Returning to the Leninist Line under Khrushchev and Brezhnev

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the ambivalence with which Lenin viewed the Jacobins is once again the reigning orthodoxy. As a result, the debate among Soviet historians over the relationship between the Jacobin dictatorship and the Thermidorian reaction to it, which began in the 1920s but was interrupted during the Stalin era, resumed. Most considered the downfall of the Jacobins the catalyst for economic changes that essentially reversed the Jacobins’ policies; several others, however, saw a ‘growing over’ in terms of policy from the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution to the Thermidorian one. But the debate did not shake the consensus that the revolution ended with the demise of the Jacobins in 1794, rather than with Napoleon’s coup five years later.

The French Revolution in the Russian Revolutionary Movement

The focus of Chapter 2 is exclusively on the Russian revolutionary movement, with special attention devoted to what revolutionaries in Russia understood to be the essence of ‘Jacobinism’. Mistaking the Jacobins in the French Revolution for advocates of the conspiratorial methods they deemed necessary in Russia, many found solace and confirmation of their own revolutionary virtue in the personal qualities they believed the Jacobins possessed. But on what these qualities actually were there was no consensus. In fact, some revolutionaries, such as Kropotkin, abhorred the Jacobins and considered their penchant for centralizing political authority morally abhorrent and tactically foolish; others, such as the terrorists of Narodnaia Volia (who assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881), disagreed. Because the Bolsheviks considered themselves the rightful heirs of the intelligentsia (from which the revolutionary movement emerged), they were acutely conscious of the revolutionaries who preceded them chronologically, and found it necessary to adjudicate their divergent opinions on the French Revolution.

Transgressing the Leninist Line in the Gorbachev Era

With the advent of the Gorbachev era, there emerged a genuine diversity of opinion on the French Revolution, with ‘hardliners’ reiterating the Leninist orthodoxy, and ‘liberals’, most notably Alexander Yakovlev, the actual architect of Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika (‘reconstruction’), arguing publicly—and almost certainly with Gorbachev’s approval and agreement—that the revolution inaugurated a sequence of revolutions in modern history in which the October Revolution, while going well beyond the French Revolution, was itself superseded by the peaceful revolution that was perestroika. A corrective of the worst excrescences of Stalinism, Gorbachev’s policy of ‘reconstruction’ would redirect the course of history, culminating in a humane and liberal (though not necessarily democratic) socialism that was prefigured in the French Revolution and the revolutions in France that followed it.

Stalin

For Stalin, the Jacobins, while undeniably bourgeois, acted like NKVD agents during the Great Terror of the 1930s, linking treason inside France with the revolution’s reactionary enemies in the rest of the Europe. Chapter 9 also includes discussion of Stalin’s ambivalence towards Napoleon, and the intellectual contortions required of Soviet historians of France to remain in Stalin’s good graces. It also demonstrates how Stalin’s views on the Jacobins were reflected in Soviet culture. Finally, the chapter describes and explains the change in Trotsky’s conception of Thermidor; in 1935 he reversed himself, claiming now that while the Soviet Union was already experiencing it, it was merely a period of reaction that would end once Stalin lost power and Trotsky replaced him.

1917—Russian Jacobins Come to Power

Chapter 6 shows in detail the degree to which concepts and categories particular to the French Revolution permeated political debate in Russia in 1917 between the February and the October Revolutions. It also shows Lenin relying on what he understood (or misunderstood) to be the essence of Jacobinism in advocating an armed insurrection in Petrograd before the preconditions for a proletarian revolution, as Marx and Engels had described them, existed. This was a dilemma that Lenin, by 1917, had wrestled with for well over a decade; that the Jacobins, in 1792–3, provided a scenario for taking power successfully after a revolution in their own country had begun helps to explain the Bolsheviks’ decision in October 1917 to carry out an armed insurrection in Petrograd that would supersede the revolution that had occurred in February.

