term never mentioned publicly or in the Soviet interest in, and respect for, the French
press until 1925 241 Revolution 119, 165
Thermidorian degeneration 260 Itogii i perspektivy (Results and Prospects) 94–5
Thermidorian Reaction 61, 456 Literature and Revolution 383
Thermidorianism 261 Nicholas II, suggests public trial followed by
Thermidorians 200, 493 execution 184–5
Thiers, Adolph 111, 352, 396, 480, 484 on Bolshevik Terror 183, 194
Third Republic 460 on First World War 154
Thomas, Edith 457nn5–6 on French bourgeoisie 385
Thomas, P. 461n33 on Girondins 166
Tiananmen Square 302n7 on Jacobins and Jacobinism 92–5, 166, 185,
Tikhomirov, Lev 43, 83 244–9, 425
Tilsit, treaty 174, 412 on Karl Kautsky 193–4, 480
Tkachev, Pëtr 36–8, 47, 83, 207–10, 343, on Paris Commune 474–80
362, 491 on personal virtues required by successful
affinity for Blanquism 48 revolutionaries 386
believes the Jacobins represented a definable on relationship between French and Russian
and recognizable class 45 revolutions 193
revolutionary tactics 44 on Revolution of 1830 350–1
sees Russian peasants as hopelessly on Revolution of 1848 in France 381–6
conservative 45 on revolutionary tradition 386
and the narodovol’tsy 23n92 on Soviet Thermidor 243–9
believes Russian anti-monarchists should oratorical ability 93
imitate the Jacobins 44–5 Our Political Tasks 91
Tocqueville, Alexis de 15, 313 political demise and fate 432, 450
Togliatti, Palmiro 261 Red Army, role in creating 421
Tolbert, B. A. 303 rejects comparison between Napoleon and
Tolstoy, Alexei (play, The Death of Danton) 225 Stalin 433
Tolstoy, Leo 6 Results and Prospects 383–4, 439
Tombs, Robert 121n43, 340nn3–4, 456n4, 487, Revolution Betrayed 433, 476
493n3 ruthless about annihilating class enemies 185
Tomskii, Mikhail 257 Theory of Permanent Revolution 94, 117,
trade-union consciousness 86–7 480, 496
trees, newly planted (called ‘freedom trees’) 218 tsarist ministries renamed ‘commissariats’ 219
Trotsky, Leon 17, 65, 90–1, 107–9, 116–18, Tsereteli,Irakli 154,161,173,374,379,408,369–70
122, 127, 185, 187n202, 240, 279, 284, Tucker, Robert 277n11, 333n70
287, 347, 351n49, 408, 417, 422, 425–7, Turgenev, Ivan 18
430, 449, 474, 492 Turgenev, Nikolai 20
accuses Stalin of counter-revolution and Turner, Jr., Henry A. 436n142
Bonapartism 245, 429 Turskii, Gaspar Mikhail 48
admires Danton 184
admires Napoleon Bonaparte 427 Ulam, Adam 106n84, 224n200, 437n148
as stateless exile 247 Unaniants, N. T. 144n30, 298nn89–92,
becomes a Bolshevik in 1917 157, 384 215nn152–3, 216nn155,158,
Bonaparte and Bonapartism 150n58, 246, 421, 217nn160,162,164, 219n177, 221nn185,187,
425, 428, 430–40 225nn205,209–10, 226nn212,215–16,
compares himself to Robespierre and 227nn218–22, 229n228, 275n5, 297n85,
Saint-Just 184 299nn93,95, 302nn4,6, 303nn8–9
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Union des Femmes 457 White, Stephen 217n166

United Nations 319, 329 Whites, the 181, 185, 247, 380, 385
Unity Congress of the RSDLP 122, 347, 402 Whitley, M. J. 218n168
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 329 Wildman, Allan K. 406n40
Universal League of Revolutionary Williams, Albert Rhys 144n29
Communists 64–5 Wilson, Edmund 5n4, 51n1
Universal Revolutionary Type 161 Winter Palace
Urbahns, Hugo 428 bomb detonated in 74
Ustrialov, Nikolai 234–6, 242, 244, 254–5, re-enacting the storming of 229
258, 261, 415 storming of 217, 224, 229
argues Soviet Union was approaching Winter War against Finland 287
equivalent of Thermidor 254 Witte, Sergei 425
critique of Bolshevism and Soviet Union 236 Woehrlin, William F. 361n19
Utechin, S. V. 23 Wolfe, Bertram D. 108n90
Utin, N. I. 32 Woloch, Isser 46n68
utopia, -n 58n27, 92, 95, 148, 207–10, 237–8, Woronoff, Denis 248n50, 437nn145,147,150
301, 333, 417 Wortman, Richard 147
Wright, Gordon 341n14, 392
Valentinov, Nikolai 33n14, 103
Van Ree, Eric 278 Yakovlev, Alexander 320–3
Varlet, Jean-François 189 describes French Revolution as fundamentally
Veber, B. G. 104n74, 120n38, 307, 389–90 bourgeois 320
Velikanov, Iu. P. 298 French Revolution grounded in the
Versaillais 456–9, 462, 468, 480–6, 493 Enlightenment 321
Versailles 16, 46, 182, 459, 462–5, 483 Yaresh, Leo 424n98
Treaty of 182 Yarmolinsky, Avrahm 16nn54,57, 43n61
Vinaver, M. 111n2 Yeltsin, Boris 449
Vinogradov, Alexander 373–4
Vinogradov, V. 6n8 Zaborov, P. 111n6
Vladimir Akimov 89 Zaichnevskii, Pëtr 27, 32, 208–10, 361
Voinov, Vsevolod 222n193 pamphlet, Molodaia rossiia 32
Vol’gin, V. P. 310–11, 387, 447 Zakher, Ia. M. 203, 204n122, 269–70
Volkogonov, Dmitrii 127n59, 278, 304–5 Zalutskii, Pëtr 242–3, 250, 255–9, 264
Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet 19, 221, accused of betraying October Revolution 258
320–1 comments on Soviet Thermidor 256
Von Geldern, James 218n171, 222nn190,192, expulsion from Central Committee 259
223nn197,199, 482n133 Zasulich, Vera 46, 47n73, 74–6, 81, 86, 100
Voprosy istorii 293 Zatonskii, Dmitrii (compares Stalin to
Vorontsova-Dashkova, Ekaterina 19 Napoleon) 448
Voroshilov, Kliment 190n72, 246, 258 Zemlia i Volia 74
denounces Zalutskii 258 Zhou Enlai 302n7
Vorovskii, V. V. 125 Zhukov, Georgii 443–50
Vovelle, Michel 198n98, 241n22, 265n117, accusations of Bonapartism 444–6
286n44 demotion and dismissal of 443–6
Vpered 125–6, 199–200, 402 feared by Khrushchev 444
article, ‘Tricks of the Bonapartists’ 402 political ambitions 444
Zimmerman, Judith 11n32
Waterloo, Battle of 73, 451 Zinoviev, Grigorii 167, 242–3, 254n70, 255–61,
Weber, Eugen 335, 390 376n65, 463, 468, 470, 474–5, 482
Wedemeyer, Joseph 395 Znamia Truda (Banner of Labour) 216