The Marxist Inheritance of the French Revolution

It was Marx and, to a lesser extent, Engels, who provided the Bolsheviks with a teleology of French revolutions, in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871, in relation to which they could situate their own anticipated revolution. Marx and Engels were not consistent in their evaluation of these revolutions, stressing while they were in progress the ability of individuals to alter the course of history and perhaps even to accelerate it. Indeed, they praised the Jacobins in the French Revolution for their success, albeit limited, in advancing the revolution beyond what the haute bourgeoisie believed to be consistent with its interests. But once Marx and Engels, after the failure of revolutions in France and the rest of Europe in 1848, realized that any repetition was unlikely for the foreseeable future, their admiration of the Jacobins diminished. Chapter 3 concludes with analysis of their infatuation, in the last years of their lives, with the terrorists of Narodnaia Volia, whose audacity in killing government officials and ultimately the tsar himself caused their ‘Jacobin’ sensibilities to re-emerge.

Revolution as Martyrdom

For all its early promise, and despite the heroism of its supporters, the Paris Commune, in the end, was a failure. But the Bolsheviks valued it precisely for that reason; the mistakes it made could be avoided in their own efforts to carry out a successful revolution. Moreover, the martyrdom the Communards achieved by fighting their principal enemy, the Versaillais, so valiantly caused the Bolsheviks to venerate them for their personal qualities, even as they recognized their political and ideological naiveté. And while cognizant that with the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871 the French Revolutionary Tradition ended, the Bolsheviks considered the Commune a precursor of the proletarian revolutions they expected in the twentieth century not only in Russia but in the more economically advanced countries of Western and Central Europe.

The Phantom of the Russian Bonaparte

Chapter 14 traces the evolution of the concept of Bonapartism. Marx and Engels thought it a remediable ‘wrong turn’ in history’s evolution that happily occurred only under capitalism; Louis Napoleon and Bismarck were its archetypical expressions. Initially, the Bolsheviks did not take issue with this characterization. But by the 1920s the Bolsheviks recognized that Bonapartism could also occur under socialism, and that the dictatorship it entailed would be a military one; the dictator would either be an army general or a civilian totally dependent on the military for his power. This caused the Bolsheviks to consider Napoleon Bonaparte, rather than Louis Napoleon, the prototypical Bonapartist in power. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the role the accusation of Bonapartism played in Khrushchev’s dismissal of Marshal Zhukov as Minister of Defence in 1957.

The Phantom of the Soviet Thermidor

Chapter 8 describes the origins of the debate over Thermidor—the phase in the French Revolution following the Jacobin Terror—in the New Economic Policy Lenin initiated in 1921. It also shows the role the concept played in the struggle for power to succeed Lenin. The debate over what its realization in the Soviet Union would entail reflected the very real fear among the Bolsheviks that their revolution might end before the construction of socialism had even begun. To them, Thermidor was virtually a synonym for counter-revolution. For mostly political purposes—but also because their fear of it was real—Stalin and Bukharin, in the mid-1920s, argued that to evoke the danger of a Soviet Thermidor was tantamount to advocating it. Trotsky, who always considered analogies with French revolutions instructive, in the 1920s defined Thermidor as a form of counter-revolution. But since, in his opinion, it had not yet occurred in the Soviet Union, there was reason to believe it could be avoided altogether.

Lenin

Chapter 4 focuses on the politics surrounding the emergence in 1903 of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks as discrete factions in the newly established Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDLP). It pays special attention to Lenin’s ability to finesse attacks—from Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Plekhanov, among others—that explicitly analogised him to Robespierre, and, more generally, the Bolsheviks to the Jacobins. In response, Lenin turned an ostensible defect into a virtue, proclaiming in 1904 that ‘a Jacobin is a revolutionary Social Democrat’. But because Robespierre and the Jacobins remained for Russian Marxists mere ‘bourgeois’ revolutionaries, their utility was always limited. By the end of the chapter, the reader should be aware of the ambivalence with which the Bolsheviks viewed not only the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, but also the relationship between the revolution as a whole and the proletarian revolution in Russia that was their ultimate objective.